Category Archives: BYOD

Understanding security practices in File Synchronization

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Ho hum. Another day, and another data leak. What else is new?

The latest hullabaloo in my radar was from one of Malaysia’s reverent universities, UiTM, which reported a data leak of 11,891 student applicants’ private details including MyKad (national identity card) numbers of each individual. Reading from the news article, one can deduced that the unsecured link mentioned was probably from a cloud storage service, i.e. file synchronization software such as OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. Those files that can be easily shared via an HTTP/S URL link. Ah, convenience over the data security best practices. 

Cloud File Sync software

It irks me when data security practices are poorly practised. And it is likely that there is ignorance of data security practices in the first place.

It also irks me when many end users everywhere I have encountered tell me their file synchronization software is backup. That is just a very poor excuse of a data protection strategy, if any, especially in enterprise and cloud environments. Convenience, set-and-forget mentality. Out of sight. Out of mind. Right? 

Convenience is not data security. File Sync is NOT Backup

Many users are used to the convenience of file synchronization. The proliferation of cloud storage services with free Gigabytes here and there have created an IT segment based on BYOD, which transformed into EFSS, and now CCP. The buzzword salad involves the Bring-Your-Own-Device, which evolved into Enterprise-File-Sync-&-Share, and in these later years, Content-Collaboration-Platform.

All these are fine and good. The data industry is growing up, and many are leveraging the power of file synchronization technologies, be it on on-premises and from cloud storage services. Organizations, large and small, are able to use these file synchronization platforms to enhance their businesses and digitally transforming their operational efficiencies and practices. But what is sorely missing in embracing the convenience and simplicity is the much ignored cybersecurity housekeeping practices that should be keeping our files and data safe.

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Is denying public cloud storage a storm in a political teacup or something more?

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Ah, India! The country that gave us the Silicon Valley of Asia in Bengaluru, and exports over USD$150 billion software and IT services to the world.

Last week, the government of India banned the use of non-sanctioned public cloud storage such as Google® Drive and Dropbox®, plus the use of VPNs (virtual private networks). This is nothing new as China has banned foreign VPN services, Dropbox®, for years while Google® was adjusting its plans for China in 2020, with little hope to do more it is allowed to. I am not sure what the India’s alternatives are but China already has their own cloud storage services for a while now. So, what does this all mean?

India bans public cloud storage and VPN services

Public cloud storage services has been a boon for over a decade since Dropbox® entered the scene in 2008. BYOD (bring your own devices) became a constant in every IT person’s lips at that time. And with the teaser of 2GB or more, many still rely on these public cloud storage services with the ability to sync with tablets, smart phones and laptops. But the proliferation of these services also propagated many cybersecurity risks, and yes, ransomware can infect these public cloud storage. Even more noxious, the synchronization of files and folders of these services with on-premises storage devices makes it easy for infected data to spread, often with great efficacy.

Banning these widely available cloud storage applications is more than an inconvenience. Governments like China and India are shoring up their battlegrounds, as the battle for the protection and the privacy of sovereign data will not only escalate but also create a domino effect in the geopolitical dominance in the digital landscape.

We have already seen news that India is asserting its stance against China. First there was an app called “Remove China App” that came up in Google® Play Store in 2020. Also in 2020, the Ministry of Information Technology of India also banned 59 apps, mostly from China in order to protect the “sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order”.

This is not the war of 2 of the most populous nations of the world. Underneath these acts, there are more things to come, and it won’t just involve China and India. We will see other nations follow, with some already in the works to draw boundaries and demarcate digital borders in the name of data security, privacy, sovereignty and protection.

I hear of some foreign vendors lamenting about such a move. Most have already either complied with China’s laws or chose to exit that market. This recent move by India may feel like a storm in a teacup, but beneath it all, the undercurrent is getting stronger each day. A digital geopolitical tempest is percolating and brewing.

