Posts by Adam Reid

Terminology

Strange mix-up in terminology here:

Private Cloud (off-premises storage and compute) VS Private Cloud (applications that are hosted off-premises and delivered via the web, i.e. pretty much anything).

CenturyLink seems to be selling a VMware-based private cloud - compute and storage hosted somewhere that allows the customer to run VM workloads.

The article talks about businesses purchasing 'shadow apps'.

“We were starting to see that over 71 per cent of business users were now just using shadow IT and going to these clouds already – using things like DropBox and Salesforce… lighting up an entire environment for all their sales and marketing campaigns without IT even knowing.”

This isn't private cloud, it is just purchasing an application that is hosted off-premises and delivered via the web. How does a better private cloud fix this problem?

So if your problem is that users need to share large files, you need an application that allows you to share large files, like DropBox. Purchasing compute and storage from CenturyLink doesn't solve this problem, all you've got is the ability to run VMs.

Easily avoided

This malware (in fact pretty much all malware) is easily avoided in a corporate environment:

1) Block incoming attachments that contain executable files.

2) Use an executable white-listing software so that users cannot run any program unless it is pre-approved. Applocker is built into Windows and will do this job with ease.