Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You talked about security as your opening trend. You’re a vendor that’s providing a very comprehensive stack. Are your security capabilities your own or do you work with other vendors that are providing the security capability?

Sash Sunkara: Both. There is a certain level of security that is integrated into our product. We encrypt in a variety of ways in transit as well as at rest. However, we’re not a security software provider. We do integrate with several partners in providing a higher-level of security. As I mentioned, we do financial services as well as government entities. They have higher securityrequirements. We have integrated with a couple of vendors with their solutions to provide that level of security compliance.

Sramana Mitra: In doing all this, where are you seeing the open problems?

Sash Sunkara: The problem is that certain applications and certain environments require certain level of availability and reliability. I think certain clouds meet it and certain clouds don’t. You’ve probably heard about the Amazon outage a few weeks ago. I do think that vendors and cloud providers have to provide safety levels that are probably a step or two higher than they are today. Data loss is scary for folks. I do think there’s probably more development there.

It’s funny. When enterprises are sitting on their own data centers, they may not have a DR plan. They may not have a backup plan. For some reason, they feel safer. As soon as I put it somewhere else, the level of safety to make them feel good is going to be ratcheted up. Our cloud providers aren’t providing it. A lot are not. I think there’s some movement that needs to happen there for clients to feel comfortable.

I also think cost is starting to come into the picture. One of the benefits that cloud has always talked about is that it’s going to be less expensive. Building a data center is definitely an upfront investment but you own it and you’re not being charged by the hour. If you go into Amazon, the clock is ticking. You have a whole organization using these resources. What controls do you have? Enterprises probably have the money to put better controls around it where smaller organizations can’t. Cost control is starting to become really important.

Sramana Mitra: If you were starting a company today, what kind of a company would you start?

Sash Sunkara: I don’t know if I’d start it in the cloud. It would probably be a SaaS company. I see a lot of need for video conferencing systems. We’ve used so many different ones with different enterprises and clients. I don’t feel like there’s a really good one that meets everybody’s needs. That’s just a random thought. That’s one of the areas I see a definite deficit in.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very crowded space.

Sash Sunkara: Right.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware
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