If like me, you have been following Runecast and the great things they have been doing from day one in VMware vSphere environments. You knew it would only be a matter of time before they took this same great tool and allowed IT administrators to use it beyond the world of vSphere and perhaps in the hybrid cloud.
While all of us vSphere admins love the work they have done in the realm of vSphere, the powerful intelligent best practice automation they have been providing has now been added to Amazon AWS.
Now, with Runecast 4.0 released with AWS analysis, you can have the same great Runecast automated best practices in your Amazon AWS environment. Let’s take a closer look at these new features.
AWS Best Practices and Security Analysis is Critical
Despite being an extremely powerful public cloud, Amazon AWS brings about new and often complex challenges for IT shops struggling to apply the same processes and best practices from on-premises environments into the public cloud, which in many cases, just does not work.
Public cloud environments like Amazon AWS have their own set of tools and API driven management that can lead to possible misconfigurations resulting in either downtime, or worse, security breach or data leak.
There is one type of headline that no business wants to be known for and that is leaking customer or other sensitive data. Massive data leaks have been the result of simple misconfigurations of Amazon S3 buckets that have exposed sensitive data to the world.
What if you had the same best practices, security, and configuration assistance for your Amazon AWS that you have with Runecast and your VMware vSphere environment? As of Runecast 4.0, now you do!
Runecast 4.0 Released with AWS Analysis
Runecast has now taken their very tried and true VMware vSphere best practices and compliance automation and applied it to Amazon AWS. The new release provides a very intuitive and simple way for IT administrators, who may be more familiar with managing on-premises environments, to easily manage and understand their Amazon AWS environments.
It still provides the same great VMware vSphere insights that you are used to seeing while at the same time providing new insights into Amazon AWS environments that most organizations who are running vSphere on-premises have as well.
What are some of the Runecast 4.0 AWS features and functionality that customers get with Runecast 4.0?
Runecast Analyzer 4.0 checks for the very common AWS misconfigurations (like exposed S3 buckets) and also helps your business align your AWS environment with recommended AWS best practices and security recommendations. In addition to best practices and security recommendations, Runecast Analyzer 4.0 also helps with compliance analysis.
Do you need help with analyzing and tweaking your Amazon AWS environment for PCI-DSS compliance? Runecast Analyzer 4.0 helps you accomplish the very challenging compliance tasks such as this.
Runecast 4.0 AWS Features
Let’s look at the specific AWS features found in the Runecast 4.0 release. What are the specific Amazon AWS areas where Runecast 4.0 allows analyzing in line with best practices?
- AWS Identity and Access Management – An extremely important part of Amazon AWS, especially for analysis in line with best practices. Using IAM in AWS, you can create and manage AWS users and group as well as permissions to various AWS resources, either permitting or denying access
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – Amazon EC2 is at the heart of AWS providing scalable computing capacity in AWS. Using the Amazon EC2 interface, you can provision virtual servers including storage, networking, and security of the EC2 instance. EC2 instances can easily be misconfigured or improperly secured and certainly are a great place to start analyzing for best practices.
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud or VPC mirrors the same type of networking most are familiar with on-premises in the more traditional data centers. The Amazon VPC allows using the scalable architecture and infrastructure of the AWS ecosystem. Networking that is improperly configured can allow resources to be exposed. Runecast Analyzer 4.0 helps to gain visibility into these types of misconfigurations.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) – S3 simplifies storage infrastructure as well as access to that stsorage. Amazon S3 provides a simple way for developers and others to access and retrieve data at web-scale. Exposed S3 buckets are all too common. Runecast Analyzer 4.0 helps you to find these before someone else does.
After your Runecast Analyzer appliance is upgraded to 4.0, under settings, you can Add Amazon Web Services connection to your Runecast Analyzer 4.0 appliance.
Speaking of upgrading, how do you upgrade your Runecast Analyzer appliance to version 4.0?
Upgrading to Runecast Analyzer 4.0
Upgrading to Runecast Analyzer 4.0 is extremely simple. Actually when I logged into my Runecast Analyzer running in my lab environment, it had already updated for me! All I had to do was reboot the appliance as was noted in the Runecast Analyzer UI.
Earlier versions of Runecast added the auto-update feature of the appliance. It will automatically pull down the 4.0 update for you and install it and as mentioned, you just need to reboot.
Wrapping Up
Runecast 4.0 Released with AWS Analysis is no doubt going to be welcomed news to all who not only have on-premises VMware environments, but also can benefit with the automated best practices that Runecast provides in their Amazon AWS environments as well.
Really the sky is the limit for Runecast as they have a solution that is sorely needed in most markets today, whether on-premises or in today’s public and hybrid cloud environments. Amazon AWS is no doubt the first of many cloud environments to come for Runecast Analyzer analysis. Azure next? Google Compute Cloud? Time will tell. In the meantime, be sure to check out the following Runecast resources:
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