Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bradley Kolb, CEO of nScaled (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The other trend that I have picked up over several conversations is on security. For a while, cloud security was becoming less and less of a concern, which actually increased the adoption of the cloud. We started doing this series called Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series back in 2008. We saw clear disappearance of cloud security from the conversations over that period of time. The numbers really spoke for themselves. Now, we’re seeing a projection of a trillion dollars in cloud IT solutions budget this year. This year, cloud security concerns have started coming back into the conversations again. In particular, the whole Snowden thing and the government snooping has activated that concern. What is your observation on that?

Mark Jameson: You’re absolutely correct. We definitely see the same thing. That’s why it started that way because public cloud began with development environments where that type of security was not as critical. Since we, traditionally, have provided recovery and data retention for production environments, that’s always been critical to us. It’s something that our clients are always asking about. As more compliance regulations come out, they continually ask for more and more. One of the beautiful things about this system is that it was designed from the ground-up as a multi-tenant solution. We have a very secure environment so that’s why we scored a five out of five in the Forrester study in the security space. It’s definitely something we talk to with almost everyone of our clients and prospects.

Sramana Mitra: What else is worth discussing in what you guys are working on?

Mark Jameson: Disaster recovery and backup are a very defined market. But when we look at it, we look at it a little bit differently. We look at events. One thing that we scored really well in the Forrester study is the testing capability within our system. We give our clients the ability to test their environments everyday with a handful of servers. Testing to us can be new patches rolled out or new releases. They want to test the patch before they put it in production. We basically give our clients a sandbox to test in. It does not have to be just for disaster recovery. They could fire up one of their servers in their databases and they could pull reports against it internally. It’s a different concept.

We see it as an event because it may not be disaster. Maybe they’re moving their data center and they leverage us as a tool. We have had clients do that with us too. There’s a variety of different things, which makes for some pretty unique and different cases.

Ilya Beyer: I wanted to add one more use case. Our solution is also used by quite a few of our prospects as a seamless path to computing and storage virtualization. More and more people want to virtualize the system from commodity hardware into the virtual environment. As a part of our solution, that technology is available as a one-button virtualization technology that people are using free of charge when they buy the nScaled solution for disaster recovery.

Sramana Mitra: You’re swimming in this space – disaster recovery – and also adjacent spaces. You’re interfacing with virtualization, storage and all kinds of adjacent spaces. I would like to move to a discussion of where you see blue sky opportunities. If you were starting a company today, what are you hearing from customers today as open problems that they would like to solve and they’re not able to solve. I’m not asking you to give me proprietary confidential information about your product roadmap. I’m asking more about natural extensions of your product but are pain points that customers are highlighting.

Ilya Beyer: I could throw some light on this. One area where I believe is a blue sky opportunity is the big data analytics. People have no idea what they’re sitting on. They have no idea where certain data resides. There’s redundancy of data. I think a solution that could help them analyze that data and store it potentially in a big data repository – whether it’s object storage or some other storage – and provide a very clear analysis and cut through the view of what the data is would be very useful. That would be an interesting solution for somebody to solve. There have been companies that are solving that here and there for certain verticals, but there’s a lot of green grass out there. It’s not a short grass, actually.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Bradley Kolb, CEO of nScaled
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