Confidence is key when it comes to managing large IT systems. The tricky part is when a CIO tries to generate the trust and confidence of a company’s IT environment. Complete transparency is the answer. As you may recall, I’ve written about the need for transparency concerning Newvem’s services in the past. As the cloud industry market matures, the AWS cloud continues to grow at ground-breaking speeds, in addition to the usual individual cloud deployment. In either respect, transparency becomes an issue.

Cloud management vendors recognize the need for transparency and are taking the necessary steps to enhance their solutions to better support active visibility. The natural evolution of a typical management system begins with gathering data and presenting it in report tables. While traditional IT tools have had a similar evolution, the infinite cloud resources and dynamic manner of the environment take the lack of controllability issue to the extreme. This, makes visualization more crucial than in a traditional, finite data center.
This week, I met my good old `cloud friends` from Dome9 that released their new cloud security visualization solution, Dome9 Clarity –

“Think Street-view for AWS security. Transparency into on-premise security has been around for the last 15 years, we are simply extending this value to the cloud.” Zohar Alon, Co-Founder and CEO at Dome9.

The value of IT management features has more than proven itself over the last two decades. Issues concerning systems’ availability, security and performance are anything but new in the world of IT services. Despite the fact that the cloud doesn’t eliminate any of these concerns, it does force a change to the key methodologies and processes. As an ex-Check Point employee, Zohar Alon, Dome9’s Co-Founder and CEO, built and led the security giant’s security firewall management systems. With this experience, the natural next step was to apply his knowledge to the world of the cloud.
Dome9’s Cloud Clarity provides cloud network security visualization within the AWS cloud. It is the sensible solution for optimized cloud security management. Controlling an environment with hundreds or thousands of EC2 instances that are grouped into as many as hundreds of security groups, not to mention the rapid and dynamic growth of inter-dependencies is far from an easy DevOps’ task. With Dome9, AWS users get a visual picture of their AWS VPCs and security group configurations. According to Alon, their new capability reduces such security audit efforts significantly and has been proven to condense four hours of auditing work into a mere 15 minutes – quite impressive!
As cloud deployments become more and more complex, consequently, the overall stack complicates as well. DevOps models evolve to be able to regain control supported by distributed systems’ methodologies. With the help of Clarity’s real visibility feature, customers are enabled with a clear understanding of their security system, which in turn enables control and support of the modern application stack.