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Creating software is a perpetual journey. Just like relationships, technologies start young and reach maturity over time as they evolve through several phases of completion. Some of them don’t reach adulthood because they’re ahead of their time or simply not practical, while others refuse to go quietly due to their massive popularity in the business world.

Regardless of industry and activity field, truly ground-breaking technologies are designed with a sole intention: to transform the customer experience in ways that no one has done before. With most businesses, however, change doesn’t come naturally, just as habits (good or bad) die-hard in a long-term relationship.

In my previous post I raised a flag around the importance of identity and access management (IAM), and how this should be embedded in your overall security planning.

What does identity and access governance stand for?

According to Gartner, it represents "a combination of administration and account provisioning, authentication and authorization, and reporting functions" which is either served from the cloud (IDaaS) as a utility, or implemented internally in a more silo’d approach.

Companies may choose to run a combination of the two in their hybrid environment, where they bring up a secondary IAM system to handle their hosted apps, while continuing to rely on standard IAM for internal applications.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have started to grow in intensity and sophistication as more companies rely on web-based applications for their daily business operations. In the past few months, such attacks have become the weapon-of-choice for cyber criminals in every corner of the world because they hardly ever miss their target(s). Taking the analogy further, I would say that these insidious attacks are as precise and merciless as a DSR-50 riffle is for a trained sniper.

What makes DDoS attacks a bad dream for even the most experienced of IT admins is their distributed nature, as the very name suggests. This means that not only one, but a multitude of compromised systems (also known as botnets or bots) seize the target host with simultaneous requests through a breach in the system, which thereby becomes saturated and unavailable to user access.

March was quite a prolific month for dominant players in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) space. Recently, the public cloud pioneer Amazon Web Services entered the Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) market by announcing general availability for AWS Workspaces.

The newly-launched service offers four bundles of prebuilt software that is instrumental for the end-user experience. Licensing consists of flat monthly fees for each bundle, and among the cool stuff under the hood you’ll get coverage for mobile devices, Active Directory, PC-over-IP (PCoIP) support, persistent storage, and data encryption.

On top of it all, AWS-tailored security software is included in two of the available bundles, which is (for now) limited to a single security vendor. The way we know Amazon and their far-reaching vision in extending their service portfolio, they will most certainly consider integration with additional security vendors for future updates.