Cloud Logging

Last week, I noticed new buzz word 'Cloud Logging' at our architect Ambal desk. This blog is about that.

Trust is not only a cloud issue. Alan Murphy points out that to get the benefits of clouds, one has to trust the providers for certain things, but doing so continues a trend in technology

Clouds will need different audit models than do traditional data centers. The diagram shows physical servers onto which the virtual machine instances (VMI) may map. As each VMI generates a loggable event, typically using calls to syslog or snmp, the physical server inserts a time stamp from a trusted (i.e., cryptographically signed) network time protocol server, and then transmits multiple copies of the log events to distributed master logs within the provider infrastructure. At those locations, software and servers sort the log events by VMI and customer, and create viewable, secure logs that the customers can audit. This design is towards LaaS (Logging As A Service)

Alternatively, in a community cloud, independent auditors can apply suitable tests to the customer data extractors and certify them, perhaps for a given digitally signed version of the code. This design approach does assume that the VMI-hypervisor is trusted; there have been some experimental side channel attacks from one VMI to another. This is an area, especially when there are legal requirements to demonstrate due diligence, in which recognized expert help may be needed.

Apple iCloud

iCloud stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more at cloud. And wirelessly

pushes them to all your devices — automatically. It’s the easiest way to manage your content.

iCloud is so much more than a hard drive in the sky. It’s the effortless way to access just about everything on all your devices. iCloud stores your content so it’s always accessible from your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, or PC. It gives you instant access to your music, apps, latest photos, and more. And it keeps your email, contacts, and calendars up to date across all your devices. No syncing required. No management required. In fact, no anything required. iCloud does it all for you.

When you sign up for iCloud, you automatically get 5GB of free storage. And that’s plenty of room, because of the way iCloud stores your content. Your purchased music, apps, books, and TV shows, as well as your Photo Stream, don’t count against your free storage. Since your mail, documents, Camera Roll, account information, settings, and other app data don’t use as much space, you’ll find that 5GB goes a long way. And if you need more storage, you can easily purchase a storage upgrade right from your device.

Amazon Cloud Player

Interesting product from Amazon; itz nothing but Amazon Cloud Player. Amazon has made its entry into the music streaming world with Amazon Cloud Player. Rather than stream a library of predetermined music, Cloud Player lets you upload your existing music library and stream it from any computer or Android device.

Amazon Cloud Player is a browser based application that supports Mac and PC computers and iPad devices. Cloud Player is not optimized to run on some mobile phones or tablets including: iPhones, Blackberrys, and Windows Mobile devices. For Android phones and tablets, itz recommended to install the Amazon MP3 app for Android which includes Amazon Cloud Player for Android.

You can upload your existing music library to Amazon Cloud Drive so all of your music is stored in one place and accessible from anywhere. All Amazon accounts have access to 5GB of free Cloud Drive storage for uploading content. Additional storage is available for an annual fee.

Amazon has thrown down the gauntlet and set a high bar for cloud-based music streaming. Apple and Google, which are expected to launch their own cloud players sometime this year, will have to match Amazon on usability and price if they’re going to compete.

Amazon can’t rest on its laurels though; Apple will surely harness its control of the iPhone, iTunes and iOS to boost its own offering and give the shopping giant a run for its money.

Cloud Security

Cloud computing security (sometimes referred to simply as "cloud security") is an evolving sub-domain of computer security, network security, and, more broadly, information security. It refers to a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls deployed to protect data, applications, and the associated infrastructure of cloud computing. Cloud security is not to be confused with security software offerings that are "cloud-based" (a.k.a. security-as-a-service).

Many commercial software vendors have offerings such as cloud-based anti-virus or vulnerability management.Third-party cloud computing represents the promise of outsourcing as applied to computation. Services, such as Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s EC2, allow users to instantiate virtual machines (VMs) on demand and thus purchase precisely the capacity they require when they require it. In turn, the use of virtualization allows third-party cloud providers to maximize the utilization of their sunk capital costs by multiplexing many customer VMs across a shared physical infrastructure.

In the emerging cloud security space, Craig Balding laid the foundation for cloudsecurity.org (http://cloudsecurity.org/) This site is for people that want to learn more about cloud computing from an enterprise security perspective. Lot of interesting topic, discussion, blog are available and so the interested folks can fetch the benefit out of it