Ridding consumer storage mindset for Enterprise operations

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I cut my teeth in Enterprise Storage for 3 decades. On and off, I get the opportunity to work on Cloud Storage as well, mostly more structured storage infrastructure services such as blocks and files, in cloud offerings on AWS, Azure and Alibaba Cloud. I am familiar with S3 operations (mostly the CRUD operations and HTTP headers stuff) too, although I have yet to go deep with S3 with Restful API. And I really wanted to work on stuff with the S3 Select when the opportunity arises. (Note: Homelab project to-do list)

Along with the experience is the enterprise mindset of designing and crafting storage infrastructure and data management practices that evolve around data. Understanding the characteristics of data and the behaviours data in motion is part of my skills repertoire, and I continue to have conversations with organizations, small and large alike every day of the week.

This week’s blog was triggered by an article by Tech Republic® Jack Wallen‘s interview with Fedora project leader Matthew Miller. I have been craning my neck waiting for the full release of Fedora 36 (which now has been pushed to May 10th 2022), and the Tech Republic®’s article, “The future of Linux: Fedora project leader weighs in” touched me. Let me set the context of my expanded commentaries here.

History of my open source experience- bringing Enterprise to the individual

I have been working with open source software for a long time. My first Linux experience was Soft Landing Linux in the early 90s. It was a bunch of diskettes I purchased online while dabbling with FreeBSD® on the sides. Even though my day job was on the SunOS, and later Solaris®, having the opportunity to build stuff and learn the enterprise ways with Sun Microsystems® hardware and software were difficult at my homelab. I did bring home a SPARCstation® 2 once but the CRT monitor almost broke my computer table at that time.

Having open source software on 386i (before x86) architecture was great (no matter how buggy they were) because I got to learn hardcore enterprise technology at home. I am a command line person, so the desktop experience does not bother me much because my OS foundation is there. Open source gave me a world I could master my skills as an individual. For an individual like me, my mindset is always on the Enterprise.

The Tech Republic interview and my reflections

I know the journey open source OSes has taken at the server (aka Enterprise) level. They are great, and are getting better and better. But at the desktop (aka consumer) level, the Linux desktop experience has been an arduous one even though the open source Linux desktop experience is so much better now. This interview reflected on that.

There were a few significant points that were brought up. Those poignant moments explained about the free software in open source projects, how consumers glazed over (if I get what Matt Miller meant) the cosmetics of the open source software without the deeper meaningful objectives of the software had me feeling empty. Many assumed that just because the software is open source, it should be free or of low costs and continue to apply a consumer mindset to the delivery and the capability of the software.

Case in point is the way I have been seeing many TrueNAS®/FreeNAS™ individuals who downloaded the free software and using them in consumer ways. That is perfectly fine but when they want to migrate their consumer experience with the TrueNAS® software to their critical business operations, things suddenly do not look so rosy anymore. From my experience, having built enterprise-grade storage solutions with open source software like ZFS on OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana, FreeNAS™ and TrueNAS® for over a decade plus gaining plenty of experience on many proprietary and software-defined storage platforms along this 30 year career, the consumer mindsets do not work well in enterprise missions.

And over the years, I have been seeing this newer generation of infrastructure people taking less and less interest in learning the enterprise ways or going deep dive into the workings of the open source platforms I have mentioned. Yet, they have lofty enterprise expectations while carrying a consumer mindset. More and more, I am seeing a greying crew of storage practitioners with enterprise experiences dealing with a new generation of organizations and end users with consumer practices and mindsets.

Open Source Word Cloud

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Control your Files. Control your Sovereignty.

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Data residency, data sovereignty, data localization – the trio of data compliance and governance – have been on my mind a lot lately. I am seeing a disturbing trend. “Splinternet” has taken a hurried and hastened pace. We are now seeing many countries drawing up digital boundaries in the name of data privacy and data protection with sovereign laws and regulations. Besides, these digital demarcation along the lines with data definitions, digital “colonization” is a strong undercurrent as developing countries are accepting larger and more powerful foreign powers into their playpen.

Public cloud services transcend national borders. The breakneck speed in the adoption of public cloud services is causing anxieties and concerns with conservative governments everywhere. On the flip side of the coin, commerce has certainly flourished and bloomed as global wide collaborations bring new opportunities, new markets – all for capitalism and growth.

