Cloud computing era must be safe to escort

Few people will deny that cloud computing is the most important it trend of the era, a few years ago people will ask what is cloud computing, cloud computing is the concept of speculation or the future direction of development? And now there is no doubt that cloud computing is the most important it change of the era. As the trend Technology chairman Zhang Ming said, cloud computing is like playing baseball, a total of nine levels, but we have now reached the second level. At the first level, we ask what is cloud computing, is cloud computing a trend? But now few people ask such questions, now more concerned about cloud applications, how to reduce the cost of the enterprise through application? How do I migrate existing data to the cloud? What are the difficulties of virtualization steps? People are starting to have real problems.

The Chinese government has made clear in the "Twelve-Five" new generation of information technology industry development thinking, in the next five years will use the cloud computing technology to carry out the emerging service demonstration, the implementation information Huimin major application demonstration project. Dong Baoqing that cloud computing is the most representative and far-reaching technological change in the new round of information technology change. China's government has taken cloud computing as a strategic emerging industry to promote development, the national Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Public Information also issued a policy of promotion. At present, five major cloud computing pilots have been built in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Wuxi and Hangzhou.

Trend Technology Chairman Ming that the era of post-PC has been opened. Recent IT news has shaken our nerves: HP stripped its PC business and acquired a UK company doing cloud business, and Google acquired Motorola, which has leapt to the world's largest market capitalisation. The entire IT world is welcoming a new era. Cloud computing has been very clearly demonstrated, foreign Google, Amazon, domestic Alibaba, Baidu, etc. have very large data applications. Song, referring to some of the financial clients recently contacted, found that these customers, who were most cautious about data security, were moving in that direction, not as a choice, but as a necessity.

June 24, the trend of science and Technology in Beijing hosted the "Cloud computing security high-end CIO Summit" and 2011 Enterprise Cloud Computing and Virtualization Security Strategy Conference, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology department, deputy director Dong Baoqing, Trend Technology chairman Ming, Broadband capital Chairman Tian, Song, executive director of VMware Greater China, shared with many of the CIO and guests about the changes in cloud computing and the issues that could be encountered in change.

Government perspective: Cloud computing will bring new challenges to government regulation

Dong Baoqing, the director of the Ministry of the Cloud, believes that the advent of the era will bring four impacts:

On the technical level, cloud computing is a new development of distributed computing architecture, mainly divided into three segments: Cloud + broadband + terminal. Each segment is now the focus of competition among it vendors, ICT vendors, and even companies want to focus three segments to form an updated business model.

At the industrial level, first of all, cloud computing will bring the increase of industrial concentration, and the trend towards monopolistic development, with the further improvement of industry, began to lead Enterprises + SME cluster industry chain competition model. Different from the past, ICT vendors will form the competition pattern of industrial chain system to the industrial chain system. Secondly, the industry will move from product economy, project economy to service economy. The information industry will increasingly have a variety of business characteristics of the service industry, to the development direction of modern information service industry.

From the user level, cloud computing realized on-demand, that is, the use of the search is used to reduce the threshold of technology, shorten the use of modern science and technology, can reduce enterprise ICT costs, improve efficiency.

But it also poses security, regulatory and social responsibility challenges. In the relevant monopoly, fair competition, protection of personal privacy, corporate trade secrets for the government's regulatory generation has brought enormous challenges. In addition, for businesses, the advent of new IT architectures means that the security policies that are compatible with them need to be synchronized.

Dong Baoqing pointed out that cloud security is the premise of cloud computing development, the need for security in development, in the development of security.

Business perspective: Cloud ERA means the change of business model and the importance of user experience

Cloud computing not only means the change of technology, but also the change of business model. In technology to the direction of open source. In the business model, the mode of one-time sale and service charge from the previous, to the demand, according to the use of the payment method.

In Zhang Ming's view, the cloud era is a knowledge-based economy era, it is to consider how the data can be processed into a lot of information, information into the creation of financial knowledge. Information gathering is now increasingly available, such as a smart grid where sensors can be used to collect information about electricity consumed by millions of households, as well as the presence of such data on clouds and the use of cloud devices (such as tablets, such as tablet phones) to receive such information at any time to quickly act upon it. The cloud era lowers the threshold of technology, bringing more opportunities and enthusiasm for innovation.

The big impact of cloud computing is the use of the apple we relish. There are many business models behind Apple that are worth exploring. Previously used Oracle database, IBM Middleware, Microsoft's system, mainly the use of complex development, Buchan, maintenance, but the emergence of Apple so that we reflect on whether there is a simple way to use? In fact, technology is now moving in this direction, mainly open source.

