|
By Laton McCartney
Since one of Unisys' strong suits has traditionally been security, it doesn't come as a surprise that the Blue Bell, Pa.-based IT service provider is building its cloud computing strategy around what it calls a stealth security solution. This patent-pending data protection technology was initially designed for government applications and is now available to commercial clients.
The "stealth" approach sets Unisys apart from the rest of the pack, argue some analysts. "Unisys was unique among the 12 large service providers we interviewed recently in its emphasis on security," said Juergen Urbanski, managing director of research firm TechAlpha. "We think that will go some ways toward establishing comfort around moving more business-critical workloads such as Oracle or SAP to the cloud."
That comfort zone -- or lack thereof -- remains a major obstacle for many CIOs weighing a move to the cloud for important applications. In a poll of more than 300 enterprise users announced this week, Unisys found that more than half cited security and data privacy concerns as the greatest barrier to adoption.
"These poll results confirm what we continue to hear from our clients as well as industry analysts," said Sam Gross, VP of Unisys' global IT outsourcing solutions, in a statement. "Until they are convinced that there is 'industrial-strength' security in the cloud, CIOs will remain reluctant to move more than development and test systems into that environment. This is why we have made comprehensive security and data protection integral parts of the Unisys cloud computing strategy and solutions."
"CIOs are looking for extra-strength security," Brian C. Daly, director of media relations at Unisys, told CIOZone. "That's critical."
TechAlpha's Urbanski agrees. "Security is definitely the number-one concern we came across," he noted. "In the cloud, it's difficult to physically locate where data is stored. Security processes, once visible, are hidden behind layers of abstraction. The most significant difference stems from the sharing of infrastructure on a massive scale."
Users spanning different corporations and trust levels often interact with the same set of computing resources, he added. "Layer on top of that the dynamic and transient aspects -- the desire to continually load balance and optimize for performance, energy, availability and other service level objectives that customers pay attention to -- and the problem becomes further complicated, creating more opportunities for misconfiguration and malicious conduct."
The Unisys stealth technology cloaks data through multiple levels of authentication and encryption, bit-splitting data into multiple packets so it moves invisibly across networks and protects data in the Unisys secure cloud. "Their bit-splitting approach seems promising and makes sense to us based on the technical conversations we have had with Unisys," said Urbanski.
Originally designed for government applications, the patent-pending data protection technology is currently being tested and evaluated by the U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) to ensure that data is secure and readily available to authorized users.
Under the one-year task order, awarded through the Defense Information Systems Agency's Encore II contract, Unisys will provide technical support at the USJFCOM site in Norfolk, Va., and at its subordinate Joint Transformation Command for Intelligence site in Suffolk, Va.
The commands will test the ability of cryptographic bit-splitting technology to help converge various Department of Defense Global Information Grid networks operating at different security levels into a single infrastructure where virtualized communities of interest can coexist, while still maintaining complete isolation.
Unisys' secure solution became available in the third quarter. Its external cloud offering affords secure infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service and what it calls "My Secure Application as a Service." Unisys will provide a hybrid external/internal design to provide maximum agility, elasticity and security beginning early next year.
Will these stealth-based cloud offerings meet the industrial-strength security benchmark? It's too early to tell. "We have not tested their technology in the lab so I can't comment on whether it's ultimately good enough," said Urbanski.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
