Links List 12.11.09

December 11th, 2009 by Valerie Barber

It hasn’t been a good news week for Amazon Web Services, who suffered two cloud-related issues, highlighting two of the biggest concerns about the cloud: reliability and security.

First up: Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region data center in northern Virginia lost power on Wednesday, highlighting the need for performance monitoring. A “single component of the redundant power distribution system failed” and then “a second component, used to assure redundant power paths failed as well.” The outage lasted about 45 minutes but it took several more hours to get customer instances back online, with all but a “small number” of instances restored within five hours.

Secondly: In another instance of cloud vulnerability, the password stealing botnet Zeus turned was recently spotted on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. The perpetrators first hacked a website that was hosted on Amazon’s servers, the installed their command and control infrastructure. Their modus operandi: a Christmas e-card from the “Online Banking Team” addressed “Dear Online Banking member”. This is the first time Amazon’s cloud has been used for this type of illegal activity, but probably not the last as hackers do what hackers do. (You may want to check out at McAfee’s “Twelve Scams of Christmas”, sent to me by Luis, our internal IT guru.)

A conglomeration of companies have come together to form an Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council to work together to remove barriers to enterprise use of hosted cloud computing. The council includes Microsoft, Cisco, IBM and a number of telecoms. The issues expected to be addressed include enterprise’s fear of vendor lock-in, security and reliability. Amazon is absent from the list of companies on the council. However, earlier this week they posted a cost comparison calculator that compares the cost of using EC2, hosting internally or using a co-located facility as well as a white paper outlining the direct and indirect costs of running a data center.

Department of Energy CIO Tom Pyke reports that his agency will be using “the full extent” of options on GSA’s cloud computing dashboard. The agency is piloting the use of Google apps in government and going green. They have received $37 billion in stimulus money on top of its $27 billion budget.

The Obama administration has released its Open Government Directive detailing steps federal agencies must take to become more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. Agencies and departments are expected to meet specific milestones over the next 45 – 120 days. Some examples include publishing high value data sets on data.gov, creating a web page devoted to its government activities, and publishing their open government plans. Chris Kemp, CIO at NASA Ames Research Center says these types of information may be best delivered via cloud computing. He added that finding ways to share data and make it useful to the public will be a challenge for IT in the coming years.

“As federal agencies, we really need to start thinking about overall enterprise architecture because I think open government has profound implications on federal IT enterprise architecture.”

Chris Kemp, NASA CIO

In keeping up with our “best-of” lists for 2009 and the decade, do you remember whose wife said, “‘Well, it is not my teachable moment. However, it is our money. No more Internet banking for you.”

Finally, here’s a bit of irony…David Kernell, the college student who hacked Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account during last year’s presidential campaign, was using a computer that contained spyware that secretly logged and reported his personal information. That’s what I call poetic justice.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Related Posts

• No Related Post

Add comment