Skytap Brings Self-Service To Hybrid Clouds

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by || 09/09/2011

More and more companies are turning to cloud technologies to build private, public and hybrid cloud solutions. However, many are finding that managing those silos of services is becoming an impossibility, surrounded by incompatibilities, complex dashboards and differing standards.

Cloud services vendor Skytap is looking to eliminate many pain points for those venturing into the cloud. The company has released a new set of solutions, which brings management simplicity and federation to clouds of all shapes and sizes.

The key component of Skytap’s latest innovations comes down to one word: automation. Skytap claims that its cloud automation tools will deliver cost savings of as much as 70%, if not more. Some of the savings come from time reduction and overhead savings.

To achieve those savings, Skytap has integrated four core capabilities into a solution that promotes the privatization, federation and management of cloud-based services. Those capabilities, which are based upon Skytap’s intellectual property, include:

  • Self-Service Hybrid Cloud: Skytap’s new solution capabilities enable IT managers to create hybrid clouds by configuring network connectivity and security policies quickly using a web UI. Functional users are then empowered to connect their cloud instances with corporate data centers with point-and-click ease. Skytap’s hybrid cloud solution enables enterprises to create cloud instances that act as a seamless extension of their data centers. With this innovation, Skytap offers comprehensive enterprise hybrid capabilities, including automated import/export of existing images, full support of existing applications, a two-way IPSEC tunnel and advanced multitier topologies that emulate in-house virtual data centers. More than 25% of Skytap customer cloud environments are now hybrid in nature.
  • Cloud Orchestration and Configuration Routing: Skytap released new cloud orchestration and network connectivity capabilities that enable development and test users to consolidate and centralize their build/test servers in the cloud, avoid set-up errors and reduce costs. Using the new network routing feature, software teams are able to create a hub-and-spoke model with centralized servers acting as a hub, individual dev/test configurations acting as nodes and network routes acting as spokes. Dev/test teams are able to utilize the self-service cloud orchestration features to automate the sequencing and scheduling of a complex multiserver environment. This eliminates the need for complicated scripts and costly software licenses.
  • Security Policy Management for Cloud Access and Control: Skytap introduced new security policy management features that provide one central cloud facility for enterprises to keep up with ever- changing security and policy requirements, as well as protect sensitive applications in the cloud. New enterprise-ready features such as IP access range limits, browser validation and email verification strengthened Skytap’s comprehensive security policy management capabilities.
  • Organizational Policy Management: Businesses can now use Skytap’s cloud platform to manage the needs of multiple large user groups with varying roles, such as development, test, training, sales engineering and IT operations. Departmental or divisional cloud administrators can assign role-based permissions and user-level quotas to govern cloud usage within and across various teams. Skytap provides a flexible model to organize users into “groups” based on a user’s specific role in a project, geographic location or business unit.”Over the last twelve months, Skytap has led the innovation agenda in enabling enterprises to accelerate their adoption of secure, self-service hybrid clouds,” said Sundar Raghavan, VP of marketing for Skytap. “The market opportunity for proven cloud solutions continues to grow as enterprises look to the cloud as the preferred model to focus and deliver on their application development priorities.Skytap offers several packages and pricing tiers across their various services offerings. More information is available at Skytap.com.