Tag: aix

MGM Resorts Ransomware Attack: Disaster Recovery as a Malware Defense

This article was authored by me and posted on my company’s website. Please read the full article there.

MGM Resorts reported an active Ransomware incident starting on September 11th, and as of September 17th, it had not fully recovered. Rumors are that the company did not pay the ransom and is “recovering” its systems.

It makes you wonder, if a company like MGM Resorts, with all of its available resources, is struggling with a ransomware attack, what does that mean for the everyday company, not on its scale? After all, cyber criminals attack companies of all sizes.

I previously wrote about the concept of using the cloud to test and perfect your malware defenses. The main point is that the cloud could be a safe way to test your preventative measures in a live sandbox environment without the risk of actual contamination.

Why didn’t MGM switch to its Disaster Recovery (DR) system? You would think it would have a mirror of its production systems, and it could “switch over” in such events. Most DR systems are designed to switch over in minutes or hours, but not days or never. There are a few possibilities. One might be that its DR system was also impacted by the attack. The other is that its DR model likely did not include shared components essential to its overall operation, which seems unlikely.

Continue to the full article at this link.

How to “Float” on the Multi-Cloud.

There is a lot of talk about “multi-cloud,” but trying to achieve that level of cloud diversity might be challenging for many organizations. If you are starting out in the cloud, instead of building cloud-specific expertise across multiple cloud providers, try to “float” across multiple clouds as much as possible. Here is how.

First off, “What is Multi-cloud?”

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“Lift and Shift” doesn’t mean “No Re-Factoring Required.”

If you have legacy applications and are moving to the cloud, one popular pattern is to do a simple “Lift and Shift.” That means you don’t architecturally change the application but simply move it to your cloud of choice and run it just like you did before. This approach lets you more quickly “get out of the data center” and doesn’t initially imply that you have to refactor any part of the application to use native services provided by your cloud vendor.

In fact, if the application is stable but just legacy, your valid strategy might be to let it run forever in an “as-is” state. Nothing changes. Just get it running in the cloud and out of the data center.

This approach’s major downside is that Lift-and-Shift also carries forward all the Technical Debt accumulated for that application.

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“My application can’t be moved to the cloud!”

My company provides the ability to host IBM Power AIX and IBMi application workloads in the cloud. We partner with two of the world’s largest technology companies to provide this service. During my daily activities as a Cloud Solutions Architect (aka Pre-Sales Engineer), I listen to many customers tell us about their “hopes and dreams” regarding moving legacy workloads to the cloud. These are definitely “Cloud Stubborn”. But when it comes to legacy applications based on IBM Power one of their common responses is:

“It is impossible to move my IBM Power-based application to the cloud.”

Of course, that begs the question “Why not?” The answer is often one of these:

  1. “My application is based on IBM’s AS/400 or more recently called IBMi, or IBM AIX.”
  2. “My application has hard-coded IP addresses compiled into the source code.”
  3. “There is no longer anyone around who knows about the code or applications that are still running.”
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Application Archiving in the Cloud

Introducing “Cold Storage” of complete application systems in the Cloud.

Traditional application archiving is often described in one of two ways:

1) Archiving – this is where you have an application that has accumulated large amounts of historical data that exists on Tier 1 primary storage within the data center. The basic concept is that you take some of the older, infrequently accessed data and “archive” it or move it to some other read-only data warehouse that utilizes less expensive storage. The idea is to save money by reducing the pressure to expand more expensive storage and potentially reduce those costs over time. The application system remains “active” but with only newer relevant data.

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Prepare for AIX Migration to the Cloud

AIX in the cloud is now a “thing”.

When moving your AIX workloads from on-prem to the cloud, there are two big-ticket items to initially consider for planning and execution:

  1. Mapping Resources from on-prem to the cloud equivalent
  2. Techniques for the actual movement of the images

Mapping Resources

First, get a list of all the LPARs that are candidates for migration and capture the essential attributes like CPU allocation, memory, storage , IOPS, and expected network bandwidth required for each server. If you attempt to do a straight “lift and shift,” you may or may not be able to do an exact mapping in a pure self-service model. Why? Because cloud vendors typically have “safety caps” on some resources that prevent an untrained cloud user, or a run-away automation script from doing unwanted actions.

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Chaos Engineering for Traditional Applications

Not all on-prem applications have a future in the cloud, but can those same on-prem applications leverage cloud-like capabilities to help make them more reliable?

In 2011 Netflix introduced the tool called Chaos Monkey to inject random failures into their cloud architecture as a strategy to identify design weaknesses. Fast forward to today, the concept of resiliency engineering has evolved, creating jobs called “Chaos Engineer.” Many companies like Twilio, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and LinkedIn, use chaos as a way to understand their distributed systems and architectures.

But all of these companies are based on cloud-native architectures, and so the question is:

Can Chaos Engineering be applied to traditional applications that run in the data-center and will probably never be moved to the cloud?

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The Cloud Dilemma

What to do with traditional on-prem applications that don’t appear to have a path to the cloud?

“My app can’t be moved to the cloud…..it is based on AIX or IBMi…….”

What is implied is that the app owner doesn’t want to re-engineer their application to all use cloud-native services, but instead wants to do a classic lift-and-shift of their application without making any application code changes. Since IBMi (AS/400) and AIX are based on PowerPC and not x86, the path the cloud is not apparent for these types of applications.

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