The joint offering with EMC, available through EMC and its channel, is designed to provide a secure Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service offering that is less expensive and less complex to deploy than existing DR solutions.
Jean Banko, Director of Product Marketing with EMC’s Data Protection and Availability Division
EMC has announced an expansion of its existing partnership with Ottawa-based CloudLink Technologies, in which the CloudLink SecureVSA data security offering will be integrated with EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines in a secure Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service solution.
CloudLink, which this year renamed the company after their flagship product, was previously AFORE Solutions. They began life as a custom engineering shop, and four years ago changed their focus to cloud security and data encryption management.
“Our SecureVSA flagship product was released three and a half years ago,” said Mike Burns, CloudLink’s Director of Marketing. “Eighteen months ago, we became an EMC Select Partner, and they resold us. It has been a very good go-to-market strategy for us.” Their existing partnering agreements with EMC and its affiliated companies include: SecureVSA being white-labelled as the data security foundation in EMC Encryption As a Service; CloudLink SecureVM for VMware vCloud Air, a solution for data security management on Windows and Linux-based virtual machines; and certification with the RSA Data Protection Manager.
The new offering with EMC is designed to provide a secure Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service offering for the midmarket, enterprise and service provider markets that is less expensive and less complex to deploy than existing DR solutions.
“We see DR-as-a-service as a driver of the public cloud, but we think this is a great solution both for internal private clouds and public clouds,” said Jean Banko, the Director of Product Marketing with EMC’s Data Protection and Availability Division. “We see it as especially promising for midmarket customers that don’t want to invest a lot. We have been seeing pent-up demand for the product since we announced it at VMworld, both within our regular RecoverPoint install base, and the broader EMC customer base.”
RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, which EMC unveiled two months ago, protects virtual machines with local and remote replication, allowing for any Point in Time recovery. Combining the solution with CloudLink ensures both that Data At Rest and the Data In Motion traversing the network to the remote location are fully encrypted and secure.
“We partnered with CloudLink because of the strong existing partnerships we have with them in other elements of our portfolio, and because they are already certified with key go-to-markets for us like VSPEX,” Banko said.
The solution is a virtual storage appliance, which is integrated with RSA Data Protection Manager and has flexible encryption key storage options including RSA DPM integration.
“We are agentless, which is not the case with some other offerings, and we have separated encryption from key storage and management, which gives customers a lot of flexibility,” said Tim Bramble, Director of Product Management at CloudLink. “On the cloud side, we are storage agnostic, like RecoverPoint. We are 100 per cent software, so are easy to deploy, and we require no changes to the applications being protected. Customers are in complete control of the solution because they own and manage the keys.”
Bramble said they believe the solution will be of particular interest to cloud service providers.
“It offers an opportunity for cloud service providers to provide secure DR as a service, and we are seeing a lot of interest there,” he said.
Banko suggested that RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines’ cloud capabilities may be extended by similar types of arrangements.
“We believe the hybrid cloud will become pervasive in the future, so it is logical that we would investigate whether we should also add cloud gateway and management capabilities, as well as security,” she said.
The combined CloudLink SecureVSA and EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines solution will be available in the fourth quarter of 2014 through EMC and EMC channel partners.
