Sunday 14 March 2010
Rohati Systems announces Virtualized Cloud Security initiative
To address growing security challenges in virtualized data center and cloud computing environments, Rohati Systems is announcing its Virtualized Cloud Security initiative. With this, Rohati will extend its on-premise security solutions to virtualized servers and off-premise cloud environments. IT organizations can leverage Rohati solutions to provide security and controls for accessing all applications and resources consistently and seamlessly, regardless of whether they reside on physical or virtual server infrastructures on-premise or in off-premise clouds.
“Just as every other computing revolution has left security to the last, cloud computing has been no different so far,” stated Richard Stiennon, founder and chief research analyst of IT-Harvest, an independent analyst firm. “Moving forward, cloud computing is going to generate a high demand for secure processes, controls, and products to lock down an otherwise world-changing technology. Rohati’s security initiative is a much needed step in this direction.”
Enterprises leverage Rohati solutions for securing collaboration and simplifying compliance across all users and resources. The Virtualized Cloud Security initiative enables enterprises to leverage virtualized compute infrastructures as well as rent compute capacity on demand while continuing to collaborate securely and meet compliance demands. By extending internal security and controls to workloads and data that travel between the enterprise and virtualized clouds, enterprises will be able to rapidly realize elasticity and cost-effectiveness.
“Providing ‘control and trust’ is essential when it comes to collaboration and sensitive data in the cloud,” said John Keagy, CEO and co-founder of GoGrid. “We are impressed with the accomplishments of the team behind Rohati as well as their unique new approaches to security, and we are proud of our partnership. Rohati’s Virtualized Cloud Security initiative provides powerful security and controls for accessing data and applications in the cloud, and will help end-users move to the cloud quickly and with confidence.”
“Virtualization and cloud computing have created a unique inflection point,” said Prashant Gandhi, Rohati Systems president and CEO. “It demands new and innovative approaches for enabling dynamic security and controls while simultaneously reducing complexity and rigidity. We are very pleased to work with industry thought leaders to bring our security innovations to virtualization and cloud environments.”
Rohati’s Virtualized Cloud Security initiative will expand the capabilities of its flagship product, the Transaction Networking System™ (TNS™), into virtualized servers, cloud computing, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments. Later this year, Rohati will be announcing specific product releases that support this strategic initiative. Contact Rohati at www.rohati.com/company/contact-us.php.
About Rohati Systems
Rohati Systems, a data center and cloud security company, provides award-winning Transaction Networking Systems (TNS) to enable secure collaboration and simplify regulatory compliance. The TNS patent-pending agent-less architecture implements high-performance, identity, and application-fluent policies for controlling access to data center and cloud resources without touching applications, servers, operating systems, or clients. Granular, context-based policy controls are applied to all application resources, including virtualized and mobile workloads. TNS is available as a 1-RU fixed form-factor appliance for 1G server farms or as a 5-slot modular chassis for 10G data centers.
Rohati, Transaction Networking System, TNS, and related logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Rohati Systems, Inc. All other products or company names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
CA's Support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
CA, Inc. announces that it is bringing enhanced automation and management of existing internal IT infrastructures and external cloud services to the enterprise. CA’s Business-Driven Automation, Service Management, Application Performance Management, and Database Management solutions now support the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). CA also plans to extend the capabilities of several Systems Management solutions to support Amazon EC2. The power and flexibility to manage applications in the Amazon EC2 environment as an extension of their enterprise helps customers achieve Lean IT.
“To further maximize the benefits of cloud computing many enterprises want management capabilities that allow them to discover, monitor and provision their physical and virtualized resources as a unified set of integrated services,” said David Williams, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. “At the same time, as infrastructure components move into the cloud, enterprises must manage the transaction flow of business-critical applications across physical, virtual and cloud environments in order to effectively measure service quality levels.”
