Kate's Comment

Nick and I have built a market-leading, multi-award-winning, multi-million dollar hosting/cloud IaaS company using entirely open source software and an “automate everything” philosophy. We have recently attained a cross-government CESG accreditation for our service under the G-Cloud project, incorporating the open source hypervisor Xen, even though Xen itself was not certified. Here are my views on why open source is actually more secure and reliable than alternatives.

I contend that the next stage of evolution of storage is “Just a Bunch of Disks” (JBOD), comprised of a range of media types with different performance characteristics, and with software doing the cleverness. In this first post (1 of 2) I shall address the resilience aspects of this evolution. RAID failings Large RAID (Redundant Array of Independant Disks) systems…

Infographic summarising cloud security including using cloud computing as a weapon.

Cloud security is nothing mysterious and the same approaches that one takes when verifying any supplier’s integrity should be followed. You should ask questions like: 1) Will the data remain within the EU (for data protection) 2) Who in the supplier organisation has access to my data and what control are placed upon them? 3) What checks does the supplier…

I’m very proud of my personal and corporate security. At work we use pwgen to create passwords, a sample of our tool is inset and you can access it yourself here. Our policy dictates that staff choose one for themselves and since we know it is cryptographically strong (ie. not based on anything guessable) we don’t require that they change…

In the 1980s, computer viruses passed around on floppy disks were the main security risks. How things have changed! Now, we have bot nets, adaptive computer viruses, social engineering, and phishing to worry about. From hackers / script kiddies to DoSers (Denial of Service), we as hosting providers have to fight them all them all. But that’s just part of our job, however there are some important things people can do to protect themselves.

There has recently been a lot of news about cyber security, and it is a hot item in Whitehall, education and at the top levels in the IT industry. However, is this “new” cyber security concern warranted and do we need government and/or academia to get involved with a dedicated centre for tackling the issue? In short, I don’t think so, and this is why.

As the increasing use of cloud computing and other technologies is changing the world of data management, keeping your data private and secure is an ongoing concern for everyone. Here’s what you should be doing to keep your data safe.

Unfortunately IT suppliers are not immune from the global economy and can fail just like any other company. I believe the best way you can protect yourself is by disintegrating the IT services supply chain. I shall explain…

To give the guys a break I had been doing the Christmas on-call. Keeping a weather-eye on our plethora of monitoring systems I noticed a spike in bandwidth usage from one of our customer’s servers. A few moments later the cause is obvious; some script kiddie has hacked in and started up a bit torrent site serving various illegal rips…