Cloud Computing Strategies for the CIOMuch of the hesitancy surrounding cloud computing adoption stems from nagging questions about cloud security and reliability. But Sun Microsystems is hoping to change all that.
The company has released a slew of new cloud security products, including:
- OpenSolaris VPC Gateway, which enables a secure, communications channel to the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.
- Immutable Service Containers (ISC), which leverage service compartmentalization and integration techniques to create virtual machines with improved security protection and monitoring.
- Security Enhanced Virtual Machine Images (VMIs), which include non-executable stacks and encrypted swap for use with Amazon EC2.
- and the Cloud Safety Box, which simplifies the management of encrypted content in the cloud.
Lew Tucker, the vice president and CTO of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems, took some time to answer our questions on these latest security products and how they'll improve this much-maligned aspect of the cloud.
With Immutable Service Containers, what are the stronger
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security and monitoring features? Can you explain how this improves security for the user?
Lew Tucker: Immutable Service Containers build in security features, such as turning off unused network ports, and add monitoring capabilities that help identify possible attacks on the service.
Within Security Enhanced VMIs, what does non-executable stacks and encrypted swap mean?
LT: In an attack on a service hosted by a cloud service provider, information stored on disk may be compromised. Security Enhanced VMIs therefore encrypt that space set aside for the operating system, thereby protecting this information. Non-executable stacks similarly thwart many of the common ways Internet services are attacked.
Can you give an example or two of what Cloud Safety Box does?
LT: The Cloud Safety Box makes it extremely easy for users to encrypt and decrypt data being sent to the cloud from their own workstation or servers. This means that even if a service was compromised, no one other than the user would be able to read the data stored in the cloud.
If I am a corporate IT department and want to turn on some EC2 instances securely, how do I physically take advantage of the Sun's security tools? Are they available alongside the AWS services?
LT: Yes, the tools released by Sun are made available for use with Amazon Web Services.
What is the cost of using these tools from Sun?
LT: The tools are free and are contributed to the open source community, in order to make it easier for anyone to use cloud's services in a secure fashion.
Steve Cimino is the Assistant Editor of SearchCloudComputing.com. Contact him at scimino@techtarget.com.
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