[Discuss] NAS: encryption

[Rich Braun]

Jack Coats <jack at coats.org> wrote:
> Rich, your post reminded me of this sticker I saw:
> 
> (There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer)

;-) Amusing but not quite a precise description of the dominant industry trend happening to data centers. The "cloud" is actually software-defined and software-implemented replacements -- coupled with automated provisioning APIs -- for (almost) all of the hardware I used to buy from the likes of Dell, Cisco, F5, Isilon, and so forth.

Cloud security breaches that I've seen so far are different from those at data centers, which provide separate out-of-band management subnets. I've seen script-kiddies who grep through github and other sites for carelessly-posted API keys, and then crank up as many compute instances as the vendor allows, to run whatever rogue software they're seeking to run (probably Bitcoin-mining, though maybe less of that now that it's gotten harder). A more-sophisticated hacker could do a lot more harm than simply racking up a big compute bill.

So my point about fighting last year's war is that for most of us who do more or less the same job of infra management as we did 10 years ago, the products we were familiar with back then are utterly irrelevant in 2015. Those are the products you still see on most  cert-compliance approved-product lists. 

The cloud is different in nature, different enough that despite my decades in the industry, I couldn't have predicted how these APIs would come to be defined, and how complex they've gotten to be. Apparently few others foresaw this either; one company managed to get about a 7-year head start on all the others, who are still begging customer prospects to revisit their discounted compute-instance price list. The Cloud, properly defined, is a software-defined model of resources needed to replace EVERY component you'd ever want in a private physical data center. That's been achieved by only one vendor.

I think I'm digressing from original topic by a substantial margin, but eventually those of us who fancy bigger NAS boxes for our homes will turn our attention to cloud-based equivalents. Those potential rival cloud vendors are going to have to wake up from a standing stop, toss out OpenStack and all the other cruft, and develop a simpler, faster, cheaper solution to entice us home and small-biz users.

-rich