As public cloud computing continues to gain strong momentum, the vendor landscape for IaaS is rounding out nicely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) the clear leader of the pack. Focussing on the enterprise application space, from my observation, a significant amount of customers cloud projects over the past few years fell into two major buckets: 1) virtualizing server applications to build the private cloud (datacenter) and 2) running test and development projects to work out the kinks and build up the experience required to ensure applications will run equally or better than in the enterprise.
With data center virtualization projects well in hand, organizations are now looking towards leveraging the public cloud in a variety of ways – for some, desktop virtualization projects are the priority, for others, data backup or disaster recovery, while a third grouping look to the public cloud as an extension of their private cloud to handle certain workloads.
Regardless of the use case, while the confidence in cloud is growing due to its undeniable benefits, top customer pain points continue to revolve around security. While IaaS cloud providers have invested heavily in building strong security controls protecting everything from core networking, processing and storage infrastructure right up to and including the operating system, they promote a concept of shared responsibility where customers maintain responsibility for securing the actual workloads instances and their associated data.
To help AWS customers take control of securing their private data in the public cloud, AFORE announced a suite of encryption solutions designed to help secure virtual desktops (VDI), applications servers and EBS storage. These solutions not only help companies address regulatory compliance and protect against cyber surveillance and other forms of external threats, but can also helps with the ever growing concern of insider threats. Underpinning our solutions is a unique approach that makes deployment and management simple for IT managers giving them the ability to secure both private and public cloud workloads from a single security management plane. To learn more about AFORE, check our cloud security products or better yet, drop by and see us if your attending the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.