Sourcefire's Immunet anti-malware offering completes 2 million endpoints

Sourcefire Inc., provider of cybersecurity solutions, announced Monday that Immunet, its advanced anti-malware solution, has surpassed 2 million installed endpoints. Immunet achieved this milestone due to its "big data" approach to endpoint security, which allows it to provide an additional layer of protection not afforded by traditional anti-malware technologies.

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Is Cloud Security Mere Vapor? Part Two

This article is the second in a two-part series exploring the best ways CIOs can ensure security in the cloud. This part reveals the final five of ten cloud related challenges CIOs face. Click here to read the first article in this series.

6. User Experience. Despite cost, user experience has to be as good or better.For example, if you can’t surf a YouTube video from your virtual desktop, then you’re probably not going to think it’s terrific. Find strong security mechanisms that work well at the desktop but are nearly undetectable to the users. Security that is obvious is easily mapped for workarounds by hackers and is a source of endless complaints from those we try to protect.

7. Mobility. If you can’t get to your virtual desktop from your Windows or Mac OS, iPad, iPhone, Android, Linux, or whatever else comes next, then you’re not going to use it. Without such functionality, BYOIT really doesn’t mean anything since anything less equals minimal functionality. Plus, if you don’t go the virtual desktop route via your mobile devices, then you are stuck navigating a mobile device strategy to secure data and other things you really don’t want on those devices to begin with. The simple yet unpopular CIO decision so far? Ban them all! But you don’t have to. Combine a virtual strategy with some mobile armor techniques to control these endpoints and you’ll strike a happy medium with your corporate users.

8. Voice/Video. In an everything-virtual world that is quickly going cloud, CIOs realize that their voice system needs to follow them into the cloud or half of their business is going to be down. Plus, being tied to costly physical PRI and analog lines can be very limiting. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks and instant Direct Inbound Dial (DID) range provisioning and mobility are quickly becoming par for the course now. But when it all goes IP, who is listening in? And even when encrypted, who holds the keys?

9. User & Application Metrics. Particularly around cloud desktops and applications, the need to improve the user experience or application response time is top of mind. A few innovative cloud providers offer amazing dashboards and functionality around this and it’s a huge lure because normally such systems with that amount of eye candy are costly, thus putting them far beyond the reach of anything less than the most sophisticated enterprise corporations. Like anything cloud, it’s what you can do with something that is most appealing. So naturally, being able to see in near real-time – via a remote web dashboard -- all of the processes running on your 50,000 desktop users deployed in 12 countries worldwide is too good to pass up. Granular metrics also lend themselves to spotting anomalies quickly and easily. Such anomalies are usually security risks waiting to be mitigated.

10. Professional Services. Even the large corporations with tons of staff and huge budgets are finding they can’t execute fast enough. IT was built in silos,where, for ages, a server team, desktop team, application team, storage team, and others all operated independently. But today’s technologies must leverage all of these technologies simultaneously or they just won’t work. Cloud architects are a rare breed of multi-certified individuals who usually have one or more certifications in each of these technology silos so that they can deliver a comprehensive solution that scales beyond enterprise to cloud-sized infrastructures wherein an infinite number of even the largest enterprises are hosted. Don’t be afraid to get a second pair of eyes and a new range of tools to parse the vast amount of security logs and other data your infrastructure produces. This could save your business a lot of public humiliation later.

Cloud Standards or Wild, Wild West?
Open Stack, Microsoft Federation, Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and other emerging standards are increasingly being adopted by various cloud providers. Keep an eye on how agnostic, open and API friendly your cloud provider is. Open standards are often the most secure since they are tested by a wide community of people with a vastly diverse set of skills.

