Cloud security: Why Cloud software is more competitive than hardware

Riverbed announces acquisition of virtual devices and cloud load Balancing Company-Zeus Technologies. Zeus is a nearly 15-year-old new venture, its main competitor is F5 and Citrix NetScaler. In fact, there are some unique values that can be analyzed. The

Zeus is a unique technique. Almost all of the development teams are from the University of Cambridge's computer science department, which uses software architectures to load balance, but has outperformed most hardware-type load-balancing devices, and has a 7th-tier network capability over other load-balancing devices. However, this is an "impossible secret" in the world of load balancing technology, and they are not as active in marketing as other vendors, and more focused on newer and better technologies. In the cloud, most companies use software architectures to replace hardware, because the software architecture can be scaled or scaled up as needed, but there is no hardware. That's why hardware vendors riverbed and F5 spend a lot of time developing virtual devices, but their virtual product progress is slower than hardware.

The recent riverbed takeover may change that. They now have a high order n +1 Scalable load-balancing device capable of looking at the complete network layer 7th envelope message and making intelligent judgments accordingly. Even better, it is a native cloud product that can be used to guide traffic to riverbed software devices or even hardware devices. This is a great ability to be absolutely helpful to riverbed.

should Citrix worry? Not sure. Citrix has recently made important plans for OpenStack, with a very powerful cloud load balancing and wide-area network optimization technology that can be well matched with their virtualization protocol-ICA. So from this point of view, the deal may be to let riverbed catch up with Citrix and F5. And it seems that Gartner's Joe Skorupa was right about a few years ago when he predicted that wide-area network optimization and load balancing would be combined! Now the top three of load-balancing and wide-area network optimization technologies provide both functions, although F5 's wide-area network optimization technology derived from the acquisition of Swan Lab has not been used for much.

But there is a challenge: wide-area network optimization is not used for encrypted traffic (some formats can be decrypted, but not all), because the compression technology for random bit processing efficiency is very poor, and encryption design is to generate random bits. So if riverbed, Citrix and F5 want to win the cloud, they need to work closely with cryptographic vendors, especially when theyCustomers are scrambling to encrypt network traffic through cloud encryption technology and policy-based Key management. The gossip that the

circulated a few months ago was that Cisco also wanted to buy Zeus, but did not make a deal. From the cloud's point of view, this could be a mistake.

(editor: Heritage)