50% of cloud deployments are insecure, but Newvem’s new ‘Cloud Care’ will check yours for free

People have health care, and now clouds have “cloud care.” The only difference?

Cloud care is free.

Half of cloud deployments are insecure and vulnerable to attack, and a third are not properly set up to maintain service if Amazon Web Services has downtime, says cloud optimization company Newvem. Which is why Newvem is releasing a free version of its analytics product to pinpoint problems in small and medium-sized business’s clouds.

Above: A sample Newvem report

“We’re just amazed at how exposed many small and medium-sized customers of Amazon are,” Newvem CEO Zev Laderman told me yesterday from Tel Aviv.

The free services that Newvem will now offer include emergency triage, activity diagnostics, and cost efficiency reports. The reports will highlight security risks, show where companies can improve availability options in case of Amazon cloud issues, point out where backups are needed, and expose situations in which companies can resize their cloud usage and potentially move to a lower service level to save money.

Newvem tracks almost $250 million in Amazon EC2 usage annually and has 1,500 cloud clients who use its services to manage their increasingly sophisticated — and complex — cloud deployments. Enterprise clients and heavy cloud users get more trend analysis, can separate cloud usage by business group, get better Amazon reserved instance tracking and S3 analysis, which shows what storage capacity they have and what they’re actually using.

“The big guys who spend over $1,00,000 … they have everything they want,” Laderman says. “But the small and medium guys, there’s a big gap.”

This new product, Cloud Care, is aimed solidly at those small and medium guys, who might spend $1,000 to $5,000 a month on Amazon. Based on Amazon Web Services’ projected 2013 revenue of around $3 billion, that group likely consists of about 3,500 businesses that are using, but not necessarily optimizing, the cloud.

Amazon delivers its cloud services with what it calls a “shared responsibility” model. The problem is that the small and medium users don’t have the same level of resources as the big boys to devote full-time staff to ensuring they keep up with their side.

Above: A sample report from Newvem

photo credit: bitzcelt via photopin cc