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Posts Tagged ‘Services’

Quick Ping: VMware’s Horizon App Manager – A Big Bet That Will Pay Off…

May 17th, 2011 2 comments

It is so tempting to write about VMware‘s overarching strategy of enterprise and cloud domination, but this blog entry really speaks to an important foundational element in their stack of offerings which was released today: Horizon App Manager.

Check out @Scobleizer’s interview with Noel Wasmer (Dir. of Product Management for VMware) on the ins-and-outs of HAM.

Frankly, federated identity and application entitlement is not new.

Connecting and extending identities from inside the enterprise using native directory services to external applications (SaaS or otherwise) is also not new.

What’s “new” with VMware’s Horizon App Manager is that we see the convergence and well-sorted integration of a service-driven federated identity capability that ties together enterprise “web” and “cloud” (*cough*)-based SaaS applications with multi-platform device mobility powered by the underpinnings of freshly-architected virtualization and cloud architecture.  All delivered as a service (SaaS) by VMware for $30 per user/per year.

[Update: @reillyusa and I were tweeting back and forth about the inside -> out versus outside -> in integration capabilities of HAM.  The SAML Assertions/OAuth integration seems to suggest this is possible.  Moreover, as I alluded to above, solutions exist today which integrate classical VPN capabilities with SaaS offers that provide SAML assertions and SaaS identity proxying (access control) to well-known applications like SalesForce.  Here’s one, for example.  I simply don’t have any hands-on experience with HAM or any deeper knowledge than what’s publicly available to comment further — hence the “Quick Ping.”]

Horizon App Manager really is a foundational component that will tie together the various components of  VMware’s stack offers for seamless operation including such products/services as Zimbra, Mozy, SlideRocket, CloudFoundry, View, etc.  I predict even more interesting integration potential with components such as elements of the vShield suite — providing identity-enabled security policies and entitlement at the edge to provision services in vCloud Director deployments, for example (esp. now that they’ve acquired NeoAccel for SSL VPN integration with Edge.)

“Securely extending the enterprise to the Cloud” (and vice versa) is a theme we’ll hear more and more from VMware.  Whether this thin client, virtual machines, SaaS applications, PaaS capabilities, etc., fundamentally what we all know is that for the enterprise to be able to assert control to enable “security” and compliance, we need entitlement.

I think VMware — as a trusted component in most enterprises — has the traction to encourage the growth of their supported applications in their catalog ecosystem which will in turn make the enterprise excited about using it.

This may not seem like it’s huge — especially to vendors in the IAM space or even Microsoft — but given the footprint VMware has in the enterprise and where they want to go in the cloud, it’s going to be big.

/Hoff

(P.S. It *is* interesting to note that this is a SaaS offer with an enterprise virtual appliance connector.  It’s rumored this came from the TriCipher acquisition.  I’ll leave that little nugget as a tickle…)

(P.P.S. You know what I want? I want a consumer version of this service so I can use it in conjunction with or in lieu of 1Password. Please.  Don’t need AD integration, clearly)

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Budget Icebergs, Fiscal Anchors and a Boat (Fed)RAMP to Nowhere?

April 4th, 2011 No comments
United States Capitol in daylight

Image via Wikipedia

It’s often said that in order to make money, you have to spend money; invest in order to succeed.

However, when faced with the realities of budget shortfalls and unsavory economic pressure, it seems the easiest thing to do is simply hunt around for top-line blips on the budget radar and kill them, regardless of the long term implications that ceasing investment in efficiency and transparency programs have in reducing bottom line pain.

To wit, Alex Howard reports “Congress weighs deep cuts to funding for federal open government data platforms“:

Data.gov, IT.USASpending.gov, and other five other websites that offer platforms for open government transparency are facing imminent closure. A comprehensive report filed by Jason Miller, executive editor of Federal News Radio, confirmed that the United States of Office of Management and Budget is planning to take open government websites offline over the next four months because of a 94% reduction in federal government funding in the Congressional budget…

Cutting these funds would also shut down the Fedspace federal social network and, notably, the FedRAMP cloud computing cybersecurity programs. Unsurprisingly, open government advocates in the Sunlight Foundation and the larger community have strongly opposed these cuts.

