Virtualization news for the channel community and you !

Both VMware, Citrix and Microsoft have announced their cloud-initiatives. The one is a little bit ahead in development then the other, but in general none of the three have a cloud-initiative that is “ready to manufacture”.

In the case that the cloud is “ready-to-manufacture”, the next step is analyzing which application can be moved into the cloud and who will be your cloud-provider. When looking at the type of applications you will be “clouding”, it is important to verify the “value” of the application to the business.

First of all you are moving an application (which requires data) to the internet / cloud. So there are possible security risks. The Cloud Computing Incidents Database (CCID) tracks all events that impact cloud computing providers. Do not forget that the CCID is an open-community (only founded earlier this year.), so it relies on people logging the events, as you can espect major cloud-providers are not logging their events.

If you look at the stats for Q3/08 you get 3 critical events, 3 high severity events and 3 others, the incidents range from disaster recovery, design faults, … into session hijacking, user impersonation, … Even one resulted in all data being lost due to closure of the service (The Linkup).

It must be said, whatever cloud initiative you will be implementing keep a very close eye on the financial stability of your provider, the relationship with your provider and the security your provider is offering you.

A vendor that is specializing in offering cloud solutions to cloud providers must be aware of the security risks and react accordingly in order to prevent security breaches which might result in data theft, resulting in lost profitability of the customer. 

Looking at the earlier mentioned vendors, we see that VMware is moving with small steps ahead when it comes to providing security solutions for their cloud initiative and it must be said that their solution will be probably the latest on the market.

Addition 13.10.2008 – If the information on the web is correct, it seems to be that VMware will indeed takeover BlueLane Technologies, a specialist in protecting both physical and virtual servers. Yet it gets integrated on the server itself and is in that way not the security solution when it comes to protecting the data center or the cloud center.

Microsoft has already a number of security solutions onboard, but do their security features meet the grade? We will have to wait for the next big event from Microsoft, probably more will be announced then.

Citrix is probably in this field, the one that is leading the pack. Their Netscaler can be equipped with layer 7 application firewalling, the access to the cloud can be encrypted with SSL-VPN solutions and their end-to-end virtualization solution can be integrated with the market leaders on 2-factor-authentication such as Vasco.

Another question that comes to mind is the type of cloud provider. Do endusers need to go ahead with big cloud providers such as Amazon.com, Google, Flexiscale, …. or can they rely on their value added reseller. Seen the fact that VAR has been implementing the IT infrastructure for the enduser and supporting its infrastructure, he is probably the best positioned to offer cloud services. Afterall it is just moving the infrastructure to another virtual location (sort of speak).

On the other hand the value added reseller might not have structure to setup big clouds. This might lead to clouds being set up by different value added resellers across the world, resulting in a gigantic cloud with follow-the-sun support.

One thing is for sure, the cloud computing initiative has just been founded, vendors are still working on their final offerings, the market is preparing itself, VARs & integrators need to prepare business cases, … we are not there yet ! However, we might be there in a very short time ! Prepare !