“Some cloud vendors tout that systems deployed within their framework require little or no administration: You create an image with the software and applications that you want it to provide services for, spin it up in a management console, and Voila! you have an entirely new system online; with minimal cost, no hassle, little work. However, even with newer models for virtualization appearing on the horizon, this is not exactly how things are actually used today.”

In the early 1990s the Open Software Foundation formed a committee to select and standardize a new Management Platform Toolset for and from the UNIX ecosystem. After much soul searching over a few months the OSF Management Platform never arrived. One of the committee, from the team that invented The Newcastle Connection (1980s *NIX history, go Google it) made a compelling presentation explaining why they failed. He spent the next 40 minutes wearing two hats, an exquisite red silk Chinese mandarin hat (with feather), and a green canvas guerrilla cap.

THE WORLD OF COMPLIANCE

At the official start of summertime 2016 in Britain we are starting to consume the labour of last autumn, five gallons of alcoholic homemade cider (yum!) made from eight apple varieties grown in mine and my neighbors’ gardens. I’m very VERY careful sterilizing glassware, containers, and buckets: there was this unfortunate incident three years ago (no, you don’t want to hear the horrible details), enough to say I watch each step like a hawk to ensure a batch does not become tainted.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

I was at the Red Hat Summit in Boston at the end of June. We had a lot of activity at our exhibitor stand, and a lot of discussions being passed on to me by our sales team

I continued to have the same conversation again and again over the three days. This seems to be the year people have finished bedding down Puppet in their server/VM infrastructure, and are looking for ways to fill gaps where Puppet isn’t so useful. Like problems with OS security.

Day after day, we see the evidence of an increased number of breaches. As a Privileged Account Management (PAM) provider, we are also seeing a similar increase in requests for proposals on our Core Privileged Access Manager (BoKS) solution.

Big or small, every organization has accounts that hold ‘keys to the kingdom’ credentials. Almost every account holds some level of privilege that can potentially be compromised, resulting in not only financial, but reputational damage.