Unisys reckons it can win business from enterprise IT shops by bringing to market cloud services designed from the ground up for security and privacy.
The company’s UK chief told us its introduction of highly secure cloud services will help overcome a perception among CIOs that it will be difficult for them to guarantee security and integrity of data once enterprise applications are moved from on-premise data centres out into the cloud.
“For 70% of CIOs that is the number one issue, when it comes to cloud computing,” Duncan Tait the MD of Unisys UKMEA said.
Before announcing its new Unisys Secure Cloud Solution and Cloud Transformation Services, Unisys said it had reviewed current network security protocols and the processes that are needed to secure data at rest and while in motion.
It found that data is not always secured while in motion, and that sometimes separate local network infrastructures had to be maintained to physically separate data associated with different security levels.
The Unisys Stealth Solution is what it has come up with to circumvent the problem, using cryptographic-splitting technology called SecureParser created by Security First Corp.
SecureParser splits data using secret-sharing algorithms and transmits split shares of IP packets over different network paths.The net result is that a snooper in the network will not see a coherent stream of packets between endpoints, but rather a disjointed set of encrypted partial packets.
The technology was initially developed for US Homeland Government security and has already been deployed for US-based government and public sector customers, Tait explained.
Using it, organisations can create a private cloud within their data centres, a public cloud through secure Unisys-managed cloud solutions, or a hybrid cloud solution combining private and Unisys-managed cloud services.
“Data can be securely and safely transferred across public and private networks, embedded in the cloud,” he said. Organisations can now share sensitive data in one managed, shared cloud service without needing to rewrite or alter applications.
The company this week introduced two new offerings, Secure Cloud Solution, providing data security for multi-tenant environments in which clients share a common IT infrastructure, and Cloud Transformation services, reportedly a portfolio of advisory and implementation services to help clients assess cloud computing options and determine which option fits their needs or financial objectives.
The Secure Cloud Solution should go live at the end of the month. The company’s Cloud Transformation Services comprises advisory, assessment and migration services, to deploy applications to either a managed secure cloud or a client-managed internal cloud, or both.
