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CohesiveFT, a three year old Cloud Computing platform provider, today announced the release of an exciting new security product for the Clouds that could lure the enterprises into Cloud Computing. Their new product, called VPN-Cubed, provides a security perimeter for the IT infrastructure whether it is inside a single cloud or multiple cloud or hybrid cloud-datacenter ecosystem. This is a pretty exciting product that has the potential to reshape the enterprise cloud adaption. Let me first offer some background on the company and then talk about their newest offering.
CohesiveFT was started in 2006 offering Elastic Servers and the Elastic Server Platform, an online service for configuring and assembling custom stacks to be deployed on the cloud infrastructure. Elastic Servers are custom application stacks that can be assembled seamlessly using wide range of applications available. The granular control offered to the users allows them to just run the software they want and, in their words, nothing more nothing less. One can either use the pre-populated application stacks or stacks offered by other users or by building your own stack by cherry picking various components. Once the stack is assembled on the Elastic Server Platform, it can be deployed easily on any virtual environment or the cloud computing infrastructure.
The issue of vendor lock-in is one of the important issues facing companies planning to shift their operations to the cloud. According to Phil Clarke, Sales and Services Director at CohesiveFT, their platform offers an ideal solution to avoid such a vendor lock-in. He points out that any stack built using their elastic server platform can be deployed to any cloud infrastructure easily. It is true from the point of view of deployment but I think it doesn’t help much in the migration of an existing stack from one cloud vendor to another.
Right now they have a free Community Edition suitable for developers and a very inexpensive Personal Edition for commercial purposes. They will be releasing a Team Edition sometime in the future satisfying the needs of bigger companies. I asked Mr. Clarke about the support for Hyper-V and he told me that they might offer it in the future after sorting out the licensing issues. Unlike Rightscale, which is involved in the management of Cloud instances after initial deployment, CohesiveFT focuses on helping their customers in assembling the application stack at a lower cost.
After developing a successful platform for the deployment of various application stacks in the cloud infrastructure, CohesiveFT is taking the next step in the evolution of a company by tackling the security problem, the most important issue preventing the enterprise customers from joining the cloud computing bandwagon. Today’s release of VPN-Cubed will offer a security perimeter covering the IT assets deployed in any kind of ecosystem (cloud or managed). One of the biggest worries for enterprise customers is the need to cede control of the security of their data to the cloud provider. With this solution, the company can retain the control of security even inside the cloud. VPN-Cube uses the popular Open Source VPN software, OpenVPN, to act as an encrypted LAN inside a single cloud or as an encrypted WAN across multiple clouds. This allows the cloud based clusters or the hybrid cloud-enterprise datacenter ecosystem to appear as a single physical network similar to Enterprise 1.0 infrastructure. VPN-Cube enables enterprise software requiring multicast networking and, also, offers greater control over network addressing, thereby offering an enterprise level secure network either inside a single cloud or across multiple clouds. With VPN-Cubed, companies can easily scale their infrastructure in the cloud with the ability to seamlessly add the newly provisioned resources into their existing VPN-Cubed network. Unlike the traditional VPN approaches commonly used to connect remote employees and offices, CohesiveFT's VPN-Cubed product runs inside the cloud-computing facilities with failover capability that keeps cloud clusters running reliably even in the event of a VPN server failure.
With the release of VPN-Cubed product, CohesiveFT now offers both an automated deployment option inside the cloud and a way to maintain control of the security. This makes cloud computing an attractive option for enterprises worried about the privacy and security of their data. This product will also help companies interested in having a hybrid cloud-datacenter ecosystem to protect their critical data by keeping on their servers while offloading the non-critical applications and data to the cloud. Right now, VPN-Cubed supports Amazon EC2, Flexiscale, Go Grid, Mosso and a few other cloud infrastructure vendors. I spoke to Patrick Kerpan, CTO at CohesiveFT, and asked him about their plans to support Windows Azure. He said they might extend their product to support it in the future. I also asked him if he expects enterprises to embrace cloud computing rapidly after the release of this much needed security tool, he was very optimistic about it and feels that the current economic downturn might force companies to consider cloud computing as a way to cut costs. Irrespective of whether we see a rapid enterprise adaption of cloud computing or not, I am pretty confident that VPN-Cubed will help companies control the security of their data.
[..] Enterprise IT folk will like that. They’re answerable for the integrity and safety of the data assets under their control, and cloud providers have been taking that accountability away from them. “The cloud has great cost advantages,” CohesiveFT’s CTO Patrick Kerpan told me yesterday. “If you combine that with it being the customer’s infrastructure under their control in the cloud, it really starts to firm up.”Cloud Avenue’s write-up agrees. [..]
I've now employed Hamachi as well and ditched the problematic MS VPN solution. There would be miss dials, I'd have to restart the "Routing and Remote Access" service sometimes as well as power cycle the modem. Now I have no issues. Install Hamachi on the client pc's and set their hosts file up and all is well. The notebook users benefit as well. Hamachi is intelligent and knows when to use the Local Area Network to peer when it can. When remote and there is an internet connect a route is found via the net. Hamchi - it just works - it's great!!!
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