New edition of COBIT 5 Foundation Course in Valencia

On Monday, October  the 5^th, a new edition of COBIT 5 Foundation course will start.

  

A good opportunity, if you leave in Valencia or near, to learn from the foundation of COBIT 5 from Javier_Peris, awarded with Harold Weiss in 2015 by ISACA and one of the few certified trainers.

 

More information on www.javierperis.com/curso-cobit-5-fundamentos/

You're still on time to do it, don't hesitate, take the chance

 

COBIT 5 course by Harold Weiss 2015 awarded Javier Peris

Yesterday I was very lucky, I had the great fortune of attending to the COBIT 5 course provided by the reputed expert on the subject, Javier Peris, one of the few world-wide certified trainer (COBIT® Individual Trainer acreditado en España por APMG ,plus COBIT® Certified Assessor, besides of much other certifications as ITIL Expert, CGEIT, CRISC, and so on) and recently awarded with the Harold Weiss 2015 prize (you cad find here an interview)

It was only the 1^st day, so I’m really looking forward to remaining course days: today is the second one, so I’m going to get my dose soon ;-)

 

 

Is the Operating System part of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in cloud computing?

I’ve recently debated about if Operating System (in a real Cloud Environment) is part, or not, of the IaaS, and therefore, if its control (management, monitoring and so on) is customer’s responsibility or provider’s.

 

On the one hand, according to the NIST definition of Cloud Computing (the most widely accepted, “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing“, “Special Publication 800-145“) and quoting from it: “IaaS: “The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, network and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to able to deploy and run arbitrary software, wick can include operating system and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, bur has control over operating systems and deployed applications …”. So, puristically speaking, the Operating System is not part of IaaS, as it’s showed in the next picture emphasizing the control scope of the consumer and provider in an IaaS service:

 

  

On the other hand, in the practice some Cloud Providers, in their IaaS provision dashboards let you chose the operating system (“image”) to deploy in the Virtual Machine (VM) you provision. So they are responsible of guaranteeing the Operating System “image” is good; so in some way they have a partial responsibility on the Operating System level (crossing the border of the IaaS) but it’s only in the first deployment of the operating system in the VM; after then the customer gets the control of the operating System so he’s full responsible of it and software built up or installed on. This other picture shows this fuzzy border for the initial step in the VM provisioning responsibilities:

 

 

Note, of course, other (most) IaaS cloud providers let you to upload you own Operating System images, so they are responsible for providing you the VM on the hypervisor  (or container) chosen by them, but nothing else, matching the purist definition of IaaS. Note: this is the case of Tissat, we offer wide catalogue of operating system images but our Cloud Platform (called Nefeles, and based on OpenStack) let customer to upload its own images too.

 

Besides the first picture, the next one shows the PaaS and SaaS scope control of consumer and provider according to NIST definition:

 

 

 

Finally, the border between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, can be summarized in the following picture:

 

 

 

Or in a simplified way in this one:

 

 

CloudSpaces project gets the OCEAN’s Quality Open Cloud label

 

I’m proud to announce the R&D Project CloudSpaces, partially funded by FP7 Programme of the European Union, has obtained the Quality Check of the OCEAN  project.

 

   

As they say, only 20 over 74 open cloud projects in the OCD received an OCEAN Open Cloud label:

-  7 Open Cloud projects obtained the Quality Checked by OCEAN label 2014.

- 13 Open Cloud projects obtained the Reviewed by OCEAN label 2014.

 

The CloudSpaces project is been developed by a consortium integrated by 3 Universities: “Rovira i Virgili”, Eurecom (France), and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland), and 3 Companies: EyeOs, NEC and, of course, TISSAT.

 

Besides, it should be remembered that CloudSpaces is the project where it’s been developed StackSync (a personal cloud software) that recently wined 3 “Software Libre 2014” open software awards (see my last post in 2014-nov-07).

 

Please let me partially quote its e-mail with more data about the OCEAN’s Open Cloud Quality label.

 

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Dear Open Cloud Supporter,

I’m glad to inform you that your Cloud Project has been evaluated by the OCEAN project team (www.ocean-project.eu) and received the Quality Checked by OCEAN label.

 

The OCEAN Open Cloud labels recognize innovative assets, new concepts, architecture documentation and/or re-usable open source cloud components described in the Open Cloud Directory (OCD).

 

The Open Cloud Directory 2014 brochure contains a short description of your project. Included links and QR codes give access to project details such as technologies, licenses, classification, and quality reports about submitted open source codes.

