Scott Morrison

Cloud Expo on Ulitzer Technology Review has published an interview with cryptography pioneer Whitfield Diffie that is worth reading. I had the great pleasure of presenting to Whit down at the Sun campus. He is a great scientist and a gentleman. In this interview, Diffie–who is no... (more)

Cloud Security Journal on Ulitzer Two weeks ago, I delivered a webinar about new security models in the cloud with Anne Thomas Manes from Burton Group. Anne had one slide in particular, borrowed from her colleague Dan Blum, which I liked so much I actually re-structured my own m... (more)

Here at Layer 7, we’ve been really excited about Amazon’s Relational Data Service (RDS) ever since they announced it last month. RDS is basically a managed mySQL v5.1 instance running in the Amazon infrastructure. The point of RDS to provide another basic service that we all need... (more)

Last week, Anne Thomas Manes, Research Director from Burton and I did a Webinar entitled New Security Model Requirements for the Cloud. It’s probably generated the most feedback of any webinar I’ve done. It’s now online, so have a look at it here. ... (more)

Ben Kepes, from the excellent CloudAve blog, wrote an entry about Layer 7’s strategy in the cloud. We had a good talk about Layer 7’s new Amazon AMI image, which is available right now in the Amazon Marketplace. CloudAve has been on my blogroll for a while, and I was quite please... (more)

I had a great discussion with Mike Vizard of CTOEdge the other day about how to secure the cloud. I was joking with Mike afterward that I had tried to avoid delivering any overt vendor message because this is such an important topic. Nevertheless, some SecureSpan specific feature... (more)

James Urquardt, from Cisco, published a review of the US Government’s recently announced cloud initiative. I had the pleasure of sharing a panel with James recently at GigaOm Structure, and his CNET column should be on your must-read list if clouds are of interest to you. In thi... (more)

Ah, the reuse question. My thoughts are here. ... (more)

I had a discussion with Wayne Rash the other day about security in cloud computing. He followed up with an excellent article in eWeek with the provocative title Is Cloud Computing Secure? Prove It. I’d encourage you to have a look; Wayne spoke to a number of well-known people in ... (more)

My answer is here. ... (more)

We were at this week’s RedHat Summit/JBoss World show in Chicago to announce that the SecureSpan line is now fully certified against the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. We’ve seen increasing use of JBoss in our engagements, so this endorsement is important for both Layer 7 and Red... (more)

Is SOA ready to move from the whiteboards and into production IT? As you might have guessed, the answer remains a disappointing sort of. The issue comes down to tools and infrastructure, and the fact that only some SOA components are mature and easy to source. The application ser... (more)

Enterprise PKI has a bad name. Complex, costly, difficult to deploy and maintain - all these criticisms have dogged this technology since it first appeared. To the dismay of so many CIOs, few applications have stepped up to make effective use of PKI. But this may soon change: Web... (more)

It's a problem as old as networked computing. Consider two applications. They negotiate a level of trust. How can that trust - or security context - be transferred to a third application, one that may exist in an entirely different security domain from the first? This problem ha... (more)

Business has long pursued the goal of making IT more of a strategic tool and less of a necessary evil. Organizations are constantly looking for easier, cheaper, and more logical ways to build applications and unite the silos of functionality they still depend on. One approach tha... (more)

True story from the consulting trenches: the operations staff had left hours ago, shaking their heads and reluctantly leaving the consultants to resolve a problem with their code. It was well past midnight, in the middle of winter, in a town many time zones from home. The project... (more)