FortyCloud Upsizes Clientele Through Collaboration W/ Rackspace
FortyCloud, an Israeli cloud security startup with offices in US, has joined forces with Rackspace. The firm will provide a comprehensive security solution to all Rackspace customers through Rackspace Marketplace. This network security-as-a-service works independently, although it is interoperable with Rackspace cloud services.
The 2014 Cloud Security Survey conducted by Liebsoft and 2014 State of the Cloud Survey conducted by RightScale indicate that cloud security concern among enterprise cloud users (both beginners and veterans) has decreased significantly over the last year, however, it is still a major challenge for most enterprises. Cloud vendors are remedying this problem by integrating different security solutions or by developing a Virtual Private Network (VPN). FortyCloud’s security solution, therefore, is a breath of fresh air in this industry in that it is an all-inclusive package.
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace, was delighted with this partnership saying, “We are pleased to welcome FortyCloud to our growing Rackspace Marketplace. As a fast-growing cloud security service provider, FortyCloud offers our managed cloud customers a security perimeter solution that helps to minimize the need for additional integration, management and maintenance.”
Amit Cohen, Co-founder and CEO, FortyCloud, was equally elated. He added, “Our Company’s mission is to promote the migration of enterprises to the public cloud. We are excited to collaborate with Rackspace, one of the industry’s leading IaaS providers, to enable customers to gain significant operational efficiencies through an automated, end-to-end configuration and the ability to control and monitor their cloud network in real-time.”
Rackspace launched Cloud Networks, a VPN, on their cloud to mitigate security issues for all its users. This system uses layers of access points to public cloud servers. Using Cloud Networks, users can create a virtual private network for their data and applications by creating a private IP subnet, which is accessible through a second virtual Ethernet interface in the cloud instance. Unless the customer changes a cloud instance, every virtual network created in this instance will be allocated a new Ethernet interface.
FortyCloud uses VPN and related technology to improve the isolation of the Cloud Network instances, eliminate the need to associate a public IP on each instance, connect multiple virtual private networks (from the same or different data-centers) and even enable user based access control to the Cloud Networks. This makes it easier for users to
Features:
Data-in-motion Encryption: FortyCloud offers end-to-end encryption. It encrypts all data in-motion using IPsec and VPN technologies; whether the data is in transit from the user to the cloud or it is in transit across cloud servers and between data centers even if they are not in the same geographical region.
Scalable Security: The cloud offers companies a solution that is easy to modify based on their needs. Similarly, FortyCloud has the same agility and flexibility capabilities allowing companies to scale up or down depending on business requirements brought about by growth and expansion.
VPN Connectivity and Routing: FortyCloud can be used for both public and hybrid cloud. For cloud users, it adds a VPN access to cloud deployments. For hybrid cloud users, it creates a private network in the cloud, and then using VPN tunnels, it interconnects Cloud Networks and enterprise sites.
Access Control: FortyCloud allows users to control access to cloud servers centrally by allocating identities, thus every person has to be authenticated before he or she is allowed access to the cloud server. Besides, system administrators can enforce level of authorization for all cloud users to limit access to cloud servers based on their duties through Access Rights policies found on FortyCloud Admin console.
Monitoring and Auditing: FortyCloud automatically registers all system events and employees’ activity in the cloud and the administrators’ audit trails. The collated information is then stored and can be retrieved and analyzed as required. The historical logs can be used for compliance and forensic purposes.
Network Firewall: FortCloud allows users to change firewall rules to be enforced in the whole cloud to control interaction between users-cloud, intra-cloud, and inter-cloud.
Ease of Use: It is does not require technological expertise to set up. It allows every nonprofessional to create a well-protected distributed network for public clouds and hybrid clouds at a low cost.
Cloud security is the next battlefield for cloud vendors. As more and more cloud vendors seek for solutions to ease cloud security concerns among CIOs, and thereby increase cloud adoption, there will be an increasing number of partnerships (or acquisitions of) with cloud security firms. IBM is already in the race having acquired CrossIdeas, a privately held provider of security software that governs user access to applications and data across on-premise and cloud environments on July 31, 2014. According to TechCrunch, FortyCloud partnerships have just began. It intends to form a consortium with other cloud providers.
