Lecture at Catalyst Europe 2010

April 21, 2010 I’ll be at the Catalyst 2010 conference in Prague, hosted by Burton Group (recently acquired by Gartner), presenting a lecture titled Securing the Internal Cloud.

2010 is considered the year of cloud computing. Vendors like VMware, Citrix, Red Hat and Microsoft are releasing new solutions that turn virtualization platforms into Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
There are new parts of the equation: side-by-side with the hypervisor and the management layer, there’s automation, billing, self-service provisioning, service catalogs, application SLAs, multi-tenancy and more.
Across the globe, customers are looking at this offering and evaluating the conversion of their data centers in private clouds, and security is one of the first aspects that should be assessed.

How do the new elements of a private cloud impact security?

In this session, we’ll explore the differences between a virtual infrastructure and a private cloud, trying to figure out if and how they extend the data center attack surface, and what can be done to handle any new threat that IaaS architectures introduces.

There are amazing professionals speaking at the conference, including:

  • Chris Wolf – Senior Analyst at Burton Group
    with Server-hosted Virtual Desktops: Assessing Vendor Solutions (and many more sessions)
  • Drue Reeves – Vice President, Research Director at Burton Group
    with Building a Viable Cloud Strategy (and many more sessions)
  • Giles Hogben – Program Manager, Secure Applications at ENISA
    with Europe’s security strategy for cloud computing
    (we worked together on the Cloud Computing Security Risk Assessment published in November 2009)
  • Richard Garsthagen – Senior Evangelist at VMware
    with Building a Private Cloud using Virtualization: Practical Next Steps
  • Richard Jones – Service Director, Data Center Strategies at Burton Group
    with Server Virtualisation Hypervisor Competitive Differences
    (a top speaker at our own Virtualization Congress)
  • Ruben Spruijt – CTO at PQR and Jeroen van de Kamp – CTO at Login Consultants
    with Project VRC 2010: Best Practices in Virtualising Terminal Servers and Desktops
    (another two top speakers at the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress)
  • Simon Crosby – CTO, Data Center & Cloud at Citrix
    with Extreme Makeovers: Virtualization and the future of the enterprise desktop

For this reason virtualization.info will report from the conference, publishing interesting news and announcements launched during the keynotes and some sessions.

If you plan to attend and you didn’t register yet there’s a great gift: Burton Group was kind enough to grant virtualization.info readers a special discount price.
To use it go here and use the DOTINFO to pay 995 Euros.

I’ll stay in Prague for the entire conference (April 20-22). If you plan to attend I’d be extremely pleased to meet you in person before or after my speech.

Alessandro

(just in case you are interested but cannot attend, I’ll speak at other events this year. My full schedule is here)