All about Virtualization and Cloud Security | Recent Articles:

VMworld USA is one of the largest events infrastructure and operations (and security) people look forward to every year in San Francisco. With this year’s theme “Ready For Any”, it is definitely a reflection of what we are doing at Bitdefender: we ARE ready for ‘any’ and protect it all in ‘one’.

Infosecurity Europe is Europe’s number one information security event with over 345 exhibitors showcasing the most diverse range of products and services to 13,000 visitors.

Below you have 7 reasons why you need to visit Bitdefender's stand C180

I recently signed up a family member for extracurricular activities, and upon arriving at a small local business, ended up in a conversation with the owner. After a few pleasantries, the usual, “where do you work” question came up. I proudly answered, and the floodgates opened with the owner asking many questions about IT and security:

 Should I use two host service providers? One for internal access? One for external access? 

 How do I protect the business, given my IT environment?  

 Should I move certain services into the cloud? If so, how do I make sure my customers are protected?

 What is virtualization and how can it help me? Does it make sense for me?

When we think of farming and agriculture, we tend to think of dirt, maybe some animals, and perhaps some large machinery. And when we think technology and agriculture, maybe our minds wander to a farmer using a mobile phone or some high tech tractor.

Others might think biotech or biometrics for plant or animal breeding, or other farm-related necessities. ITC in agriculture has made many advancements – some for the better, others would argue for the worse. And it shows no sign of slowing down.

For example, here is a fascinating 2014 story from Business Insider that goes into great depth about emerging technologies in agriculture. Another story in The Guardian points to how entrepreneurs are using their tech backgrounds to build unique agricultural operations and urban farms.

As an AWS customer, chances are you made a great business decision to move to that model for some or all the following reasons:

•      Flexibility
•      Capacity
•      Agility
•      Speed
•      Accessibility
•      Ease of use
•      Scalability
•      Continuous Delivery

Whether you’re a startup or a DevOp in a large enterprise, some of the most compelling reasons to move a business model or develop a business process on AWS is that incredible and versatile infrastructure.

The power and productivity is second to none (well except in the case of the odd outage here and there – but that’s another story). When all is running smoothly, so is your business or your project. The ability to scale and spend according to your delivery model, timelines and needs, while delivering world-class applications and business processes is like no other time in history.

Destkop-as-a-Service (DaaS) is on the rise in terms of adoption and maturation. You just have to look at some of the media articles flying around to see that this movement is gathering steam. Cloud computing is eliminating the entire on-premise conundrums – cost, maintenance, etc. Choose a platform vendor, anyone… VMware, Citrix, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, and you’ll find the expansion of elasticity is happening fast.  

In early May 2014, Amazon launched its Workspaces DaaS in Europe. Microsoft recently debuted its upcoming offering, RemoteApp At Citrix Synergy 2014, announcements about Workspace Services got a lot of people excited. The challenge is now keeping up with who is getting into the DaaS business. In the past few weeks alone the following companies announced their DaaS services: RapidScale, IndependenceIT, NComputing, Proxios, and the list goes on. 

Anyone who thinks the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon will quietly go away is not being realistic. As many senior technology executives are learning, this trend is continuing to grow—whether IT likes it or not.

The rising popularity of smartphones and tablets among the general population in recent years has translated to a “consumer IT” environment in which employees use their own devices for work purposes.

What the analysts say

As a VAR or managed services provider, you’ve no doubt received queries from many of your customers about server and desktop virtualization, and how they can take advantage of these technologies to improve business operations.

Some of these companies might already be dabbling in virtualization. But regardless of where they’re at with server and desktop virtualization, they’re also likely to be concerned about information security in this new environment. They want to be sure that their data and applications are safe from malware and other threats.

Without effective security strategies and tools that were created for the virtualized environment, some of the gains made possible by these technologies might be negated. Here are 5 key factors that you need to consider when evaluating anti-malware solutions designed for virtualized environments:

Governments, federal, state/provincial and municipal, always face mounting costs when it comes to IT, this isn’t news.

And increasingly, many are turning to virtualization and cloud innovations to deliver better service to citizens. Virtualization and cloud technologies bring the promise of better data management and services within and across departments, the storage of the billions of records, and overall, a better user experience both for government workers and citizens alike.

However, security in these innovative environments is no easy task. Traditional implementations rely on a licensing model based on physical machines (per-seat, per-machine, per-year), which ultimately costs more.

But virtualization and cloud present an entirely different methodology, where ‘islands of hardware’ disappear, and the traditional security licensing model becomes troublesome.

Building apps on Amazon Web Services, often led by technical operations (or DevOps) and driven purely by business needs, tends to focus on building and delivering functionality in as little time as possible.  The flexibility and agility available with AWS allows teams to build an app or a business process from conception to production rollout.