Begun, the cloud war has.
We have been talking about cloud computing for a few years now on this blog, but in terms of market maturity it is still early days. We are really entering the equivalent of the second inning of a much longer game, it will be over for a long time, and things are just now getting really interesting. In case you missed it, the AWS Summit began this week in San Francisco, with Amazon announcing several new services and advances. But the headline of the week was Google’s announced price cuts for their cloud services:
Google Compute Engine is seeing a 32 percent reduction in prices across all regions, sizes and classes. App Engine prices are down 30 percent, and the company is also simplifying its price structure. The price of cloud storage is dropping a whopping 68 percent to just $0.026/month per gigabyte and $0.2/month per gigabyte/DRA. At that price, the new pricing is still lower than the original discount available for those who stored more than 4,500TB of data in Google’s cloud.
Shortly thereafter Amazon countered with their own price reductions – something we figured they were prepared to do, but didn’t intend during the event. Amazon has been more focused on methodically delivering new AWS functionality, outpacing all rivals by a wide margin. More importantly Amazon has systematically removed impediments to enterprise adoption around security and compliance. But while we feel Amazon has a clear lead in the market, Google has been rapidly improving. Our own David Mortman pointed out several more interesting aspects of the Google announcement, lost in the pricing war noise:
“The thing isn’t just the lower pricing. It’s the lower pricing with automatic “reserve instances” and the managed VM offering so you can integrate Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Google App Engine. Add in free git repositories for managing the GCE infrastructure and support for doing that via github – we’re seeing some very interesting features to challenge AWS. GOOG is still young at offering this as an external service but talk about giving notice…
Competition is good! This all completely overshadowed Cisco’s plans to pour $1b into an OpenStack-based “Network of Clouds”. None of this is really security news, but doubling down on cloud investments and clearly targeting DevOps teams with new services, make it clear where vendors think this market is headed. But Google’s “Nut Shot” shows that the battle is really heating up.
On to the Summary, where several of us had more than one favorite external post:
Favorite Securosis Posts
Adrian Lane: Incite 3/26/2014: One Night Stand. All I could think of when I read this was Rev. Horton Heat’s song “Eat Steak”.
Mike Rothman: Firestarter: The End of Full Disclosure.
Other Securosis Posts
Mike’s Upcoming Webcasts.
Friday Summary: March 21, 2014 – IAM Mosaic Edition.
Favorite Outside Posts
Gal Shpantzer: Why Google Flu is a failure: the hubris of big data.
Adrian Lane: Canaries are Great!
David Mortman: Primer on Showing Empathy in the Tech Industry.
Gunnar: Making Sure Your Security Advice and Decisions are Relevant. “Information security professionals often complain that executives ignore their advice. There could be many reasons for this. One explanation might be that you are presenting your concerns or recommendations in the wrong business context. You’re more likely to be heard if you relate the risks to an economic moat relevant to your company.”
Gunnar: Cyberattacks Give Lift to Insurance. The cybersecurity market is growing: “The Target data breach was the equivalent of 10 free Super Bowl ads”.
Mike Rothman: You’ve Probably Been Pouring Guinness Beer The Wrong Way Your Whole Life. As a Guinness lover, this is critical information to share. Absolutely critical.
Mike Rothman: Data suggests Android malware threat greatly overhyped. But that won’t stop most security vendors from continuing to throw indiscriminate Android FUD.
Research Reports and Presentations
Reducing Attack Surface with Application Control.
Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Security Monitoring.
The Future of Security: The Trends and Technologies Transforming Security.
Security Analytics with Big Data.
Security Management 2.5: Replacing Your SIEM Yet?
Defending Data on iOS 7.
Eliminate Surprises with Security Assurance and Testing.
What CISOs Need to Know about Cloud Computing.
Defending Against Application Denial of Service Attacks.
Executive Guide to Pragmatic Network Security Management.
Top News and Posts
Apple and Google’s wage-fixing. Not security but interesting.
Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud.
Cisco plans $1B investment in global cloud infrastructure.
Microsoft Security Advisory: Microsoft Word Under Seige.
Chicago’s Trustwave sued over Target data breach.
Blog Comment of the Week
This week’s best comment goes to Marco Tietz, in response to Friday Summary: IAM Mosaic Edition.
Thanks Adrian, it looks like you captured the essence of the problem. IAM is very fragmented and getting everything to play together nicely is quite challenging. Heck, just sorting it out corp internal is challenging enough without even going to the Interwebs. This is clearly something we need to get better at, if we are serious about ‘The Cloud’.
- Adrian Lane
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