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The Sky’s the Limit: A Look at Dell’s Cloud

Dell has been a major player in the cloud space but from a HW infrastructure perspective, providing the driving force behind many private and public cloud offerings around the world. The major difference for Dell is that we are entering into the cloud arena with the ability to deliver hardware and services in a consumable fashion that meets our customers’ needs. Why now? Network speeds have increased dramatically, linking the world together in a way that just was not possible before; the types and quality of cloud service providers have risen consistently and an increase in comfort level for businesses to place their crown jewels – their data – outside the traditional four walls, as many CIOs now consider hosted environments to be more secure and stable than their own due to SLAs and overall customer commitments; and a growing number of CIOs seeing technology-as-a-service having the most profound influence, providing scalable methods of managing the IT side of the world. Yes – now is the time for Dell to strengthen its position in this market, facilitating our continuing transition from a hardware and services company into a solutions organization that can bring the best of breed products – hardware, services, application modernization, security, integration and cloud-based offerings – to our customers, helping to transform businesses and enabling new value.

KB: Let’s talk about bringing the cloud down to earth. What solutions and services does Dell offer to not only help organizations maximize their IT investment but also meet their broad-based business demands?

EC: As I mentioned, and probably will again, Dell already provides a very robust set of offerings for delivering cloud infrastructure to its customers. In fact, 18 out of the top 25 Internet companies on the planet use Dell hardware as their backbone for their day-to-day services, so we understand the cloud – from a hardware perspective, a services perspective and an overall infrastructure perspective.

In addition, our IT management Software-as-a-Service [SaaS} offerings – which are a robust set of tools focused on email management, distributed device management, backup, recovery & encryption, monitoring, and alerting allows us to fulfill the needs of customers in areas such as maintaining a cloud based disaster recovery for email. In other words: Simple-to- set-up email continuity, archive and security solutions. If you are upgrading exchange, dealing with email system outages or needing to simplify your disaster recovery process, it pays to have a cloud ‘flip of the switch’ fail over system at your fingertips.

We also have some great services, such as SecureWorks, an amazing security offering that allows us to provide additional security controls for our customers’ organizations such as network log, security devices and other key assets such as monitoring, 24/7 support with alerts, and vulnerability and web application scanning. We also have InSiteOne, which gives us the ability to provide data storage, archive and disaster recovery for medical data and information, along with a integration service called Boomi, which allows us to integrate data across new and legacy applications in a simplified fashion by literally taking information from one application to another application in an cloud enabled automated drag and drop fashion. Boomi and SecureWorks are my favorite acquisitions because when I talk about the cloud, the two biggest concerns we hear from our customers revolve around security and legacy system interoperability: These services solve both better than any other offering in the market.

In the near future, we’ll be offering public cloud offerings that will give us the ability to provide infrastructure as a service to manage elastic demand needs, burst capacity for peak and season demand as well as scalable infrastructure for services providers.

The reality is that we think there’s a lot of hype in the cloud today. What Dell brings is a pure backbone of how to approach the cloud effectively so that our customers feel comfortable about their journeys. We’re finding that every customer’s journey is a little different. Slowing down to completely understand our customers’ ultimate goals and requirements will help us partner together to find the best way to manage their growing data management needs, ever changing compute workloads, applications needs, integration bursting requirements and the associated services to bring it all together.

KB: What exactly does the term ‘cloud’ mean to consumers these days?

EC: Cloud is being used as more of a marketing term versus an offering, so when everybody talks about cloud, and they use it fairly self-servingly. That’s completely understandable and I am certainly guilty of this too. The challenge with the word ‘cloud’ is that it can have so many meanings depending on the lens through which one are looking.

I truly believe that Dell sets itself apart because it has the right set of integrated solutions for its customers. Whether it’s the on or off premise cloud hardware infrastructure, the consulting, the wraparound services, or the application modernization that’s needed to run an organization’s backbone, Dell provides solutions in a way that other providers cannot. Of course, the cloud it not just about savings; it’s also about bringing together a complex environment and making it easier for our customers to manage it, simplifying business processes and enabling an IT delivery model to help transform any organization.

KB: Will Dell’s cloud solutions enable businesses to deploy and manage private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures?

