Cloud Computing: The Great Arms Race For Virtualization Security
Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gavin Hill.
Since its infancy in the early seventies when the first computer virus was created, the malware and anti-malware business has grown into multi-billion dollar industries. No longer are script kiddies creating malware for notoriety, instead the malware industry is run by organized criminals who invest time and money in new technologies and methods to compromise systems for profit.
The evolution of malware is the driver for the progress of security. Malware propagation has gone from floppy disks, to email attachments, and on to remote exploits of vulnerabilities. Malicious software itself has become more sophisticated by using kernel-level code to hide as rootkits, effectively moving down the stack. The result: an ‘arms race’ between organized criminals and security vendors. Each party reacts to changes in the industry to gain the upper hand. Take for example the growth in broadband adoption since the early 2000’s. As broadband adoption grew so too did the number of endpoints in botnets…
Dropbox now has 100 million users. Founder Drew Houston noted the benchmark in a blog post, and the company celebrated by giving away a gigabyte of storage space. The sheer number of users indicates that most of them are consumers, not businesses (and certainly not midsize firms).
The Met Office has won a new award for its use of cloud services, also taking the prize for the most effective use of collaborative technology at the UK IT Industry Awards The winning Met Office Weather Observation Website (WOW) project, has used the Google App Engine to build and host web applications exploiting cloud and collaborative technologies.
CloudBerry Lab has made an incremental update to its CloudBerry Explorer application, which aims to simplify file management on Amazon S3 so it’s as easy as managing files on local computers. Besides a few other small enhancements to the cloud application, the key addition to the v3.7 release is support for Amazon Glacier. Essentially, the new Glacier-related features revolve around Amazon S3 archiving to Glacier, giving Amazon S3 users the option of using CloudBerry Explorer to archive data stored on S3 to low-cost Glacier storage.
Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management, announced it has registered stable growth of 4% over the last quarter, as well as nine percent in the first nine months of 2012 for the Rest of the World reporting region that includes the Middle East. A particularly strong momentum was registered by the infrastructure, buildings, power, and IT business units.
Cisco Systems Inc., the world’s largest maker of computer networking gear, said Sunday it is buying Meraki for $1.2 billion to expand its ability to let customers compute in the cloud. Cloud computing refers to the increasingly popular practice of storing software applications in remote data centers that are accessed over the Internet instead of installing programs on individual machines.