Piston Cloud Computing Takes on Private Cloud Security

Piston Cloud Computing recently earned $4.5 million dollars of funding for supplying software in the crowded space of private cloud computing. Earlier this year and for several months Piston participated in the Nebula NASA project, and for awhile it has been the favored beta software for testing by early users. Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston announced that they will announce a new set of products in the near future, but in the meantime it will remain as a small group of developers who are all working on their cloud platform.

It is a fact that users have varying user experience from even the top tablet PC’s. To make this on field level, take a close look at the strengths and weaknesses of Android/Honeycomb, Apple iOS and RIM’S QNX OS. McKenty, one of the founders of the OpenStack was the brains behind Nebula. OpenStack has contributed to Rackspace as well as NASA on a service-for-a-fee cloud infrastructure and hopes to become the standard for the cloud-based environment as preferred by users and suppliers.

On the NASA project, McKenty said “Most of what we did at NASA around security couldn’t be released,” this is understandable since any leakage on their security domain will compromise the entire system, so the government gave specific instructions that they do not want any information to be on the public domain.

All IT platforms in general should operate as a business working within another business. This is when resources for business are provided by the company to get a good return of their revenue investment. McKenty said “Some aspects of security are being addressed (in OpenStack) and others are not. Security is a logical place to build a start-up, open source business.”

Piston products will be offered similar to the components of OpenStack that is built on Phyton. It will hopefully arrive at a balance between being a major contributor to OpenStack, while it reserves some important codes for Piston as a value added feature of the product.

According to McKenty, OpenStack’s Project Policy Board is the governing body for Piston. He said at the last poll survey, Piston landed at number three among the contributors for OpenStack codes and he said he will be glad for them to land at number one.

On adding security to big data that have already been setup, McKenty stated although the cloud is the perfect place for huge data. It will be so complex to add security once the cloud platform has been in place already. To add to this, security that is placed after a huge data may not be as efficient if they were done simultaneously. “You have to take the right architectural approach to keep them both performing well,” McKenty said.

Another cloud player based on OpenStack is Cloud.com that combines its extensions based on Java to create CloudStack. Cloud.com was recently acquired by Citrix. Amazon’s former VP of engineering Chris Pinkham has a new project that is to create a generic edition of Amazon Services, to avoid being tied up with Amazon’s API virtual machine. To date, Piston partnered with Hummer Winblad, Divergent Ventures, and True Ventures (see quick announcement here) for their funding.

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