CohesiveFT's moment rises as cloud computing interest grows 9 November, 2008 By Liam Lahey

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By creating a secure bridge between the customer's data center, as well as between multiple cloud computing providers, CohesiveFT said it helps customers establish their own security perimeter for cloud-based assets, thereby solving a critical obstacle to cloud-computing adoption.

With VPN-Cubed, a packaged service offering, companies could leverage the cloud for redundancy, failover and scalability during critical transitions; whether scaling up to grow the business or scaling down to cut costs.

"In the same way an enterprise maintains control of sensitive data in a physical data center, VPN-Cubed offers security and control in the cloud," said Patrick Kerpan, chief technology officer at CohesiveFT. "VPN-Cubed acts as an encrypted LAN in a single cloud and as an encrypted WAN across multiple clouds, allowing cloud-based clusters to appear to be part of one physical network. Enterprises can grow their services horizontally and achieve better risk reduction and fault tolerance at the same time."

Chicago-based CohesiveFT was founded two years ago on the premise that four major IT trends were colliding in the data center that would ultimately reshape the IT environment from development through to deployment: open source, open standards, virtualization, and loosely couple architectures.

The cloud computing model allows customers to dynamically scale their hardware requirements to match the needs of an application. If capacity demand rises, additional server and storage resources would automatically be provisioned.

It may be a few years yet before cloud computing is commonplace, but CohesiveFT understands security concerns (in general) would have to be answered sufficiently before enterprises of all walks jump aboard. 2010 is the magic year the vendor expects cloud computing to become widespread.

"We're a complement to helping customers, whether they're individual developers or small development teams, for organizations that want to deploy infrastructure into clusters in the clouds," Kerpan said. "We help people assemble, deploy, and manage, for virtual infrastructure in the clouds."

Meanwhile, the current economic downturn could potentially increase interest in cloud computing, Kerpan said.

"We think it has to do with people looking at this year's hardware refresh cycle and rather than write that $2 million cheque to update their data center with new servers, they're looking at how they . . . can not spend that precious capital," he said.

VPN-Cubed is based on trusted, open standards and technologies including the open source software project OpenVPN. Unlike the VPN approaches commonly used to connect remote employees and offices, CohesiveFT's VPN-Cubed product runs inside cloud-computing facilities with failover capability that keeps cloud clusters running reliably even in the event of a VPN server failure. The company has offered a precursor to the VPN-Cubed product in production for more than a year via the Open Source VcubeV project.

With cloud computing touted as providing highly scalable access to computing, storage and network resources delivered via the Internet as a pay-per-use service, the company cited figures from IDC that stated cloud computing is poised to capture 25 percent of IT growth spend by 2012. Despite this, 74 percent of IT executives/CIOs cited security as the top challenge preventing their adoption of the cloud services model. Today, clouds are secured by their providers; CohesiveFT's VPN-Cubed gives customers the confidence to utilize cloud computing by offering a layer of security that the customer controls.

"Security controls, security integration, these are the questions on people's minds in terms of how to make the cloud work," he continued. "But it's as much about control as it is about security itself . . . think of VPN-Cubed as a cloud VPN but unlike traditional VPN, there's elements to it where you need a novel substantiation and implementation to make it appropriate to cloud computing."

VPN-Cubed features and specifications:

*Customer-controlled security using an encrypted LAN in a single cloud and an encrypted WAN across multiple clouds;

*Enhanced security via VPN-Cubed, in addition to customer's cloud vendor VLAN, and individual virtual server firewalls;

*Multicast support in the cloud enables seamless software compatibility without costly changes;

*Customer-controlled network addresses for their devices in a cloud or across multiple clouds;

*Enables failover strategies from one cloud vendor to another;

*Customer-controlled encryption of the communication between devices in the cloud VPN;

*Available for use with most operating systems, virtual environments, and third-party cloud offerings including Amazon EC2 and Flexiscale.

CohesiveFT's VPN-Cubed product is a complement to the company's Elastic Server platform for real-time, automated assembly of virtual servers and custom application stacks. Users choose from a component library consisting of open source, third-party, and proprietary customer code, and assemble cloud- or virtual environment-destined servers in minutes. The automated assembly process dramatically improves the quality and consistency of application stack builds at the same time that it reduces the time to market, the company said.

For more information, surf to www.cohesiveft.com/vpncubed.