Towards A “Social Network” of Monitoring and Incident Management in the Cloud?

I recently read a very interesting article called “Log files – are you reviewing yours?”. Organisations often fail to fully leverage and analyse the audit log information that is collected within their IT and business environment …

Things might get worse when more and more organisational services and IT infrastructure is outsources in the Cloud …

This triggered a few thoughts about how assurance could be provided in the Cloud and how this could be done effectively to handle various degrees of risks.

Interestingly, when outsourcing in the Cloud, part of the organisational control on IT and processes is lost. This might include the ability of logging information at the desired level of granularity and timely acting on it, e.g. in case on incidents …

Which mechanisms should be put in place to enable organisations to get timely information, including logs and incidents, from their Cloud Service Providers?

This has an impact not only on SLAs and contractual agreements but also on technical solutions that needs to be deployed to:

- enable Cloud service providers to flexibly collect log information, at different level of abstractions in the IT stack – for specific customers - and provide it to organisations
- enable organisations to deal with mixed sources of log files, with potentially different level of accuracy and trust, to drive their audit & compliance management activities as well as incident management processes

It is going to be a “recursive” issue, as Cloud Service providers might rely on other providers in the Cloud …

I envisage a situation where enterprises’ business and governance requirements will dictate a wider collaboration between various Service Providers in order to collect, process, sanitise and share “logs information” and incidents.

Are we moving towards Federated Monitoring in the Cloud i.e. a sort of “Social Network” of Monitoring and Incident Management in the Cloud? …


--- Posted by Marco Casassa Mont (here and here) ---

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--- NOTE: my original HP blog can be found here ---

On 2008 Trends in Identity Management …

A recent article (published by sourcewire.com) provides an overview of the ten predominant topics and trends in Identity Management in 2008, based on an analysis provided by the analyst group Kuppinger Cole + Partners.

Here is the list of these trends:

• Trend No. 1: OpenID, InfoCards, CardSpace – Identity 2.0 is becoming part of real life
• Trend No. 2: Governance, Risk Management, Compliance as a “superstructure”
• Trend No. 3: Open systems and modules instead of monolithic suites
• Trend No. 4: SOA and IAM are growing together
• Trend No. 5 Authentication and authorization in the context of the user
• Trend No. 6 Privacy and data protection regain in importance
• Trend No. 7 More, not less vendors
• Trend No. 8 Secure online banking – finally!
• Trend No. 9: Information and identities are linked: “Enterprise Information Management”
• Trend No. 10: Federation is growing up – slowly

I particularly believe that trend number 2 is happening, i.e. the fact that Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) are more and more influencing the way IT is perceived, managed and run. GRC is influencing CISOs/CIOs and their decision making process, including investments in Identity Management and related requirements.

I really agree that the change we are going to experience is from administration-focussed to business-orientated Identity Management.

--- NOTE: my original HP blog can be found here ---