 

Your OCEAN Open Cloud label offers several dissemination opportunities:

1- Your project is listed in the Open Cloud Directory Brochure – to be distributed at OpenStack Summit Paris and upcoming cloud events.

2- You can use the attached OCEAN Open Cloud label and place it on your website and documentation with a direct link to the Open Cloud Directory : http://www.ocdirectory.org/

3- Do not hesitate to mention your OCEAN Open Cloud label on social networks, in your dissemination deliverables and Press Releases.

 

Only 20 over 74 open cloud projects in the OCD received an OCEAN Open Cloud label:
-  7 Open Cloud projects obtained the Quality Checked by OCEAN label 2014
- 13 Open Cloud projects obtained the Reviewed by OCEAN label 2014

On behalf of the entire OCEAN project team, congratulations to your consortium!

StackSync has wined 3 “Software Libre 2014” awards

    

I’m proud to announce that StackSync (http://stacksync.org/), an open-source scalable software (for personal clouds built on OpenStack) developed jointly by the “Rovira i Virgili” University (Tarragona, Spain) and the company Tissat, inside the CloudSpaces Project that is partially funded by European Commission (under the FP7 R&D Programme), has got 3 “Software Libre” (free software) awards in the 2014 call (its 6^th edition). The “Software Libre” is an initiative of “PortalProgramas”.

StackSync has wined in the 3 categories it has competed:

- ESENCIAL PARA EMPRESAS (essential for companies)

- ESENCIAL PARA LA TECNOLOGÍA (essential for technology)

- MAYOR POTENCIAL DE CRECIMIENTO (bigger potential growing)

It that categories it competes against other famous software as, LibreOffice, Ubuntu, NetBeans, Gecos, QVD, and so on

More details here or clicking in the “GANADOR” word in the red label of the next award logos:

New “Cloud Security Services” by SVTCloud & Tissat

Tissat, empresa especializada en el outsourcing de servicios de misión crítica, ha suscrito un acuerdo estratégico con SVT Cloud Services, empresa de soluciones para el mundo empresarial en Internet, para poder ofrecer conjuntamente servicios de Cloud Security (Centro Global de Operaciones de Ciberseguridad) a empresas.

 

Cloud Security está ubicado en Walhalla, uno de los centros de proceso de datos más avanzados de Europa por su Arquitectura, Eficiencia Energética,  Seguridad y Calidad que permite ofrecer a sus clientes la confianza que ofrece un centro Tier IV, certificado por el Uptime Institute; además de estar avalado con certificaciones en Seguridad: ISO 27.001, Gestión de Servicios: ISO 20.000,  Gestión de calidad: ISO 9.001, Medio Ambiente: ISO 14.001, Eficiencia Energética: ISO 50.0001 y Sostenibilidad Energética: EA:0044 entre otras así como el Cumplimiento de los requisitos de Seguridad PCI-DSS para el alojamiento de entornos medios de pago.

 

Actualmente, las empresas se enfrentan a una gran cantidad de amenazas, (Virus, Troyanos, Botnets, Ataques de denegación de Servicio, Fugas de Información…)  que, a grandes rasgos, se podrían clasificar en: amenazas humanas y organizativas, amenazas hacia los activos de la organización, amenazas físicas y ambientales, amenazas ligadas a los recursos humanos, amenazas de Seguridad lógica y amenazas hacia continuidad de negocio.

 

En palabras de Nuria Lago, Directora de Seguridad y Calidad de Tissat, “es muy importante ser consciente de los riesgos de las empresas y estar preparados para mitigarlos en la medida de lo posible, y combatirlos en el caso de ser materializados, siendo de vital importancia la Seguridad Preventiva”.

 

Cloud Security dispone de personal especializado en Servicios de Seguridad; siendo capaz de prestar Servicios  Seguridad Perimetral gestionada para empresas, Centro de respuesta a Incidentes para empresas privadas (CERT), Auditorías de Seguridad bajo demanda (Audit as a Service), Sistemas de detección de Vulnerabilidades y Alerta Temprana, Formación on-line y  Asesoramiento, entre otros servicios disponibles en su Catálogo de Servicios de Seguridad, todos ellos disponibles también en modalidad cloud.

 

La clave de la excelencia de servicios de misión crítica es la mejora continua, disponer de tecnología puntera en Seguridad y contar con un equipo de profesionales especialistas en Seguridad (CISSP, ITIL, CISA, CISM, Auditores ISO, CEH …), algo que ya es posible gracias a la alianza estratégica de  Tissat  y SVT Cloud Services.

