Securing clouds, and more, by policy

The key advantage of using policy-based management of networks, particularly when they are used to run cloud services, is that this removes complexity and stresses usability, enabling users to enhance their security, while also saving time. This is certainly the view of CloudSigma, a public cloud IaaS provider with advanced hybrid hosting solutions, which has just introduced advanced network policy management across all its cloud locations.

With this new feature, the company claims that customers can create, manage and apply enterprise-grade networking policies in relation to their cloud infrastructure in a fully integrated way.

The new network policies enable customers to configure and constrain both inbound and outbound traffic while defining these policies in a simple fashion within the Web interface or directly over the API.

The policies range from a single rule that blocks all external public IP traffic, to complex schemes that only allow connections to certain ports from a set of IPs. Network policies are saved and then applied to one or more virtual servers as required. Furthermore, network policies can be reconfigured and reapplied to running servers without service disruption.

CloudSigma has developed the system to hit an important user need: that convenience drives usage and real security requires convenient, easy-to-use security features. It claims that this is what its new networking policies can now deliver. Users are able to control everything via the API which is expected to be a significant benefit. On top of that, the company can provide solutions to help customers manage the complexity of the network policies for big deployments and to avoid misconfigurations. It also means that users no longer need to configure dedicated firewalls, which will save them money.

Using CloudSigma, customers can provision processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources as they please, as well as extend private networks out of existing infrastructure and elastically into CloudSigma’s IaaS cloud to create easy to manage and transparent hybrid cloud solutions.

 “We’ve received many requests from our customers about offering this enterprise-grade firewalling. We listened and delivered. We didn’t want to deliver a half-baked product. By allowing customers to create policies independent of servers, multiple requirements can easily be maintained, adjusted and reapplied over time.”

“We take security very seriously, and so do our customers,” said Robert Jenkins, CEO of CloudSigma. “We’ve received many requests from our customers about offering this enterprise-grade firewalling. We listened and delivered. We didn’t want to deliver a half-baked product. By allowing customers to create policies independent of servers, multiple requirements can easily be maintained, adjusted and reapplied over time.”