What you need to learn about the virtual blind spots of a data centre & how to avoid those?

There is no doubt regarding the fact that virtualization is one of the major trends of cloud computing since the last decade. By differentiating the elements of the computing platform, the users have gradually done away with the traditional model of ‘one app, one server’. Instead of following the conventional process, they have moved to virtual machines so that they can realize the full potential of both their employees and their servers. Simply put, ignoring the benefits of virtualization is no longer an option for any organization that belongs to the competitive industry.

Since many of the machines handle traffic on a single server, it has quite a remarkable downside, i.e., traffic visibility. Since the VMs are built on depending on a lot of factors, it can turn out to be a problem to analyse the packet flow or trace a packet. It’s an important task as this helps understand exactly how a network is actually performing at a given point of time.

In most of the deployments, the lack of visibility into the virtual data centre security and performance might not become absolutely apparent until and unless it’s too late. For instance, when a vital performance problem occurs, especially with a mission critical networked application, it becomes difficult to track the exact problem due to lack of visibility. This is why administrators should make the right choices in network architecture. This will help them achieve the complete business benefits of virtualization. In this way, they can also meet the demand of packet-level visibility.

As far as avoiding the virtual blind spots is concerned, gaining access to the packet-level data is only half of the mission. In order to ensure end to end visibility into both the virtual and physical infrastructure, the traffic that comes from the virtual data centres must be analysed, filtered and broadcasted. This ensures the full suite of performance security monitoring tool of the company receives exactly the packet flow at the right time. This helps organizations do their job in the best possible way and in a timely fashion.

Avoiding the virtual blind spots is a concern for the entire data centre industry and hence, the largest data centres of the industry are investing in network monitoring switches. This is basically an emerging class of technology which connects the data centre network with the monitoring tools efficiently. Just as that of a physical network, load balancing and filtering for packets is extremely critical in a virtual environment as well. This is where the network monitoring switch helps one best as its job is to deliver exactly the data that is needed for analysis to each of the network tools.

This helps improve the overall productivity of the data centres by making all the monitoring tools run more accurately and more efficiently. There are many other benefits of this kind of an environment. Make sure you have a thorough knowledge of all these so that you can make utilization of all the features in the best possible way.

What are the potential security issues of cloud computing and how to overcome those?

In the present time, Cloud is undoubtedly one of the most talked about topics of the IT industry. No matter whether you are associated with a small business organization or a large scale enterprise, you must have heard about the importance of adapting cloud for improving the business processes. Well, there is no doubt regarding the fact that cloud is a boon for small as well as medium scale business enterprises as it allows them to cater to a large number of audience at a minimum cost. Cloud computing is basically the practice of using a wide network of remote servers that are hosted on the internet. These servers are used to manage, store and process data.

While the hype about cloud computing is completely justified, there are also a lot of concerns regarding security issues. One of the main reasons of the security issues with cloud computing is the great exposure that it gets. Since more data is transferred online, the chances of security breaches get higher. But this should not restrict the organizations from opting for cloud solutions. Instead of that, they should address the different security concerns individually and check how they can manage the risks more effectively. Here some of the most obvious security issues are discussed, going through which will enable you to understand how to overcome these issues –

·         Lack of control – The IT security experts who are most efficient to interact with the servers get extremely anxious while moving to the cloud. This is mainly due to the lack of control that they sense for not being physically present at the location.  However, this is not quite the case as the professional service providers usually have a very strong sense of responsibility. In fact, when the IT team of a company gets rid of the task of solving the hardware problems, they can be allocated for more productive functions. They too, will be able to utilize the extra time for log analysis, compliance management and threat remediation.

·         Loss of ownership – There is a common perception that when the data is stored in the cloud, the organization loses its ownership to a great extent. At times, professionals are also worried about the compliance implications for different standards like PCI-DSS and HIPAA. However, how much control of the data will be with you completely depends upon the partner that you choose. Just as you need to select a contractor to work on your premise, you have to be very wise while selecting a partner for a cloud solution. Make sure you check whether the service level agreement (SLA) offers full ownership of data or not.

While these are the two most important security issues with cloud computing, lack of maturity is another concern. There is a common belief among most business leaders that cloud is not mature enough to deal with the security demands that has been increasing at a constant pace. However, if you can choose the right cloud solution, you can rest assured of the required maturity.