A Trusted Cloud Platform

Why this video is on Apcera home page?

The first message a visitor reads on Apcera’s home page is:

Innovation, Meet Trust: Transform your business with the most secure and trusted cloud platform

This is not just a marketing claim. The founder of Apcera, Derek Collison, has a rich experience from working over many years at Tibco and Google, then initiating the Cloud Foundry project. When he worked at Google, Derek and his team used an internal tool called Borg. No Google developer had direct access to hardware, only to Borg. Derek discovered that Google trusted Borg to protect their core business, while allowing devs to move fast.

This is why

Apcera is the ultimate platform that Derek created to build on this concept. He placed trust first in the design priorities. In this video from Apcera, - that Apcera just placed on their web site - Jason Hoffman, Head of Product Area Cloud Systems at Ericsson, talks about trust.

In Ericsson, we are responsible for mission-critical infrastructures globally. Those range from your ability to make a 911 call to just being able to connect to your kids when you are on the road and tell them you miss them. When our infrastructure doesn’t work, presidents and prime ministers call our CEO, upset.

What is trust? 

Any company feels in a way  honored that the highest dignitaries are upset when their products are facing a temporary service interruption. A Hasidic teaching says: “Provide love; trust will be born from it. Demonstrate your trust, and it will awaken love.” In business, customer love leads to loyalty. In 140 years, Ericsson has a fantastic reputation and sense of responsibility towards its loyal customers.

Trust also means dealing with ethical and professional people

When you are looking at what you are doing professionally or in your personal life, it does boil down to whether you can trust the system you’re working with.

What is a professional? A professional is someone who does not simply know about something. A professional does something with what he knows. Professionals are not judged by what they know, but by what they produce as a result of that knowledge.

We value both the technology and the people

When we start thinking of the scenarios where people start using multiple clouds, or multiple technologies, when we start thinking of that type of machinery, that’s exactly why we were so attracted to the Apcera platform, because this is a layer can be rolled out across the top of everything. We have to deliver trusted infrastructures, and the basis of that trust from us is the Apcera platform.

The blockchain technology as a measure of trust

There is a technology that hit the headlines last year, but it is not new, called blockchain. According to Economist magazine cover story:

 In essence it is a shared, trusted, public ledger that everyone can inspect, but which no single user controls. The participants in a blockchain system collectively keep the ledger up to date: it can be amended only according to strict rules and by general agreement. Bitcoin’s blockchain ledger prevents double-spending and keeps track of transactions continuously. It is what makes possible a currency without a central bank.

Apcera trust is the result of steady automated policies enforcement.

 But the blockchain technology can measure the trust. Reading   Mike Gault - the  CEO of Guardtime - article in Wired magazine:

A keyless signature provides an alternative method to key-based technologies, and delivers proof and non-repudiation of electronic data using only hash functions for verification. By using hash functions, the technology can prove the time, authenticity, and origin (machine, organization, individual) of the input data. 

In addition, keyless signature technology provides mass-scale, non-expiring data validation while eliminating the need for secrets or other forms of trust. Thus, it eliminates the need for complex certificate-based solutions which carry certificate management issues, including expiration and revocation.

In practical terms:

This technology helps organizations to validate, verify and self-authenticate their big data. The keyless nature of the technology reduces the security and administrative footprint because it removes the need for cipher keys and passwords, which can be lost or mislaid. For data authentication to be align squarely with data authenticity, taking signatures keyless is key in our new brave big data world.

Some interesting tweets 

@derekcollison @Jim_Reno_ If @Apcera is a trust machine, can we create a "trusted private ledger" to put flesh on the trust bone?

— Miha Ahronovitz (@myinnervoice) December 20, 2015

@myinnervoice @Jim_Reno_ @Apcera that's the plan.

— Derek Collison (@derekcollison) December 20, 2015