Rich here,
When I grew up in New Jersey, summer didn’t really start until June 25th, the day we got out of school. It was weird to me when I moved to Colorado and school ended in May and started in August, but people also used the word “pop” to describe soda, so I figured it was a wacky cultural thing.
Today Cloudera announced that they have acquired Austin-based data encryption vendor Gazzang. From the press release:
While Cloudera customers will continue to have a choice of a broad range of cross-platform data protection methods available from Cloudera partners, Cloudera now offers encryption for all data-at-rest stored inside the Hadoop cluster – using an approach that is transparent to applications using the data, thereby minimizing the costs associated with enabling encryption. Cloudera…
Mike is off giving a giant mouse all his money, so Rich and Adrian ran the Firestarter as a duo this week. The question of the day is: Are we in a Sputnik moment? Did the Target breach shake things up so much that security is moving up the chain? Or are these short-term reactions, which will fade with our memories of what happened?
I am a pretty upbeat person, and despite my tendency towards snark I am optimistic by nature. You might find that surprising, given my profession of computer and software security, but it’s not. I have gotten a daily barrage of negative news about hacks, breaches, and broken software for well over a decade now. Like rainwater off a duck’s back, I let the bad news wash over me, and continue to educate those interested in security. Sure, I have had days where I say “Crap, security on everything…
I didn’t want to become that Dad. The one who says, “Turn that crap down.” Or “What is this music?” Or “Get off my lawn!” I didn’t want that to be me. I wanted to be the cool Dad, who would listen to the new music with my kids and appreciate it. Maybe even like it. For a while, I was able to do that.
Amazon Web Services dropped a security bomb this week when they announced the immediate availability of volume storage encryption. With one click, for free, you can encrypt any EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volume in AWS. For those who aren’t familiar with AWS, they are effectively virtual hard drives you attach to a running instance (virtual machine). I missed this one, but Contributing Analyst Gal Shpantzer picked it up and mailed it to us internally.
The past week has been a bit of a whirlwind. Last Friday I flew out to Denver for a family thing, then transferred over to Boulder for a DevOps.com advisory board meeting, Camp DevOps (where I presented), and Gluecon.
One of the things I don’t miss about running a marketing team is worrying about responding to negative press. It’s a lot worse today, now that you not only have to spin less informed beat reporters who frequently troll for page views by misrepresenting competitive nonsense. But also bloggers and Tweeters who make things up say things about the product.
As we get into late May it is getting to be summer in the ATL. The kids finish up school this week, the pools open, and my standard work attire consists of shorts, a T-shirt, and flip flops. The Boss is frantically getting the kids ready for camp, and we have a few family trips planned before they leave.
We apologize for the quality of this week’s show… but Rich is on the road and can’t seem to understand the word ‘bandwidth’. Assuming you are willing to put up with us, watch us amuse ourselves over FBI wanted posters with Chinese army members on them. Then we debate the sometimes-sorry state of 95% of the 863 security cons in the world.