Rational Survivability

I was brainstorming a couple of Cloud things with Doug Neal and Mark Masterson the other day and whilst grappling for an appropriately delicious analog for Cloud Computing, my 5-year old approached me and asked to play the “burping beer game (iBeer)” on my iPhone.  Aha!

Whilst I have often grouped Cloud Computing with the consumerization of IT (and the iPhone as it’s most visible example) together in concert in my disruptive innovation presentations, I never really thought of them as metaphors for one another.

When you think of it, it’s really a perfect visual.

The iPhone is a fantastic platform that transforms using technology that has been around for quite a while into a more useful experience.  The iPhone converges many technologies and capabilities under a single umbrella and changes the way in which people interact with their data and other people.

In some cases we have proprietary functions and capabilities which are locked into the provider and platform.  We pay for this forced allegiance, but we tolerate it as necessary.  We also see the inventiveness and innovation of people for whom brute forcing their way into openness with jailbreaks is a reasonable alternative.

There’s lots of ankle biting as vendors and providers clamor to bring the familiar trademarks of the iPhone to their own platforms.  There are marketplaces being built around these platforms to open up new opportunities for collaboration, applications and experiences with the, gasp!, phones.

It’s true.  The iPhone is, at its heart, a phone, and we’ve had mobile phones forever.  Some complain that the iPhone is nothing more than a smartly packaged combination of technology we’ve already had for ages and that thanks to Moore’s law, we’re able to cram more and more stuff into smaller and smaller spaces.  That logic therefore dictates that the iPhone is the mini-me “mainframe” of mobility. 😉 And millions buy it still.  It’s like technology timesharing as the phone, Internet and mobility capabilities all compete for a timeshared swath of space in my pocket.

Yes, that’s right.  The iPhone is simply timesharing of functions on a phone. <snort>

To the detractors’ point, however, for all the innovation and exciting capabilities the iPhone brings, it has and continues to suffer from some seriously goofy limitations that in other platforms would be game stoppers, but people settle anyway, waiting for the technology to catch up and dealing with the implications as they become important (or not.)

The best example?  Cut and paste.  I had freaking cut & paste in my Newton 15 years ago.  The lack of C&P made certain things unusable on the iPhone let alone inconvenient and even insecure (having to copy and write-down complex passwords since I stored them in 1password, for example.)

However, I’ve purchased each revision of the iPhone as it came out and have been incrementally giddy with each new hardware/software combinaton, especially with the 3.0 software upgrade which finally gave me my beloved cut and paste 😉  The reality is that there are probably better solutions for my needs, but none that are so damned convenient and sexy to use.

The thing I love about my iPhone is that it’s not a piece of technology I think about but rather, it’s the way I interact with it to get what I want done.  It has its quirks, but it works…for millions of people.  Add in iTunes, the community of music/video/application artists/developers and the ecosystem that surrounds it, and voila…Cloud.

The point here is that Cloud is very much like the iPhone.  As Sir James (Urquhart) says “Cloud isn’t a technology, it’s an operational model.”  Just like the iPhone.

Cloud is still relatively immature and it doesn’t have all the things I want or need yet (and probably never will) but it will get to the point where its maturity and the inclusion of capabilities (such as better security, interoperability, more openness, etc.) will smooth its adoption even further and I won’t feel like we’re settling anymore…until the next version shows up on shelves.

But don’t worry, there’s an app for that.

/Hoff

I wanted to be able to take the work I did in developing a visual model to expose the component Cloud SPI layers into their requisite parts from an IT perspective and make it even easier to understand.

Specifically, my goal was to produce another visual and some terminology that would allow me to take it up a level so I might describe Cloud to someone who has a grasp on familiar IT terminology, but do so in a visual way.

I came up with extending the notion of infrastructure as a foundation and layering what I call metastructure and infostructure layers atop.

You can see how I define “metastructure” and “infostructure” in the diagram definitions to the left.

Essentially Infrastructure is comprised of all the compute, network and storage moving parts that we identify as infrastructure today.

Metastructure* is the protocols and mechanisms that provide the interface between the infrastructure layer and the applications and information above it.

Infostructure is the applications and information/content as well as the service definitions that depend upon the other substrates.

These groupings really align well and simplify how I talk about various elements of Cloud.

Specifically, these three layers line up remarkably well with the S, P, I layer demarcation points that I outlined in my Cloud Model (see the extensive discussion here) built before that I use in my Frogs presentation that has met with good reception thus far.

I can drill down as needed, but if I want to summarize from a security perspective where/what I am talking about, I now have three handy and easily understood set of macro-definitions to help me.

What do you think?  I know we’re all pretty buzzworded out these days, but this really seems to resonate with folks up and down the stack I have presented it to.

