Public cloud services like AWS have garnered a ton of fanfare from startups and established businesses. These solutions allow the burgeoning companies to get off the ground with little overhead, and they give larger companies cheap digs for their sizable data to live in. But some in the industry say what these converts gain in economy, they lose in transparency. Do any of them really know what these providers are doing with their data?

Marie Hattar, chief marketing officer at Ixia, talked with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at theCUBE’s Palo Alto Studio for a special CUBEconversation. Hattar spoke about key differences between private and public cloud. “Private cloud — you pretty much own the infrastructure, so you can put in whatever equipment or gear you want into that. It’s just what happens is, it’s virtualized.”

On the other hand, truly public cloud is opaque to customers — and that is a cause for concern, she believes. “When it comes to the AWS or Azure type environments, well, that’s not your infrastructure anymore if you think about that,” she stated. “Most people don’t quite know what’s going on in terms of that cloud infrastructure as it relates to their data.”

But it is their data, Hattar stressed, so Ixia is working on agent-oriented capabilities that allow them to keep an eye on it in what is basically just someone else’s computer.

Virtual reality check

Hattar said that Ixia is helping customers make such migrations with new virtualized tools. “You want to make sure that as you migrate to that functionality, that it works like it did in the physical world,” she said.

“We’ve developed a whole slew of what we call virtual editions, which pretty much you can roll back and deploy software wise anywhere in your network, so we’re seeing a big shift happening where — especially I’d say on the testing side, and also I would say on the production side — when you move to a virtual world that you need the tools, the agents, the capabilities to do everything virtually,” she said.

Watch the complete video interview with Marie Hattar below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE