Scale Computing and WinMagic recently announced a partnership improving the security of Scale’s HC3 solution. I had the opportunity to be briefed by the good folks at Scale and WinMagic and thought I’d provide a brief overview of the announcement here.

But Firstly, Some Background

Scale Computing announced their HC3 Cloud Unity offering in late September this year. Cloud Unity, in a nutshell, let’s you run embedded HC3 instances in Google Cloud. Coupled with some SD-WAN smarts, you can move workloads easily between on-premises infrastructure and GCP. It enables companies to perform lift and shift migrations, if required, with relative ease, and removes a lot of the complexity traditionally associated of deploying hybrid-friendly workloads in the data centre.

So the WinMagic Thing?

WinMagic have been around for quite some time, and offer a range of security products aimed at various sizes of organization. This partnership with Scale delivers SecureDoc CloudVM as a mechanism for encryption and key management. You can download a copy of the brochure from here. The point of the solution is to provide a secure mechanism for hosting your VMs either on-premises or in the cloud. Key management can be a pain in the rear, and WinMagic provides a fully-featured solution for this that’s easy to use and simple to manage. There’s broad support for a variety of operating environments and clients. Authentication and authorized key distribution takes place prior to workloads being deployed to ensure that the right person is accessing data from an expected place and device and there’s support for password only or multi-factor authentication.

Thoughts

Scale Computing have been doing some really cool stuff in the hyperconverged arena for some time now. The new partnership with Google Cloud, and the addition of the WinMagic solution, demonstrates their focus on improving an already impressive offering with some pretty neat features. It’s one thing to enable customers to get to the cloud with relative ease, but it’s a whole other thing to be able to help them secure their assets when they make that move to the cloud.

It’s my opinion that Scale Computing have been the quiet achievers in the HCI marketplace, with reported fantastic customer satisfaction and a solid range of products on offer at a very reasonable RRP. Couple this with an intelligent hypervisor platform and the ability to securely host assets in the public cloud, and it’s clear that Scale Computing aren’t interested in standing still. I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s next for them. If you’re after an HCI solution where you can start really (really) small and grow as required, it would be worthwhile having a chat to them.

Also, if you’re into that kind of thing, Scale and WinMagic are hosting a joint webinar on November 28 at 10:30am EST. Registration for the webinar “Simplifying Security across your Universal I.T. Infrastructure: Top 5 Considerations for Securing Your Virtual and Cloud IT Environments, Without Introducing Unneeded Complexity” can be found here.