Update 6/21: Reuven Cohen posted a nice follow-up to this blog on his in regards to his “metaverse” concept.

/Hoff

* I first mentioned the concept of “metastructure” in a post back in Februrary in another Incomplete Thought titled “Incomplete Thought: What Should Come First…Cloud Portability or Interoperability“

Please excuse me if I’m late to the party bringing this up…

We talk a lot about the utility of Public Clouds to enable the cost-effective and scalable implementation of “server” functionality, whether that’s SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS model, the concept is pretty well understood: use someone else’s infratructure to host your applications and information.

As it relates to the desktop/client side of Cloud, we normally think about hosting the desktop/client capabilities as a function of Private Cloud capabilities; behind the firewall.  Whether we’re talking about terminal service-like capabilities and VDI, it seems to me people continue to think of this as a predominantly “internal” opportunity.

I don’t think people are talking enough about the client side of Cloud and desktop as a service (DaaS) and what this means:

If the physical access methods continue to get skinnier (smart phones, thin clients, client hypervisors, virtual machines, etc.) is there an opportunity for providers of Infrastructure as a Service to host desktop instances outside a corporate firewall?  If I can take advantage of all of the evolving technology in the space and couple it with the same sorts of policy advancements, networking and VPN functionality to connect me to IaaS server resources running in Private or Public Clouds, isn’t that a huge opportunity for further cost savings, distributed availability and potentially better security?

There are companies such as Desktone looking to do this very thing in a way to offset the costs of VDI and further the efforts of consolidation.  It makes a lot of sense for lots of reasons and despite my lack of hands-on exposure to the technology, it sure looks like we have the technical capability to do this today.   Dana Gardner wrote about this back in 2007 and it’s as valid a set of points then as it is now — albeit with a much bigger uptake in Cloud:

The stars and planets finally appear to be aligning in a way that makes utility-oriented delivery of a full slate of client-side computing and resources an alternative worth serious consideration. As more organizations are set up as service bureaus — due to such  IT industry developments as ITIL and shared services — the advent of off the wire everything seems more likely in many more places

I could totally see how Amazon could offer the same sorts of workstation utility as they do for server instances.

Will DaaS be the next frontier of consolidation in the enterprise?

If you’re considering hosting your service instances elsewhere, why not your desktops?  Citrix and VMware (as examples) seem to think you might…

/Hoff

Last week Kevin L. Jackson wrote an insightful article titled: Cloud Computing: The Dawn of Maneuver Warfare in IT Security.  I enjoyed Kevin’s piece but struggled with how I might respond: cheerleader or pundit.  I tried for a bit of both while I found witty references to OMD.*

Kevin’s essay is an interesting — if not hope-filled — glimpse into what IT Security could be as enabled by Cloud Computing and virtualization, were one to be able to suspend disbelief due to the realities of hefty dependencies on archaic protocols, broken trust models and huge gaps in technology and operational culture.  Readers of my blog will certainly recognize this from “The Four Horsemen of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse” and “The Frogs Who Desired a King: A Virtualization and Cloud Computing Security Fable”

To the converse, I’ve certainly also done my fair share of trying to change the world both by thought and action in the stance of “cheerleader”; I’ve been involved in everything from massive sensornet deployments to developing AI/Neural Networking based security technologies, so I think I’ve got a fair idea of what the balance looks like.  The salty pragmatist often triumphs, however…

Kevin’s article represents a futurist’s view, which is in no way a bad thing, but I fear it is too far disconnected from the realities of security and operational maturity outside of the navel:

The lead topic of every information technology (IT) conversation today is cloud computing. The key point within each of those conversations is inevitably cloud computing security.  Although this trend is understandable, the sad part is that these conversations will tend to focus on all the standard security pros, cons and requirements. While protecting data from corruption, loss, unauthorized access, etc. are all still required characteristics of any IT infrastructure, cloud computing changes the game in a much more profound way.

Certainly Cloud is a game changer, but just because the rules change does not mean the players do.  We haven’t solved those issues as they pertain to non-virtualized or Cloud infrastructure, so while sad, it’s a crushing truth we have to address.  Further, to get from “here” to “there,” we do need to focus on these issues because that is how we are measured today; most of us don’t get to start from scratch.

To that point, check out “Incomplete Thought: Cloud Security IS Host-Based…At The Moment” for why this gap exists in the first place.

I should make it clear that this does not mean I necessarily disagree with the exploration of Kevin’s future state, in fact I’ve written about it in various forms several times, but it’s important to separate what Cloud will deliver from a security perspective in the short term from the potential of what it can possibly deliver in the long term; this applies to both the cultural and technical perspectives.

