EMC World 2016 is coming up in early May and it should be very interesting this year. Every year the conference is full of announcements dealing with new technologies along with insights as to the direction that EMC and the industry is moving towards. But this year will be even more so with the EMC/Dell merger news.

Zero Day Exploit – A recent flaw discovered, that is leveraged by a hacker or “threat actor” before a patch or preventative measure can be made available by the manufacturer of the system or software. The bugs or flaws are unknown, go on undetected, and can continue to be exploited for many weeks, months or potentially years. Some security researchers will responsibly report such flaws to the company responsible, giving them enough lead time to pinpoint and resolve any such issues with software updates before going public with the information. Keep up with system patches, and make sure to look for network and traffic anomalies in your security management consoles.

More of the web is encrypted today than ever before. Use of SSL certificates is on the rise and with good reason. Concerns over user and data privacy are a large part of the push to an encrypted web. The good news is that encrypted web traffic does in fact make snooping a lot harder to do. The bad news is that writers of malicious software have also picked up on the trend, making malware detection and web usage compliance much harder for system and network admins alike.

 At VMworld, VMware announced tech preview of project skyscraper. Project skyscraper promises that we will be able to take workloads that are in our private cloud, and move them to the public cloud (vCloud Air), much like a vMotion Works today in the datacenter. The goal is to provide a seamless migration between private and public cloud with no downtime!