 

Cloud Security dispone de todas las salvaguardas necesarias para prestar sus servicios de Seguridad en modalidad “as a Service”, incluyendo, como valor añadido, Tecnología Patentada, Informes de actividad, Cuadros de Mando, etc.

“Juno” release of OpenStack has just been delivered

This post is only to remember that last Friday (October the 17^th) the new version of OpenStack, named Juno, was released.

 

As Stefano Maffulli says in its e-mail to the OpenStack community, IT IS THE RESULT OF THE EFFORT OF 1.419 PERSONS, from 133 organizations, that contributed to its development. OpenStack Juno is tenth release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds and it has 342 new features to support software development, big data analysis and application infrastructure at scale.

 

Let me make emphasis that in this new version, Sahara it’s completely integrated (it was in incubation in the previous vesion). Sahara is the Data Processing module based in Hadoop for Big Data processing suport, i.e. this module capabilities let automate provisioning and management of big data clusters using Hadoop and Spark. Big data analytics are a priority for many organizations and a popular use case for OpenStack, and this service lets OpenStack users provision needed resources more quickly.

 

Another significant advance is that the foundation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has been consolidated in Juno, providing improved agility and efficiency in telco and service provider data centers.

 

Let me copy and mix from the Juno website and the Official Press Release for summarizing the main features (module by module):

• Compute (Nova). Operational updates to Compute include improvements for rescue mode that enable booting from alternate images with the attachment of all local disks. Also, per-network settings are now allowed by improved nova-network code; scheduling updates to support scheduling services and extensibility; and internationalization updates. Key drivers were added such as bare metal as a service (Ironic) and Docker support through StackForge. Additional improvements were made to support scheduling and live upgrades.
• Object Storage (Swift). Object Storage hit a major milestone this release cycle with the rollout of storage policies. Storage policies give users more control over cost and performance in terms of how they want to replicate and access data across different backends and geographical regions. Other new features include updated support for the Identity project (Keystone) and account to account copy feature rollout. Additional work on erasure coding within object storage continues and is expected sometime during the Kilo release cycle.
• Block Storage (Cinder). Block Storage added ten new storage backends this release and improved testing on third-party storage systems. Cinder v2 API integration into Nova was also completed this cycle. The block storage project continues to mature each cycle building out core functionality with a consistent contributor base.
• Networking (Neutron). Networking features support for IPv6 and better third-party driver testing to ensure consistency and reliability across network implementations. The release enables plug-ins for the back-end implementation of the OpenStack Networking API and blazes an initial path for migration from nova-network to Neutron. Supporting Layer 3 High Availability, the networking layer now allows a distributed operational mode.
• Dashboard (Horizon). Dashboard rolled out the ability to deploy Apache Hadoop clusters in seconds, giving users the ability to rapidly scale data sets based on a set of custom parameters. Additional improvements include extending the RBAC system to support OpenStack projects Compute, Networking, and Orchestration.
• Identity Service (Keystone). Federated authentication improvements allow users to access private and public OpenStack clouds with the same credentials. Keystone can be configured to use multiple identity backends, and integration with LDAP is much easier.
• Orchestration (Heat). In Juno, it is easier to roll back a failed deployment and ensure thorough cleanup. Also, administrators can delegate resource creation privileges to non-administrative users. Other improvements included implementation of new resource types and improved scalability.
• Telemetry (Ceilometer). Telemetry reported increases in performance this cycle as well as efficiency improvements including metering of some types of networking services such as load balancers, firewalls and VPNs as a service.
• Database Service (Trove). The database service went through its second release cycle in Juno delivering new options for MySQL replication, Mongo clustering, Postgres, and Couchbase. A new capability included in Juno allows users to manage relational database services in an OpenStack environment.
• Image Service (Glance). The Image Service introduced artifacts as a broader definition for images during Juno. Other key new features included asynchronous processing, a Metadata Definitions Catalog and restricted policies for downloading images.
• Data Processing (Sahara). The new data processing capability automates provisioning and management of big data clusters using Hadoop and Spark. Big data analytics are a priority for many organizations and a popular use case for OpenStack, and this service lets OpenStack users provision needed resources more quickly.

 

In Tissat we’ve been testing the last beta versions and they look great, and we are starting to plan the migration IN LIVE.