Legal Issues of Cloud Forensics — Part 1

The use of cloud services has skyrocketed primarily because it is cheaper and more convenient than the alternative. Unfortunately, many companies have entered the cloud without first checking the weather forecast or performing a risk analysis. What happens if the cloud gets stormy, you suffer a breach, and you find yourself in the position of having to conduct digital forensics? What now? Can you collect data yourself? Where is your data? Who else has had access to your data? Is the provider the actual data holder or have they subcontracted? Many of these issues are better addressed before you enter the cloud. Failing that, what can you do?

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How Much is the Cloud Growing?

There is no denying that clouding computing has grown exponentially since 2011. Data center traffic is also quickly growing. How are data center and cloud computing related? Many organizations have moved their data centers to the cloud or are preparing to implement cloud in their IT infrastructure. Cisco shared this infographic with us, detailing how much data center traffic will grow in the cloud in just the next few years and where that traffic will come from.

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PaaS for Application Management

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is where you’ll find the full promise of cloud computing. I say this because cloud computing (and most legacy IT infrastructure too) exists for one purpose: to deliver software applications to users. We don’t run huge data centers because it’s fun — we do so to host applications. All that compute, storage, and networking exist to make software features available to users, and PaaS makes it far easier, faster, and cheaper to do so, and do so well.

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Understanding PaaS Market Confusion

The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market is maturing. There are many PaaS service offerings now, so many are getting confused about what PaaS is and isn’t.

We can get some help from the internationally accepted NIST definition of cloud computing (pub 800-145). NIST defines PaaS as the capability “to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider.”

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Ten Cloud Computing Terms You Should Know

You might already know what cloud computing is, and you might already be implementing it into your business, but are you able to have a conversation about it? The lingo surrounding this newer technology can be a bit, well, cloudy. Here are just some of the terms we keep hearing as cloud computing spreads from organization to organization.

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