Skytap Aims to Bring Simplicity, Security to Hybrid Cloud

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by || 12/07/2011

Skytap Inc., a provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, has rolled out new cloud computing capabilities for increased simplicity, security, visibility and control.  The new features make it easier for business users to tap into the Skytap Cloud, as well as offer the necessary visibility and control required by IT.

“Customers choose Skytap for our unmatched self-service simplicity, deep levels of visibility and control, and the ability to easily move complex virtualized enterprise environments into a secure cloud environment without changes,” said Brian White, vice president of products at Skytap, in a statement.

Skytap’s latest functionality includes:

  • An advanced notification service that alerts customers when they’re about to run out of capacity;
  • A self-healing network automation capability that makes it easy to set up a virtual private network (VPN).
  • Ability to detect if a VPN connection drops and then reconnect it with the Skytap hybrid cloud environment; and
  • Support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) to make it easier for customers to move workloads across different virtual machines.

The Skytap Cloud Automation platform enables organizations lets IT implement and enforce centralized policy management and control over multiple self-service solutions.  Its IT management features help standardize the cloud environments, automate the provisioning process, manage users groups and monitor cloud usage. Further, Skytap Cloud provides policy management and control that enables creation of role based security policies and usage policies by user or group profile.

In addition, the Skytap Cloud Automation Platform uses a secure, 2-way IPSEC VPN tunnel to connect virtual data centers to corporate data centers, as well as create hybrid clouds. Further, it uses a REST based API that allows IT to integrate the Skytap cloud environments with their own provisioning, monitoring and billing systems.

In one instance of how valuable Skytap’s latest features are to hybrid IT projects, the Skytap notification capability provides Informatica the visibility and control it needs to effectively manage hundreds of different Skytap Cloud users within its organization, said  Informatica’s director of technical marketing Gaurav Lall.

“With notifications, Informatica is proactively alerted about virtual machines that run for more than eight continuous hours and if end-users are approaching their allocated limits of storage capacity,” Lall said in the statement. “These alerts help us manage our cloud computing environment more efficiency and effectively and at the same time keep costs down.”

One cloud analyst also said the latest Skytap functionality fills a growing need among enterprises looking at a growing number of options for cloud-based applications and services.

Companies looking to move applications to cloud are focused on trying to understand what apps are best suited for which cloud model, according to Cameron Haight, Research Vice President, Gartner Inc.

In fact, many enterprises are moving to public as well as hybrid cloud models “for low risk scenarios that still require placement flexibility such as development and testing, product demonstrations and technical training,” Haight added.