enStratus Cloud Governance

The Business Perspective

enStratus delivers security, reliability and continuity for applications in the cloud.

The Business Perspective

Confidence In The Cloud

enStratus™ provides a suite of tools for managing cloud infrastructure. We support the provisioning, management and monitoring of applications in multiple public and private clouds including Amazon Web Services, The Rackspace Cloud, Windows Azure, Terremark's Enterprise Cloud and Visi's ReliaCloud.

We invite you to evaluate our solution if you like the business advantages of cloud infrastructure but need to comply with enterprise-class IT security policies and compliance regulations, or if you have concerns about cloud reliability and availability SLA's, or if you need to provide a reliable disaster recovery or business continuity solution for your organization. These are the challenges that we address.

We provide:

• Security - The cornerstone of our approach. Our patent-pending security architecture ensures the separation of security keys from encrypted data and provides advanced user management and activity logs for compliance.
  
  
• Reliability - our automated management tools, auto-recovery engine and unique clustering capabilities minimize human error and enable support of SLA's up to 99.9999%.
  
  
• Cloud Independence - use of a single cloud provider can represent significant business continuity risk. enStratus ensures that your applications are not dependent on either an individual cloud infrastructure or enStratus. We provide cloud-independent backups as well as cross-cloud disaster recovery.
  
  Our platform is structured into the following key components:
  
  Console - Provides real-time snapshots and drill-down detail for your cloud infrastructure and users.
  User Manager - Helps you control permissions to enStratus while encrypting all data in the cloud and keeping decryption and authentication credentials outside the cloud.
  Cloud Manager - Provides a user friendly way to interface with Amazon or Rackspace Clouds including file directories and the ability to manage servers, security groups, machine images and more.
  Cluster Manager - Delivers a holistic approach to your applications in the cloud providing the security, scalability and performance your customers require.
  

In addition, we provide Consulting Services to assist you in your migration into the cloud.

The Technical Perspective

Through key management, auto-recovery and cross-cloud support, enStratus provides reliability and security for your applications.

The Technical Perspective

enStratus is a SaaS based solution that supports the provisioning, management, and monitoring of enterprise-grade applications in public and private clouds.

enStratus operates outside of the clouds we support and without any operational elements in any public cloud. This separation provides two core advantages:

• First, an external operation ensures enStratus' ability monitor cloud services and notify you of actual failures either at a general level or with your particular assets.
• Secondly, our system enforces the separation of roles in an IT infrastructure. Through the combination role separation with the wide use of encryption and proper key management, we enable the construction of a highly secure cloud-based infrastructure that will meet the governance requirements of enterprise-grade IT operations.
  

There are three main components of the enStratus system:

• The Console
• The Provisioning System
• The Credentials System

The Console is the web interface through which you manage the cloud. This interface is broken down into four main areas: The Report Console,The Cluster Manager, The Cloud Manager, and The User Manager.

The Console is your “at-a-glance” window into your infrastructure with access to reports, alerts, and job information.

The Cluster Manager enables you to define your uptime objectives, application architecture, and system configuration and rely on enStratus to manage the deployment and operation of applications. In the Cluster Manager, you essentially tell enStratus everything about your system and then the Provisioning system takes over from there.

The Cloud Manager is where you take direct control over the cloud resources you are managing. You essentially get a complete console for doing everything to your cloud infrastructure that your underlying cloud provider supports.

The final piece of the enStratus Console is the User Manager. As its name implies, the User Manager is where you setup and manage the users who have access to enStratus as well as to the servers running in the cloud. You can define different roles for users and know that when a user is removed from enStratus, their full access to the console and all cloud resources is gone.

The Provisioning System is the liaison between you and the cloud. It stores all of your critical configuration data and takes actions like backup management, auto-scaling, auto- recovery, and more on your behalf. It also monitors your cloud systems and alerts you when events that require your attention are happening.

The first part of the Provisioning system accepts requests from the enStratus Console and either passes them on to the underlying cloud or alters your configuration. It talks to your cloud provider using the API key from your cloud provider and manages the infrastructure.

The next part is a monitoring element that watches over the cloud, looking for changes and trouble. It is almost always the first to know when a server is running into trouble in the cloud, and can even alert you that other customers are seeing widespread issues even if you are not yet impacted. It also listens to agents on servers with agents installed so that it can report on alerts and audit information provided from your cloud applications.

The final part is an active intelligence system that executes actions on your behalf. It will scale up (and down) when demand changes on your systems based on criteria you specify. When a server fails or becomes impaired, it will take actions to recover that server. Finally, it performs multiple levels of backups—even cloud-independent cross-cloud backups for disaster recovery purposes.

The Credentials system is a storage system that is not routable from the Internet for storing all authentication and encryption credentials—all encrypted using customer-specific encryption keys that are never stored on the file system or are otherwise accessible to humans.

The Credentials system itself never has any of the keys for encrypting or decrypting the data it stores. In other words, a compromise of the Credentials system alone has no impact on the security or integrity of your data. Because your keys sit encrypted outside the cloud on a server not accessible from the cloud, you have the ability to separate the data you are encrypting in the cloud from the keys that encrypt it.

What’s unique about this approach, however, is not simply the physical separation of keys from data—but also the organizational separation that prevents a government or other entity from leveraging access to one system to compromise your encrypted data.

To learn more, review the screen shots below or view an enStratus demo of how to launch an AMI. If you have questions or would like to discuss your project in more detail, contact us or call 612-746-3091.