The Present & Future of IT Security.
Posted on September 7, 2009
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Security, like the rest of the IT industry, changes fast and the techniques that businesses have previously used including, ‘defending the perimeter’ are now becoming rapidly redundant as remote working and the use of mobile devices become a major part of day to day working life.
Several analysts at Gartner continually look at security in IT and are very well-qualified to give an unbiased view of what will come in the future, especially when it comes to security and the business working simultaneously.
Last year IT Pro interviewed Research Vice President Jay Heiser, who has 22 years experience in the IT industry before moving to Gartner four years ago.
Heiser feels it was the nature of business to make its own vulnerabilities. He added that the threat environment is outside of our control and in terms of digital theft, the criminal threat is becoming more significant.
Generally, businesses are becoming more complex and distributed, giving criminals more opportunity to make money. He stressed that complexity was by no means a misdemeanor, but there had to be balance when it came to these growth issues and the needs of security. The profession of those people who stop things from happening to computers in the IT industry puts a premium on vision, which is about looking down the road and anticipating the potential impact of the things businesses need to have to upgrade It security.
Gartner particularly emphasises the alignment between IT risk management and business, which Heiser states has traditionally not been areas well understood by IT security professionals. Heiser claims that traditional security people have always said this is bad, but have not drawn out plans on how to accentuate IT security. They seemed to be certain in their own minds, despite not understanding where the money came from.
I would add that in an ideal world, the world of security needed to align with business without losing the basic expertise. That’s key, because these are arcane things and people with expertise who are really good at this are in most part people who do not care about the business. The most essential leadership trick is to make use of these people who have special skills but don’t see the big picture as the present and future of IT security of your firm relies on better security for uninterrupted productivity.
VMware to wrest Data Center Control.
Posted on September 7, 2009
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VMware is making a way to wrest data center control away from every other vendor and become the single door globally, through which users and admin staff see data centre server, networking and storage resources.
A data centre administrator will increasingly monitor, manage and diagnose data centre resource problems through VMware APIs, using manufacturer-supplied plug-ins to link the VCenter server to supplier’s boxes downstream in the stack.
The raft of storage suppliers provide plug-ins at VMworld so that their arrays can be managed through VMware. Also, pretty soon it will make internal development resource sense for them to deploy their management software as a VMware virtual machine (VM) and simultaneous plug-in.
I can foresee that no storage vendor can withstand VMware and none appear to want to wrest data center control for if they gotta sell product into VMware shops that works with VMware then they will and they are already doing it.
Actually, the storage suppliers are much farther along this road than the networking suppliers. You can imagine what could happen with storage as all storage provisioning, monitoring, reporting and management could be done through VMware. A VMware shop could, when looking to buy storage, say that it has to be managed through VMware and that it’s simply not interested in any supplier-specific features outside of VMware.
As such supplier specific features add value which means lock-in and extra expense and complexity. It will be more simple to go for the standard storage and that standard could be VMware-driven. All storage vendors could find themselves competing to deliver the best storage commodity that runs with VMware, whereas networking product vendors could look at this prospect and blanch.
Generally, their boxes do not have X86-based controllers, which many storage suppliers use.
The networking vendors who are keen to avoid VMware-driven commoditisation should avoid using X86 controllers like the plague as any X86 software can be likely turned into a VM and run in an ESX server. VMware’s effect can be likened to taking server and network and storage box value-add and rendering it less and less relevant because everything is seen through a VMware admin’s view and accessed through VMware.
VMware is becoming the new Microsoft, since Microsoft provided a good basic and cheap operating system for IBM PCs and as they became a standard, so too did Microsoft. It’s not a perfect comparison by any means, but why would any data centre operator, having adopted VMware, want to adopt anything else?
VMware & Global Data Centre Domination
Posted on September 7, 2009
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VMware is the great leveler when you want to run Windows, Linux, Unix, whatever on the same X86 hardware. I can see that VMware is being honest and keeping its prices down for global data center domination.
The more popular, VMware becomes, the less relevant will be Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell (SuSE) and XEN. The hypervisor is the data centre high ground and VMware has got more of it than any other supplier put together, globally. There is a kind of gravitational effect at work here with VMware’s popularity and widespread use attracting more suppliers to work with VMware, which attracts more customers to adopt it, which drives VMware to add more features and so the VMware virtuous circle spins round and round.
VMware galaxy form in the data centre space and all the individual product stars are falling into place spinning around, held in VMware’s thrall similar to the stars in a galaxy, imprisoned in their place with no way to break free.
The client server era gave way to a multi-tier architecture with server sprawl. Unix standardisation failed and Linux is no more than a worthy competitor to Microsoft in the data centre.
VMware minimises the number of steps to have apps run more and more in VMs that have a thin or almost non-existent OS layer between the app and the VM.
