Cloud computing

Launched on the US market mid-November, the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet has yet to cross the Atlantic. With its 7” display, a mere 8GB storage capacity, and WiFi but no 3G connectivity, it’s unlikely to be seen as an adequate alternative for a BYOD iPad in the corporate environment.

What’s got us interested in a device that clearly targets the consumer market (why else launch it just in time for Christmas?) is Silk, the native web browser. To quote from Amazon’s web site:

“Amazon Silk is a revolutionary, cloud-accelerated browser that uses a “split browser” architecture to leverage the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud. Supports Adobe® Flash® Player.”

That last sentence is clearly targeted at the iPad; if you’ve been following us you know how to solve that problem. So what about this “revolutionary, cloud-accelerated browser”, then?

On closer inspection, it turns out that Amazon has adopted very much the same approach to browser architecture that we’ve been offering for nearly three years. Silk, like CommonIT’s AirShip product, selectively executes browser components in the cloud, streaming the result to the device. When we originally developed this approach for the Virtual Browser product, the objective was to deliver a highly secure web browser by isolating browser execution from the end point device. We quickly saw that this also offered the opportunity to boost browser performance compared with a natively executed browser, especially on older or less powerful devices such as battery-powered mobiles and tablets.

Amazon has taken the same approach for performance reasons. Amazon, of course, has a cloud ready to use for this. So the cloud-based browser, an approach originally developed by CommonIT, is now going mainstream. It’s nice to have company! But if what you need is a browser for enterprise deployment, offering centralized management, multi-platform support (user and server side), directory integration, multiple concurrent browser configurations… there’s still only one solution.

gPartner positions itself as a new generation of consultant, distributor and integrator for the SaaS market. Based in Paris and Lyon (France), gPartner is one of Google’s leading partners in the French market for the Google Enterprise family of products and services, with the expertise to integrate Google technologies in the core of the enterprise IT environment.

Seeking new ways to accelerate customer migration to online services, gPartner has turned to commonIT. With our Virtual Browser solution, the enterprise retains full control over end-user access to Cloud services through full management of the browser. Whether the need is for access and content filtering for security reasons, support for diverse end-point platforms and application environments, or to deliver transparent connectivity for end-users, Virtual Browser delivers performance and affordability.

The partnership with gPartner reinforces our positioning in the Cloud Services Brokerage market segment, where Virtual Browser facilitates and accelerates enterprise migration to Cloud Computing.

In Gartner’s “Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing 2010″*, analysts David Cearley, Benoit Lheureux and Daryl Plummer present the “Cloud Brokerage”. This market is focused on technologies and services that improve security while reducing cost and complexity in cloud services access and management. This market presents a high potential and proliferates as cloud services consumers seek to simplify and improve their consumption of cloud services across multiple cloud services providers. In its “Hype Cycle” Gartner identifies commonIT as one of the seven sample vendors.

*Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2010, David Mitchell Smith, July 27, 2010.

The browser is an integral element in the corporate Cloud strategy. The broad take-up of web technology with standardized languages and protocols has resulted in the browser taking on the role of a universal client for end-user access to web-based and cloud-based resources. Browsers are free, and everyone knows how to use one. Pretty compelling arguments when budgets are tight!

But is using an industry standard browser really a zero-cost proposition for the enterprise? Let’s take a look at some of the issues.

Consumer-driven technology. The browsers we’re all familiar all obey one fundamental design principal: they must be as easy to use as possible for the greatest number of users. They must not hinder the user’s interaction with the web and the sites they want to visit – no matter what content those sites are hosting. In response to the Web 2.0 drive to increased user interactivity with rich internet applications, the browser transparently downloads and executes “helper” applications (Ajax, Flash, Java, ActiveX for example). In other words, the configuration of the browser is unstable and unmanageable. Is this really what you want from a key element of the corporate information infrastructure, the user interface to business critical applications?

Insecure design. Security professionals are increasingly aware that browsers are inherently insecure. The problems are threefold: (i) the browser, like any complex software environment, will always be exposed to bugs and vulnerabilities; (ii) the browser, connected to the internet, is inherently more exposed to external threats than software operating primarily locally on the machine, with local data; (iii) the browser’s self-modifying architecture (via plugins, for example – see above) multiplies the two preceding security risks.

No protection for confidential data. The end user connecting to enterprise Cloud services from home or from a cybercafé using the locally-installed browser is a threat to the enterprise. Business-critical processes and data may be exposed, via the browser, to a PC over which the enterprise has no control. Even if the user is sufficiently security-aware (and technically competent) to clear the browser cache and history at the end of each session – and how many of your users are? – sensitive data may still be stored locally (Flash cookies, to give just one example, without going into spyware and other threats).