[ Note: While we are on this debacle, the voices of decentralization are getting louder as well, but that is a topic for another day ]

Where are your data files now?

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Don’t go to the Clouds. Come back!

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Almost in tandem last week, Nutanix™ and HPE appeared to have made denigrated comments about Cloud First mandates of many organizations today. Nutanix™ took to the annual .NEXT conference to send the message that cloud is wasteful. HPE campaigned against a UK Public Sector “Cloud First” policy.

Cloud First or Cloud Not First

The anti-cloud first messaging sounded a bit funny and hypocritical when both companies have a foot in public clouds, advocating many of their customers in the clouds. So what gives?

That A16Z report

For a numbers of years, many fear criticizing the public cloud services openly. For me, there are the 3 C bombs in public clouds.

  • Costs
  • Complexity
  • Control (lack of it)

Yeah, we would hear of a few mini heart attacks here and there about clouds overcharging customers, and security fallouts. But vendors then who were looking up to the big 3 public clouds as deities, rarely chastise them for the errors. Until recently.

“The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox” released by revered VC firm Andreessen Horowitz in May 2021 opened up the vocals of several vendors who are now emboldened to make stronger comments about the shortcomings of public cloud services. The report has made it evident that public cloud services are not panacea of all IT woes.

The report has made it evident that public cloud services are not panacea of all IT woes. And looking at the trends, this will only get louder.

Use ours first. We are better

It is pretty obvious that both Nutanix™ and HPE have bigger stakes outside the public cloud IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offerings. It is also pretty obvious that both are not the biggest players in this cloud-first economy. Given their weights in the respective markets, they are leveraging their positions to swing the mindsets to their turf where they can win.

“Use our technology and services. We are better, even though we are also in the public clouds.”

Not a zero sum game

But IT services and IT technologies are not a zero sum game. Both on-premises IT services and complementary public cloud services can co-exist. Both can leverage on each other’s strengths and support each other’s weaknesses, if you know how to blend and assimilate the best of both worlds. Hybrid cloud is the new black.

Gartner Hype Cycle

The IT pendulum swings. Technology hype goes fever pitch. Everyone thinks there is a cure for cancer. Reality sets in. They realize that they were wrong (not completely) or right (not completely). Life goes on. The Gartner® Hype Cycle explains this very well.

The cloud is OK

There are many merits having IT services provisioned in the cloud. Agility, pay-per-use, OPEX, burst traffic, seemingly unlimited resources and so. You can read more about it at Benefits of Cloud Computing: The pros and cons. Even AWS agrees to Three things every business needs from hybrid cloud, perhaps to the chagrin of these naysayers.

I opined that there is no single solution for everything. There is no Best Storage Technology Ever (a snarky post). And so, I believe there is nothing wrong of Nutanix™ and HPE, and maybe others, being hypocritical of their cloud and non-cloud technology offerings. These companies are adjusting and adapting to the changing landscapes of the IT environments, but it is best not to confuse the customers what tactics, strategy and vision are. Inconsistencies in messaging diminishes trust.

 

 

Setting up Nextcloud on FreeNAS Part 2

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[ Note: ] This is a continuation of Setting up Nextcloud on FreeNAS Part 1 in June 2021 blog.

Nextcloud logo

I mentioned in my previous blog that what I did here was not unique. There were many great open source crafters who have done this better than I did. I stood on the shoulders of giants whose videos have helped me to learn and configure Nextcloud on FreeNAS™ (not TrueNAS® CORE, because my weekend exercises were on version 11.2U5). The videos made by Nhan P. Nguyen were instrumental in getting my Nextcloud to work, and I would shamefully admit that I have copied his work almost verbatim.

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SSOT of Files

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[ This is part two of “Where are your files living now?”. You can read Part One here ]

“Data locality, Data mobility“. It was a term I like to use a lot when describing about data consolidation, leading to my mention about files and folders, and where they live in my previous blog. The thinking of where the files and folders are now as in everywhere as they can be in a plethora of premises stretches the premise of SSOT (Single Source of Truth). And this expatriation of files with minimal checks and balances disturbs me.