The support of CA Spectrum(R) Automation Manager, CA CMDB, CA Service Desk Manager, CA Wily Introscope(R), and CA Insight(TM) Database Performance Manager (DPM) for Amazon EC2 can enable customers to achieve Lean IT by helping them to:
* increase efficiency and reduce costs by streamlining processes, improving server utilization, and optimizing energy consumption patterns by provisioning capacity to Amazon EC2;
* reduce risk by automating rapid, policy-based responses to changing business demands, facilitating improved security and compliance;
* improve end-user response times and service performance across existing infrastructure and Amazon EC2 while triaging bottlenecks by monitoring transactions across these infrastructure components.
“By recognizing the benefits of the cloud and taking steps to manage it as a critical component of their IT architectures, enterprises can accelerate IT’s potential to transform business,” said Stephen Elliot, vice president of Strategy for CA’s Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit. “Extending our management solutions to include Amazon EC2 helps customers achieve Lean IT by delivering unprecedented agility and efficiency between existing internal infrastructure and Amazon EC2.”
“As more enterprises embrace cloud services as a solution to cost-effectively optimize the supply of IT resources, many are interested in comprehensive management capabilities between existing internal infrastructure and the cloud,” said Terry Wise, director of Business Development for Amazon Web Services. “We are pleased to be working with CA to help our mutual customers take advantage of Amazon EC2 as a simple extension of their enterprise IT infrastructure.”
CA’s Business-Driven Automation strategy is designed to provide IT organizations the flexibility to respond to changing business demands as they occur. CA Spectrum Automation Manager provides full support of Amazon EC2 resources. The integration of the two solutions can help organizations realize the cost savings, scalability and improved service quality that cloud computing offers. By using informed automation and process automation, CA Spectrum Automation Manager allows customers to dynamically and rapidly respond to fluctuations in resource demand through automatic provisioning and configuration of Amazon EC2 resources.
Further integration with CA Service Desk Manager (that includes CA CMDB) governs the change and configuration management process for provisioned Amazon EC2 resources. CA Service Desk Manager allows IT organizations to track change requests to help facilitate compliance with business best practices, ITIL process models, and regulatory rules and procedures. Adding Amazon EC2 infrastructure to the 360-degree view of individual infrastructure components lets CA Service Desk Manager perform impact analysis on planned changes to help avoid business disruptions.
The support of CA Wily Introscope, a key component of the CA Wily Application Performance Management solution, for Amazon EC2 allows enterprises to maintain the visibility of transactions and business processes through internal physical or virtual systems and their external cloud resources hosted on Amazon EC2. CA Wily Introscope helps customers ensure that applications address business and service level goals by helping them to proactively identify, triage and resolve performance problems before end users are impacted.
Customers can gain even more benefits by using CA Spectrum Automation Manager and CA Insight DPM in conjunction with CA Wily Introscope. Using real-time application and database performance metrics enables enterprises to make infrastructure provisioning decisions with the end user in mind. The integration of these solutions can help customers achieve Lean IT by eliminating waste and increasing efficiency.
CA Insight DPM helps customers improve availability and performance of databases running in physical, virtual and/or Amazon EC2 environments. Customers can now place their databases in the cloud and continue to proactively manage their performance.
To provide additional business value, CA also plans to architect several of its Systems Management solutions to support the Amazon EC2. For example, updates to CA eHealth(R) Performance Manager, CA Spectrum(R) Infrastructure Manager, and CA NSM currently planned will provide customers the ability to remotely monitor the health and performance of Amazon Web Services-based resources as an integrated and natural extension of existing in-house IT infrastructure.
For more information about CA’s solutions for managing cloud computing environments, please visit http://www.ca.com/cloud.
About CA
CA (Nasdaq: CA) is the world’s leading independent IT management software company. With CA’s Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision and expertise, organizations can more effectively govern, manage and secure IT to optimize business performance and sustain competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.ca.com.
Informatica Corporation
Informatica Corporation, a leading provider of data integration software, today announced the beta release of Informatica PowerCenter Cloud Edition, an innovative cloud computing data integration product running on Amazon EC2. Complementing this new product is the latest Informatica On Demand offering, PowerCenter Service, to enable IT and business users to remotely execute and manage data integration jobs on Amazon EC2, simply by using an Internet browser.
