Dell is one of several IT mega-vendors trying to modernize its portfolio in order to catch up with the competition, coming both the big vendors and the smaller companies spearheading innovation. Cloud is one of the areas the manufacturer is focused on, and its latest initiative is realized via a partnership with Morphlabs.

The firm is introducing a new enterprise-grade PaaS called mCloud, which is destined to compete with Amazon over the hearts of the clients that are particularly jealous of their data protection. Public cloud options often depict the potential risk in storing data remotely rather vividly, and it’s this barrier the hardware giant and Morphlabs are looking to dissolve with the new offering.

mCloud runs on converged Dell infrastructure powered by the latter’s PowerEdge C boxes, which come equipped with speedy SSDs.

“Although it’s on-premise or hosted, Morphlabs said its new mCloud service will be priced on par with Amazon Web Services, but will bring with it the security of a private cloud to service providers and other companies that require it. Many companies still aren’t ready for the public cloud because of data security and other concerns about shared infrastructure.”

Dell is branching out towards different direction in the cloud, and another alongside flash is open-source – specifically OpenStack. Last week it made a solution based on the open cloud OS available in several key European markets, which is a milestone even though the product first launched last year. It comes to show that clients are becoming aware of the advantages that open software can deliver, and at the same time Dell is identifying and addressing the opportunity on its own end. The news followed an announcement about an update to the company’s official developer forums.