On Wednesday, CohesiveFT (our previous coverage of VPNCubed here and here) announced the release of VPNCubed for VMWare’s vCloud ecosystem. 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. 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.
In March of this year, CohesiveFT announced the release of VPNCubed for EC2. With this release Amazon EC2 customers could create their own secure private network either within an EC2 regions or across several regions. Couple of months back, Amazon released Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and at that time I wondered about what it means to CohesiveFT.
The moment I saw the tweet about this announcement, it struck me that this is a direct threat to VPNCubed from CohesiveFT (See Cloud Ave’s review of VPNCubed and our coverage about their support for EC2). I got in touch with folks at CohesiveFT to ask about their reaction. They highlighted a very important difference between their product and Amazon’s. It is all about control. With VPNCubed, the control of network overlay lies in the hands of the customers whereas in the case of Amazon’s offering, the control is with them and the need for a trust factor doesn’t go away completely. VPNCubed supports multiple clouds (Sun Cloud, vCloud, Private Eucalyptus Cloud, etc.) and it can also work with a hardware based firewall whereas Amazon’s cannot.
Now they have made the public availability of the vCloud support. They have now packaged their products as VPNCubed vCloud Solutions which could help enterprises take advantage of many different cloud services. This package includes
- Datacenter to vCloud – offers a network overlay between the existing datacenter and vCloud including those offered by third party providers like Terramark.
- EC2 to vCloud – helps enterprises extend their existing EC2 deployments to vCloud hosted either in a managed datacenter or public providers like terramark
- vCloud to Cloud – if you are already deployed in vCloud and want to extend it to public clouds, it is possible
- vCloud to vCloud – if you are a Xen hater and want to confine yourself to different vCloud providers, it is possible with this product
This announcement is unique from few different angles
- Even though VPNCubed running on EC2 offers much better control, Amazon’s VPC announcement is a threat to CohesiveFT. By expanding their support to multiple cloud providers (and multiple virtualization platforms), they are keeping themselves competitive
- As I have mentioned many times in this space, I see a future where the cloud ecosystem is open and federated. Supporting multiple cloud platforms with VPNCubed only strengthens and accelerates the formation of such an ecosystem.
- Support of different virtualization platforms will also help those enterprises who find the idea of private clouds prohibitively expensive. These businesses will want to spread their wealth, oops, data and a secure perimeter kind of security will help them use multiple clouds.
Overall, I am pretty impressed with CohesiveFT and their strategy. Unlike a few other cloud vendors, they don’t make much noise but they do have a solid solution that will help the enterprises take advantage of the cloud ecosystem.
