By Ericka Chickowski 1

FireHost this week teamed up with Dell Services to roll out a converged infrastructure solution that brings together Dell compute and server hardware with FireHost’s cloud architecture to create a secure, single-tenant managed cloud. Known best for its security-focused public cloud platform, FireHost steps out with this move into the managed private cloud market for the first time.

“Our secure managed private cloud offering provides the channel with a physical, converged readymade rack that can be deployed on site,” says John Funk, director of global partnering for FireHost. “By us offloading some of the security and compliance burden from customers through our secure managed service approach, the channel has a unique talking point and can position themselves more strategically in accounts as a partner who enables customers to scale toward other key business priorities.”

As Funk explains, putting certain workloads and data into off-premise, multi-tenant clouds is completely off the table for many organizations. The partnership’s resulting managed private cloud service is meant to especially help service the healthcare, government, financial and retail industries that are constrained by compliance and security concerns that wouldn’t allow them to take advantage of even the most bullet-proof public cloud services. By teaming up, FireHost will be joining the Dell Cloud Onsite Service and has provided the back-end capability to connect to the rest of FireHost’s multi-tenant infrastructure.

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“This provides a flexible, hybrid option for customers who need to park data in certain places based on data sovereignty, compliance, and security needs,” Funk says.

Leveraging security as a differentiator has been a sticking point for a lot of channel partners and cloud brokers to date.

“Partners and cloud brokers have done a good job of driving basic cloud adoption. However, the challenge with traditional service providers and cloud vendors is they were built for elasticity and scale,” says Funk, who explains that a lot of the channel’s expertise has been driven by those benefits to the detriment of risk management. “As more cloud providers emerge, this specialization becomes key. Customers and their partners want specialists who are experts at a craft, particularly one as critical as security, compliance, and risk reduction.”

According to Funk, whether sold direct by cloud providers or through the channel ecosystem, today’s managed cloud offerings tend to lack the operational backstop of security expertise. This leaves a lot on the table for partners who can either resell or build their own services focused on security. 

“Offerings today either do not have a managed component with real security expertise behind it or are sold as products with IT organizations left to maintain, manage, and protect their enterprises,” he says.