The rise in popularity of the hybrid cloud means that many companies’ assets are divided between private clouds, public clouds and data centers. This increase in complexity can make managing data difficult. So how are some companies moving forward with the hybrid cloud?

Joe Kinsella, founder and CTO at CloudHealth, joined Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss the issues around cloud complexity, cloud security and CloudHealth’s partnership with Amazon. CloudHealth provides the tools enterprises need to govern and manage their view into all of the clouds, no matter who is hosting.

A constant struggle with cloud complexity

The conversation started out with cloud in general and quickly moved to its recent issue of complexity. “The great power of the cloud comes with one great cost, and that is complexity — The amount of effort you can put into securing, or driving cost efficiencies, or driving performance and availability across your cloud infrastructure,” said Kinsella.

He went on to say there is a definite need for the cloud to be harnessed and controlled; it requires governance. “So what I set out to do with CloudHealth was to build an open management platform that integrates with the tools that you use. These could be from any number of vendors — to be able to harness what they do in a single pane of glass where you can actually drive,” explained Kinsella.

Expectations for the upcoming AWS’ re:invent conference

Miniman pointed out that, for the most part, CloudHealth lives in the AWS marketplace. Kinsella agreed and said, “Amazon’s been a great partner … the key for us is to always make sure we’re extending and complementing what they’re doing what other partners of ours are doing.”

Kinsella mentioned looking forward to the upcoming AWS’s re:invent conference, and said he’s sure Amazon will cover an AWS lambda feature, serverless. “Anytime there’s a disruptive innovation, there’s a tendency to use it like the predecessor technology. Today, we’re starting to see a glimpse of what the cloud can become, which is … consumption-based, on-demand, third-party managed, better virtualization. But I think serverless, that’s the future of the cloud. I would be surprised if there’s not some big announcements around that,” said Kinsella.

Cloud security management

Miniman asked if there were any new features the guest would like to mention.

“The key to CloudHealth is that we seek to complement and extend the products that matter to our customers,” said Kinsella. He explained that its customers use a wide variety of different security products and that CloudHealth isn’t trying to replace those products. However, there was a security piece around configuration monitoring with which customers were struggling. So CloudHealth launched a new feature on its base platform that provides active governance across the security infrastructure.

“Five years ago, security was the concern for why you wouldn’t move into the cloud. Now, everyone’s moved beyond that; now, it’s just how do I keep up with it? How do I make it better? In many cases, customers are more secure when they move their infrastructure into a public cloud like Amazon,” said Kinsella. “That results from being able to take advantage of all these different, underlying components that allow them to put controls into place that were harder to do inside their data centers.”

Watch the complete video interview below.

Photo by SiliconANGLE