Michael Scarborough

Does Cloud Computing Really Create any New Security Risks?

December 12, 2012 Michael Scarborough Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

Short answer: No.

We can think about the risks associated with public cloud computing in terms of the CIA triad, which are:

Confidentiality – Information is only available to those who are authorized to use it
Integrity – Information is what it purports to be. Transactions are authentic and unmodified in flight
Availability – Information is accessible when it’s needed

If we consider a public cloud solution from a standpoint of CIA, we quickly realize that the security risks that are associated with cloud are not really new risks.

Can We Ever Get Away From the Sprawl?: Using ITIL to Organize IT

December 5, 2012 Michael Scarborough Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

This song lyric, which is the title of this post, describes how it’s hard to break away from cities that continually grow and how that continual growth results in dead islands within cities that ultimately affect our behavior.

Modern organizations are often similar to cities in this respect. They grow over time, and pieces of them become somewhat obsolete islands. The effect this has on IT is paramount. We end up with functionally obsolete aspects of technology such as applications, servers, storage, tapes, printers, user IDs, and myriad other technology artifacts that offer little more than increased risk to the organization.

Service Portfolio Real World Example – Cloud Services Provider

November 28, 2012 Michael Scarborough Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

In a recent post, I gave an overall description of a service portfolio and the key components of a portfolio. Here, I will describe how a cloud services provider might implement an ITIL service portfolio. A cloud services provider will regularly have a set of services under development, a set of service in live operation, and a set of services that are retired.

Common Network Routing Protocols and Threat Consequences

November 21, 2012 Michael Scarborough Cisco, Cloudera, Featured, Professional Development, Project Management, Routing & Switching, Technology, Training in Business

RFC 4593 was released in 2006 and is titled Generic Threats to Routing Protocols. In this RFC, several threats to routing protocols are identified. This RFC focused on commonly used network protocols, including OSPF, IS-IS, RIP, and BGP.

To fully understand the threat consequences to routing protocols, it’s useful to consider what routing protocols do.

What is a Service Portfolio?

November 14, 2012 Michael Scarborough Professional Development, Training in Business

ITIL describes a service portfolio as a collection of the overall set of services managed by a service provider. A service portfolio describes a service provider’s boundaries and promises across all of the customers and market spaces it serves. I like to think of a service portfolio as describing the past, present, and future collection of services offered by a service provider. The figure below shows a high-level view of a service portfolio.