Secured2’s Multi-Mesh vs. Composability, Converged, Hyper-converged and Cloud.

Today’s Information Technology (IT) is dramatically changing and frankly it's very confusing. IT administrators must digest, disseminate, and anticipate the current state of IT and the next phases. IT staff are required to provide 100% service uptime, maintain minimized risk of breach, implement security, and provide all these services within budgetary constraints. IT has been an impossible job, but things are getting better as new innovations are entering the market like Secured2's quantum safe Multi-Mesh? architecture with Toolkit? hybrid work solutions and trusted IT services partners like Arnett Group that make taking control of your IT much more cost effective.

To help demystify architecture strategies here is where we see the market today and an introduction into Secured2's new Multi-Mesh? architecture.

COMPOSABILITY

Composability is a relatively new methodology also known as 'disaggregated infrastructure.' It allows a user the ability to connect compute, Graphic Processing Units (GPU), storage, and networking into pools of resources that are provisioned through software APIs and networking. These pools are then provisioned into server nodes. Composability is like cloud services. You can have infrastructure behind your firewall but extend your infrastructure beyond your firewall to a pool of services outside. Vendors are setting up Composability services on a pay as you go basis.

If you are running a workload that needs more GPU than you have, you can use Composability to access 20 more GPU for the workload you are processing. This solution greatly reduces your cost of ownership in addition to only being charged on a pay as you go basis. The challenge of Composability is that your workload goes into hardware you don't control. You are not able to control to the hardware vendors security setup, which is likely not quantum safe and is using today's encrypted security which is reaching end-of-life.

CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE

Converged infrastructure has been around for a very long time. In fact, many of the early models of computing were based on converged systems. The most recognizable converged infrastructure was mainframe computing, which is basically a converged system of software, hardware, and networking. Theses combined elements and the dummy terminals were a big hit, until the fatal flaw. All the activities were centralized, and you share time on the mainframe. Anyone remember sign-up sheet for CPU time?

Well, times have changed so has converged infrastructure. In today's world, converged infrastructure now includes software, hardware, storage, administration services and packaged applications. By bringing everything together, it's easier to manage, run, deploy, and maintain your systems. Converged systems are in most of today's collocation environments and internal data center environments. Converged systems can be easily integrated with hybrid or cloud computing architectures. So, the interoperability can be very seamless.

The challenge with Converged Infrastructure is it requires a staff to maintain the systems. The security protocols are not quantum safe. And if you configure it wrong, a wrongly configured system can upset the operation of your business. In summary, a Converged Infrastructure gives you a great deal of control, but all that control comes at the risk of having issues arise due to a all the management needed with these systems.

HYPER-CONVERGED SOLUTIONS

Hyper-converged Solutions are almost a carbon copy of converged systems but with a major differentiator. Everything in a hyper-converged world is 'software' defined, not hardware defined. Through new virtualization technologies and techniques, Hyper-Converged Solutions abstracts the resources of hardware, storage, compute, networking, management into segments you can scale on-demand. A hyper-converged system is like having your own 'private cloud' solution that lives in your own data center or colo. VMware is one of the lead hyper-converged solution vendors. Also, like any cloud solution, the VMware hyper-converged cloud suffers from the same issues of the other Cloud vendors with centralization of data, reliance on encrypted systems, need for outside consultants or expensive full-time resources to properly manage the solution.

THE CLOUD

We all love the cloud. If you look back on this past year, our businesses would not have survived had it not been for the cloud. The ability to access data when we were all working at home or on the go was critical.

The cloud provides massive infrastructure provided as a service on demand. This includes all the elements of hyper-converged solutions but with added benefits. The cloud has a distributed architecture, extensive API libraries, orchestration, automation, and massive scale. Most major cloud solutions also build in redundancy, resiliency, and multi-datacenter scale. When you place data in one cloud container, it can be replicated into containers all around the world. The big benefit of the Cloud is the sheer scale, as well as, the other benefits of instant updates, patching, automation, and the access to unique services that come along like quantum computing as a service. The cloud can use its scale to make it affordable to buy, extend and provide services that were only available to large enterprises. When you add in the 'dashboarded' management tools, all elements are easy to administer, manage and deploy. Well, this sounds magic but what is really behind the fluffy veil of the cloud?

Today, the Cloud’s fatal flaws are just coming to light. The Cloud is made up of many different vendors, many different solutions and is not a flat architecture. The Cloud is only as safe as its weakest point as was evidenced by the SolarWinds hack or the Super Micro debacle. If vulnerable systems can be breached, it can open entry points into the Cloud and make the entire Cloud vulnerable to attack. When you have centralized all your information in the Cloud, you have put a bullseye on your data. I believe that lack of complete data security in the Cloud is one of the biggest threats facing our nation today. With encryption end of life, advancements in exascale computing or quantum computing that can break encryption, things are only going to get worse. 

The end-of-life for our encrypted systems has arrived, the Clouds only line of defense is encryption and right now I am frightened by how vulnerable our data really is. Why do you think the Cloud doesn’t indemnify you against a data breach?

NEW SECURED2 MULTI-MESH? OVERVIEW

The Secured2 Multi-Mesh? architecture is the first 'decentralized' solution for today's growing IT organization that includes quantum safe security, storage, network infrastructure and applications. Secured2 sees a need to create an application/ infrastructure framework that provides customers the flexibility of installing applications through solutions like Docker behind their own firewall, and then decoupling the storage backend to a configurable multi-mesh solution that gives you the flexibility of storing data anywhere you choose. The key point is that the Multi-Mesh architecture is storage agnostic. You can create your unique storage configurations utilizing local, hybrid, cloud, multi-cloud, or any combination to meet your business needs (all from an easy to use dashboard). This will lower your storage costs with more choices and more flexibility. Your storage costs will now be a commodity and is now under your control.

In a Multi-Mesh architecture, you can easily move data anywhere you want within the framework and connect into any service you choose. The Secured2 Multi-Mesh? architecture is also the future of Cloud management. You are not beholden to one provider or locked into solutions that does not meet your business needs anymore. With Multi-Mesh? at the core of your solution, you are in control and most importantly quantum safe with all data going to storage!

Each approach detailed above has pros and cons. However, the bet we are making at Secured2 is decentralization is the key to security, flexibility is paramount, management is critical, consolidation and simplification of resources the only way to go. That's why the new Secured2 Multi-Mesh architecture is gaining traction and will continue to define the future of data center architecture. In the future, we will be inviting app developers to grab our quantum safe API, protect their applications in our solution and deploy application services into our multi-mesh network similar to app stores you use today. Making it all 'quantum safe.' Our new architecture combines the quantum safe security, tools, flexibility, hybrid work software, storage, and flexibility you need to operate your business with confidence in this turbulent unsecure world we find ourselves today. Most importantly - with Secuerd2 we indemnify you against a data breach with our cyber warranty backed by Lloyd's of London. Something no other provider gives you today!

I hope you have a much better understanding of how all these solutions work, and what one is best for your business. It’s very clear – if security matters Secured2 Multi-Mesh is the only choice.