EC: The short answer is ‘yes.’ We have hardware that supports the cloud infrastructure from our Dell Data Center Services [DCS] organization, which allows us to provide the right backbone to our customers through hardware solutions, designed specifically for the cloud.

From a build and operate perspective, we certainly offer all sorts of tools across the infrastructure. For example, we have a self-service Virtual Integrated System [VIS] director program, which allows us to manage virtual environments in a clean, effective way.

These solutions and many more combined with Dell Cloud Solutions HW, IaaS [Infrastructure as a Service], SaaS [Software as a Service], Security, Integration and Consulting give us the ability to deliver on all combinations of hybrid cloud solutions.

KB: Regardless of a business’s size, what is the common denominator when it comes to designing, building and deploying highly efficient cloud solutions?

EC: It really depends where the customers are in their journey. For many customers, consolidating their environments into a centralized location and reducing operating expenses and capital expenditure is a huge step in achieving their goals; I mean, who would not want this? They also see that these services are being designed to bring scalability staff, so their resources can be refocused on other business mission critical activities, thus providing a whole bunch of savings and, more importantly, efficiency. The challenge here is that is does take introspection from customers to identity those parts of their business that will bring them the best results.

Then, there are other customers who are just looking to start leveraging cloud based services and have specific areas of pain where help is needed, so it’s really about a maturity scale and understanding where your customers are on their own journeys.

Dell’s customers are in many different areas. Some are well down the path and have a defined cloud strategy and understand where they can increase savings and how they want to utilize it, while others are still in discovery mode and are looking for that trusted advisor that can come in and help them understand how their environment works and how it will work in the cloud. These customers can use a crawl, walk, run methodology, knowing where that low-hanging fruit is where they can get quick value-added help. Customers ultimately want to learn what to put to and in the cloud that will allow them to create more of a leveraged environment that hopefully should bring with it optimum efficiency. We have a great Cloud Consulting services that utilizes a clear methodology to assess cloud readiness and can help through all aspects of defining an organization’s cloud strategy.

KB: How important is it to consolidate business applications onto one database grid to enable increased scalability?

EC: I don’t think it’s critical that it’s all on a single platform; it’s like saying that my need for a CRM system, HR system and email server need to be all the same data center to work. They do not in today’s world. With the ability to integrate applications across the cloud, customers can lean on the right expertise to maximize their business. Many companies today get payroll services outsourced, use SaaS-based sales tools such as salesforce.com, and use online travel booking service, for example. Why? Because these providers can typically do it better and more efficiently than businesses can do it in house.

It’s about picking the pockets of expertise that allow your company to be the most efficient. For instance, if I had a small liquor distributorship and I decided I wanted to become the biggest liquor distributorship on the planet, well, the first thought in my mind isn’t about IT and the consolidated systems and my backend billing and procurement systems; it’s about my relationships with my vendors and my customer base. Essentially, the IT part of it becomes an afterthought. So, for organizations looking to the cloud, our recommendation is that you go down kind of a diverse path, which allows us to determine what we can do to build and operate, whether that is through a partner or an internally supported organization. Customers need to ask themselves how they can develop and integrate into a program that will not only allow them to build out their cloud platforms but also truly consume and deliver them.

Our goal is to provide a holistic view to our customers, so that when they’re figuring out what their journeys look like, they can have the right competitiveness, the right control and the right choice based on the types of services for which they are looking.

Dell recommends to its customers that they first investigate. This means understanding what’s in their environments and determining what would make the most sense to move to the cloud. Experiment! Look to things where you think you’re going to gain some efficiency within the organization and then figure out how you adopt.

KB: Do you anticipate a single giant emerging and claiming the marketplace in the cloud space? Also, why, in a sky crowded with cloud providers, should businesses entrust their environments to Dell?
EC: As far as if it’s going to be one monolithic owner of the cloud, I don’t think so; I think that the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the industry will allow the market to continue to open and introduce additional wraparound services.

