Afore Solutions Allies With Tech Data To Enhance Cloud Security

Afore's CloudLink Secure VSA solution provides AES-256 encryption to protect data that is either at rest or in motion in virtualized and multitenant environments. The offering is fully tenant-specific and can be independently controlled, monitored and administered. It is compatible with both RSA Data Protection Manager and Microsoft Active Directory. It has also been validated and certified to work in VMware, CA's AppLogic and Amazon EC2 and VPC Public Cloud environments.

"We have had early success with the channel, and we want to expand it to a broader base," said James LaPalme, vice president of sales and marketing at Afore Systems. "We think Tech Data has a good representation of VMware channels. This is an important area for the partners. Many of them don't know how to integrate encryption within virtualized or cloud environments. You can't do it in the same way that you would install encryption in an on-premise solution, or you defeat the whole virtualized paradigm shift. So, we will communicate this to the channel through Tech Data and build greater awareness among their 60,000 partners."

[Related: Tech Data Reports Profit Growth Despite Sales Decline ]

LaPalme added that his company's solution can also be used to support compliance standards, such as those from HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI.

The offering will be made available through Tech Data's TD Cloud Solutions Store, in order to simplify provisioning.

"The solutions store is a front-end of our StreamOne platform, which can be used to provision cloud products in almost real-time," said Bharath Natarajan, director of TD Cloud and software services at Tech Data. "We've been assembling cloud complementary solutions, such as migration tools, encryption tools and data synchronization tools. These are all new challenges that the channel is dealing with, so the Afore Technologies solution is an excellent fit."

Natarajan went on to say that Tech Data expects that the overall market will largely evolve into a hybrid environment in which data consistently moves between the cloud and on-premises infrastructure. This, he says, will drive further need of security and management functions. In addition, ease-of-provisioning becomes another important aspect of these capabilities.

"In the solutions store, we have direct API links with our vendors," he said. "So we can effectively provision in real time because we are not waiting for a transaction to be completed in the traditional way. The APIs feed into the provisioning system to generate a software link and a key that can then be used to provision the service. It all happens in a matter of minutes."

PUBLISHED MARCH 12, 2013