Best-of-breed strategies have long since fallen out of favor in the enterprise, because the work required to stitch together the components proved to be too difficult. But best of breed is back with cloud. Companies today are hell-bent on buying the ideal SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS cloud services for the job, and while APIs make the integration work easier, the resultant cloud silos create a new challenge: How do you assure service performance in this multi-cloud world?

The short answer: By maintaining global knowledge of what is happening (and where) across IT infrastructure, applications, and services. But we’ll get back to that.

Companies use eight cloud providers on average, according to IHS Markit Ltd., a research firm in London. IHS’ survey of 155 companies in a range of industries shows that number swelling to 11 within two years. When you include any and all SaaS services, the average number of cloud applications that companies use explodes to almost 1,500, by some counts. 

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Gray Hall, CEO of Alert Logic, cut his teeth delivering enterprise-class services when he started VeriCenter, one of the earliest managed hosting companies.  Hall eventually sold that company to SunGard Data Systems in 2007, and in 2009 joined Alert Logic where he has since driven revenue growth 12x.  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with Hall to learn more about Alert Logic and the security-as-a-service movement.

Lets start with a brief background on the company.

Alert Logic was founded in 2002 -- the founders are still with us today in very key roles – and the original vision was to bring together SaaS and managed security services, starting with Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). Sourcefire had been around for a long time, they were the gorilla in the space (now owned by Cisco), but Sourcefire is a very advanced product and most of our customers would say it’s expensive, complex, and you need a lot of expertise to make it work.  It’s only as good as the content you feed it and once you reconfigure your network, you have to do it all over again … tuning, configuration, etc.

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Sam Ramji, who joined Google about six months ago as VP of Product Management for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), has deep roots in open source:  He was the founding CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation and he designed and led Microsoft's open source strategy.  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix sat down with Ramji at the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston to discuss how Google is trying to differentiate its cloud service.

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