Scratches on Intel's image may signify gloss polishing for on-premises software solutions

Louder than fireworks on New Year's Eve were certainly the big bang breaking news about Intel’s meltdown and spectre bugs. Consequently, Amazon AWS customers faced noticeable slowdowns on their cloud servers. More importantly, Intel processors with the worldwide reputation of making computer chips faster became vulnerable for an extremely far-reaching hitherto. As if cloud computing, despite its role as the digitization tool par excellence, is not sufficiently confronted with security concerns on the part of customers and strict legislation, Intel’s disaster is beyond all expectations and poses a serious challenge to the progress of cloud computing in terms of security. For many years, processors have been trimmed to achieve outstanding speed. In doing so, required data was retrieved in advance to reduce delays to a minimum. Intel’s recent bug revealed that this method can be tricked out so that sensitive data can get into the hands of hackers.

"The processor bug allows user processes to read passwords, keys and other sensitive data out of the kernel's protected memory area." (theregister.co.uk)

For sure, not everyone is affected in the same manner. Especially customers that make a lot of system calls are expected to experience noticeable performance reduction. However, security concerns over cloud based solutions become the most discussed topic, above all because security experts cannot fully exclude that Intel’s security leak has already been exploited. In addition, as Blick.ch makes clear, the vulnerability was discovered in June already and reported to companies to give them enough time to develop antidotes. Nevertheless, while Intel’s image gets scratches, cloud providers themselves may have to respond to customers developing preferences for on-prem solutions. n'cloud.swiss, Netkom’s “Swiss made” alternative to the big 5 (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba), takes into consideration these preferences.

Make your own cloud with n’cloud.swiss, even on-prem

The idea behind n’cloud.swiss is to enable customers to design a cloud according to their specific requirements with the same product, either as a service model, an ON-PREMISE version in existing IT environments or even as a hybrid variant. With Intel’s vulnerability coming to light these days, the ON-PREMISE version of n’cloud.swiss is certainly a powerful solution for many customers seeking a safe, powerful and secure in-house cloud solution. By definition, on-premises software is installed and runs in-house. On top of that, the on-prem version of n’cloud.swiss is able to run on any standard server, storage or network equipment. The question after the location and security of the data is thereby not only answered – it’s fully in your hands!

What allows n’cloud.swiss to stand out additional from the competition, is API connectivity for easy and fast transfers of existing developments from/to other cloud platforms. n'cloud.swiss users can easily transfer their developments from VMware, Amazon AWS, and in early 2018 also from Google and Microsoft Azure to n'cloud.swiss or back again - quickly and easily. Interestingly, the ON-PREM VERSION can be used centrally or as a multicloud variant in a satellite network for large companies. n’cloud.swiss ON-PREM comes with an advantageous license model and personal support from Netkom. The customer decides whether the administration of the cloud platform is taken over by Netkom, through its own IT department or in a mix of both. Flexibility and simplicity in managing all workloads and resources, via a single development and production platform characterizes n’cloud.swiss further. The main focus hereby is, that a cloud platform is freed from all known limitations by hardware vendors. Get more insights on www.ncloud.swiss.