The cloud’s many benefits include not being on-premise. In theory that should make it an ideal place for enterprises to store data off site.
In practice, however, the cloud also sparks privacy and compliance concerns. EMC Corp., which last month released its RecoverPoint for Virual Machines solution for replicating VMs in the cloud, is trying to address that by integrating it with an Ottawa data protection service called CloudLink Technologies.
CloudLink’s Secure VSA is an agentless data-at-rest encryption solution for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V VMware, Amazon Web Services, and Azure virtual and cloud environments. The integration with RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines is another score in its partnership with EMC.
“It addresses regulatory and data privacy concerns that are preventing organizations from deploying (disaster recovery) in the public cloud,” Tim Bramble, CloudLink’s director of product management, said in an interview.
It also puts customers in control, he added because they manage the encryption keys and can select which VMs are protected.
CloudLink can be bought direct from the company or through EMC partners.
RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines is the latest in a long line of RecoverPoint products but this is the first all-software offering, said Jean Banko, EMC’s director of solutions marketing for virtualization and cloud solutions.
It provides local and remote replication for VMs, allowing recovery to any point in time, with built-in disaster recovery orchestration.
CloudLink’s Secure VSA presents encrypted storage back to the hypervisor in the form as a data store, so its available to RP.
Typically, an enterprise using both solutions would have RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines and CloudLink Center, which providers a Web based view for configuring security policies and key control, in the data centre. Secure VSA is in the cloud to provide a secure virtual data store for VMs placed there by RecoverPoint. CloudLink also creates a secure network tunnel between the appliance in the data entre and the virtual storage appliance in the cloud for encryption in transit.
”We think disaster recovery as a service is one of the first workloads that will go into the pubic cloud,” said EMC’s Banko. “However there are concerns around a data protection and privacy that come along with that. That’s why we built this joint solution with CloudLink, to secure any data at rest or in flight going into a public cloud”
Formerly known as Afore Solutions, CloudLink has partnerships with a number of companies. Earlier this month it announced SecureVM with Microsoft BitLocker encryption for Amazon AWS, allowing enterprises to secure virtual desktops and VMs with Windows encryption tools.
SecureVM is also available for VMware’s vCloud Air, Microsoft Azure.