Harris launches cloud facility

Harris Corp. has opened a new 140,000-square-foot data center that the company says forms the foundation of a major push into the cloud computing space.

According to Jim Leach, VP of market development for Harris, the company’s so-called Cyber Integration Center is the base for Harris’s Trusted Enterprise Cloud service, an infrastructure-as-a-service offering that will allow enterprise clients to self-provision servers, storage and networking infrastructure up to the operating system level.

“Our Trusted Enterprise Cloud was engineered for commercial and government organizations of a size and complexity that require higher levels of availability, security, performance and flexibility than is available through IT systems based on the public Internet,” Leach said. “These enterprises typically have established IT budgets and are looking to begin their journey to the cloud to leverage its inherent advantages in terms of cost, business agility and speed-to-market.”

One of the key differences of Trusted Enterprise Cloud from other offerings, Leach said, are the proprietary trust technologies Harris offers, including what it calls the Global Trust Repository.

“Our Global Trust Repository is the world’s largest database of hardware and software reference images with over 3 billion measurements,” Leach said. “These technologies provide continuous monitoring, assurance, and attestation that the software and configurations in the cloud environment are deployed and operating according to specification and have not been compromised. We continuously monitor our Trusted Enterprise Cloud system against this database and issue alerts for any system changes that occur. Change, whether it’s the malicious code of a hacker or the relatively benign maintenance patch, is the Achilles heel of IT as it can be the source of instability.”

Harris has implemented cloud technologies from VCE, EMC, Cisco, RSA, VMware, HP, and BMC along with its own technology into the facility, Leach said. It is designed to meet industry and government standards for reliability and security, he said, including NIST 800-53 High, ISO 27001, SAS 70 and compliance and automation frameworks including S-CAP, HIPAA, PCI, and Sarbanes Oxley.