With regards to where we’re at in the cloud today, the industry is still very young. When you look at the different eras of computing – the mainframe era, the PC client server era, the Internet era and the virtual era – all of these changes have brought about new applications, new resources and new ways of adapting to the business.

Dell wants to be the cornerstone of that and we offer a full foundation of cloud services that allows our customers to have choices in their journeys, to pick and choose those services, those applications and those cloud-based tools that allow them to become more efficient in their space and do more with fewer resources.

So I see this as a journey that everyone is going to go through and certainly Dell is putting its footprint down very hard right now. We’re opening up 10 new data centers around the planet with more than a billion dollar investment. We want to take a good portion of the market share by offering the right tools and key strategic partner offerings to our customers.

The fact is that it’s not just about being there first; it’s about offering that right solution and that’s what we’re focused on. We want to make sure our solutions are wrapped around offerings that make it easier for our customers to achieve success however they need to define it. Of course, we must remember, it’s not just about savings; it’s also about bringing together a complex environment and making it easier for our customers to manage through it.

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Legal Issues in the Cloud: Exploring Business Continuity, Liability and SLA-related Issues

Many companies are familiar with ‘e-discovery’ and have data retention, storage and destruction policies in place that apply in the event of litigation. If a cloud customer is sued, or there is the threat of litigation, the customer may have to initiate a ‘litigation hold’ to preserve documents, including electronic documents and any metadata in the documents. This could present a challenge in the cloud if the customer’s data is commingled with that of other clients or if the customer’s data is stored on parallel servers. Cloud customers should determine the vendor’s ability to prevent the destruction, alteration or mutilation of customer data in the vendor’s possession, as well as the vendor’s search capabilities for the data. Cloud customers should also make sure that their corporate policies and procedures account for any data in the cloud. Do the data retention and destruction policies of the cloud vendor align with those of the customer?

As for the vendors, they need to develop a process for dealing with e-discovery requests and should provide notice to their customers promptly (within hours, not days) of any subpoena or other legal process seeking access to the customer’s data. Vendors may also need to provide the customer with access to its logs and reports to verify the security, integrity and chain of custody of the customer’s data.

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Likewise unveils software to give companies better control of unstructured data

Likewise announced Thursday new software to better access, secure, manage and audit unstructured data across multiple platforms – financial files, medical records, office documents, media and big data files, which account for nearly half of all stored information.

Companies have been limited in their ability to control unstructured data across multiple platforms. Likewise Data Analytics and Governance, the new application available now as a public software beta, gives organizations greater visibility into their unstructured data for improved security, auditing and compliance.

The Likewise Storage Services platform, used by such OEM storage vendors as HP and EMC Isilon, offers a consistent security model for file-based access and cross-platform, unified storage across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Likewise Storage Services provides integrated identity and access management, as well as secure access to data from Windows, Unix and Linux systems. Supported protocols include SMB/CIFS 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, NFS 3.0, and a RESTful API. Likewise Storage Services is available with a commercial license from Likewise Software.

“With 40 percent of unstructured data classified as sensitive and only 14 percent of organizations with a plan for managing that data, it is a critical and growing challenge to secure and govern data, and extract information,” said Barry Crist, CEO, Likewise. “Likewise intersects identity, security and storage to harness and secure data, track and manage who has access to what data, and free its use to make the most of it.”

Likewise Data Analytics and Governance enables organizations to implement a set of automated best practices to secure and manage unstructured data. The application uses analytics to contextualize data with user identity, sensitivity, and other information to mitigate risks, reduce costs and create value.

The software can help organizations understand performance and usage across storage pools, categorize unstructured data to create new applications or lines of business, and exploit data to maximize revenue. Companies can consolidate reporting across data silos, enforce consistent access policies, and manage entitlements from a single web console. The result is a global hierarchical view of an organization’s unstructured data that can identify and remediate root causes of security, performance and access issues.

