Top Trends Driving the Data Center in 2015
One of the major issues that many organizations have with pushing anything relating to IT management into the cloud is the possibility that corporate data might wind up outside the four walls of the organization.
To address that specific issue, Meru Networks this week unfurled Meru XPress Cloud, a management service in the cloud that is linked to a controller-less Meru XP8i access point that only sends network management traffic into cloud. All corporate data travelling across the 802.11ac wireless network stays behind the corporate firewall.
Dennis Huang, director of product marketing for Meru Networks, says that as wireless networks become the primary means through which end users are accessing applications, there’s a lot more sensitivity to how data is managed and transferred across those networks. While there is no shortage of wireless networks that can be managed via the cloud, the fact that Meru Networks doesn’t rely on controllers to manage the network means that no data ever has to leave the local wireless network, says Huang.
Frameworks for managing wireless networks have been one of the first classes of IT management to be pushed into the cloud. In the case of Meru Networks, however, the controller functionality embedded in the cloud eliminates the need for corporate data to travel beyond the firewall.
Meru Networks also offers a full range of controllers that can be deployed on premise. But Huang says that as more network management moves into the cloud, IT organizations are concerned with security and compliance issues that the Meru XPress Cloud is designed to take off the table.
It remains to be seen to what degree IT management in general will be pushed into the cloud. But given the fact that most organizations would rather not have to acquire dedicated IT infrastructure to run IT management software, chances are that a lot more IT management software is about to head into the cloud.