Did you catch the last paragraph?  They’re kidding, right?

After demonstrable empirical data that shows how Vivek Kundra and his team’s plans for streamlining government IT is already saving money (and will continue to do so,) this is what we get?  Slash and burn?  I attempted to search for the investment made thus far in FedRAMP using the IT Dashboard, but couldn’t execute an appropriate search.  Anyone know that answer?

Read more on the topic by Daniel Schuman “Budget Technopocalypse: Proposed Congressional Budgets Slash Funding for Data Transparency

Now, I’m not particularly fond of how the initial FedRAMP drafts turned out, but I’m optimistic that the program will evolve, will ultimately make a difference and lead to more assured, cost-efficient and low-friction adoption of Cloud Computing. We need FedRAMP to succeed and we need continued investment in it to do so.  Let’s not throw the baby out with the Cloud water.

We literally cannot afford for FedRAMP (or these other transparency programs) to be cut — these are the very programs that will lead to long term efficiency and fiscally-responsible programs across the U.S. Government.  They will ultimately make us more competitive.

Vote with your clicks.  Support the Sunlight Foundation.

/Hoff

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CloudPassage & Why Guest-Based Footprints Matter Even More For Cloud Security

February 1st, 2011 4 comments
VM (operating system)

Image via Wikipedia

Every day for the last week or so after their launch, I’ve been asked left and right about whether I’d spoken to CloudPassage and what my opinion was of their offering.  In full disclosure, I spoke with them when they were in stealth almost a year ago and offered some guidance as well as the day before their launch last week.

Disappointing as it may be to some, this post isn’t really about my opinion of CloudPassage directly; it is, however, the reaffirmation of the deployment & delivery models for the security solution that CloudPassage has employed.  I’ll let you connect the dots…

Specifically, in public IaaS clouds where homogeneity of packaging, standardization of images and uniformity of configuration enables scale, security has lagged.  This is mostly due to the fact that for a variety of reasons, security itself does not scale (well.)

In an environment where the underlying platform cannot be counted upon to provide “hooks” to integrate security capabilities in at the “network” level, all that’s left is what lies inside the VM packaging:

  1. Harden and protect the operating system [and thus the stuff atop it,]
  2. Write secure applications and
  3. Enforce strict, policy-driven information-centric security.

My last presentation, “Cloudinomicon: Idempotent Infrastructure, Building Survivable Systems and Bringing Sexy Back to Information Centricity” addressed these very points. [This one is a version I delivered at the University of Michigan Security Summit]

If we focus on the first item in that list, you’ll notice that generally to effect policy in the guest, you must have a footprint on said guest — however thin — to provide the hooks that are needed to either directly effect policy or redirect back to some engine that offloads this functionality.  There’s a bit of marketing fluff associated with using the word “agentless” in many applications of this methodology today, but at some point, the endpoint needs some sort of “agent” to play*

So that’s where we are today.  The abstraction offered by virtualized public IaaS cloud platforms is pushing us back to the guest-centric-based models of yesteryear.

This will bring challenges with scale, management, efficacy, policy convergence between physical and virtual and the overall API-driven telemetry driven by true cloud solutions.

You can read more about this in some of my other posts on the topic:

Finally, since I used them for eyeballs, please do take a look at CloudPassage — their first (free) offerings are based upon leveraging small footprint Linux agents and a cloud-based SaaS “grid” to provide vulnerability management, and firewall/zoning in public cloud environments.

/Hoff

* There are exceptions to this rule depending upon *what* you’re trying to do, such as anti-malware offload via a hypervisor API, but this is not generally available to date in public cloud.  This will, I hope, one day soon change.

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