RSA Security Conference – Cloud the Logging Killer App?

I am attending the RSA conference this week. The first session I attended was the Cloud Security Alliance(CSA) meeting. Reading some of the accompanying material and listening to some of the presentations and panels, I couldn’t help it but notice that the terms auditing and logging were all over.

Here is my attempt for an explanation of this. It seems that one of the reasons for this is the nature of the cloud. Think about it. You are in an environment where you don’t control much. You are in an environment where you cannot trust most of the infrastructure pieces. For example, if you are using AWS like we are doing at Loggly, you should generally not trust your AMIs (the OS images). Now, what do you do if you don’t trust someone? You observe them, you monitor them. That’s exactly what is and needs to happen in the cloud: You don’t trust the service. To mitigate this issue, you are going to monitor the service.

And to make this not just my explanation, here is what some panelists during the CSAmeeting said:

“Loss of visibility in the cloud” – Scott Chasin, CTO McAfee SaaS Unit

“Lose control and still maintain accountability” – Ken Biery, Verizon Business.

Is the cloud the killer app for logging? And if that’s the case, how do you manage your logs in the cloud? There are hardly any cloud logging solutions out there. I think you see where I am going with this.

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