SOURCE:Â Internet.com
Every major technological shift brings with it a shakeup in the vendor hierarchy. As mainframes gave way to desktops, along came Microsoft. Google drove to the top by figuring out how to monetize search. Now, Facebook is busy clawing its way to the top, fighting for control of turf that Microsoft, Google and others thought they owned.
Obviously, behemoth companies have an advantage during market upheaval. They have deep pockets to reinvent themselves and stay competitive. Five years ago, who would have thought Google would be a major smartphone OS player?
But big companies also can be held back by bureaucracy, inertia and group thinking that favors the status quo. Each shift creates the daylight needed for newer companies to gain momentum. VMware, Rackspace and salesforce.com have already become major players, every bit as well positioned to be incumbents when the cloud matures as other more established companies.
However, the cloud has some obstacles to overcome before it’s anywhere close to being considered mature. According to Gartner’s 2010 CIO Survey, security technology was the number-one priority of respondents. In the context of the cloud, security is an even bigger concern.
Reports from hosting.com after IBM and the IT Governance Institute all highlight the primacy of cloud security fears.
Of course, where there is pain in the market there is opportunity. Here are 7 Cloud Security emerging vendors attempting to make the cloud every bit as secure – or more so – than on-premise computing.
This article is the first in a series. We will look at 7 more cloud security companies in our next entry, with storage, platforms, monitoring and management and more to follow. Here, then, are our first 7 Cloud Up-and-Comers:
1. CREDANT
What problem do they solve? Encryption is one of the first security steps experts recommend to mitigate the risks associated with cloud computing. With businesses being asked to trust the cloud provider to manage encryption keys, though, there are inherent vulnerabilities—especially when the keys are kept in the same cloud environment.
The fear of a breach – either through an attack on the cloud provider, or through a malicious insider – is one of the top barriers to full-scale cloud adoption. Having keys stored in the environment under attack isn’t wise.