"The problem with unstructured data has grown exponentially over time. It can seem insurmountable, but companies must get their arms around the sensitive data contained in these files,” said Ginny Roth, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Without the ability to have some glimpse into this data in the wild, companies will be increasingly vulnerable to high profile breaches."

The new Likewise application integrates with the Likewise Storage Services platform used by OEM network attached storage (NAS) vendors such as HP and EMC-Isilon, and has adapters that support NetApp, EMC-Celerra and other NAS filers.

The application monitors and audits usage, ownership and classification of data with dashboards and custom reports, manages and provisions entitlements from a single, central location, generates reports that demonstrate compliance, including reports for HIPAA, ITAR, PCI DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA and FISMA, and receives real-time event alerts for policy-driven exception monitoring. It also uses analytics tools to get real-time and historical information on users and groups, file security settings, data sensitivity and access patterns, centrally views users, groups and netgroups in Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP or Sun Microsystems’ Network Information Service (NIS), identifies all CIFS and NFS users and workloads using NAS controllers, accepts events and log data from various sources through a predefined RESTful API, provides support for global environments and storage arrays with high workloads, feeds information to existing SIEM or reporting tools, works with NAS devices using the Likewise Storage, and offers services platform, as well as NetApp and EMC-Celerra NAS devices.

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AppNeta improves performance management capabilities with expanded NetFlow and packet capture service

AppNeta offers network performance management solutions required to drive exceptional application performance across all data center, cloud, remote office and mobile environments. AppNeta’s award-winning PathView Cloud solutions leverage a zero administration, cloud-based service to meet the performance demands of distributed network infrastructure and mainstream network-dependent applications including unified communications, cloud services and virtual service delivery. With more than 1,000 customers worldwide, AppNeta provides end-to-end performance insight to network engineers and IT outsourcers, enabling predictable and efficient delivery of business-critical application services from wherever they originate to wherever they are consumed.

AppNeta’s PathView Cloud solutions leverage a zero deployment, cloud-based service to meet the performance demands of today’s distributed networks and mainstream network-dependent applications including unified communications, cloud services and virtualization. PathView Cloud offers IT organizations unmatched breadth of insight and time to value with integrated capabilities that can be deployed across any IP infrastructure, at any location.

PathView Cloud now enables users to expand the value of Netflow and packet capture on any network without additional, high-end network equipment to provide visibility. The PathView m30 microAppliance includes integrated pass-through capability, remotely generating Netflow records and packet captures.

If there is an issue with the hardware or software, the appliance “fails-to-wire”; restoring the network connection automatically with no manual intervention in milliseconds. This capability is typically available only in larger, more expensive appliances.

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Cloud Computing Brings Cost Of Protein Research Down To Earth

Their research appears online in Journal of Proteomic Research and is funded by the NIH Heart Lung and Blood Institute's Proteomics Innovation Center at the Medical College. Proteomics is a biomedical research term used to describe the large-scale study of all the proteins expressed by an organism. It usually involves the identification of proteins and determination of their modifications in both normal and disease states.
One of the major challenges for many laboratories setting up proteomics programs has been obtaining and maintaining the very costly computational infrastructure required for analysis of the vast flow of proteomics data generated by mass spectrometry instruments used to determine the elemental composition as well as chemical structure of a molecule, according to senior investigator, Simon Twigger, Ph.D., assistant professor of physiology.
"We're applying this technology in our Proteomics Center to study cardiovascular disease, the effects of radiation damage, and in our collaboration with the University of Wisconsin- Madison stem cell research group," he says.
With cloud computing making the analysis less expensive and more accessible, many more users can set up and customize their own systems. Investigators can analyze their data in greater depth than previously possible, making it possible for them to learn more about the systems they are studying.
"The tools we have produced allow anyone with a credit card, anywhere in the world, to analyze proteomics data in the cloud and reap the benefits of having significant computing resources to speed up their data analysis," says lead author Brian Halligan, Ph.D., research scientist in the Biotechnology and Bioengineering Center

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