Broader Cloud Adoption Calls for New Approach to Security

Wazzup Pilipinas!

Fortinet, the global leader in high-performance cyber security solutions, cautions APAC organisations that traditional security solutions are no longer adequate in protecting today’s agile and highly distributed cloud environments and expanding attack surfaces.

While cloud service providers offer compelling new services, they also create isolated data silos that have to be managed separately, and impose unique security requirements on organizations. IT teams are already overburdened with managing their network transformation, and now must also learn how to deploy, configure, monitor, and manage dozens of additional cloud security tools.

The lack of additional resources, combined with the growing security skills gap, leaves security technicians with no good way to establish consistent policy enforcement or correlate the threat intelligence each of these devices produces.The result, in many cases, is that today’s hybrid cloud environments are recreating the same data center security sprawl that organizations have spent years trying to streamline and consolidate.

“For many organizations, their cloud-based infrastructure and services have become a blind spot in their security strategy. And cybercriminals are prepared to take advantage of this,” said Michael Xie, Founder, President and CTO for Fortinet. “A critical lapse in visibility or control in any part of the distributed network, especially in the cloud, can spell disaster for a digital business and have repercussions across the emerging global digital economy.”

The cloud has been a powerfully disruptive technology, transforming traditional network architectures that have been in place for decades. Housing workloads on cloud have allowed local businesses to be more agile, responsive and available than ever before. Networking experts predict that by 2020, cloud data centres will house as much as 92 percent of all workloads.According to Gartner, total spending for public cloud services in Asia Pacific is expected to increase to US$12.4 billion by 2019 with Software as a Service (SaaS) being the most progressive segment of the market with a growth rate of 22.5 percent and forecasted revenue of US$1.67 billion. (Source: Gartner)

So while organizations are re-engineering their networks, they have also begun to retool their security model and solutions. Security budgets for existing traditional networks are being reassigned to the adoption of specialized security tools, such as data center protection, web application firewalls, security for mobile devices, thin clients, secure email gateways, advanced threat protection, and sandboxes.

Fortinet advocates an integrated Security Fabric strategy that ensures data and security elements across an organization’s various cloud environments are integrated, cohesive and coherent, like a seamlessly woven fabric. Such a strategy allows companies to see, control, integrate and manage the security of their data across the hybrid cloud, thereby enabling them to take better advantage of the economics and elasticity provided by a highly distributed cloud environment.

Fortinet’s Security Fabric addressses three fundamental requirements necessary to meet today’s advanced networking and security requirements of the cloud:

1. Integration

Security, network and cloud-based tools need to work together as a single system to enhance visibility and correlate and share threat intelligence.

2. Synchronization

Security solutions need to work as a unified system for simplified single-pane-of-glass management and analysis, and enabling coordinated responses to threats through such methods as isolating affected devices, dynamically partitioning network segments, updating rules and removing malware.

3. Automation

For security solutions to adapt to dynamically changing network configurations and respond in real time to detected threats, security measures and countermeasures need to be applied automatically, regardless of where a threat originates, from remote devices to the cloud.


“To securely meet today’s digital business requirements, organizations need to be able to cut through the cloud security hype and intentionally select security solutions designed to be part of an interconnected, end-to-end security framework that can solve evolving physical and virtual IT challenges regardless of the deployment option. Security needs to be designed to meet this new challenge not only now, but into tomorrow as organizations continue to evolve towards a fully digital business model,” said Jeff Castillo, country manager for Fortinet Philippines.

Probe on Funeral Parlors Raking in Huge Profits from EJKs

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“Twice the victim.”

This is how Akbayan Senator Risa Hontiveros described many of the victims of extrajudicial killings (EJKs) whose families were charged by funeral homes with exorbitant fees for funeral and burial services.

Senate Resolution No. 325 filed by Hontiveros on Monday called for a Senate inquiry on the alleged exorbitant charges imposed by government-sanctioned funeral homes on victims of EJKs.

The senator said that there is an immediate need to impose proper penalties and/or halt the funeral parlors’ alleged unscrupulous practices, as well as determine if liability can be attached to the police officers in charge of their accreditation.

According to the reports received by Hontiveros’ office, it has been observed in many communities after the government declared a violent war on drugs, funeral homes accredited by the Philippine National Police- Scene of the Crime Operatives (PNP-SOCO) charge as much as P 35,000 to P 60,000, sometimes even amounting to as much as P 95,000 -- several times for funeral and burial services, more than the previous rates of P 7,000 to P 12,000.

Hontiveros said that due to the inability of many families to retrieve their loved ones from the said funeral homes, many bodies have been left in piles in unsanitary and demeaning conditions, posing health and sanitation risks.

“This is morally reprehensible. No one should charge exorbitant fees and rake in super profits from the suffering and tragedy of poor and helpless people, particularly those who were killed by extrajudicial killers. The victims of the families affected by these ruthless killings are already suffering from shock and trauma, yet they are made to deal with the stress of cobbling together the funds necessary to provide a decent burial for their loved ones,” Hontiveros added.

