Cloud News: RSA, HP & VMware, Juniper

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing sector:

RSA establishes cloud trust authority. RSA, the security division of EMC, used its annual conference to unveil the RSA Cloud Trust Authority, a set of cloud-based services designed to facilitate secure and compliant relationships among organizations and cloud service providers. In support of this effort EMC announced the new EMC Cloud Advisory Service with Cloud Optimizer from EMC Consulting, which helps customers create a balanced cloud strategy extending from legacy architectures through cloud service providers at the lowest cost while achieving trust objectives. "Forcing enterprises to develop trusted relationships individually with each cloud service provider they wish to use is cumbersome and will not scale," said Art Coviello, Executive Chairman at RSA. "New thinking in security and compliance is required to provide a future in which organizations can consume services from a wide variety of cloud service providers on-demand and for all their application needs,"  Initial offerings for the Cloud Trust Authority include an Identity Service and Compliance Profiling Service. A beta of the RSA Cloud Trust Authority will be available in the second half of 2011.

HP and VMware develop cloud security.  HP and VMware announced their intent to collaborate on developing and marketing next-generation Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) solutions designed and optimized for VMware vSphere-based virtual and cloud environments.The goal of the collaboration is to extend HP's TippingPoint IPS solution for vSphere deployments, taking current integrations to new levels. “Our customers demand a security solution that is tailored for the new requirements of virtual and cloud environments,” said Allwyn Sequeira, chief technology officer and vice president, Security and Networking Solutions, VMware. The newly converged solution is available immediately as the security layer for HP and VMware's reference architectures that were developed for Converged Infrastructure, client virtualization and cloud computing.

Juniper launches virtualized security solution. Juniper Networks (JNPR) announced the integration of its new Juniper Networks vGW Virtual Gateway with the SRX Series Services Gateways to provide a consistent, virtualization-aware solution for private and public cloud deployments. This integration is made possible by the December 2010 acquisition of Altor and will enhance visibility into virtualized environments by having the vGW automatically populate VM membership into Juniper SRX Zones. "Enterprises building private clouds and public cloud service providers need a security solution that is consistent and pervasive across the physical and the virtualized network infrastructure," said Douglas Murray, senior vice president and general manager, security business unit, at Juniper Networks. "The integrated SRX plus vGW solution ensures that security is maintained and enforced right down to each individual VM, while enhancing the operational efficiency of security management." The Juniper vGW Virtual Gateway is available immediately.