CSC Uses Skytap to Get to the Cloud

CSC, the $16 billion-a-year systems integrator-cum-hoster, cozy with U.S. federal agencies and a competitor of Accenture, HP Enterprise Services and the mighty IBM Global Services, is taking its first shot at the cloud using Skytap widgetry.

Its ambitions have spread to taking on Amazon and Azure beginning with a SaaS-style dev-and-test CloudLab, the usual starting point in the cloud game.

The pair is targeting enterprise and government accounts in the U.S.

CloudLab is available now through the CSC Gateway, an e-commerce portal for hosting and cloud services.

Skytap, which won a competitive evaluation, is kicking in its self-service cloud automation mojo to get dynamic workloads to what is supposed to be a precisely configured, highly scalable and secure environment that’s cheaper and more time-efficient than waiting for physical machines to be set up.

Primary CloudLab users are supposed to be IT operations and application developers but it can also be used for ad hoc capacity for product demonstrations or online training.

With Skytap, runtime applications are unchanged, exact copies of complex configurations can be made, access and passage rights on any project, person or environment are restricted, and user, usage and action audit trails are left. IT is supposed to have visibility and control. Skytap recently added capabilities like network automation and organizational policy management.