Deploying a grid infrastructure can help companies dramatically improve hardware utilization rates and boost computing power. But the massive resource aggregation and wider end-user access enabled by grids also have the potential to magnify security risks, implementers say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a result, companies that are implementing grid technologies need to pay special attention to issues such as user authentication, authorization and access control, as well as auditing and data integrity — both when data is in storage and while it’s in transit.<\/p>\n
Ensuring that adequate measures are in place for responding to the effects of worms and viruses, which can be amplified in a grid setup, is also crucial in grid computing, IT managers say.<\/p>\n
Most of the problems that users have to deal with in a grid environment are similar to the ones they face in nongrid environments, says John Hurley, senior manager for distributed software and systems integration at The Boeing Co.’s mathematics and computing technology group in Seattle.<\/p>\n
A grid installation harnesses the combined power of numerous servers and PCs to run applications and services as one large system.<\/p>\n
The potential severity of grid-related security problems depends largely on the context in which grids are being used, says Dane Skow, deputy computer security executive at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.<\/p>\n
“When you talk to people about grids, they have different scenarios in mind — everything from clusters in the same room run by the same infrastructure team to global power-grid-like infrastructures,” says Skow.<\/p>\n
Research grids, for instance, typically provide access to users from multiple organizations and security domains. User access, authentication and authorization in such an environment can be a big challenge, given the fact that there’s no single identity authority, says Skow, who is also part of the security group at the Global Grid Forum, a Lemont, Ill.-based organization with members from more than 400 vendors and user companies.<\/p>\n
In contrast, a grid being run by a private-sector company typically uses internal resources and is accessed by users whose identities are already stored in an internal directory. As a result, it’s easier to get a grip on identity management in a company grid than it is with grids in a research setting, Skow says.<\/p>\n
Companies that are deploying grids also must protect data during transmission on the network via encryption, says Jikku Venkat, chief technology officer at United Devices Inc., an Austin-based vendor of technologies for aggregating computing resources into clusters and grids.<\/p>\n
Addressing grid security may not involve new technologies, but because of the increased potential vulnerability, protective measures become more urgent.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/securitytopics\/security\/story\/0,10801,97815,00.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-warnings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4841,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354\/revisions\/4841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}