A year ago, just before I joined iXsystems, I was given Google® embargoed news, probably a week before they announced BigQuery Omni. Then I was interviewed by Enterprise IT News, a local Malaysian technology news portal to provide an opinion quote. This was what I quoted:

“’The data warehouse in the cloud’ managed services of Big Query is underpinned by Google® Anthos, its hybrid cloud infra and service management platform based on GKE (Google® Kubernetes Engine). The containerised applications, both on-prem and in the multi-clouds, would allow Anthos to secure and orchestrate infra, services and policy management under one roof.”

I further quoted ” The data repositories remain in each cloud is good to address data sovereignty, data security concerns but it did not mention how it addresses “single source of truth” across multi-clouds.”

Single Source of Truth – regardless of repositories

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Where are your files living now?

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[ This is Part One of a longer conversation ]

EMC2 (before the Dell® acquisition) in the 2000s had a tagline called “Where Information Lives™“**. This was before the time of cloud storage. The tagline was an adage of enterprise data storage, proper and contemporaneous to the persistent narrative at the time – Data Consolidation. Within the data consolidation stories, thousands of files and folders moved about the networks of the organizations, from servers to clients, clients to servers. NAS (Network Attached Storage) was, and still is the work horse of many, many organizations.

[ **Side story ] There was an internal anti-EMC joke within NetApp® called “Information has a new address”.

EMC tagline “Where Information Lives”

This was a time where there were almost no concerns about Shadow IT; ransomware were less known; and most importantly, almost everyone knew where their files and folders were, more or less (except in Oil & Gas upstream – to be told in later in this blog). That was because there were concerted attempts to consolidate data, and inadvertently files and folders, in the organization.

Even when these organizations were spread across the world, there were distributed file technologies at the time that could deliver files and folders in an acceptable manner. Definitely not as good as what we have today in a cloudy world, but acceptable. I personally worked a project setting up Andrew File Systems for Intel® in Penang in the mid-90s, almost joined Tacit Networks in the mid-2000s, dabbled on Microsoft® Distributed File System with NetApp® and Windows File Servers while fixing the mountains of issues in deploying the worldwide GUSto (Global Unified Storage) Project in Shell 2006. Somewhere in my chronological listings, Acopia Networks (acquired by F5) and of course, EMC2 Rainfinity and NetApp® NuView OEM, Virtual File Manager.

The point I am trying to make here is most IT organizations had a good grip of where the files and folders were. I do not think this is very true anymore. Do you know where your files and folders are living today? 

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Setting up Nextcloud on FreeNAS Part 1

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I have started to enhance the work that I did last weekend with Nextcloud on FreeNAS™. I promised to share the innards of my work but first I have to set the right expectations for the readers. This blog is just a documentation of the early work I have been doing to get Nextcloud on FreeNAS™ off the ground quickly. Also there are far better blogs than mine on the Nextcloud topic.

Note:

Nextcloud 17 (latest version is version 21)

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My 2-day weekend with Nextcloud on FreeNAS

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In recent weeks, I have been asked by friends and old cust0mers on how to extend their NAS shared drives to work-from-home, the new reality. Malaysia went into a full lockdown as of June 1st several days ago.

I have written about file synchronization stories before but I have never done a Nextcloud blog. I have little experience with TrueNAS® CORE Nextcloud plugin and this was a good weekend to build it up from scratch with Virtualbox with FreeNAS™ 11.2U5 (because my friend was using that version).

[ Note ] FreeNAS™ 11.2U5 has been EOLed.

Nextcloud login screen

So, here it how it went for my little experiment. FYI, this is not a How-to guide. That will come later after I have put all my notes together with screenshots and all. This is just a collection of my thoughts while setting up Nextcloud on FreeNAS™.

Dropbox® is expensive

Using cloud storage with file sync and share capability is not exactly a cheap thing especially when you are a small medium sized business or a school or a charity organization. Here is the pricing table for Dropbox® for Business :

Dropbox for business pricing

I am using Dropbox® as the example here but the same can be said for OneDrive or Google Drive and others. The pricing can quickly add up when the price is calculated per user per month.

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