Rational Survivability

Ellen Rubin and John Considine from CloudSwitch chuckled when I muttered this toward them in some sort of channeled pantomime of what an evaluation of their offering might bring from public-only cloud apologists.

Afterall, simply taking an application and moving it to a cloud doesn’t make it a “cloud application.”  Further, to fully leverage the automation, scale, provisioning and orchestration of “true” cloud platforms, one must re-write one’s applications and deal with the associated repercussions of doing so.  Things like security, networking, compliance, operations, etc.  Right?

Well…

CloudSwitch’s solutions — which defy this fundamental rearchitecture requirement —  enable enterprises to securely encapsulate and transport enterprise datacenter-hosted VM-based applications as-is and run them atop public cloud provider environments such as Amazon Web Services and Terremark in a rather well designed, security-conscious manner.

The reality is that their customer base — large enterprises in many very demanding verticals — seek to divine strategic technologies that allow them to pick and choose what, how and when to decide to “cloudify” their environments.  In short, CloudSwitch TODAY offers these customers a way to leverage the goodness of public utility in cloud without the need to fundamentally rearchitect the applications and accompanying infrastructure stacks — assuming they are already virtualized.  CloudSwitch seeks to do a lot more as they mature the product.

I went deep on current product capabilities and then John and I spent a couple of hours going off the reservation discussing what the platform plans are — both roadmapped and otherwise.

It was fascinating.

The secure isolation and network connectivity models touch on overlay capabilities from third parties, hypervisor/cloud stack providers like VMware (vCloud Director) as well as offers from folks like Amazon and their VPC, but CloudSwitch provides a way to solve many of the frustrating and sometimes show-stopping elements of application migration to cloud.  The preservation of bridged/routed networking connectivity back to the enterprise LAN is well thought out.

This is really an audit and compliance-friendly solution…pair a certified cloud provider (like AWS, as an example) up with app stacks in VMs that the customer is responsible for getting certified (see the security/compliance=shared responsibility post) and you’ve got something sweeter’n YooHoo…

It really exemplifies the notion of what people think of when they envision Hybrid Cloud today.  “Native” cloud apps written specifically for cloud environments, “transported” cloud apps leveraging CloudSwitch, and on-premises enterprise datacenters all interconnected.  Sweet.  More than just networking…

For the sake of not treading on FrieNDA elements that weaved their way in and out of our conversation, I’m not at liberty to discuss many of the things that really make this a powerful platform both now and in future releases.  If you want more technical detail on how it works, call ’em up, visit their website or check out Krishnan’s post.

Let me just say that the product today is impressive — it has some features from a security, compliance, reporting and auditing perspective I think can be further improved, but if you are an enterprise looking for a way to today make graceful use of public cloud computing in a secure manner, I’d definitely take a look at CloudSwitch.

/Hoff

Related articles

• CloudSwitch Releases New Version With Enhances Enterprise Features (cloudave.com)
• “Lights Out” in the Cloud (devcentral.f5.com)
• CloudSwitch Lets Developers Provision Apps in the Cloud with Point-and-Click Simplicity (devx.com)
• The Shifting Market for the Extended or Hybrid Cloud (readwriteweb.com)