fyi Sun Gets Secretive on Storage

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=83288

Kobielus kommentary:
The latest in my current series of blogposts opining on more-or-less random stories from my daily e-mail newsletter gleanings.

Well, not totally random. I chose this one for the alliteration in the headline. Also, because I actually have something to say on this topic. But I didn’t pre-meditate the following comments. They’re just off the topic of my head. Mrs. Hacker, my 10th grade English teacher, told me the best analysis and writing is that which just flows spontaneously from your crazed cranium. I’ll put her statement to the test now (Mrs. Hacker—you out there still?).

Have you noticed how many identity management (IdM) vendors are targeting digital rights management (DRM) as the next great frontier beyond federation? Or, perhaps, they hope, DRM will leverage and extend their increasingly federated security infrastructures into a distributed permissioning infrastructure where the access-control policy enforcement points (PEPs) are more closely bound to the resources—apps, data, etc.—being protected? Epok’s federated data interchange environment—leveraging XRI and XDI--is one such example. Sun’s “storage encryption” or “storage security” roadmap (see article) is another. As soon as the morning coffee decompresses my wound-up nightfunk, I’m sure I’ll recall the other three dozen vendors I’ve come across recently who have similar roadmaps.

DRM drifts and diffuses itself far and wide throughout IdM, security, e-commerce, content publisher, and storage vendors’ end-of-decade dreams. I think a lot of the renewed attention to DRM recently comes from the rash of identity-theft “data breaches” that have grabbed front-page attention. All that data in storage is sitting ducks and buried treasure for those intrepid identity pirates who find the buried map and go with flashlights in the night down into the caverns guarded by semi-reliable genies. Suddenly, encrypting all that stuff in situ—on piled-high disks and tapes and whatnot--becomes the absolute imperative for storage managers everywhere, dictated by the lawyers, bosses, and regulators.

To make encryption—an ancient technology that has been used in storage systems for years in various capacities—seem suddenly cool—not simply mandatory--the vendors have started to lump it into the growing DRM umbrella. Acronym creep, equivalent to the vastly expanded scope of SOA in recent years. It’s not storage encryption anymore. It’s storage DRM. It’s breach-busting DRM. It’s federated DRM. It’s a new pipe DRM.

Ah…the coffee has kicked in. Ya feel it?

Jim