Technology

Secure Cloud Platform – Constellation

Cloud Computing

Shift provides a secure cloud platform and service to seamlessly allow its customers to transition their existing infrastructure and data center assets to a secure geographically distributed and virtualized environment. The company’s underlying technology is built on years of industry experience and patent pending innovations, which protect the virtualized environments, ensuring customer data storage and information processing integrity.

There is much confusion in the industry as to what Cloud computing is and is not. Some have simply renamed Software as a Service (SaaS) as “Cloud”. Others define cloud computing as either Hardware as a Service (HaaS), where customers can rent virtual machines to run your software, or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where IT administrators can define a cluster of virtualized machines to work in concert. None of these really tell the whole picture. To Shift, enterprise cloud computing is not limited any one of these subsets, but a blend of all three, plus scalable storage, security and compliance. The Shift cloud solution offers its customers the ability to design and deploy most if not their entire data center infrastructure virtually across our cloud platform.

Storage

With the advent of cloud computing corporations are now finding their data stored in a number of locations throughout the world. With this comes a myriad of differing data retention and protection laws that are often wildly different and sometimes contradictory. The current reasoning is that the storage location of the data itself — i.e. the location of the hard drives on which the data is stored — becomes the legal anchor to which the data is bound. This is because the data at that location is readable and can be extracted, whether through technological or legal means, whole. Shift’s storage method, however, is very different from traditional storage methods. Because the data is stored in pieces across a large number of locations, locally and globally, there is no one single place that can act as an anchor tying the information held to a particular jurisdiction. Additionally, because any individual storage location, or anything less than a majority of the information, is unreadable and yields nothing about the contained data, even subpoenaing an individual storage site will have no effect on the overall data security. Instead, the only location where the data becomes whole again is within the corporations Virtual Data Center. This brings the legal anchor back within the corporation and within the laws in which the corporation already, and has traditionally, operated.

Monitoring & Management

Shift technology enables enterprise customers to monitor, assess and manage cyber security threats from the individual server level through a global scale. The Shift platform provides a suite of tools that layer on top of our cloud platform that can manage virtual machine configurations, and proactively distribute, defend and alert on attacks and failures. Cloud management services provide comprehensive tools to inventory, assess, test, and monitor critical infrastructure assets to assure compliance to federal regulations.

Network Infrastructure Mapping

Shift provides a network infrastructure mapping service, giving the customer a real-time view of their network and its health and relationship to the wider Internet. The mapping tools provide link-level details on throughput, latency, jitter, historical performance, network topology, baseline health, possible configuration issues and a many other diagnostic tools.

A suite of tools layered over the map provides the customer with the knowledge and capability to effectively and efficiently manage their network and global infrastructure presence. Shift also uses the same mapping and management technology internally for automatic management and risk mitigation in its internal secure cloud platform.

Cloud Security Service – Aurora

Cloud security is a core requirement of CIOs seeking to deploy cloud computing platforms across enterprise infrastructure. Shift provides new software and services to enable cloud based:

• Unified threat management;
• Globally manageable perimeter security;
• Authentication, authorization and accounting systems;
• Federated identity architectures;
• Trusted computing, storage and communication cloud environments;
• Global network defense service to completely defeat DDoS and malicious intrusion;
• Global traffic management for efficient provisioning and business continuity support;
• Granular, ACL-backed storage encryption for data-at-rest;
• Real-time visibility service for upstream providers and network partners.

Interoperability

Most enterprise IT architectures are built around a diverse ecosystem of virtualization environments, operating systems, and application requirements. Recognizing this, we have built a a unified API and software architecture that integrates with major virtualization vendor products like VMWare, Xen, and KVM.