Global Quality Journal

Will Amazon Web Services Survive Irene?

GeekWire:

Amazon Web Services bracing for Hurricane Irene in Virginia

August 26, 2011 at 12:23 pm by Todd Bishop 

Seems like Amazon.com’s data center in Northern Virginia just can’t catch a break lately. And now here comes Hurricane Irene.

Officials at the Amazon Web Services facility — a key piece of infrastructure for many high-profile websites, say in an online message to their customers that they’re “closely monitoring Hurricane Irene and making all possible preparations, e.g. generator fuel, food/water, flashlights, radios, extra staff.”

An extended outage at the facility in April caused downtime at sites such as HootSuite, Reddit and Foursquare. That was followed by another, smaller outage a few weeks ago. [Read more]

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Quality and Security: Report On Data Masking

eWeek.com:

Data Masking Reduces Business Security Risks: Report 

By: Nathan Eddy
2011-08-26

Masked data is used in application development, testing, quality assurance, support and business analysis by a range of private and governmental entities.

Data security intelligence and protection specialist Dataguise released a report suggesting data masking, or the de-identification of sensitive data used in application development, testing and business analysis, can go a long way to improving a business or organization’s ability to protect itself against security risks. The company recommended creating test and development copies through an automated process to reduce the exposure of sensitive data and improve data security in non-production instances. The company said leaving the data in the hands of employees could have “disastrous results." 

Of the available options, the study found those that provide actionable intelligence and enable information security, compliance officers and infrastructure managers to better understand shared responsibilities for protecting data are preferred. [Read more]

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Eucalyptus 3.0: High-Availability Open Source Cloud Solution

The Register:

Open source cloud-builder respawn: Eucalyptus 3.0 looms

Mickos & Co craft 'hot spare' NASA-proof cloudware

By Cade Metz in San Francisco 

Marten Mickos and Eucalyptus have pumped new life into their build-your-own–cloud platform, revamping its approach to open source while adding new code designed to protect users from catastrophic failures.

On Wednesday, Eucalyptus unveiled version 3.0 of its eponymous platform, a means of building Amazon-like "infrastructure clouds" inside your own data center. Unlike version 2.0, the new incarnation is a single platform built on a single open source code tree. Previously, the company offered an open source version of the platform as well as a for-pay "enterprise" version that included proprietary code.

"For the last nine months, we've had just one branch of code, so all the code we produce for the platform is now open source. We do still build add-ons for paying customers only, but these are truly add-ons, which they weren't before," Eucalyptus CEO and former MySQL boss Marten Mickos tells The Register. [Read the rest]

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