Sean Donaldson, Director of IT Infrastructure at Secure24, talked about his company’s approach to the cloud service market with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, live at the recently concluded VMworld 2013 conference.  See full video below.

Discussing the current state of cloud service providers, Donaldson said “cloud hosting can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. We fit a pretty unique niche in that market where we focus on high compliancy, first tier applications, in what we like to refer to as an enterprise private cloud.”

Mission-critical cloud

The company’s services are focused around the apps that are most critical to a business, in scenarios where companies want to outsource, but still want to feel secure and in control.

“Tier one applications are going to be the most critical for you.” Donaldson said. SLAs are measured from an availability point, and there is a focus on SLAs for specific apps. “Our SLA varies on a client by client basis. We partner closely with EMC and VMware. We can offer everything from zero RPO, RTOs,” to significantly lower periods.

Financial penalties are minimal for Amazon in case of downtime, quite the opposite of the Secure24 case. “There’s a significant amount of payment for us if the customer goes down, I would say very high,” Donaldson pointed out.

“Ultimately it comes down to software defined security,” Donaldson said. It offers big advantages, “the capability to more easily automate my complex network deployment, and be able to take the security up the stack.”

Security and the cloud wars

Asked about their experience competing as an ecosystem, Donaldson said that “a lot of our stack is currently EMC, Cisco, VMware,” all of these companies being very flexible. “We very much look at ourselves as a customer services organization.’

Commenting on Amazon’s statement that they’d take anyone on in security, Donaldson said, “I definitely appreciate their drive toward it.” Amazon’s focus is showing the importance of security in cloud services. “We partner and try to stay cutting edge on the security side. We are more transparent about what technology we are using.” On the other hand, Amazon uses a lot of proprietary code, their transparency is not as clear  as large companies require, he explained, referring to frequent audits and compliance requirements.

Talking about Secure24’s current state, Donaldson said: “we’re growing at a tremendous rate.” Their concept is of a very modular data center. “We can grow compute resources at a very easy, modular growth rate. The model we put in place is very automation focused.”