All the buzz today is how much money companies can save by moving their applications into the cloud. While the delivery mechanisms of clouds (public, private and hybrid) and functions (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) vary, most companies are in the process of developing business cases and considering ways that they can move critical components into the cloud.

One area often overlooked is the performance of those applications in the cloud environment. Because of the lack of transparency behind especially public clouds it's often difficult to test performance prior to making the leap into the environment. Many companies simply hope that the performance will be comparable or better than their traditional delivery method. Hope is unfortunately not a strategy.

Spirent Avalanche Virtual solves this problem by providing companies with a way to test the performance of their applications across all of the cloud delivery platforms. Using stateful application traffic through both a physical and virtual infrastructure, Avalanche Virtual can provide critical performance data pre- and post-production move into the cloud.

While monitoring SaaS applications is done with user emulation, PaaS and IaaS can be monitored by placing the Avalanche Virtual appliance within the cloud environment. Providing both client-only and client-server emulation, Avalanche Virtual can help make the decision to move to the cloud, as well as keep the cloud providers in-check, by continually monitoring performance in any possible cloud use case.

As a virtual appliance, Spirent Avalanche can also be deployed quickly in trouble spots to determine where persistent performance issues exist. While other monitoring offerings require costly physical appliances or traditional software packages, they also can't adopt to the current generation of cloud-delivery platforms. Instead of purchasing a number of different tools for different uses, Spirent can be adapted to fit the specific business needs within the cloud.

-- Michael Biddick

Category: Security

TippingPoint -- TippingPoint Virtual Controller (vController)

Judges: Tim Wilson, Dark Reading & Andrew Conry-Murray, InformationWeek

IT people agree--virtualization is one of the most important new developments to hit the data center in many years. Unfortunately, many enterprises have been hesitant to deploy virtualization and cloud technologies primarily because of one primary issue: security.

There have been a number of short-term "fixes" for the virtualization security problem, but the TippingPoint Virtual Controller (vController), in our opinion, is taking the first step toward a more concrete solution. It includes integrated management capabilities that are compatible with VMware, letting the security team see and monitor security in the virtualized environment at a granular level. Working as a next-generation IPS, it includes up-to-the-minute security research from TippingPoint's Digital Vaccine Labs (DVLabs) team and the Zero Day Initiative.

The TippingPoint vController gives organizations the ability to inspect virtual traffic with the traditional purpose-built Intrusion Prevent System appliance. For customers already using the IPS in their traditional networks, this maximizes their investment by being flexible enough to inspect both virtual and traditional network traffic. Further, since traffic is passed through the IPS, it's inspected and filtered with TippingPoint's Digital Vaccine service.

The vController is a key part of TippingPoint's Security Virtualization Framework, which is a broader strategy that will help enterprises enforce security policies in virtualized environments and group virtual machines into "trust zones" that will let them keep sensitive data isolated, even in virtual environments.

The vController itself will give security administrators visibility into virtual environments, enabling them to see how the virtual network is configured and what types of traffic are crossing it. This is the sort of information that today's network and security administrators need in order to locate sensitive data, and see where it's going and who's accessing it.

-- Tim Wilson