Very often when technology decision makers hear the word “Cloud”, skepticism takes over. How can you give a third party cloud provider control over your IT resources? That’s why you need a customized private cloud to setup a fully managed, dedicated environment for your business.
Sysfore can help you build a single dedicated private environment that is fast and flexible enough to run all your critical apps, systems or solutions on the Azure or AWS platforms.
A hosted private cloud is what you need when high security is your greatest business requirement.
So what is a private cloud?
A private cloud presents the OS and virtualization resources as a pool of shared resources.
The resource pool is created through management, based on business rules and executed through automation.
You no longer think about the number of VMs, server ratios, memory or storage. But how much compute resources you have to access it.
Your focus now shifts to the applications, where you rely on a pool of resources to supply the right capacity and capabilities.
By now, you have probably heard about the Panama Papers Leak, which leaked (and continue to leak) the names of high-profile persons who used fake companies to hide their wealth and/or avoid taxes.
The huge data leak, around 1.5 million documents were leaked from law firm Mossack Fonseca, which exposes how the rich and powerful allegedly hide their money across the globe.
The 11.5m files, which date back as far as the 1970’s, were obtained from an anonymous source by Süddeutsche Zeitung – a German newspaper. They were then passed on to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a US-based group, and then distributed to various journalists and media organizations worldwide for analysis.
How these files were obtained remains a mystery. But it’s safe to assume that it was an inside job, which required privileged access to this huge amount of data. The anonymous source offered the 2.6 terabytes of data, which surpassed the combined total of the Wikileaks Cablegate, Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks, and Swiss Leaks.
Can anyone with IT privileges and access get hold of your data? Where does your organization’s data security figure in this chaos? There are too much data, and too many ways for security breakdowns to occur. What will your company do to prevent these breakdowns?
It is this question that should be garnering more attention, especially for anyone who has to handle IT or security duties.
One possible theory circulated on how the Panama Papers breach happened is due to the sloppy patches and outdated plug-ins.
Mossack Fonseca uses WordPress on its main website and Drupal on the customer portal for sharing sensitive information, and both Its Drupal and WordPress sites were outdated, according to an extensive analysis by the team behind WordFence, a WordPress security plug-in.
Lessons learned from the Panama Paper Leaks:
There are fundamentally two key aspects to securing data:
Access – who has the right to the data. Broadly speaking, this is authentication (user id, password, and perhaps other methodologies and validations).
Protection – who is the guardian of the data. Who is responsible for the data. What precautions are taken, should someone break into a server, or an unscrupulous employee copy the data.
This wake up call to data security has made organizations take extra precautions and upgrading their existing security measures.
Prioritize your data – Know what data is valuable to you and your customers; set data protection depending on it. Set up Identity and Access Management (IAM) for all levels of your personnel and ensure it is not violated. You can use either Amazon or Azure Cloud IAM.
Data Redundancy and Replication – Spread your data across multiple infrastructures and locations to protect your information. Ensure latest technologies is employed and phase out your old legacy defenses and networks.
Educate employees – Train your employee about the latest security software, its use, recognize and spot the leak, block and report any suspicious attack.
The Panama Paper Leak is just the tip of the iceberg. If organizations want to safeguard their data in the future, the must bolster the perimeter, engage different authentication methods, educate employees and understand the strategy needed in a world where data, specifically stolen data, could be the end for your business and reputation.
You can employ Sysfore’s expertise in Cloud Security to boost your data security measures.
Give us a call at +91-80-4110-5555 or mail us on info@sysfore.com, to know more.
Adds Azure IoT Gateway SDK and Device Management to Azure IoT Hub
Microsoft held their annual developer conference called Build out in San Francisco. The three-day event from March 31 to April 1, had various Microsoft executives detailing and demonstrating the vision for computing. There were hundreds of mini-seminars on Windows development detailing what is new.
At Build 2016, Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group, and Qi Lu, executive vice president of the Applications and Services Group, demonstrated how Microsoft Azure services and the Office platform can empower developers to easily leverage advanced analytics, machine learning, emerging cloud development models and the Internet of Things (IoT) to build their intelligent apps.
Azure Internet of Things (IoT) gets a boost
Two new offerings were announced that make it significantly easier for customers to manage their IoT deployments: Azure IoT Hub device management and the Azure IoT Gateway SDK. The preview of these powerful new capabilities, shows Microsoft’s support for providing developers, IT managers and OT operators with tools to make managing their IoT deployments easier than ever.
The diverse Internet of Things (IoT) environment is mixed with many types of devices with different software, firmware, connectivity and security capabilities dispersed geographically . For many businesses, it’s a challenge to keep the software, firmware and configuration of new devices up to date.
They also need to connect to older or legacy devices to communicate directly with the cloud. The new offerings address these challenges and continues to simplify IoT, so customers can focus on development instead of the logistics.
Azure IoT Hub device management
The device management feature in Azure IoT Hub allows enterprises to remotely maintain, interact with, and manage IoT devices at scale from the cloud using accepted open source standards. Administrators can enroll, view status and health, organize, control access, and update the software, firmware and configurations of millions of geographically dispersed IoT devices.
Customers can now realize significant time and resource savings by removing the burden of developing and maintaining custom device management solutions.
Azure IoT Hub scales to manage millions of devices supporting the LWM2M protocol, the leading standard from the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) for IoT device management. The IoT Hub device management enables a simplified cloud programming model for IoT solutions through new service side APIs:
Device Registry Manager API:Provides a first-class device object for working with IoT devices in your cloud solution. Through this device object, your cloud solution can interact with device and service properties, which is used by the device for configuration or to inform the IoT solution of device state (e.g. firmware version, OEM name), service properties, such as tags etc.
Device Groups API:Work with your fleet of devices in groups and control access in a way that maps to your solution topology.
Device Queries API:Find devices in your IoT solution based on tags, device, or service properties.
Device Models API:Define the information model for the devices and entities in your IoT solution.
Device Jobs API:Run and monitor simultaneous device orchestrations on your global fleet of devices across a heterogeneous device population.
Azure IoT Gateway SDK
The Azure IoT Gateway SDK enables businesses to connect legacy devices and sensors to the Azure cloud without having to replace existing infrastructure. And for developers, the SDK helps to easily build and deploy “edge intelligence” modules that optimize and process data before it’s sent to the cloud, allowing your business to benefit from minimized latency, reduced bandwidth costs, and more effective enforcement of security and privacy constraints.
The Azure IoT Gateway SDK achieves this by providing source code that takes care of much of the necessary busy work required for the development of a gateway application, including dynamic module loading, configuration, and data pipelining.
Get the latest information on the Azure IoT Hub device management and the Azure IoT Gateway SDK from our IoT specialists. Mail us at info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555 to leverage the new updates using Sysfore’s IOT Suite.