With growing adoption of cloud computing, enterprises often collect and manage data in disparate silos across the enterprise, the cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. To gain a competitive advantage from all this data, organisations require a solution for cross-enterprise data integration. PowerCenter Cloud Edition is a comprehensive and affordable product to address these requirements.
To leverage cloud computing as an extension to traditional on-premise computing infrastructure, many enterprises want robust remote administration capabilities to better enable migration of data as well as management of data. Informatica On Demand PowerCenter Service offers a simple, yet powerful facility to address these requirements.
“Informatica was an early believer in cloud computing and pioneered both cross-enterprise data integration with remote connectivity for Software-as-a-Service vendors and Integration-as-a-Service with Informatica On Demand services,” said Girish Pancha, executive vice president and general manager, Data Integration at Informatica. “With the introduction today of Informatica’s first data integration offering for Amazon Web Services (AWS), our customers can get the best of both worlds – lowering their total cost of ownership with cloud computing infrastructure, while gaining a competitive advantage from all their data.”
Comprehensive Data Integration Offering for Amazon EC2
The PowerCenter Cloud Edition is a broad data integration offering that leverages Amazon EC2. Thousands of organisations successfully rely on PowerCenter for their on-premise enterprise data integration projects. Now, with the flexibility of deploying PowerCenter on-premise or on Amazon EC2, IT departments can optimise for both performance and network costs by running PowerCenter “near” the primary data sources. At the same time, IT departments can optimise for hardware, software and labor costs by leveraging the cloud computing model provided by AWS with the pay-as-you-use PowerCenter Cloud Edition pricing.
In addition, Informatica On Demand is powered by PowerCenter to deliver cross-enterprise data integration services. Informatica On Demand was rated “Best Data Integration App of 2008” by Salesforce.com customers and is in use by more than 250 companies of all sizes.
The PowerCenter Cloud Edition leverages Amazon EC2, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3 and also provides access to a variety of enterprise data sources including relational databases, flat files and SaaS applications.
“We are pleased that our mutual customers can now leverage Amazon EC2 when using PowerCenter,” said Terry Wise, Director of Partner Relations for Amazon Web Services. “With the release of PowerCenter Cloud Edition for Amazon EC2, customers can smoothly integrate all their off-premise cloud-based data and on-premise data.”
“During the past five years, the incredible growth around cloud computing has dramatically shifted the IT landscape,” said Srinivas Pallia, Sr. Vice President and Global Head, Business Technology Services, Wipro Technologies. “Our clients continue to seek our expertise to leverage the power of the cloud in order to gain a competitive advantage, realise cost savings and performance benefits. Informatica’s move onto Amazon EC2 will be beneficial to customers of all sizes and in all geographies. We look forward to continuing to work with Informatica to best serve our customers’ data integration needs, both on premise and in the cloud.”
Simple Remote Administration with Informatica On Demand
With the Informatica On Demand PowerCenter Service Summer 2009 release, the new PowerCenter Service will enable business and IT users to productively manage PowerCenter Cloud Edition-based data integrations jobs running remotely on Amazon EC2. The combination of PowerCenter Cloud Edition and Informatica On Demand PowerCenter Service will dramatically simplify data integration without requiring on-premise hardware or software.
“With no additional capital expenses, Informatica deployed the PowerCenter Cloud Edition on Amazon EC2 to integrate off-premise employee spend data managed by a SaaS vendor with on-premise data managed by our enterprise human resources application” said Tony Young, CIO of Informatica. “With Amazon Web Services we lowered our IT costs and with PowerCenter, we integrated all our data to gain a greater competitive advantage for our business. Now, our customers can do ‘more with less’ with the latest Informatica cloud computing data integration offerings.”
Pricing and Availability
The Informatica PowerCenter Cloud Edition on Amazon EC2 is offered with both pay-as-you-use pricing starting at $24.95 per hour and traditional perpetual license pricing. The PowerCenter Cloud Edition is available today on Amazon EC2 as a beta release, with production release planned for September 2009.
The PowerCenter Service is available immediately as part of the Informatica On Demand Summer 2009 release.
