Cloud Communications

Cloud Communications Feature

November 10, 2011

Dome9 Making a Big Splash in the Cloud Security Market

By Carrie Schmelkin, TMCnet Web Editor

In only a year, Dome9 has helped quell one of the biggest concerns surrounding cloud adoption –security.

Founded in 2010, Dome9 is a cloud security firewall management company capable of centrally managing cloud security for servers.

“The fortunate thing is there is not that much security for the cloud right now; cloud itself as a larger market is very competitive, but cloud security… not so much,” David Meizlik, vice president of business development and marketing for Dome9, told TMCnet on Thursday at Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, Calif. “Being one of the early entrances in cloud security, we have some interesting capabilities that we provide for consolidation of management and automation. We make it very simple for folks to be able to secure their clouds.”

According to company officials, Dome9 is a revolutionary cloud security service that lets you: keep all administrative ports closed on your servers without losing access and control; dynamically open any port On-Demand, any time, for anyone, and from anywhere; send time and location-based secure access invitations to third parties; close ports automatically, so you don’t have to manually reconfigure your firewall; and securely access your cloud servers without fear of getting locked out.

Dome9 touts itself on its ability to make cloud security elastic with automated cloud firewall management. Available for the enterprise and hosting providers, Dome9 centralizes firewall management across Clouds, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), dedicated servers, and Amazon’s EC2 Security Groups, covering all major operating systems and service providers.

Accordingly, Dome9 has been able to attract customers all across the space from Web hosting companies to mid market cloud adopters to companies that are building applications in the cloud. Its ability to attract customers has been noticed and, consequently, many companies have come forward to forge partnerships with Dome9.

This week at Cloud Expo, taking place Nov. 7-10, Dome 9 has been spreading the word about its newest partnership with Rackspace (News - Alert).  Dome9 has entered into the Cloud Tools Program with Rackspace, and as a member of the Rackspace Cloud Tools Program, Dome9 is expanding the potential delivery of its automated cloud firewall management service to Rackspace cloud customers to help them protect their Windows and Linux cloud servers from attack and unauthorized access.

“The RackSpace partnership is a terrific win for us,” Meizlik said. “We are one of many a dozen security services that they have as part of their cloud tools program.”

Also at Cloud Expo, Dome 9 is relishing in the fact that it is one of three cloud security companies present which confirms the fact that the company is at the forefront of the cloud security race.

Spreading the word about cloud security is of the utmost importance, according to Meizlik, particularly since many companies are unaware of how vulnerable the cloud environment can be. In fact, recently Dome9 and the Ponemon Institute (News - Alert), a privacy and information management research firm, teamed to complete a first-of-its-kind cloud security study.

Among the key findings were the fact that 67 percent of IT security respondents report that their organization is very vulnerable or vulnerable because cloud ports and firewalls are not adequately secured; 54 percent of respondents said their organizations’ IT personnel are not knowledgeable or have no knowledge about the potential risk of open firewall ports in their cloud environments; and 42 percent of respondents fear they would not know if their organizations’ applications or data was compromised by a security exploit or data breach involving an open port on a cloud server.

“We talk to people if you are going to re-architect your infrastructure, you need to look at how you re-architect your security,” Meizlik said.

“It’s a tool to raise awareness for the problem, and hopefully they will look at us to help with that,” he added of the survey.

Another concept that Dome9 hopes to bring attention to is the fact that cloud security should be both elastic and portable.

“One thing we recognize about the cloud is its elasticity and its portability, and you want to make sure that whatever security that you apply is both,” Meizlik said. “You may have a server in a data center that can move to a private cloud and then to a public cloud and from one provider to another, and you want to make sure the policy goes with it. Otherwise your security might be exposed; that’s a key requirement.”

So what’s next for Dome9? A greater attention to forming new partnerships, according to Meizlik.

“We announced Rackspace this week but there are a lot of great providers out there, and they realize that the number one inhibitor to cloud adoption is security,” Meizlik said. “They are dealing with how do they remove that obstacle and differentiate their service. You will see a lot more service provider and reseller partnerships with us.”


Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication's social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin
Free Cloud Communications Live Demo