Neil MacDonald

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Entries Categorized as 'Virtualization Security'


Security Observations from Gartner’s Data Center Summit

by Neil MacDonald  |  December 9, 2011  |  1 Comment

I’m just back from Gartner’s US 2011 Data Center Summit held this week in Las Vegas. In my previous post, I talked about information security vendor’s concerns on the potential impact of the Eurozone crisis on information security spending. Here, I want to outline the top security-related  issues and concerns that I discussed with attendees [...]

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Category: Cloud Cloud Security Next-generation Data Center Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , , ,

Security Observations from European Symposium

by Neil MacDonald  |  November 14, 2011  |  1 Comment

I spent the last week in Barcelona with 4,000+ attendees at the 2011 Gartner European Symposium. It was a new venue for Gartner (we were displaced from Cannes by the G20), and I’m happy to say it was a fantastic with record attendance. Security was front and center of attendee interests. We had a total [...]

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Category: Application Security Cloud Security Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , ,

US Symposium Summary from a Security Perspective

by Neil MacDonald  |  October 24, 2011  |  1 Comment

Last week I attended Gartner’s US Symposium conference in Orlando. With 8,000+ attendees (25% of which were CIOs) and at least 1,000 more analysts, vendors and support staff, you can imagine it was quite a scene. In addition to three presentations, I had more than 30 fantastic one on ones with attendees over the four [...]

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Category: Application Security Beyond Anti-Virus Cloud Cloud Security Information Security Microsoft Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Building Context-Aware Security: VMware Acquires PacketMotion

by Neil MacDonald  |  August 27, 2011  |  Comments Off

VMware quietly disclosed it has acquired PacketMotion in this recent blog post by Dean Coza of VMware. We identified PacketMotion as a cool vendor in Gartner in this 2009 research for clients. Essentially, PacketMotion uses standard Intel-based hardware appliances  (as well as a virtualized probe implementation that runs inside of virtualized environments) to deliver full [...]

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Category: Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , ,

It’s Time for Security to Ascend

by Neil MacDonald  |  August 24, 2011  |  1 Comment

As I research into the future of adaptive security infrastructure, I am convinced that the future of information security lies in software, not hardware. If you think about it for a bit, most of information security policy enforcement is in the form of software already – it’s just embodied (entombed?) in physical hardware. Unfortunately, the [...]

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Category: Cloud Cloud Security Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , ,

The Key to Successful Application Control is not to Control Applications

by Neil MacDonald  |  July 19, 2011  |  5 Comments

Counterintuitive? Yup. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients on the design and implementation of application control (whitelisting) solutions. The key to a successful application control implementation is *not* have to manually manage the whitelist on an application-by-application basis. Our goal should be to identify and approve how trust propagates to files on a system and [...]

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Category: Virtualization Security     Tags:

Seven Cloud Computing Pet Peeves

by Neil MacDonald  |  July 15, 2011  |  Comments Off

1) Treating Cloud as one thing. At a minimum, clarify whether you are talking about SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS – and whether you are talking about public or private cloud implementations. 2) Assuming Cloud always means Public Cloud Cloud is a computing style, not a location. 3) Citing Security as the number one issue to [...]

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Category: Cloud Cloud Security Virtualization Virtualization Security     Tags: ,

Don’t Trust Your Servers

by Neil MacDonald  |  June 17, 2011  |  3 Comments

One of the toughest problems in information security is addressing advanced intrusions that have bypassed traditional security controls and now reside undetected on enterprise systems. With financially motivated attacks and state-sponsored “advanced persistent threats” both on the rise, intrusions can remain undetectable for extended periods of time. We have reached a point where our systems [...]

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Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Improving Security by Killing Server and Desktop Workloads

by Neil MacDonald  |  June 16, 2011  |  Comments Off

It sounds counterintuitive, but today’s advanced threat environment requires new approaches to the ongoing security and management of server and desktop workloads. The trouble with Advanced Persistent Threats is that, by definition, they have evaded our traditional network and endpoint security controls and now reside undetected in our IT Systems. How many advanced intrusions will [...]

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Category: Beyond Anti-Virus Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , , ,

Is Single Instance Security the Future?

by Neil MacDonald  |  June 6, 2011  |  Comments Off

I’ve been researching the intersection between virtualization and security for several years. Like security and cloud computing, virtualization and security is also following a maturity curve. The first several years were discussions with clients on how to deploy virtualization securely. Over the past 2 years, I’ve had an increasing number of calls on the virtualization [...]

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Category: Next-generation Security Infrastructure Virtualization Virtualization Security     Tags: , , , , , ,