Cloud security, red herring, downfall of the cloud or something else entirely?

Posted on March 22, 2012 by steveg

A very common point of discussion when talking about cloud technologies or SaaS sometimes only second to costs capex/opex, is security.
Pulled out as a boogeyman by those without cloud solutions and a cautionary tale by your friends or other business owners, it is too often completely misunderstood.

Additionally the conversations on this topic seem to always be about companies with 7 figures IT budgets but if you are like 97% of businesses in the US (census 2008) you have <100 employee and likely an IT department of 1-3 with a  base budget to match (<500K) and the conversation is far different. These are the businesses I have in mind here.

Far from me to claim that security shouldn’t be a concern and a top one at that however it needs to be put in context compared to the alternative. If your choice is a cloud solution versus local infrastructure maintained by internal IT or a small consultant then what you are you trading in terms of security may not be what you think.

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Cisco, oh Cisco where art thy source routing…

Posted on March 5, 2012 by steveg

Coincidences are everywhere, in the last month I have had to deal with two separate businesses attempting the exact same thing with very similar equipment and hitting a major road block on something that seems like it should be the easiest thing in the world.

Today having multiple internet providers even for mid-size businesses is almost a common reality; a solid T1 (or a couple) for voice and some data for incoming services and a Comcast/Fios/DSL for user traffic. Both of the businesses I referred to above wanted to load balance their connections with some pretty basic requirements (all http/https traffic on secondary and all inbound vpn/email/ftp services on the primary).
Additionally both businesses made what would seem like strong equipment purchases with the Cisco ASA models for firewalls and this is where it goes off the rails. Cisco’s ASA firewalls do not support any form of source routing or actual load balancing. Yes it does allow for contexts to split interfaces but nothing more. Imagine how sheepish you feel telling a company that spent anywhere from $4k-$10k that their equipment doesn’t support such a basic feature, so basic in fact that sub-$1k firewall (such as sonicwalls, buffalos etc..) can not only do this but do it fairly well. How much more sheepish do you feel when you tell them that the only realistic solution is to add yet another device (in this case a router) outside their firewall that does support source routing and will be able to route traffic intelligently.

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Enterprise tools and the smb

Posted on February 20, 2012 by steveg

Working day to day with micro, small and medium businesses I am more and more astounded by the infiltration of enterprise services in businesses. Just a few years ago those SMB would not have been able to afford or manage systems as complex and comprehensive but with the advent of “the cloud” all those services are now available to anyone who wants them.

The catch is that most of those services are still geared towards enterprises but they have been priced and advertised to SMB of all sorts and as more and more people discover, this can mean that the simplest problem can turn into a nightmare very quickly.

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Disaster Recovery Protocol (a prelude to an S3 test)

Posted on August 30, 2011 by steveg

Backup is a concept that is often misrepresented as a simple “copy files here” and “carry files off-site sometime” in small/medium businesses and rarely is the real core of the issue broached properly. That issue is a single key question: How do we recover from a disaster?
if this questions sounds pretty basic it really shouldn’t. A good disaster recovery is hard to create and often even harder to implement however if approached methodically even a small IT department should be able to tackle this question. First in my opinion this key question can itself be broken down to three “sub” groups:

  • What is our data (user and systems)?
  1. Where do users save their work data/documents (note not where are they supposed to, but where do they actually save)
  2. What makes each of our systems/servers unique from a base install
  3. What outside data do we use everyday
  4. and many more questions that identify all your data that doesn’t come on a CD or download from the vendor/manufacturer.
  • What are our acceptable recovery time?
  1. what is our immediate time frame (5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day)
  2. what is our mid-term time frame (1 hour, 1 day, 3 days, 1 week)
  3. what is our long term time frame (1 week, 1 month, 3 months)
  • What is our process to identify the problem and recover?
  1. How do we get number 1. back in less time then 2. dictates
  2. what is our process for each of the failures and time frame (think matrices layout)

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“Rocking” classical

Posted on August 25, 2011 by steveg

Although I am not a big fan of sharing family snapshots today I had an experience with my 8 year old that I really thought was worth posting; not because of the experience itself but because of the rational behind it.

I have been a huge fan of music for as long as I can remember and even a participant since in a previous life played in bands and even did some studio engineering work for tv commercials. However passing this passion to my kids has always been a challenge. They like what they like and there isn’t much one can do about it other then expose them to new things and hope for the best.
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