I think the most significant challenges I had in reading Kevin’s article revolved around three things:

1. Mixing tenses in some key spots seemed to imply that out of the box today, Cloud Computing can deliver on the promises Kevin is describing now.  Given the audience, this can lead to unachievable expectations
2. The disconnect between the public, private and military sectors with an over-reliance on military analogies as a model representing an ideal state of security operations and strategy can be startling
3. Unrealistic portrayals of where we are with the maturity of Cloud/virtualization mobility, portability, interoperability and security capabilities

In the short term, there are certainly incremental improvements will occur with respect to security thanks to the “lubricant-like” functionality provided by virtualization and Cloud.

These “improvements” however represent gains mostly in automation of manual processes and a resultant increase in efficiency rather than a dramatic improvement in survivability or security given what we have to work with today.

The lack of heterogeneous closed-loop autonomics, governance and orchestration in conjunction with the fact that a huge amount of infrastructure and applications are not virtualization- or Cloud-ready means this picture a vision, not a mission.

Kevin juxtaposes the last few decades of static, Maginot Line IT/Information Security “defense-in-depth” strategy with the unpredictable and “agile, hostile and mobile” notions of military warfighter maneuvers to compare and contrast what he suggests Cloud will deliver with an enlightened state of security capabilities:

Until now, IT security has been akin to early 20th century warfare.  After surveying and carefully cataloging all possible threats, the line of business (LOB) manager and IT professional would debate and eventually settle on appropriate and proportional risk mitigation strategies. The resulting IT security infrastructures and procedures typically reflected a “defense in depth” strategy, eerily reminiscent of the French WWII Maginot line . Although new threats led to updated capabilities, the strategy of extending and enhancing the protective barrier remained. Often describe as an “arms race”, the IT security landscape has settled into ever escalating levels of sophisticated attack versus defense techniques and technologies. Current debate around cloud computing security has seemed to continue without the realization that there is a fundamental change now occurring. Although technologically, cloud computing represents an evolution, strategically it represents the introduction of maneuver warfare into the IT security dictionary.

The concepts of attrition warfare and maneuver warfare dominate strategic options within the military. In attrition warfare, masses of men and material are moved against enemy strongpoints, with the emphasis on the destruction of the enemy’s physical assets. Maneuver warfare, on the other hand, advocates that strategic movement can bring about the defeat of an opposing force more efficiently than by simply contacting and destroying enemy forces until they can no longer fight.

The US Marine Corps concept of maneuver is a “warfighting philosophy that seeks to shatter the enemy’s cohesion through a variety of rapid, focused, and unexpected actions which create a turbulent and rapidly deteriorating situation with which the enemy cannot cope.”   It is important to note, however, that neither is used in isolation.  Balanced strategies combine attrition and maneuver techniques in order to be successful on the battlefield.

The reality is that outside of the military, “shock and awe” doesn’t really work when you’re mostly limited to “compliance and three analysts with a firewall.”  Check out “Security & the Cloud — What Does That Even Mean?”

Here’s where the reality distortion fields trumps the rainbows and unicorns:

With cloud computing, IT security can now use maneuver concepts for enhance defense. By leveraging virtualization, high speed wide area networks and broad industry standardization, new and enhanced security strategies can now be implemented. Defensive options can now include the virtual repositioning of entire datacenters. Through “cloudbursting”, additional compute and storage resources can also be brought to bear in a defensive, forensic or counter-offensive manner. The IT team can now actively “fight through an attack” and not just observe an intrusion, merely hoping that the in-place defenses are deep enough. The military analogy continues in that maneuver concepts must be combined with “defense in depth” techniques into holistic IT security strategies.

Allow me to suggest that “fight[ing] through an attack” by simply redirecting/re-positioning the $victim isn’t really an effective definition of an “active countermeasure” anymore than waiting the attack out because there’s no offense, only defense.  There is no elimination of threat.  I’ve written about that a bit: Incomplete Thought: Offensive Computing – The Empire Strikes Back,  Thinning the Herd & Chlorinating the Malware Gene Pool… and Everybody Wing Chun Tonight & “ISPs Providing Defense By Engaging In Offensive Computing” For $100, Alex. Mobility does not imply security.

To wit:

A theoretical example of how maneuver IT security strategies could be use would be in responding to a  denial of service attack launched on DISA datacenter hosted DoD applications. After picking up a grossly abnormal spike in inbound traffic, targeted applications could be immediately transferred to virtual machines hosted in another datacenter. Router automation would immediately re-route operational network links to the new location (IT defense by maneuver). Forensic and counter-cyber attack applications, normally dormant and hosted by a commercial infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider (a cloudburst), are immediately launched, collecting information on the attack and sequentially blocking zombie machines. The rapid counter would allow for the immediate, and automated, detection and elimination of the attack source.

