An amusing story comes from Sweden where a thief returned stolen laptop contents on a USB stick

The professor, who teaches at Umeå University in northern Sweden, was devastated when ten years of work stored on his laptop was stolen.

But to his surprise, a week after the theft, the entire contents of his laptop were posted to him on a USB stick.

I hate to say it but this is a great example of why encryption can be worse than no encryption — recovery of data. A backup is a better answer to the problem of recovery, but this professor says he has not made a backup in ten years.

I find that impossible to believe, since no thief would want a laptop that is ten years old. I will assume therefore that the laptop is only a few years old and at some point the professor must have made a copy or migrated the data. Encryption with a backup would be the best option.

William Vambenepe explains his frustration with PaaS Cloud infrastructure — “can you handle the truth?”

…the instance monitoring console Google just rolled out is seriously lacking. As is too often the case with IT monitoring systems, it reports what is convenient to collect, not what is useful. I’m sure they’ll fix it over time. What this console does well (and really the main point of this blog) is illustrate the challenge of how much information about the underlying infrastructure should be surfaced.

Hard not to notice that his vent includes the phrase “as is too often the case with IT monitoring systems”, which indicates he is getting annoyed by something not specifically a cloud issue. Consoles and dashboards are rarely up to snuff, so you would expect this to be the same no matter what you call your IT environment. Then again, everything in the cloud is a cloud issue. The problem becomes you ONLY get a dashboard in the cloud, nothing more. Options are limited when you do not get to decide what they will be, just accept them as they are delivered to you.

Segmentation in virtual environments was the topic of a call I was on this morning. It reminded me that virtualization gets a hard time for something that exists in many other areas of “emerging” technology. Take wireless, for example, which now includes co-tenancy multi-mode configurations on devices like the RFS 7000 Wireless RF Switch from Motorola. Although not mentioned in their list of security options, it can support up to 256 WLANs using multi-ESS/BSSID traffic segmentation:

Exceptional level of data and network protection without sacrificing fast roaming, including: WPA2-CCMP (with 802.11i fast roaming options); Stateful Firewall at Layer 2 and Layer 3 for the wired and wireless network with role based configurations; Geofencing, integrated RADIUS Server; IPSec VPN Gateway; Secure Guest Access Provisioning; 802.11w for management frame protection, and 24×7 dedicated security via Motorola’s Wireless IPS, providing the advanced technology required to detect any rogue network, including 802.11n

It seems to me that wireless (and network in general) segmentation is pressing ahead; it will be deployed with little resistance from the standards council other than what has already been said. Cisco will not be asked for guidance. Meanwhile, security professionals and managers are hotly debating whether mixed-mode virtualization should be allowed and some are even asking virtualization vendors to provide guidance.