Cloud, Security and Technology

2020 is coming upon us, and it's time to reflect on my 2019 predictions I made, and look forward to this coming year with another technology prediction. So let's get started - first off - a lookback to see  progress in the areas I outlined, possibly no earth shattering results, but progress.  2019 retrospective - New UX - probably not as much evolution as I would have wanted to see in this area. For now, we use windows, android, IOS, and it's pretty much the same UX as it's been for a while. IoT the simple assistant - IoT continues to be the hot area of growth. I consider this more evolution than revolution. As we see IoT based technology being embedded into more and more devices. Cloud growth advances in   astonishing speeds - This past year all three cloud providers made strides in the cloud worth noticing.  AWS entered the quantum computing market with Bracket, introduced an in-house...

I've been asked several times as to what are the building blocks to build a secure cloud solution. In my last 2017 blog I revisit the paper I wrote a while back called " 13 Effective Security Controls for ISO 27001 Compliance " and reconsider the 13 security measure that help meet compliance controls. One important update for this blog over the paper, is that I will not look at IaaS services a whole lot. Protecting a OS or VM has been done to death.   IMHO organizations need to get out of the business of managing the health of OS's/VM's and WebServices.  Moving to Containers with an orchestration engines such as Kubernetes , or Platform such as provided by Azure, or AWS is one of the best long term security investments. No more AV, Patching, or Host services maintenance…  The process is to get most companies away from the IT business, and into their core competency with a High tech offering that provide a capability on demand. Moving...

Who says that the hypervisor is 100% secure. Looks like thanks to the security flaw in a virtual floppy disk  VENOM, CVE-2015-3456 has become a reality and can in fact be used to possibly escape from a virtual client into adjacent VM systems. At the time of this release the QEMU Virtual floppy disk controller (FDC) affects Xen but does not affect VMware, or Hyper-V.  This vuln is a doozy, and especially for organizations that rely heavily on Xen. This March I read a great article that had described that if a vulnerability was to be discovered in Xen that Amazon's  Steve Schmidt would 'gets busy' , which I would take is today!. Of course this lead's the the next question on my mind. Has Venom been used to successfully exploit Amazon, and would we know about it? If you're running any of these - consider the posted workaround asap! A list of affected Linux distros RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) version 5.x, 6.x and 7.x CentOS Linux version...