Clouds, HeavenThis Wall Street Journal article looks at Coca Cola’s proprietary “Black Cloud” project – a proprietary initiative involving a software defined perimeter (SDP) that will enable a much more secure public cloud for Coca-Cola’s online consumer services delivery.

Coca-Cola Looks to Secure Edge for Age of Cloud, Mobility

It’s a forward-thinking initiative that marks a significant technology advancement and also provides a glimpse into the future of secure cloud service delivery – particularly for large scale software-as-a-service platforms. It is also somewhat controversial as these secure Black Clouds pose a direct competitive threat to a wide array of network security appliance vendors i.e. firewalls, virtual private networks, and network access control devices.

The project involves Coca-Cola working closely with the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), a not for profit organization which promotes the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing. The CSA is led by a broad coalition of industry practitioners and corporations including Waverley Labs who is actively leading development of the open source version of the SDPs.

Waverley Labs’ plans to use its advanced knowledge processing engine to enable the analysis of SDPs and black clouds to provide end user visibility into the security posture of the perimeter.

It will be interesting to watch the progress of Coca-Cola’s Black Cloud and expect to see increasing debate from vendors threatened by the promise of Black Clouds. However, once proven, expect to see Black Clouds change the face of cyber security and large scale digital risk management solutions as we know it.