With the exponential growth in cloud adoption, the number of options to secure, manage and monitor your environment can be overwhelming. To simplify the process for you, we recommend the following products to cover all bases of cloud adoption.
We look at managing the cloud environment, setting up databases, using and monitoring SaaS applications and other cloud metrics and of course (being FortyCloud) – cloud security.
Managing the Deployment
Whether you are planning a migration or are already up there in the public cloud, management, maintenance and service delivery of cloud assets requires considerable expertise. For larger enterprises, selecting the type of cloud deployment is especially complex; it involves determining which resources to migrate and which resources, if any, should remain on premise.
The broader context of application portfolio management and infrastructure is necessary when determining how to migrate applications; imagine choosing one of Gartner’s “5 R’s” – Rehost, Refactor, Revise, Rebuild or Replace – without proper counsel. For these enterprises, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) provide a key role in planning and executing the initial migration and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of rebuilding the solution on PaaS, or running applications on a cloud provider’s infrastructure. They also consider financial factors, in conjunction with networking and security concerns.
Companies may choose a single cloud provider, or decide to divide resources among a few providers as a backup and recovery strategy. For global enterprises, ensuring a seamless migration requires consideration of the latency for all users, therefore the MSP must have sufficient data centers to provide the high performance upon which these business depend.
Datapipe
For the decision-maker, Datapipe is an obvious choice for maintenance, service delivery and management of cloud assets. Datapipe architects, deploys and manages multi-platform hybrid IT solutions and operates more than 15 data centers around the world to offer a genuinely global reach. Their services extend to all aspects of network, storage and compute resources.
Datapipe provides fully redundant data center infrastructure and establishes solutions for AWS and Azure among other CSPs. The infrastructure incorporates high-performance data protection, backup and restoration, secure, multi-phase migration and state-of-the-art disaster recovery solutions. To assist in the migration process and enable multi-phased moves, Datapipe provides short-term equipment and facilities leasing. In addition, their Content Delivery Network delivers static and streaming multi-media content.
Managing Cloud Security
For most businesses, security is their Number #1 consideration in moving to the cloud. We recommend two companies to protect your resources in the cloud – Ciphercloud’s protection controls for applications and (shameless plug – but we do believe in our product) – FortyCloud to encrypt your data in transit.
CipherCloud
CipherCloud utilizes AES encryption and tokenization to protect sensitive resources and prevent data leaks. In addition, its activity monitoring, data loss prevention and malware detection supply additional protection for your resources in the cloud. Salesforce, Office 365, Gmail, and Box are examples of the applications that CipherCloud secures and monitors, to ensure that your data is safe in private and public clouds. Your organization retains control of the critical encryption keys; therefore, an unauthorized user who accesses resources is not able to decipher the data.
CipherCloud’s detailed activity monitoring provides visibility into cloud usage, security, and content. Detailed security dashboards and reports track user interactions across multiple cloud applications, and alerts provide notice of untoward user activity. The compliant, scalable solution can be deployed on physical or virtual servers, as well as in private cloud deployments.
FortyCloud
FortyCloud’s cloud security solution enables organizations to build their own secure, scalable, virtual private cloud network over any number of data centers and geographic locations. The SaaS solution enhances security and control of public and hybrid cloud infrastructure deployments. FortyCloud integrates VPN, encryption, identity and networking technologies and is currently compatible with AWS, Google and many other public clouds.
The FortyCloud platform uses an overlay technology approach to enable cloud security and policy enforcement, creating a layer of end-to-end security with VPN, firewall, servers and networking. This enables organizations to define and enforce the access rights to their virtual private networks with authentication, authorization, and firewall technologies. FortyCloud benefits organizations by creating an encrypted, virtual private network to permit use of any kind of application over the network.
Managing Cloud Applications
With more and more data retained in third-party cloud storage applications such as Dropbox and then processed with Web-based software, information is no longer located within company walls. Organizations now use the SaaS model extensively. Securing SaaS applications requires new approaches that utilize data science and machine learning methods to prevent and detect breaches.
As employees routinely export data to Web-based storage and software applications, they may share it with other employees and customers, perhaps exposing the data publically on the Internet.
Elastica
To guard against unintentional sharing of sensitive information and against intentional leaks, Elastica provides real-time threat detection, risk assessment and post-incident forensic analysis. It identifies all the cloud services in use, determines which are safe and finds safe alternatives to the riskier apps.
Elastica offers full life cycle security for SaaS by evaluating inbound content risks, examining live cloud app HTTP traffic and pinpointing threatening users, accounts and risky user transactions. In addition, Elastica examines governance issues, evaluates compliance risks, and provides an audit security solution.
Managing Cloud-Based Databases
Certain businesses, such as consumer and social media sites collect large volumes of data (potentially petabytes and exabytes), usually from several geo-locations. Developing data insights through big data analysis requires agility, scalability, high availability and high performance computing. To meet this demand, cloud computing has been adopted by many companies, innovating a new approach to developing data insights as “data as a service.”
Redis
Redis Labs upgrades the Redis open-source NoSQL database to enable high performance, high scalability and high availability. For the unstructured data collected by consumer websites, NoSQL databases are the preferred choice. These sites have moved away from the traditional tabular database structure of rows and columns and have adopted what is often referred to as a ‘data structure server’.
Redis Labs products enable high-volume transactional and social media usage and real-time analytics, offering simplified and automated operations and database management. They also offer a fully managed service for hosting and running the redis dataset cloud service (Redis Cloud) and a downloadable enterprise software (Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster (RLEC).
Monitoring Cloud Resources
Businesses looking to improve their bottom line require effective real-time analytics to see how their software is performing. These metrics provide actionable insights about your software, customers, and business, allowing you to determine how your application’s performance impacts your customer segments and discover sources of poor online customer experience.
New Relic
New Relic is a real-time software monitoring and analytics platform that collects numerous data points from user click streams, mobile activity, end user experiences and transactions. New Relic is a SaaS only platform that monitors application performance across multiple public, private and hybrid clouds.
In addition, New Relic monitors the servers to track capacity, memory or CPU consumption, and provides alerts for server health issues. New Relic utilizes its SQL-flavored language, NRQL, and can monitor apps in any language, on any hosting configuration, including integrations with backend and third party services.
Last Words
We hope that you have found this survey helpful in planning your cloud deployment requirements. Do you agree? Looking forward to your comments!
This article was written by Esther Levine from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.