Interop takeaways
1) Interoperability is making a comeback – it definitely is the case that as organizations move to a hybrid cloud infrastructure that interoperability issues develop. This is one of the reasons HP is focused on Converged Cloud.
2) Security needs to be throughout the network, and that's no longer empty talk – I’ve been saying for a long time that security needs to permeate an organization’s architecture. If there is one thing we should have learned from the 1990s, it is that perimeter based security doesn’t work.
3) Cloud infrastructure is becoming a commodity, but new services will help providers protect their profits – It amazed me the amount of time and space that was dedicated to cloud at Interop. There were a large number of providers and organizations selling enabling capabilities. Naturally all of them were talking about how different they are. One person’s commodity is another another’s core business.
4) As resources move into the cloud, IT operations is forced to navigate in the dark – I don’t necessarily agree with this observation. There are numerous ways to provide greater visibility in the cloud. Granted few of them are free, but this is also an area HP has been focused on with Converged Cloud. It needs to look like one enterprise computing environment at the end of the day, regardless of where the bits are being twittled.
5) DNS vulnerabilities are becoming too risky to ignore – this last one is something I’ve heard a great deal more about recently. DNS is definitely a vulnerable point in today’s Internet protocols. OpenDNS recently unveiled a secure DNS service for consumers (it runs on both windows and iOS). It’s interesting how many people are concerned about security… but don’t realize that their DNS requests are sent in the clear and that can allow quite a bit of information leakage. Of course if you always use a VPN your risk is minimized.