Since the start of the government’s war on drugs, several funeral services have been involved in controversial cases. It was reported that the remains of Jee Ick Joo, a Korean national who was allegedly kidnapped and killed by rogue police officers, were brought to a funeral home where they were cremated. The ashes were allegedly flushed into the funeral parlor’s toilet bowl.

Last year, 250 unclaimed bodies were recovered from a funeral home that had not complied with the government’s sanitation code and was operating without the required business permits for the last three years. According to residents, bodies from the Manila Police district (MPD) were often seen delivered to the funeral home.

Archivo 1984 Proudly Presents Manuel Ocampo, Early Works: 1985-1994

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Archivo 1984 proudly presents an exhibition featuring some of the earliest, more controversial work of Manuel Ocampo, on view for the first time in his home country.

Ocampo (b. 1965) studied fine arts at the University of the Philippines before moving to Los Angeles. He enrolled at the California State University in 1984, abandoning a diploma to seriously pursue painting. He has exhibited extensively and is represented in galleries and institutions throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Manuel Ocampo's compositions juxtapose leitmotifs from established western iconography, religious symbolism, Filipino kitsch, and the annals of history. His imagery is deeply rooted in its symbolic and satirical nature.

With a career spanning 30 years, Manuel Ocampo has forged a path of (meandering) resistance in the international art circuit. Born and raised in the Philippines, he migrated to the US, graduating from college in California, where he used to be based for almost a decade. His first solo show at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1988 brought him unprecedented attention in the international art scene; cemented further by his inclusion in two prominent European art events: Documenta IX (1992) and the Venice Biennale (1993). He will be featured once again in this year’s edition of the Venice Biennale (under the curatorial program of Joselina Cruz for the Philippine Pavilllion). He has subsequently participated in numerous museum exhibitions and biennials around the world, including the biennials of Gwangju (1997), Lyon (2000), Berlin (2001), and Seville (2004). Consistently exhibiting and organizing exhibits in and outside the Philippines, noteworthy of which is the series Bastards of Misrepresentation and Manila Vice in Sete, France.

Manuel Ocampo emerged at the time when postmodernist art was coming to a close giving way to an urgent voice that sought to level the cultural field through the representation of the other, landing in California after leaving the country right after the People’s Power Revolution in 1986. Living under Martial Law and being schooled by Catholic priests where he was trained to make copies of devotional retablo paintings, within such aforementioned circumstances “he wrestled with the trinity of the spiritual (Spain), the material (U.S.), and the self (Philippines).” Within this conflicting triumvirate, he has created an equally iconic visual idiom that mixes high and low, academic and popular, sacred and secular images that resound overt commentaries on religious and social taboos, race, oppression, language, and geopolitics.

The works from his early period well represented in this exhibition bear influence that are discernible in the paintings of younger contemporaries such as Robert Langenegger (the scatological Catholic imagery and political cartoon type of depicting racial tensions), Jayson Oliveria (the non-hierarchical use of images and texts), Louie Cordero (the explosion of colours), Dina Gadia (the patina of nostalgia of sourced images, mostly ads and cartoons from post-war mid-century); and in his own contemporaries who are based in Manila such as Romeo Lee (the over-all grotesquerie), and Gerardo Tan (the layering of images and erasures/defacements that reveal the conceit of an artwork being foremost a painting than a language or a political stand). It’s no coincidence that these artists were also part of the multicity travelling exhibit Bastards of Misrepresentation out of a psychic affinity and convivial friendship.

Subject of a retrospective hosted by Archivo 1984, the bulk of these artworks have been repatriated from the collection of Track 16 Gallery and collector Tom Patchett in San Diego, USA. Complemented by a few pieces belonging to local collections, this will be the first time that these works will be exhibited here in the Philippines and is the first ever significant show of Ocampo’s notorious early period that the country is able to scrutinize.

It’s a timely and apt homecoming in light of recent global political events that appears to have reverted to how it was thirty years ago, at the dawn of a Perestroika and Glasnost, as the roots of multiculturalism began to emerge with the promise of a utopian Benetton world. Despite the altruistic aims of such an aspiration, its unraveling had been vested much in its very liberalism, its unintended consequences the unbridled hold of big business almost taking stead already of the state. What was the voice of multiculturalism shouting dissent against neo-colonial homogeneity has been umbraged into a market stranglehold, and with it the double-edged blessing of market expansion into the art world. Yet how can artists live with this paradoxical guilt of making political critiques against this system where they make money from? Ocampo, knowingly and/or queasily inserts himself in this paradoxical dilemma, playing the game, as he’d rather see it, playing the identity politics card, and acing it in a luck of the draw. Yet he bemoans that dilemma : “it’s harder to forget than it is to remember.” – an identity that catches up with him in his nomadic state, forever in exile, treading through his own path of resistance before the world gets totally walled in by tyrannical philistines.