Archive for May, 2011
Check out the latest issue of Ipswitch Insight, our customer newsletter.
We’ve received feedback that you want to watch more of our videos. You asked, and we delivered…. So take some time to sit back, put on your thinking cap, and enjoy the videos that we’ve included in this issue of Ipswitch Insight.
Newsletter webcast recordings:
- 4-part series on MFT as a platform for enterprise application integration (EAI)
- Ipswitch survey reveals security and compliance concerns for businesses
- The benefits of consolidating your file transfer solutions
Plus, you’ll learn why Monsoon, one of the world’s leading retail outlets for fashion and accessories, has selected our MOVEit suite to add security and auditability for file transfer between its international operations.
If you’d like to be added to our mailing list, shoot us an email at MyStories@ipswitch.com and we’ll add you to the list next time around. And of course, we’d love to hear all about how you are using Ipswitch File Transfer solutions too!
Last week I ranted a bit about the importance of governing your cloud vendors. At about the same time, Ipswitch’s Frank Kenney participated in a panel discussion on cloud security at the Interop conference in Las Vegas.
As you know, there is great debate over whether cloud services are secure enough for businesses to use. I believe that the cloud model will quickly evolve and prove itself to a point where security is deemed no riskier than doing business with solely on-premises tools.
I also believe that member-driven organizations such as the Cloud Security Alliance – which focus on providing security assurance within Cloud Computing – will help us get there.
At the Interop discussion, Frank Kenney spoke about the safety of the cloud, here’s what he had to say:
“Cloud customers have the obligation to assess the risk of allowing data to be stored in a cloud based on how valuable it is to the customers…. The cloud is as secure as you want it to be.
Cloud services can provide value if performance and service-level agreements align with what customers need. If not, customers shouldn’t buy them. It’s not ‘the sky is falling’. Assign risks appropriately. Security is just one of many things you have to do.”
Take a quick read of Google’s Terms of Service or Amazon EC2’s SLA Exclusions and you’ll see examples of how cloud platform vendors limit their governance and control responsibility.
So what happens when you put your business in the cloud and then the cloud goes down? Just ask Foursquare, Hootsuite, Reddit, Quora and others who endured the recent EC2 outage that hobbled their websites, resulting in lost revenue and strained customer support teams.
Chances are some of your critical business processes have already moved to the cloud. But you still need to know the instant one of them fails.
So how should you treat vendor platforms such as Salesforce.com, Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Files and Microsoft Azure?
As the saying goes, “don’t rely on a fox to guard the chicken coop”. Don’t rely solely on your service providers to alert you of inaccuracies or outages that they themselves have caused…. Service provider dashboards will be of no use when they themselves are responsible for failure. A governed pipe will instantly give you that information.
Our suggestion is to treat cloud platform vendors the same way you would treat any other vendor. Manage all file and data interactions, with visibility, management and enforcement… And carefully craft SLAs that represent end-to-end services and link them to easily trackable key performance indicators. Cloud does not solve all your data issues on its own, but you can and should leverage your Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution to extend and govern the cloud.