To pick on this specific example, even given the relatively mature anti-DDoS capabilities we have today without virtualization or Cloud, simply moving resources around in response to an attack does nothing if the assets are bound to the same IP addresses and hostnames. Fundamentally, the static underpinnings holding the infrastructure together hinder this lofty goal.  You can Cloudburst till the cows come home, but the attacks will simply follow.  You transfer all those assets to a new virtual datacenter and for the most part, the bad traffic goes with it. Distributed intelligence can certainly reduce the pain, but with distributed botnets whose node counts can number in the millions, you’re not going to provide for the “…elimination of the attack source.”

With these large scale botnets as an example, the excess capacity and mobility of the $victim could even have unintended worse ramifications such as what I wrote about here: Economic Denial Of Sustainability (EDoS)

In closing, we’ve got two parallel paths of advancing technology: the autonomics of the datacenter and the evolution of security.  I’ll wager we’ll certainly see improvements in the former that are well out-of-phase and timing with the latter, not the least of which is due to what Kevin closed with:

This revolution, of course, doesn’t come without its challenges.  This is truly a cultural shift. Cloud computing provides choice, and in the context of active defense strategies, these choices must be made in real-time.  While the cloud computing advantages of self-service, automation, visibility and rapid provisioning can enable maneuver security strategies, successful implementation requires cooperation and collaboration across multiple entities, both within and without.
The cloud computing era is also the dawning of a new day in IT security.  In the not to distant future, network and IT security training will include both static and active IT security techniques. Maneuver warfare in IT security is here to stay.

It’s absolutely a cultural issue, but we must strive to be realistic about where we are with Cloud and security technology and capabilities as aligned.  As someone who’s spent the last 15 years in IT/Security, I can say that this is NOT the “…dawning of a new day in IT security,” rather it’s still dark out and will be for quite some time.  There is indeed opportunity to utilize Cloud and virtualization to react better, faster and more efficiently, but let’s not pretend we’re treating the problem when what we’re doing is making the symptoms less noticeable.

I am absolutely bullish on Cloud, but not Cloud Security as it stands, at least not until we make headway toward fundamentally fixing the foundational problems we have that allow the problems to occur in the first place.

/Hoff

* I thought that out of all of OMD’s tracks, the most apropos titles to match to this blog post would be “Pandora’s Box,” “Dreaming,” or “The New Stone Age” 😉  Thanks for the motivation, @csoandy

I’ve covered this before in more complex terms, but I thought I’d reintroduce the topic due to a very relevant discussion I just had recently (*cough cough*)

So here’s an interesting scenario in virtualized and/or Cloud environments that make use of virtual appliances to provide security capabilities*:

Since virtual appliances (VAs) are just virtual machines (VMs) what happens when a SysAdmin spins down or moves one that happens to be your shiny new firewall protecting your production VMs behind it, accidentally or maliciously?  Brings new meaning to the phrase “failing closed.”

Without getting into the vagaries of vendor specific mobility-enabled/enabling technologies, one of the issues with VMs/VAs is that there’s not really a good way of designating one as being “more important” or functionally differentiated such as “security” or “critical application” that would otherwise ensure a higher priority for service availability (read: don’t spin this down unless…) or provide a topological dependency hierarchy in virtualized network constructs.

Unlike physical environments where system administrators (servers) are segregated from access to network and security appliances, this isn’t the case in virtual environments. In Cloud environments (especially public, multi-tenant) where we are often reliant only upon virtual security capabilities since we have no option for physical alternatives, this is an interesting corner case.

We’ve talked a lot about visibility, audit and policy management in virtual environments and this is a poignant example.

/Hoff

*Despite the silly notion that the Google dudes tried to suggest I equated virtualization with Cloud as one-in-the-same, I don’t.

Have you ever seen a presentation or listened to a talk and thought “Wow. That person just clearly and brilliantly summarized all the things I wanted to say in a way I never could?”

I just had that experience.

I am working with Mark on a project and was sent a link to check out some of his musings.  One of them was titled “Risk and Security in the Enterprise Cloud.”

It is, quite possibly, one of the best security presentations on Cloud I’ve seen.  It’s a fantastic merge of theoretical myth busting, information systems survivability, security models and Cloud.

Basically, it’s my entire blog of three years wrapped up into 120 slides presented in my favorite minimalist style.  Wow.  Humbling.

It’s freaking brilliant.

Please read it.

/Hoff

I find it amusing that there is so much drama surrounding the notion of Cloud adoption.

