A VPN for Cloud Computing

Posted by Jean-Jacques Dubray on Oct 28, 2008

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Development,

Operations & Infrastructure

Topics

Architecture ,

Cloud Computing ,

Clustering & Caching ,

Security

Tags

CohesiveFT

So far, Cloud Computing has seen a strong adoption from SaaS and PaaS providers and enthusiast developers. Enterprises on the other hand have expressed a lot of interest in the wake of their virtualization projects but there has been no major adoption wave yet. This is not too surprising. Cloud Computing was not even on the Gartner Top 10 list of technologies last year. Patrick Kerpan CTO of CohesiveFT argues that:

Security is the gating factor for preventing Enterprise Cloud adoption

Even though there's never been of a major security breach, an InfoWeek survey corroborates Patrick's argument. "The service provider can't secure our data well enough" comes as the #2 concern for not adopting SaaS.

Patrick explains, this is why CohesiveFT developed the first VPN offering for the cloud. VPN-Cubed is an encrypted virtual private network that supports 3 topologies:

enabling customer-controlled security inside a single cloud, across multiple clouds, and between clouds and private infrastructure.

Patrick sees this "customer control" as a mater of compliance and part of their governance processes.

One of the main use cases is probably going to be elastic and redundant infrastructures:

Patrick explains that:

VPN implementations sometimes [go] down for minutes and people just deal with the transient outage. [But] "blackouts" of mission critical infrastructure are unacceptable so we added redundancy measures to VPN-Cubed. VPN-cubed lets you run your whole cloud topology as a cloud WAN.

Is security the main barrier to adoption? Will this kind of technology change your mind?

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