AWS re:Invent This year, AWS re:Invent is once again being held in Las Vegas (12–15-Nov-2013). The 4 day conference focuses on all things AWS and the schedule is packed with talks, bootcamps, hands-on labs, and other events. If you didn’t attend last year, you can check out the videos online to get a feel for the…
Read MoreOver the past weeks we have been reviewing the top 10 tips for securing instances running on Amazon Web Services. We walked through the critical controls as part of the AWS shared security model. As noted in these tips, host-based security capabilities such as intrusion detection and prevention, anti-malware, and integrity monitoring are critical for…
Read MoreIn this series, Mark and I have talked about hardening your AWS resources (both inside and outside of your instances) and preforming ongoing monitoring. The last two tips are around measuring your overall security so that you can understand your risks and measure your progress. It may be an old adage but it still rings true……
Read MoreSo far in this series, Justin and I have provided tips for securing the foundations of your AWS deployment. Taken together, these tips work to reduce the overall attack surface—the area exposed to the outside world—of your application. Now it’s time to add the next layer of controls to you application, starting with a host-based…
Read MoreLast week, Justin covered some of the high level issues around AMI development. This week, we’re going to take a look at how to protect the guest operating system running on your EC2 and VPC instances. AWS Recommendations AWS had published quite a few papers around their services. AWS Security Best Practices [PDF] and AWS Risk and…
Read MoreIn our previous top tips for AWS security we looked at hardening access to your AWS resources through proper use of IAM, policies and authentication. In this tip we turn our focus to hardening your Amazon Machine Images (AMI). No matter whether you pronounce it A.M.I or Ahhh-ME (as the AWS folks do) your machine…
Read MoreReferencing Wikipedia: The Pythia , commonly known as the Oracle of Delphi, was the priestess at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, located on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. The Pythia was widely credited for her prophecies inspired by Apollo. Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) first user conference in November 2012 was over-subscribed and sold out. Given that the company offers all the infrastructure you need…
Read MoreDell World this week was huge. In addition to turning up the cloud strategy to full volume, Dell had Bill Clinton as a guest speaker. Very worthwhile conference, especially the Dell World Social Think Tank: IT Innovation, where I joined about 10 senior cloud thought leaders and another dozen execs from Dell for an invitation-only…
Read MoreWe often hear that security and privacy concerns are the main inhibitors to cloud adoption. But what are the true threats? Is the cloud really more dangerous than your on-site data center? I would say that virtualization and cloud computing aren’t inherently more dangerous, but they have unique infrastructure that must be addressed when creating…
Read MoreBy saying that encryption is not enough for cloud security, I don’t mean that you also need other types of protection like server security, identity management, etc. I think most people deploying cloud computing plan to implement more than encryption for security. What I mean is that encryption alone is not enough in an encryption…
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