There are those who paint Cloud as the savior of today’s IT great unwashed and others who claim it’s simply hype and not ready for prime time.

They’re both right and Cloud adoption is exactly where it should be today.

Here’s a great illustration: “Cloud or Fog? Two-Thirds of UK CIOs and CFOs Not Yet Sold on Cloud“:

Sixty-seven per cent of Chief Information Officers and Chief Financial Officers in UK enterprises say they are either not planning to adopt cloud computing (35 per cent) or are unsure (32 per cent) of whether their company will adopt cloud computing during the next two years, according to a major new report from managed hosting (http://www.ntteuropeonline.com/) specialists NTT Europe Online.

Whose perspective you share comes down to well-established market dynamics relating to technology adoption and should not come as a surprise to anyone.

One of the best-known examples of this can be visualized a by a graphical representation of what Geoffrey Moore wrote about it in his book “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers“:

Because I’m lazy, I’ll just refer you to the Wikipedia entry which describes “the Chasm” and the technology adoption lifecycle:

In Crossing the Chasm, Moore begins with the diffusion of innovations theory from Everett Rogers, and argues there is a chasm between the early adopters of the product (the technology enthusiasts and visionaries) and the early majority (the pragmatists). Moore believes visionaries and pragmatists have very different expectations, and he attempts to explore those differences and suggest techniques to successfully cross the “chasm,” including choosing a target market, understanding the whole product concept, positioning the product, building a marketing strategy, choosing the most appropriate distribution channel and pricing.

Crossing the Chasm is closely related to the Technology adoption lifecycle where five main segments are recognized; innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. According to Moore, the marketer should focus on one group of customers at a time, using each group as a base for marketing to the next group. The most difficult step is making the transition between visionaries (early adopters) and pragmatists (early majority). This is the chasm that he refers to. If a successful firm can create a bandwagon effect in which the momentum builds and the product becomes a de facto standard. However, Moore’s theories are only applicable for disruptive or discontinuous innovations. Adoption of continuous innovations (that do not force a significant change of behavior by the customer) are still best described by the original Technology adoption lifecycle. Confusion between continuous and discontinuous innovation is a leading cause of failure for high tech products.

Cloud is firmly entrenched in the Chasm, clawing its way out as the market matures*.

It will, over the next 18-24 months by my estimates arrive at the early majority phase.

Those who are today evangelizing Cloud Computing are the “technology enthusiasts” and “visionaries” in the “innovator” and “early adopter” phases respectively.  If you look at the article I quoted at the top of the blog, CIO’s are generally NOT innovators or early adopters, so…

So don’t be put off or overly excited when you see hyperbolic references to Cloud adoption because depending upon who you are and who you’re talking about, you’ll likely always get a different perspective for completely natural reasons.

/Hoff

* To be clear, I wholeheartedly agree with James Urquhart that “Cloud” is not a technology, it’s an operational model. So as not to confuse people, within the context of the “technology adoption curve” above you can likewise see how “model” or “paradigm” works, also.  It doesn’t really have to be limited to a pure technology.

I recently read a story from Kelly Jackson Higgins of Dark Reading outlining what are described as the “Six Worst Cloud Security Mistakes:”

1. Assuming the cloud is less secure than your data
2. Not verifying, testing, or auditing the security of your cloud-based service provider.
3. Failing to vet your cloud provider’s viability as a business.
4. Assuming you’re no longer responsible for securing data once it’s in the cloud.
5. Putting insecure apps in the cloud and expecting that to make them more secure.
6. Having no clue that your business units are already using some cloud-based services.

A very interesting list, for sure, and a reasonable set of potential “mistakes” to ponder, but I’m really having trouble with one in particular.

The one that’s getting my goose honking is #1: Assuming the cloud is less secure than your data.

Really? I maintain that this generalization about Cloud being more or less secure (in regards to one’s own capabilities) is a silly thing to argue; let’s see why.

We start off with what I think is a strange bit of contradiction:

It’s only natural for security pros to be control freaks. Being charged with securing a company’s data and intellectual property requires a healthy dose of paranoia and protectionism. But sometimes that leads to false impressions about cloud security. “One common mistake is that as soon as you talk about the cloud, [organizations] assume it’s less secure than their own IT security operation,” says Chenxi Wang, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “More control does not necessarily lead to more security.”

Assuming that one of the reasons a company might consider outsourcing their IT security operations to a third party [Cloud] provider IS the fact that they have more control or at least equal to what a company can provide themselves, it occurs to me this sort of statement can be interpreted many ways.  Here’s one, for example.

