VPN-Cubed™ - Security and Control in the Clouds

We couldn't wait any longer. Today, we announced the availability of VPN-Cubed, our packaged service (think half software half service) for enhanced cloud security. VPN-Cubed is an encrypted virtual private network (VPN), enabling customer-controlled security inside a single cloud, across multiple clouds, and between clouds and private infrastructure.

We see the current economic downturn as actually increasing Cloud Computing interest. Rather than writing that $2M check for your data center hardware refresh, wouldn't you rather manage your infrastructure as a service? Moving part of your infrastructure to the cloud turns capital expenditures (or fixed costs) into operational expenditures (or variable costs). According to IDC, a global provider of market intelligence, cloud computing is poised to capture 25% of IT growth spend by 2012. Yet, in a recent IDC survey, 74% of IT executives/CIOs cited security as the top challenge preventing their adoption of the cloud services model. Today, clouds are secured by the cloud providers, but from a governance and compliance point-of-view shouldn't you take additional measures - that you control - to secure your cloud assets? CohesiveFT's VPN-Cubed gives customers the confidence to utilize cloud computing by offering a layer of security that the customer controls.

We have always positioned ourselves as a cloud/virtualization complement, enabling users to adopt cloud computing quickly and easily with the Elastic Server® Factory for VM and cloud image assembly. Dealing with what we call the "more of everything" problem (more software components, more virtualization formats, more cloud providers, and more operating systems), CFT is at the forefront of helping customers control their infrastructure in the cloud.

We are not a security company, but we have always recognized the importance of, and pioneered techniques, to provide a customer controlled security layer inside cloud computing topologies. We started by shipping all Elastic Servers with their own unique identity and firewall. As we worked with customers looking to deploy clusters to the cloud we recognized a new and not well understood problem: the need for additional cloud security at the cluster level. Our solution is a cloud VPN, which includes well known components like openVPN within a novel implementation for use in cloud computing scenarios. VPN-Cubed is our way of moving the cloud security conversation forward.

The typical VPN is used as a tunnel between Corporate HQ, branch offices, or employees' computers for secure communication to email servers and the like. Usually VPN implementations are "cheap and cheerful" infrastructure, sometimes it goes down for minutes and people just deal with the transient outage. "Brown outs" or "blackouts" of mission critical infrastructure aren't unacceptable so we added redundancy measures to VPN-Cubed. What happens when your cloud vendor drops? VPN-Cubed is uniquely configured to deal with multiple clouds, vms and operating systems, giving you the control and flexibility to failover (cloudburst) to another cloud provider. VPN-cubed lets you run your whole cloud topology as a cloud WAN.
CohesiveFT is always working to provide you with YOUR stack in the virtualization or cloud format of your choice, we want you to extend that to include YOUR security in the cloud. Start the cloud security discussion with a member of the CFT team by visiting our VPN-Cubed page. Realize cloud computing benefits instead of just reading about them.