CloudSigma: Tackling the Big Data Challenge

Lauren Robinette recently talked with Robert Jenkins, co-founder and CTO of of CloudSigma, about its CloudSigma on demand utility platform, which is a unique utility cloud that is generating a buzz within the media/entertainment and other markets.

CloudSigma offers utility cloud hosting just like RackSpace and Amazon do, but CloudSigma does it with any operating system and has the flexibility to scale as needed. Best of all — some would say — the platform has a transparent cost structure, which can be accessed on the company’s website http://www.cloudsigma.com/.

The CloudSigma platform is a true Infrastructure as a Service product that enables outstanding performance for applications, such as storage, and delivers the flexibility via easy configuration to address different workloads. For example, the system can offer a different experience for various types of workloads: storage for SSD at the core, object storage for high performance jobs, and I/O intensive jobs.

Consider the workflow of processing and transferring of large files in the movie production industry. Today, shipping via mail of the large files for each production step takes time, and if there is an error, must be redone. With the Big Media System, which is an ecosystem built on the CloudSigma platform, users upload huge amount of data into the cloud, leverage processing functions in the cloud and provide the link for other personnel to access and address the next tasks of the workflow. The benefits of this system are immediate: faster access at less of a cost.

This system is also not limited to the media industry; it can be utilized by verticals such as financial, medical and scientific institutions. For example, an insurance company can publish data that allows changes in the pricing of policies based on traffic and where accidents happen. This type of public data can be used to create an asset that then is monetized to create a new product. Another benefit, as users’ behavior adapt, will be the increase in turnaround for iteration cycles and byproducts that require more processing. This is similar to what Google did when it improved the quality of searching, which, in turn, created changes in consumers’ behavior.

CloudSigma offers a white label to providers or the brand can be leveraged by CloudSigma providers. A partnership with CloudSigma allows providers to develop a new cloud resource, public and private clouds that target the big data industry, which reduces time to market. As Robert Jenkins succinctly stated, “It’s like selling gold pans to miners.”

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Lauren Robinette
lrobinette@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch.net

From the Trenches of RSA: Cloud, Mobility and Management

The RSA Conference is a forum for an industry trying to keep hacktivism, espionage, and money-driven crime syndicates at bay. Walk the floor and you will see how many facets there are to keeping the network secure, so that more than a third of the world’s seven billion people can use their phones, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc., to connect to the people and information they need to run their lives, businesses and governments. So what were the main themes at the conference? Cloud, mobility, and management.

Cloud: There is no doubt organizations are migrating to the cloud, whether it’s a public, private or hybrid model, to take advantage of its scale and economies. However, securing that cloud deployment can be tricky as you navigate various migration paths, relationships and control issues. While it seems everyone has a cloud story (which evidently necessitates blue collateral and puffy clouds somewhere in the booth), the reality is most still tend to be more of a repackaging of existing technologies rather than new, innovative solutions. For example, VMware talked about its collaboration with partners to deliver security in the cloud, and Fortinet released a new form factor optimized for data centers for its firewall technology in the FortiGate 5140B/5001B.

Mobility: Anything mobile is a hot security issue especially as the bring your own device (BYOD) trend heats up; the devices, are becoming an increasingly attractive target. We have already seen data traffic rise exponentially on smartphones and tablets. Video is now the leading driver of total data traffic, averaging 50 percent across geographies. Then, there are the apps that contain particularly sensitive information, for example, retail sales through mobile devices is on the rise. According to Internet Retailer, the 300 largest U.S. mobile merchants generated $5.37 billion in sales through mobile devices. Mobile banking app usage is also increasing with nearly 14 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers accessing banking services on their devices.

Depending to whom you talk, the percentage of phones infected with malware is estimated between one and five percent. There are solutions being hyped from Juniper (Pulse) and CheckPoint that focus on encrypting mobile traffic and controlling and optimizing access to applications for the enterprise. Other companies attempt to tackle attack identification and remediation on the device, such as Alcatel-Lucent Kindsight, for end users (as a service for providers).

Management: Visibility into the traffic is one of the hardest things to get; most service providers and enterprises cite visibility and subsequent security identification and event management (SIEM) as one of their hardest problems to solve, which is why almost every booth had some sort of SIEM story to tell. But that is really the problem: different “panes of glass” for different functions, regardless of how helpful that pane is, it doesn’t take the pain away from the time and effort it takes to manage the network and the security of that network. Ultimately, all the logs and information that each of the devices in your network generate turn it into a big data issue. The National Science Foundation puts the “Big Data” market at a $100 billion industry. It’s why we have seen companies such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP spend a combined $15 billion+ acquiring technology that can help them with data management and analytics. Of course there are security-specific solutions too, such as NetForensics, HP’s ArcSight and many others.

For questions or more specifics, please contact Sarah at ssorensen@acgresearch.net.

Sarah Sorensen

ssorensen@acgresearch.net

www.acgresearch.net