LinuxCon Toronto: Increasing DataCenter Security

Managing datacenter operations can be quite the challenge. Not only do you need to deal with issues relating to physical infrastructure (which “ software defined everything ” makes abstract) and customers who want everything to “just work for less money,” but your environments are under constant attack from malicious actors the world over. Just keeping up with the pace of digital evolution can be a challenge.Fortunately, at linuxCon next week in Toronto we canfocus attention on some of the important innovations available to us.

As I look over the agenda, I see a significant focus on both containerization and the security of containers. This focus is part of the trend towards the usage of container technologies in production , which multiple surveys identified this year. Having been through the virtualization and cloud trends, I view containerization as a logical step along the path towards what technology consumers really want agile, on-demand, scalable deployment of application services. When you think about it, we’re at a point where application services are sufficiently isolated from infrastructure to create an illusion that secure application delivery is inherent in the platform.

The reality is that secure application delivery is a team effort. It requires application owners to understand and take responsibly for the code they want deployed. It requires them to clearly communicate security requirements, assumptions and expectations to the operations teams who perform those deployments. Lastly, it requires those operations teams to have an understanding of the core infrastructure supporting those deployments. While we want application owners to trust datacenter operations, we don’t want them to assume anything about the security of their applications.We decidedly don’t want them to believe that perimeter defenses will protect them against everything out there.

This philosophy is what’s behind my session on Using Hypervisor and Container Technologies to Increase DataCenter Security . We know there are bad actors out there, and we know we’re unlikely to curb their enthusiasm for mayhem anytime soon. This means we need to do our level best to ensure that when they turn their attention to us, any impact is minimized and any scope of compromise is similarly limited. Fortunately, there have been significant recent advances in hardware, virtualization, operating system security and containerization. When properly combined, these advances make it much harder to compromise application stacks. Please do come to my session and learn more.