The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure
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I mean, short of a Mission Impossible-style rappelling from the ceiling kinda thing, it'd be awfully tough for Average Joe Hacker to waltz into a data center and plug a malicious USB in. Key cards, cameras, security guards, etc. are all something they'd have to pass through to get to the hardware.
My favorite, absolute favorite, thing is MANTRAPS.
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@ChrisL said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
I mean, short of a Mission Impossible-style rappelling from the ceiling kinda thing, it'd be awfully tough for Average Joe Hacker to waltz into a data center and plug a malicious USB in. Key cards, cameras, security guards, etc. are all something they'd have to pass through to get to the hardware.
My favorite, absolute favorite, thing is MANTRAPS.
Not to mention that they would have to get in, then identify how to get to the right customer's equipment, then figure out which of that equipment was the one that they were there to target. It is layer after layer of complexity to do this kind of attack - any kind of physical attack in this sort of environment. Just getting in the door, which you could potentially do with a tank, isn't enough. You still have to find the target. I've been in many a datacenter and figuring out which server is which is pretty hard in the sea of machines. They all look about the same.
Sure if you've been in there loads of times, know exactly where it is, know exactly what you are looking for it is one thing. But this requires more and more nearly impossible situations.
Whether it is colocation or even corporate datacenters, I have almost never had access to get to the equipment personally - and I'm normally the senior-most technical person overseeing those systems. It's not like you could grab any casual IT person and have them identify equipment for you.
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@scottalanmiller said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
@ChrisL said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
I mean, short of a Mission Impossible-style rappelling from the ceiling kinda thing, it'd be awfully tough for Average Joe Hacker to waltz into a data center and plug a malicious USB in. Key cards, cameras, security guards, etc. are all something they'd have to pass through to get to the hardware.
My favorite, absolute favorite, thing is MANTRAPS.
Not to mention that they would have to get in, then identify how to get to the right customer's equipment, then figure out which of that equipment was the one that they were there to target. It is layer after layer of complexity to do this kind of attack - any kind of physical attack in this sort of environment. Just getting in the door, which you could potentially do with a tank, isn't enough. You still have to find the target. I've been in many a datacenter and figuring out which server is which is pretty hard in the sea of machines. They all look about the same.
Sure if you've been in there loads of times, know exactly where it is, know exactly what you are looking for it is one thing. But this requires more and more nearly impossible situations.
Whether it is colocation or even corporate datacenters, I have almost never had access to get to the equipment personally - and I'm normally the senior-most technical person overseeing those systems. It's not like you could grab any casual IT person and have them identify equipment for you.
Exactly. It'd be an Ocean's Eleven style heist just to get to the server and it'd have to be AN INSIDE JOB DUN DUN DUNNNNNN
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@JaredBusch I think over the next 5 to 10 years as the cost of a 1Gbps connection comes down and the availability of 1Gbps increases, speed of access will be less of a concern.
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@PenguinWrangler said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
@JaredBusch I think over the next 5 to 10 years as the cost of a 1Gbps connection comes down and the availability of 1Gbps increases, speed of access will be less of a concern.
I'm not so sure. As speed and access go up so do file size and quantity. I think we're going to get to the point where we have to ask if it makes sense to have fat clients sitting on a desk, instead of zero/thin clients calling back to a desktop pool somewhere.
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@coliver said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
@PenguinWrangler said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
@JaredBusch I think over the next 5 to 10 years as the cost of a 1Gbps connection comes down and the availability of 1Gbps increases, speed of access will be less of a concern.
I'm not so sure. As speed and access go up so do file size and quantity. I think we're going to get to the point where we have to ask if it makes sense to have fat clients sitting on a desk, instead of zero/thin clients calling back to a desktop pool somewhere.
I saw today that Google has a new algorithm that reduces JPEG file size by 35 percent. Would there be a practical implementation for something like that in the IT/data world that would effectively reduce file size? We're moving at a blistering pace in terms of shrinking the size of nearly everything.
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@coliver said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
@PenguinWrangler said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
@JaredBusch I think over the next 5 to 10 years as the cost of a 1Gbps connection comes down and the availability of 1Gbps increases, speed of access will be less of a concern.
I'm not so sure. As speed and access go up so do file size and quantity. I think we're going to get to the point where we have to ask if it makes sense to have fat clients sitting on a desk, instead of zero/thin clients calling back to a desktop pool somewhere.
They do, but not at the same pace. For example, the size of a desktop document has gone up since 1997 by a bit, but maybe 2x at most. But the speed of a LAN connection in that time has gone up 1,000x from 1Mb/s to 1Gb/s. And we are on the verge of 10Gb/s to the desktop. And the WAN has gone from 128Kb/s to 100Mb/s in that time, a similar increase.
Sure file sizes have grown, but not proportionally to network speeds. Even things like movie sizes have not grown that much. In 1997 a DVD was 5GB. A BluRay today is 50GB. That's only 10x in two decades.
Not only does the network get faster faster, but compression helps to keep file sizes at bay.
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@coliver said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
I think we're going to get to the point where we have to ask if it makes sense to have fat clients sitting on a desk, instead of zero/thin clients calling back to a desktop pool somewhere.
Why either? Why not web applications? In the vast majority of cases, any kind of "desktop service" is a bit silly. In cases where it is not, something is so dramatically "heavy" that we can't just say that fat or thin clients make sense. It's more complicated than that. But in the majority case, neither style desktop makes sense.
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@scottalanmiller we are looking at off loading our document management system. I work at a law firm and we create 3000 to 5000 documents a day easy. Talking to one vendor that is cloud based and they quoted us that we need 3 Mbps connection for 250 people.
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@PenguinWrangler said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
@scottalanmiller we are looking at off loading our document management system. I work at a law firm and we create 3000 to 5000 documents a day easy. Talking to one vendor that is cloud based and they quoted us that we need 3 Mbps connection for 250 people.
That's awfully small. I'd test that before going with that
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@PenguinWrangler said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
@scottalanmiller we are looking at off loading our document management system. I work at a law firm and we create 3000 to 5000 documents a day easy. Talking to one vendor that is cloud based and they quoted us that we need 3 Mbps connection for 250 people.
I think my parents still have their old dial-up modem laying around if you'd wanna use that instead
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@PenguinWrangler said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:
@scottalanmiller we are looking at off loading our document management system. I work at a law firm and we create 3000 to 5000 documents a day easy. Talking to one vendor that is cloud based and they quoted us that we need 3 Mbps connection for 250 people.
Is it a dedicated/bonded circuit to their data center or something?
Whats the budget for this, I think that makes all the difference in the world.
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@scottalanmiller Oh we have a 1Gpbs connection.
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+1 to this, cause I once tried backing up ESXi VMDK to an external drive by plugging the external USB drive to the server...
hehe what a laugh that was, apparently after searching ESXi does not allow cases like this, cause it reserves all the USB and ports for passing through the virtual machines.
