Tuesday, October 19, 2010

CA Summit in Security Risks in the Cloud 19 Oct 2010

I attended the CA Summit on Security Risks of the Cloud today at the Westin Hotel. The focus of the seminar was on Identity and Access Management Solutions in the cloud. CA latest acquisition of Arcot Systems and its flagship Siteminder IAM product suite was show cased in a short case study.  CA demonstrated that it had or were working towards end to end  solutions TO, FOR and FROM the cloud. Geoff Charron VP, Software Engineering, CA spoke at the event.

TO the cloud are solutions for a user to access cloud based solutions such as SalesForce.com aswell as federate between an enterprise and cloud based applications.

FOR the cloud were solutions for building an identity and authentication framework solution for the hypervisor layer in cloud architectures

FROM the cloud were solutions from Arcot Systems for cloud based multifactor authentication using their soft PKI certificates.

The conference was well attended with a large number of delegates, who took a keen interest in the technical aspects of cloud based authentication. There were several questions on the types of threats faced by cloud based authentication, the time taken to deploy such a solution and the contractual agreement for its use.

I was very happy to see that the IT and Security teams in Mumbai are evaluating solutions that use the cloud. As business realise the immense savings that cloud based services can bring, the IT and Security teams need to be abreast with the technical and security risks behind cloud based deployment. A secure authentication mechanism, particularly the CA, TO the cloud solution will be most useful for first stage cloud movers.

The event closed with a lovely dinner.

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