I find myself confused by the highlighted sentence regarding control and security within the context of what is written.  In fact, if you read the next paragraph, it seems to imply that the because a Cloud provider has more control they can offer better security:

In fact, with services such as Google’s SaaS, data loss is less likely because the information is accessible from anywhere and anytime without saving it to an easily lost or stolen USB stick or CD, according to Eran Feigenbaum, director of security for Google Apps. And Google’s security-patching process is more streamlined than a typical enterprise because its server architecture is homogeneous, he says. “Many attacks [come from a] lack of patch management and server misconfiguration…For Google, when the time comes to patch, we can do so across the entire platform in a uniform fashion,” he said.

I’ll say it again: SaaS is a convenient way of dumbing down “Cloud Computing” to a singular instance/application/service but it completely obviates Platform and Infrastructure as a Service offerings, which are wildly different animals, especially from a security perspective.  Please see my latest commentary about this in my response to Bruce Schneier’s equation of SaaS with Cloud Computing to the exclusion of PaaS/IaaS.

I’ve made the point before that comparing managing/patching a single application and its supporting infrastructure in a SaaS offering to an enterprise that would otherwise have to support not only that service but potentially hundreds more is a completely unfair comparison.  If you want to compare apples to apples, I’d maintain that any organization with a mature security program whose only charter was to support (securely) a single application could do it just as well as a SaaS provider, all other things being equal.

The differences here become scale and multi-tenancy in the case of the Cloud provider, I think these issues actually make a Cloud environment more difficult to secure.

Also, suggesting with the Google example that “data loss is less likely” because it’s “accessible from anywhere” and doesn’t involve “…lost or stolen USB stick(s) or CD(s)” seems an awfully arbitrary one given the fact that one of the most interesting data loss/leakage incidents in recent Cloud history came from Google’s Docs offering due to an operator (Google) system misconfiguration.  USB sticks and CDs are also a very narrow definition of data loss/leakage.

Then there’s the more global view SaaS and other cloud providers have, Feigenbaum says. “As an enterprise, you only see a small slice of what’s affecting you [threat-wise],” Feigenbaum said during a panel on cloud security at the RSA Conference in April. “A cloud provider can have the economy of scale for a holistic vision…the cloud shifts security and also makes it better,” he said.

I don’t have anything to argue about here; a wider perspective and better visibility is a good thing.  Again, however, this depends upon the type of service, what is being monitored and protected, on behalf of whom and from whom.

But that doesn’t mean you should blindly trust your cloud provider, though the larger ones do tend to have a better handle on threats due to their size, Forrester’s Wang says. “These people deal with security issues at more complex levels than your own IT team sees on a daily basis,” Wang says. “It’s a misconception to say cloud security is definitely less capable or more problematic.”

No, you shouldn’t blindly trust your providers but that last statement suggests we should similary trust that providers do a better job and deal with security issues at more complex levels?  What does that even mean? Please do NOT tell me that a SAS70 Type II is your answer.  Just as “It’s a misconception to say cloud security is definitely less capable or more problematic,” I can just as easily suggest the converse is true without evidence.

I would like to see the empirical data that backs that set of statements up and the common metrics I can use to measure across providers and enterprises alike.  Thought so.

Thus far, security has been one of the main hurdles to adoption of cloud-based services, says Michelle Dennedy, chief governance officer for cloud computing at Sun Microsystems. “Trust in the cloud, more than technical abilities, has been hindering adoption,” Dennedy says. “But the cloud can be more secure than a private environment in many cases.”

Michelle is definitely correct; trust represents a fundamental issue with Cloud adoption, and it rolls both ways.  Asking us to “trust but verify” when what we’re being asked to verify can’t easily be trusted poses a very difficult scenario indeed.

By the way, I think the worst Cloud Security mistake is not knowing what Cloud Security even means.

/Hoff

Update: Please see this post if you’re wondering why I edited this piece.

I read a recent story in the Guardian from Bruce Schneier titled “Be Careful When You Come To Put Your Trust In the Clouds” in which he suggests that Cloud Computing is “…nothing new.”

Fundamentally it’s hard to argue with that title as clearly we’ve got issues with security and trust models as it relates to Cloud Computing, but the byline seems to be at odds with Schneier’s ever-grumpy dismissal of Cloud Computing in the first place.  We need transparency and trust: got it.

Many of the things Schneier says make perfect sense whilst others just make me scratch my head in abstract.  Let’s look at a couple of them:

This year’s overhyped IT concept is cloud computing. Also called software as a service (Saas), cloud computing is when you run software over the internet and access it via a browser. The salesforce.com customer management software is an example of this. So is Google Docs. If you believe the hype, cloud computing is the future.

