Delivering Cistera Hybrid Cloud Safely and Scalably

Any reasonable person can build web and mobile applications and there are plenty of companies that (used to be) out there to prove that point. The technology is straight forward and there are plenty of tools to help you along the way. Heck these days, it is more like assembly than actual coding.

However what sorts out the men from the boys (so to speak) is that the good companies know how to scale into millions of users. They know from practical experience what works and doesn’t work when you are talking about managing millions of events that occur in the network. The best companies know how to build scalable stateful systems, systems not only scale, but scale in a way that is secure and reliable and effective. This only comes from experience. The three principles of enterprise applications: Security, Scalability and Reliability. This is something Cistera has been doing for many years for on-premise private networks.

However, we are quickly moving towards cloud based systems, in particular the area we deal with, Hybrid Cloud, the mixture of cloud-based call control with on-premises network elements. A good example is Broadsoft’s UC1 solution, Telco based call control, on-premise or mobile devices.

There is conventional wisdom in the general public that Cloud is inherently less secure than on-premise solutions. Is this only true if you adopt the same paradigm for security as we used to with developing on-premise solutions in the cloud.  That is, security is something you do after you have done everything else.

With cloud development, and particularly our flavor of cloud development, Hybrid, security is an integral part of design and development effort. It is because it is part of the every nature of Hybrid, the ability to integrate Cloud and on-premise application.

Communications applications in particular will need to inherently live within this new model of delivery of security. As we are developing the latest major version of the Cistera CCS, we are incorporating fundamentally new models for security for communications applications including “outsourcing” the security framework to Azure and others.