For more information about the PowerCenter Cloud Edition, and all Cloud Data Integration solutions offered by Informatica, please visit www.informatica.com.
About Informatica
Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA) is the world’s number one independent leader in data integration software. The Informatica Platform provides corporations with a comprehensive, unified, open and economical approach to lower IT costs and gain competitive advantage from their information assets. More than 3,700 companies worldwide rely on Informatica to access, integrate and trust their information assets held in the traditional enterprise and in the internet cloud. For more information, visit www.informatica.com.
The cloud CRM provider unveiled the facility at a company event here, with top Singapore trade officials also in attendance. The data center, located at the eastern side of the island-state, was first announced by the company a year-and-a-half ago. At the same time, Salesforce also unveiled a new offering that lets Singapore enterprises build and run their “first” application for free on Force.com, the company’s cloud computing platform. Singapore is the only country, outside the United States, where the company is availing the offer, though executives said it intends to make the same offer to the rest of the world in the “next two to four weeks.
The Force.com Free Edition, as Salesforce calls it, is intended to lure enterprises to have a taste of running an application over the cloud before they are charged for succeeding applications. Once hooked up, customers can develop their own applications or buy them from AppExchange, a marketplace for applications that run on Force.com. he company said “customers and partners” built about 120,000 business applications on Force.com, while there are some 800 applications available on AppExchange.
Salesforce officials said the Asia-Pacific region stands to benefit from cloud computing as both small and midsize businesses (SMBs), as well as big corporations can take advantage of the cheaper cost of operating a business over the Internet. As proof that a “paradigm shift” in the computing landscape has already transpired, Salesforce executives said it already exceeded US$1 billion in annual revenue early this year.
However, enterprises are also concerned about security, quality of service, integration, compliance, lock-in, and the long-term costs of public clouds. Private clouds for the exclusive use of one enterprise can however mitigate these concerns by giving the enterprise greater control. 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, colocated with 7th International Virtualization Conference & Expo 2009, which will take place November 2-4, 2009, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley offers a number of sponsorship and exhibitor packages.
ll platinum sponsorships were sold out by June 2009 and other sponsorship opportunities are expected to be sold out before the event date, and currently offered at a first-come first-served basis. SVP of Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager, will explore how enterprises are likely to adopt public and private cloud computing, building on a foundation of virtualization infrastructure and management systems.
It was inevitable, and I just missed the release by a few months, however, Microsoft is working hard on releasing the “Private Cloud”, your own on-premises cloud computing software. ith the Microsoft cloud strategy, organizations can now move towards cloud computing models with the confidence that their existing investments in their datacenter are safe, and can be leveraged in this new paradigm. Existing applications and services will be able to move to the private cloud without the need to learn unproven technologies or introduce unnecessary complexity.
Microsoft is enabling customers to build the foundation for a private cloud infrastructure using Windows Server and System Center family of products with the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Enterprises, availability scheduled in the first half of 2010.
HP Software & Solutions (HPSS) Professional Services provided the domain knowledge to support Verizon Business’ CaaS architecture. HPSS Professional Services assisted with the design and implementation of Verizon CaaS. “HP’s industry leadership and strategy around ‘everything-as-a-service’ is enabling us to deliver what we believe is truly a best-in-class cloud solution.”
Automated processes include incident resolution, change orchestration and routine maintenance tasks standardized in a manner that enforces compliance processes. Offers a reporting engine for data centers and records all operational data associated with change information. It also offers open interfaces to extract and integrate HP Service Automation Reporter data with other Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs).
Guy Bunker, chief scientist at Symantec, said that cloud service administrators had “god-like status” when it came to accessing confidential data. He said that there were already low-key legal cases being taken against cloud service providers, where administrators had access to data.
Bunker said: “This isn’t just cases in the cloud – we’ve seen this in enterprises where somebody within the organisation who has access to the data has decided to take it and sell it on to somebody else.” Bunker was speaking at a Symantec-held event about how businesses should cope with cloud computing in terms of security. The Symantec expert also said that enterprises often didn’t know what their sensitive information was or even where it was, and that the cloud compounded the issue.