Clearly there is a lot of hype around Cloud Computing, but I believe it’s important — especially as someone who spends a lot of time educating and evangelizing — that people like myself and Schneier effectively separate the hype from the hope and try and paint a clearer picture of things.

To that point, Schneier does his audience a disservice by dumbing down Cloud Computing to nothing more than outsourcing via SaaS.  Throwing the baby out with the rainwater seems a little odd to me and while it’s important to relate to one’s audience, I keep sensing a strange cognitive dissonance whilst reading Schneier’s opining on Cloud.

Firstly, and as I’ve said many times, Cloud Computing is more than just Software as a Service (SaaS.)  SaaS is clearly the more mature and visible set of offerings in the evolving Cloud Computing taxonomy today, but one could argue that players like Amazon with their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or even the aforementioned Google and Salesforce.com with the Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings might take umbrage with Schneier’s suggestion that Cloud is simply some “…software over the internet” accessed “…via a browser.”

Overlooking IaaS and PaaS is clearly a huge miss here and it calls into question the point Schneier makes when he says:

But, hype aside, cloud computing is nothing new . It’s the modern version of the timesharing model from the 1960s, which was eventually killed by the rise of the personal computer. It’s what Hotmail and Gmail have been doing all these years, and it’s social networking sites, remote backup companies, and remote email filtering companies such as MessageLabs. Any IT outsourcing – network infrastructure, security monitoring, remote hosting – is a form of cloud computing.

The old timesharing model arose because computers were expensive and hard to maintain. Modern computers and networks are drastically cheaper, but they’re still hard to maintain. As networks have become faster, it is again easier to have someone else do the hard work. Computing has become more of a utility; users are more concerned with results than technical details, so the tech fades into the background.

<sigh> Welcome to the evolution of technology and disruptive innovation.  What’s the point?

Fundamentally, as we look beyond speeds and feeds, Cloud Computing — at all layers and offering types — is driving huge headway and innovation in the evolution of automation, autonomics and the applied theories of dealing with massive scale in compute, network and storage realms.  Sure, the underlying problems — and even some of the approaches — aren’t new in theory, but they are in practice.  The end result may very well be that a consumer of service may not see elements that are new technologically as they are abstracted, but the economic, cultural, business and operational differences are startling.

If we look at what makes up Cloud Computing, the five elements I always point to are:

Certainly the first three are present today — and have been for some while — in many different offerings.  However, combining the last two: on-demand, self-service scale and dynamism with new economic models of consumption and allocation are quite different, especially when doing so at extreme levels of scale with multi-tenancy.

So let’s get to the meat of the matter: security and trust.

But what about security? Isn’t it more dangerous to have your email on Hotmail’s servers, your spreadsheets on Google’s, your personal conversations on Facebook’s, and your company’s sales prospects on salesforce.com’s? Well, yes and no.

IT security is about trust. You have to trust your CPU manufacturer, your hardware, operating system and software vendors – and your ISP. Any one of these can undermine your security: crash your systems, corrupt data, allow an attacker to get access to systems. We’ve spent decades dealing with worms and rootkits that target software vulnerabilities. We’ve worried about infected chips. But in the end, we have no choice but to blindly trust the security of the IT providers we use.

Saas moves the trust boundary out one step further – you now have to also trust your software service vendors – but it doesn’t fundamentally change anything. It’s just another vendor we need to trust.

Fair enough.  So let’s chalk one up here to “Cloud is nothing new — we still have to put our faith and trust in someone else.”  Got it.  However, by again excluding the notion of PaaS and IaaS, Bruce fails to recognize the differences in both responsibility and accountability that these differing models brings; limiting Cloud to SaaS while simple for cute argument does not a complete case make:

To what level you are required to and/or feel comfortable transferring responsibility depends upon the provider and the deployment model; the risks associated with an IaaS-based service can be radically different than that of one from a SaaS vendor. With SaaS, security can be thought of from a monolithic perspective — that of the provider; they are responsible for it.  In the case of PaaS and IaaS, this trade-off’s become more apparent and you’ll find that this “outsourcing” of responsibility is diminished whilst the mantle of accountability is not.  This is pretty important if you want ot be generic in your definition of “Cloud.”

Here’s where I see Bruce going off the rails from his “Cloud is nothing new” rant, much in the same way I’d expect he would suggest that virtualization is nothing new, either:

There is one critical difference. When a computer is within your network, you can protect it with other security systems such as firewalls and IDSs. You can build a resilient system that works even if those vendors you have to trust may not be as trustworthy as you like. With any outsourcing model, whether it be cloud computing or something else, you can’t. You have to trust your outsourcer completely. You not only have to trust the outsourcer’s security, but its reliability, its availability, and its business continuity.