VMware hegemony is an X86 phenomenon and has no ability to play on SPARC, POWER, mainframe and other architectures. IBM mainframe users will be able to sail on, rising effortlessly above the VMware tide and watching as VMware uses software to bind X86 servers, multiple networking gear and storage into a simulacram of a mainframe. Separate boxes seductively glued together with VMware’s software.
VMware is gradually going to become more important than EMC itself and EMC could easily become VEMC. Storage, after all, is just a place to store data. The important place in the data center IT hierarchy is where decisions are made and that is in the servers. When all servers are X86 servers then the supplier of the main server control software and the hypervisor, which calls the shots. The chief executive of that hypervisor company can also expect to call the shots. Who would have thought that selling add-on external storage could be the start of a path leading to data centre domination?
That’s what could be in store and every other supplier with pretensions to be a data centre kingpin better get a strategy for dealing with VMware, because this little puppy could eventually grow to become the biggest data centre canine there has ever been.
Free Treats lure SBMs to VMware.
Posted on September 7, 2009
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According to Joe Andrews, VMware’s group manager of product marketing, Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are flocking like bees to virtualization in droves to adapt the free treats offered on VMware.
VMware defines the SMBs in the US and Europe as having 1,000 employees or fewer, with small being 500 or fewer and very small being 100 or fewer. Cut those numbers generally in half for the companies in Asia and Pacific SMB definitions.
Andrews claims that the small SBMs are clamoring to become customers by adopting virtualization with the fastest growing segment for VMware is in the under 100 group. VMware claims to have 150,000 full customers who are using VMware Infrastructure 3 or vSphere- and the majority of those are SMBs.
A report by Forrester Research projects that 50 per cent of SMBs will embrace vitualization in the next 12 months. Andrews claims that the reason is simple: Take a 20-server company and yYou could save $200K over three years just from the server consolidation and have a one month payback.
Andrews continues that the company’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) was not yet getting a foothold in the SMB space, but the majority of the adoption for VMware in SMBs has been for server consolidation.
The company’s new free Web-based, hosted VMware Go management tool is a beta focused on getting a handful of free ESXi servers up and running locally. Essentially, it is a marketing tool to entice SMBs to drive virtualization around the block before they are committed to buying their way into the VMware customer base and it is also to keep them out of the XenServer and Hyper-V camps.
VMware Go service, is seen as an on-ramp app when comparing it to the company’s internal and external virtual data center vCloudInitiative.
According to Andrews, not every SMB can benefit from virtualization since the free treats are mainly to lure SBMs to VMware in order to let them have first hand experience of the usage of VMware. The content creators in the motion-graphics, video or pro-level audio spaces, needle-in on the one area where it may not make sense to virtualize. Ninety plus per cent of the applications that any business in any industry is going to run is on virtualization which is really a proven technology.
VMware is becoming the new (old) Microsoft, not only in overarching reach, but with an unshakable ability to stay on message.
Windows 7 XP Mode disabled by Sony in Vaio Laptops
Posted on September 7, 2009
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In the PC world, it makes little sense to make your newest laptops future roof on the BIOS level, but that’s just what Sony is up to with a recent decision to disable hardware virtualization on all current Vaio laptops using Intel Core 2 Duo processors, due to security concerns.
This may seem like an esoteric BIOS setting, but it’s required by any user hoping to use Windows 7’s upcoming Windows XP mode, which allows XP applications to be virtualized without worrying about whether or not they will break, like they might under Windows Vista.
Sony’s response is typically corporate as Xavier Lauwaert, Sony’s Senior Manager for Product Marketing stated that we have received very little if any requests to enable VT technology up until very recently.
Xavier added that our engineers and QA people were very concerned that enabling VT would expose our systems to malicious code that could go very deep in the Operating System structure of the PC and completely disable the latter.
Xavier continued that the Z series will not be part of our VT-enabling effort and the focus will be on more recent models. In short, if you are intending on running Windows 7 XP Mode, don’t buy a Z series Vaio, at least not without rolling up your sleeves for some deep system hacking.
Several angry Sony PC customers who have splashed out nearly $2,000 on a new Vaio laptop should give up hopes of running Microsoft’s Xp virtualization tech in Windows 7.
The consumer electronics giant has said it will enable Intel’s Virtual Technology (VT), which supports Windows XP Mode in the forthcoming Windows 7, only on selected Sony Vaio models in the future. The Z series Vaio, which is priced at $1,719, will not be one of the machines selected.
Vaio Z users until then will join everybody else buying one of 10 Vaio PC brands that will also be incapable of running Windows 7’s Windows XP Mode.
This means that the customers whose old Windows XP applications do not work with Windows 7 will find their software unlikely to run on Windows 7.
Sony has squeaked out the policy news on VT support in the Vaio range after it took great flak from the customers who had discovered not a single member of the currently shipping Vaio family supports Intel’s VT, despite the fact VT is one of the features in the Intel Core 2 Duo mobile processor that the Vaios use. Apparently, Sony has deliberately blocked the BIOS in all current Vaios from working with hardware virtualization in the Core 2 Duo.
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