Trying to Make the Cloud Safe for Corporate Data

Thousands of small companies rent cheap computing power from the so-called public clouds of Google and Amazon.com, but the bill for those services adds up to less than 6 percent of the $153 billion in annual U.S. spending on data center equipment. Most of that still goes into pricey hardware from Cisco, Oracle, Dell, and others, bought by bigger companies worried about their data security. The massive breaches at Home Depot, Target, and JPMorgan Chase in the past year should make more businesses rethink that strategy, says former Cisco executive Tom Gillis.

Gillis now runs Bracket Computing, a startup that on Oct. 22 unveiled software designed to make public clouds secure enough for sensitive corporate data. Essentially, Bracket’s software wraps a company’s business applications in a bubble of encryption without making the applications harder to manage. “If we demonstrate that the public cloud is every bit as good, why would anyone build another data center?” says Gillis.