TECHNOLOGY

The Need to Orchestrate New Identity Policies in the Cloud

Published

2 years ago

August 1, 2022

The Need to Orchestrate New Identity Policies in the Cloud

Cloud computing has played a pivotal role in navigating the digital transformation journey of businesses across the globe.

However, the current multi-cloud and hybrid cloud management processes have created new challenges and hurdles for businesses leveraging the cloud. Whether it’s the absence of a defined interoperability standard or identity management for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, many areas need reengineering to ensure seamless connectivity between cloud and on-premise identity systems.

Also, when we talk about the predefined standards and policies, businesses can achieve greater flexibility and user experience as they’re assured that different hardware, software, and apps work in symphony.

But, new standards have recently emerged in the identity and access management space that ensure smooth authentication and authorization across multiple clouds and applications. Nevertheless, there’s still scope for improvement through new identity policies.

Let’s dig deeper into this and understand why there’s an immediate need for new identity policies in the cloud computing landscape.

Why Won’t Conventional Identity Policies and Standards Work in 2022 and Beyond?

Artificial Intelligence On Premises vs Cloud

The entire internet is built on specific standards and protocols that allow us to access and interact with global content. Moreover, various encryption standards and data privacy policies have also accelerated the growth of secure information transfer, storage, and management.

However, conventional identity policies are impotent regarding distributed authorization since cross-platform applications and cloud deployments require robust information security. Hence, cloud security standards, including OpenID Connect and Cross-Domain Identity Management, help solve the issues and challenges of federated single sign-on (SSO) during cross-platform communications.

Apart from this, cybercriminals are always hunting for new ways to sneak into a network, and they’re now targetting cloud deployments since most businesses now leverage the cloud. And the early standards, including security assertion markup language (SAML), aren’t robust enough to enable identity providers to authenticate and share authentication data between different platforms.

Several new standards have emerged in the identity management landscape that helps organizations deal with the challenges of distributed authentication and authorization.

OpenID Connect and System for Cross-Domain Identity Management helps seamlessly transfer authentication and authorization data between various applications and platforms with minimum risks of data breaches and thefts.

Why are New Standards and Cloud Identity Policies Becoming the Need of the Hour?

In a competitive digital business landscape, where the growth of software as a service (SaaS) is encouraging the use of new identity standards and policies, businesses leveraging different clouds need to rethink their security infrastructure.

Since most organizations rely on a combination of cloud-based and on-premises systems, managing secure access control becomes an uphill battle. Everything in this ever-expanding multi-cloud environment is distributed, and organizations run an endless number of applications on these distributed systems, each with its unique identity. Hence, managing identity security brings new challenges and hurdles.

Although various cloud service providers are working to address identity orchestration and provisioning, businesses are still surrounded by unaddressed issues. Hence, a new standard and a robust set of data security and privacy policies in the identity landscape is the need of the hour to ensure secure data management on the cloud.

How to Incorporate Robust Identity Policies in the Cloud?

5 Cloud Computing Trends That Are Playing A Major Role in 2021 Beyond

By leveraging identity management through a reliable solution.

A robust CIAM can help businesses ensure a stringent level of security across multiple cloud platforms.

A CIAM solution removes any chances of identity theft and identity-related security issues since it incorporates multiple authentication and authorization processes through multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Apart from this, an identity management solution also provides risk-based authentication (RBA) /adaptive authentication, ensuring the highest security level in high-risk scenarios.

By incorporating data governance and compliances.

When it comes to cloud security, businesses need to understand the importance of data governance. Data governance emphasizes threat detection, prevention, and mitigation.

Businesses can identify potential threats by incorporating adequate data governance and regulations policies. Apart from this, enterprises leveraging the cloud must comply with various data security and privacy regulations, including the GDPR and the CCPA. With these compliances in place, businesses can ensure they offer maximum protection to their users, and sensitive data isn’t compromised.

In Conclusion

Information security should be the priority for businesses leveraging the cloud in the digitally-advanced modern world that runs on data as its primary fuel.

Businesses can ensure robust security with adequate information security policies, primarily when relying on cloud storage. However, a lack of robust identity policies and standards may lead to compromised customer identities and sensitive business information.

Businesses must put their best foot forward in incorporating the latest technologies to help establish reliable identity policies and standards to safeguard crucial information.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud