Update 2019: We’ve been busy working on some great training content around security, check out the Cloud Academy library to prepare on all-things cloud security.
Welcome to the Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest. This week, we’ll learn about anticipating and planning for disasters, including disasters of the apocalyptic kind, about new legal responsibilities you may face in managing users’ data, and about a class of third-party tools for managing resources spread across multiple platforms.
The end is coming. Plan for it
David Gewirtz at ZDNet has a sobering discussion about anticipating disaster in the cloud. No matter what platform we use, our data and app deployments are always going to face some risks and we’d be fools to ignore them. What will you do if your servers go down for a few hours? How about if they disappear forever (and don’t think that’s not possible)?
User data: some strings attached
One of the nice things about cloud computing is the seamless connectivity it offers between providers and consumers anywhere in the world (and, soon, beyond). On the other hand, one of the really frightening things about cloud computing is the seamless connectivity it offers between providers and consumers anywhere in the world. Anna Brading at the Naked Security blog reports that the European Union is working on a new law that would require data protection compliance for anyone – anywhere – who holds data belonging to any EU citizen. Fines will top out at €100 million.
Just speak to your lawyer
…And it’s not just personal data: Security Week reports that Canada’s CRTC (the agency responsible for communications oversight) has a new law that could require explicit user consent before some kinds of applications can be silently updated. Read the whole thing.
Third-party resource management
Dan Kusnetzky at ZDNet brings the third-party hybrid and multi-cloud strategies cloud management tool, DivvyCloud, to our attention. As Kusnetzky acknowledges, DivvyCloud certainly isn’t the only product that provides a single interface to manage cloud resources hosted on multiple platforms (AWS, GCE, OpenStack, etc), but it is important for cloud computing professionals to at least be aware that such tools exist.
