Good clouds. Safe clouds.

With so many column inches these days dedicated to analyzing the storm clouds engulfing the world’s economy, its nice to have a good excuse to have a more positive cloud story to tell. One of our portfolio companies – cohesiveFT – just announced their new VPN Cubed ‘packaged service’ for enhanced cloud security (from the Elastic Server Blog:)

VPN-Cubed is an encrypted virtual private network (VPN), enabling customer-controlled security inside a single cloud, across multiple clouds, and between clouds and private infrastructure.

One of the key elements we see driving the emergence of the disruptive business models in markets and financial services is of course the ever decreasing cost of computing, storage and communication. This inexorable and exponential trend is absolutely critical when considering many opportunities in financial services and markets as more often than not they involve very high volumes of data processing, computational intensity or both, usually in real time. Indeed one of the most significant historical barriers to entry in finance was the cost and complexity of the required ICT infrastructure. In our minds, clearly the trend towards computing as a utility will underpin a new paradigm in a number of different industries and will fundamentally change ‘what is possible’. We think companies like cohesiveFT will play an important part in facilitating this transition, especially with young innovative companies that aren’t trapped in any particular legacy infrastructure. That said, we also believe that ultimately this trend will affect everyone. Indeed as the cohesiveFT team points out, the current poor economic conditions could actually end up catalyzing such a move sooner rather than later:

We see the current economic downturn as actually increasing Cloud Computing interest. Rather than writing that $2M check for your data center hardware refresh, wouldn’t you rather manage your infrastructure as a service? Moving part of your infrastructure to the cloud turns capital expenditures (or fixed costs) into operational expenditures (or variable costs). According to IDC, a global provider of market intelligence, cloud computing is poised to capture 25% of IT growth spend by 2012. Yet, in a recent IDC survey, 74% of IT executives/CIOs cited security as the top challenge preventing their adoption of the cloud services model.

So for any of you out there – whether you are working in a big bank, a small hedge fund or a ‘sixth paradigm’ start-up, I encourage you to engage your management and your IT leaders in a discussion about your cloud computing strategy and perhaps to have a look at VPN Cubed and cohesive’s other products. I think you might like what you find.

Disclosure: My company is an investor in cohesiveFT and we are represented on the Board by Amy Nauiokas. Further, Craig Heimark, cohesiveFT’s CEO is an advisor to Nauiokas Park.

Tweet This Post

Permalink||Comments|Filed under 'Tools'