"There Would Be No Cloud Without Open Source" - Simon Crosby

XenSource pioneer talks about cloud, security and open source

I first became aware of cloud security issues listening to Simon Crosby, fresh off of taking in millions and millions of Citrix dollars when they bought XenSource, speak with my friend Chris Hoff at several conferences, podcasts and blog posts. In many ways Crosby and Hoff brought cloud security and even cloud computing itself to the forefront in many peoples minds. So it was great to catch up with Simon this week and hear some of his views on the cloud, virtualization, security and open source.

You can listen to my conversation with Crosby below. But let me give you some highlights:

• "There would be no cloud, without open source" - Crosby says that we would not have a cloud with open source. Before there was an OpenStack or anything cloud platforms were built and continue to be built on open source foundations like Xen. In fact of all the cloud platforms today, the only one without an open source foundation is Microsoft's Azure and even there they are making it easy to incorporate open source software like Hadoop.
• Virtualization and the cloud represents a tremendous opportunity for security - Virtualization almost by definition gives you the ability to isolate processes which should make security from one to another easier than in the physical world.
• Virtualization and the cloud rather than hindering security, will make for better security

Alas, nothing much about his new company Bromium which is still in stealth mode. He said to be on the lookout for news in the next few months.

So listen in to Simon Crosby talk about virtualization, the cloud, cloud security and open source.

• Data Center
• Security
• Software
• Cloud Computing
• Alan Shimel
• bromium
• Citrix
• cloud security
• open source
• security
• Xen