There’s really nothing like a cross-country flight from San Francisco to Austin in late June to really shake up your senses. We departed under cool 55-degree temperatures only to arrive back home to a balmy 101. I imagine this is how a piece of firewood must feel as it’s pulled from a cool, dry resting place and tossed into a blazing furnace.

But that’s life on the road, I guess. Or at least it was last week, when Gazzang hit the GigaOm Structure Conference in San Francisco to launch zTrustee.

Below are a few thoughts from last week, along with a tremendous analyst write up on our just announced universal key management solution.

• We heard and participated in a number of good discussions on cloud security at Structure. It’s great to see this topic continue to be dissected and debated. I think everyone can agree there’s no single solution to cloud security, especially when you factor in escalating compliance mandates, international data privacy regulations and the rapid adoption of big data as a service.

• We believe the right approach is to adopt layers of security with encryption and key management at the core. Here’s a photo of me being interviewed on the subject ---à

• It was great to connect with new GigaOm Pro analyst, Davi Ottenheimer. Kudos to GigaOm on bringing him into the fold. We spent a good 90 minutes with Davi on Wednesday, talking security for big data and demoing zTrustee. We look forward to seeing GigaOm take on a greater security focus in the future.

• Speaking of zTrustee, 451Research recently published a detailed look at the market for a universal key and opaque object manager. Since the early days of Gazzang, we’ve been carrying the torch for key management as a service. Our customers would tell us that “encryption is great, but real data security only comes with proper key management. ” So we made sure our zNcrypt key storage system provided maximum protection for Gazzang cryptographic keys.

Over time, we saw the opportunity to take what we learned from our KSS and expand its capabilities to manage keys from all encryption utilities as well as tokens, certificates and other bits of important IT DNA. So begat zTrustee, and the solution is hitting the market at just the right time. As Steve Coplan from 451Resarch notes:

“The outcome of hybridization is that there is more need to maintain trust across domains and insulate proprietary data running on third-party services from unauthorized access. This all adds up to greater likelihood of cryptographic keys and security materials floating around. In this initial iteration, Gazzang is providing an operational fix to a clear problem.”

• Finally, a quick travel tip for folks tired of overspending on hotels. Book through HomeAway. We found an awesome four-bedroom townhouse in Pacific Heights, about two miles from the conference. Just check out the patio and zen garden. You can’t find this at the Staybridge Suites. At around 4:30pm on Tuesday, Dustin Kirkland and I took an 8.5-mile jog to the Golden Gate and back.

Had we run that distance in Austin, I’m fairly certain my feet would have melted.