China and even the whole of Asia from the Industrial Revolution to now basically the main manufacturing, mainly for price competition, so constantly thin profits. Apple's success also allows us to reflect on the importance of the user experience, to design according to the needs of the user, to consider how users use the technology, and to understand the users experience. A good user experience will become the real competitive advantage of enterprises.

How to deal with the security challenges of cloud computing and virtualization?

Few people now suspect that cloud computing can bring more agility and efficient use of resources, but there are doubts about whether cloud computing and its suppliers are trustworthy and safe. According to a number of findings, the main problems impeding the adoption of cloud technology by enterprises generally include data security, compliance, and the technical blockade of vendors. The external factors involved in these impediments include the stability of cloud technology suppliers and the impact of regulatory agencies. Among them, data security and compliance are the problems that security companies and cloud providers need to solve.

At present, the development of cloud computing is in the new stage of transformation brought by the integration of virtualization and enterprise business. So the most important thing now is to solve the security problems in the virtualized environment. Typical security issues encountered in virtualized environments include:

An external attack. Virtual servers also face security risks associated with physical environments, such as malware infections, vulnerability exploits, and SQL injection. This protects application and system security in virtualized environments using malware and vulnerability masking solutions.

Second, the immediate start of the protection gap. It is not possible to configure security policies for these virtual machines quickly and consistently and keep them up to date during the snapshot, hibernation, and activation processes. In this case, you can deploy a agentless security solution that integrates seamlessly with the underlying system of the virtual environment, so that virtual machines that have previously been dormant but are now activated will immediately receive the latest protection.

Iii. virtual machine internal attack. Traditional network security Devices cannot view network traffic within a virtual machine, and therefore cannot detect or suppress attacks from virtual machines originating from the same host. In this way, you can intercept and inspect the internal network traffic of the virtual machine by deploying a agentless security solution that integrates seamlessly with the underlying system of the virtual environment. Considering that system and application vulnerabilities are the primary targets of an attack, the security solution must have the ability to mask virtual machine vulnerabilities.

Iv. resource contention. resource-intensive operations, such as virus scanning or anti-virus updates, on a host's virtual machine can quickly cause a surge in the system (CPU, memory, network, and disk I/O) load. In this way, by deploying a security solution with virtualization awareness, you can eliminate resource contention and use a preset and task-based security policy to ensure the highest server efficiency during peak and off-peak hours.

V. Complexity of management. In Dynamic Data centers, new security virtual machines are automatically set up, reconfigured, and even migrated automatically. This makes it extremely difficult for administrators to track, maintain, and enforce consistent security policies. In this respect, by deploying a agentless security solution that integrates seamlessly with the underlying system of the virtual environment, you can minimize the number of clients that need to be installed and managed, and ensure that the security policies, defenses, and configurations of the virtual machine are consistently compliant, regardless of where it is located.

VI. Audit compliance/deficiencies. Maintaining compliance with industry rules in a virtual environment is becoming more complex, a dynamic feature of virtual data centers. The most effective approach is to integrate security features directly into the virtualization platform using a solution that has the visual function of the hypervisor, which can monitor all traffic entering/out of the virtual machine.

In trend technology, cloud security can be viewed in four directions: cloud infrastructure (especially in virtualized environments), cloud data (a large amount of centralized data), cloud applications (Web sites, software services), cloud terminal equipment (mobile, terminal).

Map: Trend Technology Cloud computing security overall solution architecture diagram

Trend Technology recently released the "Cloud Security 5.0" solution from four aspects to provide targeted protection strategy in the above four directions:

The agentless security for the virtualization architecture. With the "Cloud shield" technology and virtual environment without agent dynamic integration to protect all kinds of enterprise data centers, application system security, so that cloud applications/cloud services platform itself from viruses, attacks, system vulnerabilities and other threats.

Second, cloud Platform data protection. Through the "Cloud safe" technology in the key and policy management mechanism to protect users ' privacy and data stored in the cloud is not illegally stolen and exploited, so that enterprises can safely use the cloud platform to store or exchange data.

Third, the mobile device without boundary security access. Protects mobile internet mobile terminals, smartphones from virus threats, and effectively manages mobile devices ' access to borderless data on the Web at any time.

Iv. Cloud computing security threat management. The Intelligent unified Cloud computing security threat Management platform provides flexible policy management, only associated queries, and rich log audit and reporting functions.