You don’t want your critical data to be on some cloud computer that abruptly disappears because its owner goes bankrupt . You don’t want the company you’re using to be sold to your direct competitor. You don’t want the company to cut corners, without warning, because times are tight. Or raise its prices and then refuse to let you have your data back. These things can happen with software vendors, but the results aren’t as drastic.

…
Trust is a concept as old as humanity, and the solutions are the same as they have always been. Be careful who you trust, be careful what you trust them with, and be careful how much you trust them. Outsourcing is the future of computing. Eventually we’ll get this right, but you don’t want to be a casualty along the way.

So therefore I see a huge contradiction.  How we secure — or allow others to — our data is very different in Cloud, it *is* something new in its practical application.   There are profound operational, business and technical (let alone regulatory, legal, governance, etc.) differences that do pose new challenges. Yes, we should take our best practices related to “outsourcing” that we’ve built over time and apply them to Cloud.  However, the collision course of virtualization, converged fabrics and Cloud Computing are pushing the boundaries of all we know.

Per the examples above, our challenges are significant.  The tech industry thrives on the ebb and flow of evolutionary punctuated equilibrium; what’s old is always new again, so it’s important to remember a couple of things:

1. Harking back (a whopping 60 years) to the “dawn of time” in the IT/Computing industry making the case that things “aren’t new” is sort of silly and simply proves you’re the tallest and loudest guy in a room full of midgets.  Here’s your sign.
2. I don’t see any suggestions for how to make this better in all these rants about mainframes, only FUD
3. If “outsourcing is the future of computing” and we are to see both evolutionary and revolutionary disruptive innovation, shouldn’t we do more than simply hope that “…eventually we’ll get this right?”

The past certainly repeats itself, which explains why every 20 years bell-bottoms come back in style…but ignoring the differences in application, however incremental, is a bad idea.  In many regards we have not learned from our mistakes or fail to recognize patterns, but you can’t drive forward by only looking in the rear view mirror, either.

Regards,

/Hoff

I was reading a blog post from Charlie McNerney, Microsoft’s GM, Business & Risk Management, Global Foundation Services on “Securing Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure.”

Intrigued, I read the white paper to first get a better understanding of the context for his blog post and to also grok what he meant by “Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure.”  Was he referring to Azure?

The answer is per the whitepaper that Microsoft — along with everyone else in the industry — now classifies all of its online Internet-based services as “Cloud:”

Since the launch of MSN® in 1994, Microsoft has been building and running online services. The GFS division manages the cloud infrastructure and platform for Microsoft online services, including ensuring availability for hundreds of millions of customers around the world 24 hours a day, every day. More than 200 of the company’s online services and Web portals are hosted on this cloud infrastructure, including such familiar consumer-oriented services as Windows Live™ Hotmail® and Live Search, and business-oriented services such as Microsoft Dynamics® CRM Online and Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite from Microsoft Online Services. 

Before I get to the part I found interesting, I think that the whitepaper (below) does a good job of providing a 30,000 foot view of how Microsoft applies lessons learned over its operational experience and the SDL to it’s “Cloud” offerings.  It’s something designed to market the fact that Microsoft wants us to know they take security seriously.  Okay.

Here’s what I found interesting in Charlie’s blog post, it appears in the last two sentences (boldfaced): 

The white paper we’re releasing today describes how our coordinated and strategic application of people, processes, technologies, and experience with consumer and enterprise security has resulted in continuous improvements to the security practices and policies of the Microsoft cloud infrastructure.  The Online Services Security and Compliance (OSSC) team within the Global Foundation Services division that supports Microsoft’s infrastructure for online services builds on the same security principles and processes the company has developed through years of experience managing security risks in traditional software development and operating environments. Independent, third-party validation of OSSC’s approach includes Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure achieving both SAS 70 Type I and Type II attestations and ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certification. We are proud to be one of the first major online service providers to achieve ISO 27001 certification for our infrastructure. We have also gone beyond the ISO standard, which includes some 150 security controls. We have developed 291 security controls to date to account for the unique challenges of the cloud infrastructure and what it takes to mitigate some of the risks involved.

I think it’s admirable that Microsoft is sharing its methodologies and ISMS objectives and it’s a good thing that they have adopted ISO standards and secured SAS70 as a baseline.  

However, I would be interested in understanding what 291 security controls means to a security posture versus, say 178.  It sounds a little like Twitter follower counts.

I can’t really explain why those last two sentences stuck in my craw, but they did.

I’d love to know more about what Microsoft considers those “unique challenges of the cloud infrastructure” as well as the risk assessment framework(s) used to manage/mitigate them — I’m assuming they’ve made great STRIDEs in doing so. 😉

/Hoff