15 Cloud Computing Firms to Watch: Security, Storage, Apps

For enterprises considering moving their IT operations to the cloud, the market can feel a little overwhelming. In addition to the major players like Salesforce, Amazon and Google, a bewildering array of startup firms offer tools and services for cloud computing -- and their numbers seem to grow by the day.

Here, we have highlighted 15 promising cloud computing vendors that are carving out a niche for themselves in this emerging arena. Though by no means comprehensive, this list serves as a primer for some of the innovative startups whose offerings range from cloud security and storage to apps and infrastructure.

1) Abiquo: One of the more promising upstarts in the cloud-management space, Abiquo offers a comprehensive hypervisor support portfolio that encompasses leading vendors such as VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and Zend. The firm boasts a support system that provides drag-and-drop conversion for virtual machines from one hypervisor to another in an effort to defang the problem of vendor lock-in.

Abiquo offers a multi-tenancy, permission-based hierarchy that enables enterprises to forge public, private or hybrid clouds spanning data centers on- and off-premises as well as hosted resources.

2) Appirio: San Mateo, Calif.-based Appirio is tackling the challenges of enterprise adoption of cloud computing from both the technology and consulting perspectives. Founded in 2006, the firm has tallied more than 200 enterprise clients that it has helped implement cloud deployments with some of the leading vendors, including Google, Salesforce and Amazon with a portfolio spanning strategy, migration, development and management.

And lately, the company has been on a modest acquisition spree. Earlier this month, Appirio scooped up VMG, a consulting firm specializing in cloud training and learning programs for its third acquisition in two months.

3) Bluelock: An enterprise-focused cloud hosting provider, Bluelock's services are tied to VMware's virtualization technology.

Bluelock can boast that it is a leading VMware vCloud hosting provider, offering both technology and services in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space. Bluelock pitches businesses with a tailored solution for establishing a virtual data center hosted on either a public or hybrid cloud.

4) CloudOptix: Cloud virtualization software player CloudOptix backs its signature MeghaWare product line, offering businesses and individual users an affordable path to creating a private cloud from a variety of vendors. The preconfigured MeghaWare Cloud Appliance portfolio of storage, application and compute clouds promise low-cost deployments that can be set up in less than 15 minutes, while the CloudTop Application suite allows customers to choose among devices, apps and cloud providers, skirting the trap of vendor lock-in. Founded in May 2009, CloudOptix is headquartered in Boca Raton, Fla.

5) CloudSwitch: Billed as an enterprise cloud gateway, CloudSwitch offers software that syncs policies and tools rooted in the data center with a cloud environment, providing security and scalability for businesses looking to maintain both in-house and cloud-based IT assets. Earlier this month, CloudSwitch announced a joint solution with Riverbed to boost performance and security in the cloud while easing the burdens of deployment and management.

6) Kaavo: Kaavo's core product, IMOD, is an application management and deployment tool that promises to expedite the process of bringing server systems online, configuring middleware, and other steps to hasten the transition to a cloud-based environment. Kaavo bills itself as "the first and only company to deliver a solution with a top-down application-focused approach to IT resource management across public, private and hybrid clouds."

Kaavo believes that its application-centric approach is essential to effective management in the cloud, once the apps have been liberated from the server environment, and CEO Jamal Mazhar has recently taken gentle pokes at Amazon and Microsoft for what he sees as following Kaavo's lead.

7) Nasuni: For businesses still contemplating a move to the cloud, storage can be a double-edged sword. The cloud offers essentially limitless capacity, high redundancy and reliability. But when sensitive data resides in the ether, IT managers worry that they are ceding control over how, when and by whom sensitive information is permanently deleted.

And rightly so, says Nasuni, which offers a "cloud gateway" that seeks to marry the best aspects of cloud and on-premises storage through a partnership with leading cloud-computing providers. In March, the Natick, Mass.-based company augmented its Nasuni Filer product with a feature dubbed "snapshot retention," which enables IT managers to set policies governing how long files stored in the cloud should be retained after they are permanently deleted, a boon for compliance-oriented industries such as health care.

Small, deduped snapshots of a firm's working filesystem are cached to local storage infrastructure, sending frequent updates to the cloud provider, offering prompt and complete restoration of past versions of files, directories and filesystems. With the snapshot retention feature, the manager can determine at what point a snapshot is irrevocably deleted.