If corporate IT management is to take full control of the cloud computing environment, we need to rethink the client-side connection. A new browser architecture is needed, secure by design, protecting corporate IT resources against web-based threats.

For more about the security issues of the browser and the Cloud, take a look at our White Papers.

The latest release of Virtual Browser introduces several new features (like every new release — with thanks to Mathieu’s team!). One of these new features in particular adds a whole new dimension to the Virtual Browser solution. Virtual Browser now supports delivery of ICA and RDP remote desktop clients, alongside our already familiar browser support (IE, Firefox, Java, Flash, etc). With this release the end-user now has access not just to web-based applications but to any application which can be virtualised, as well as full-featured virtual desktops.

It’s worth taking a few minutes to understand where we’re going with this. Release 1.3 offers a single, secure, platform-independent client delivering installation-free end-user access to any web-based or virtualised application without the need to worry about (i) the configuration of the end-point device; (ii) the compatibility of end-point browser configuration and the target application/server; or (iii) the appropriate network configuration (VPN, etc) to access the remote application. The objective is to position the Virtual Browser solution as the universal client for access to cloud-based services.

The “Cloud” and “Cloud Computing” are still relatively new terms and there are varying definitions of what they comprise. For us, they cover the full set of web-enabled or virtualised applications, hosted in the enterprise (the private cloud) or by third-party service providers (SaaS). What we’re seeing today is enterprises migrating step-by-step to cloud computing models, with the infrastructure becoming decentralised — some of it moving to virtual environments (Citrix and others), some of it onto the Intranet, and some moving to the Internet, taking advantage of Cloud offerings vendors like Google, Salesforce.com and other SaaS providers.

In positioning Virtual Browser as the universal client for cloud access, we’re facilitating enterprise migration to cloud computing by resolving three key management issues:

1. Security: encrypted traffic between the VB client and server, strong authentication, and support for multiple isolated user environments: Internet, Enterprise (internal) applications, on-line (cloud, SaaS) services, on both enterprise (managed) end-points and non-managed end-point devices.
2. Single point of management and maintenance — configuration, updates, patching — of the client environment, on a centralised server environment, clustered for redundancy and scalability.
3. Platform independence and compatibility: No matter what type of device the end-user is using or where they connect from, the application sees the same browser, eliminating compatibility issues and facilitating application development and support.

In Sizing the Cloud; Understanding the Opportunities in Cloud Services (published in March 2009) analysts at Gartner, Inc. predict a global market for enterprise cloud services reaching $150.1 billion in 2013 – more than three times the size of today’s market of $46.4 billion. The cloud-based enterprise will be dependent on the internet to an extent way beyond the situation today, and information systems and applications will be utility services, like water or electricity — a click of the mouse to bring up the CRM software and shut it down, with the user paying for a metered service.

As far as I’m concerned this is a fantastic development which will allow businesses to focus on — well, what they do best, where they can add value. Information resources will be available on demand, like tapwater. Except that a packet of data is not like a drop of water; those data packets may be carrying business-critical data. The internet is a two-sided coin for the enterprise: one the one hand, on-demand access to flexible, massively scalable information resources ranging from basic hardware platforms to individualized services and applications software; on the other hand, the vector for increasingly intense efforts to penetrate enterprise information systems for criminal gain. In other words, the enterprise is in the process of migrating it’s information resources to the most stressful environment you can think of if you’ve ever had to think about information security.

If the Cloud Computing paradigm is to fulfill its promises, we urgently need to find ways of reducing the stress of internet dependency. We need to protect ourselves from the internet that threatens us, to get the full benefits of the internet that will make our business more agile, more responsive, which will allow us to evolve and progress. If we can’t make the internet “stress free” we’ll start seeing the (costly) development of parallel secure networks for enterprise applications.

If the best way to avoid internet attacks is not to connect to the internet, that’s clearly an unrealistic approach today. What we can do, however, is to segment different usages, isolating access to sensitive, business-critical data and applications from the potential threats. While building an entirely new network is probably a stretch too far, a more realistic solution, perfectly feasible today, is to isolate individual web applications by virtualizing access at the source, the browser itself. Enterprise end-users access sensitive business applications and data over the internet using secure tunnels carrying virtualized browser sessions. With the virtual browsers hosted in close proximity to the applications, data need never be exposed on the internet with this architecture. We can’t clean up the internet to make it entirely safe for your business critical data and applications, but by ensuring that critical systems and end-user browser sessions are protected from attack we can bring a “stress-free” internet experience several steps closer for the CIO.