Other speakers suggested that there was no possible international regulatory solution when it came to securing cloud computing, and that the best hope was for businesses to organise a technical standards body. John Carr, secretary of the UK’s Children Charity Coalition for Internet Safety, suggested that there should be a ‘kitemark’ - a technical standard for cloud computing. He said: “Only the businesses can do that. I seriously doubt there is any governmental institution that can get even close. Bunker said: “This isn’t just cases in the cloud – we’ve seen this in enterprises where somebody within the organisation who has access to the data has decided to take it and sell it on to somebody else.”
I believe that cloud computing will revolutionize the way enterprises obtain business and IT services and change the kind of payback they get from their IT investments,” said Rich Marcello, president, Unisys Systems and Technology. “Our clients tell us that they see great value in moving enterprise applications and data to the cloud. However they have lacked the comprehensive security to make them confident in doing so.” Underpinning this strategy is Unisys Stealth security solution, a data protection technology initially designed for government applications and now available to commercial clients. The Unisys Stealth technology cloaks data through multiple levels of authentication and encryption, bit-splitting data into multiple packets so it moves invisibly across networks and protects data in the Unisys secure cloud.
Using Unisys services and technologies, organizations can create a private cloud within their data centers, a public cloud through secure Unisys-managed cloud solutions, or a hybrid cloud solution combining the best of both private and Unisys-managed cloud services. The Unisys cloud computing strategy enables clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed, automated IT infrastructures to Unisys-managed cloud services. This allows clients to reap the economic benefits of cloud services more quickly.
- Cloud Transformation Services, a portfolio of advisory and implementation services that help clients assess potential cloud computing options and determine which option best suits their needs or financial objectives.
Unisys also is planning a Stealth solution for data security on storage area networks (SAN) by providing the same cloaking capability for “data at rest” in a virtualized storage environment. Integrated with the new Unisys Secure Cloud Solution, the Unisys Stealth technology enables encrypted “data in motion” to remain invisible as it traverses the infrastructure until it is reassembled upon delivery to authorized users. As client needs or data security requirements dictate, the Unisys Secure Cloud Solution can balance workloads across a global network of Unisys data centers, which are certified to key international standards such as ISO/IEC 27001:2005 for security, ISO/IEC 20000 for service management and the SAS 70 Type II auditing standard.
The new services include Secure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), for provisioning physical and virtual servers that both scale out and scale up; Secure Platform as a Service (PaaS), which provides a Java software stack, with .NET support planned, to make it easier for clients to move their applications to the cloud without making changes; My Secure Application as a Service (AaaS), for automatic provisioning of IT resources to support applications with multi-tier architectures; and Secure Software as a Service (SaaS), which provides access to hosted applications. Unisys plans a “cloud-in-a-box” solution as a comprehensive IT infrastructure package, enabling quick and cost-effective implementation of a private cloud. This solution will include virtualization capabilities, automation of ITIL best practices for service management, and Unisys Converged Remote Infrastructure Management capabilities, with Unisys Stealth solution as an option for extreme security.
AppZero 4.0
Server application virtualization pioneer AppZero has announced general availability of AppZero 4.0 for Windows. Targeted at enterprises and ISVs that want to move Windows server applications from the datacenter to a cloud computing environment, AppZero encapsulates server side applications as virtual application appliances (VAAs). This enables 100% mobility and nearly instant provisioning of applications as services across a network, on any server (physical or virtual), in the datacenter or in the cloud. AppZero is offering a free two-week down load of AppZero 4.0 at http://www.appzero.com/content/download.
By separating the application from the operating system, legacy and new applications — such as those built on SQL Server, Oracle, IBM, SAP or open source stacks that include MySQL — can be quickly moved across different servers and to and from clouds such as GoGrid and Amazon EC2. AppZero’s VAA approach is designed specifically to address the complexity and challenge of server application virtualization for today’s datacenter and cloud computing environments. VAAs are pre-installed, preconfigured applications that contain zero OS, permitting mobility without violation of Windows licensing agreements.
Serve-side application virtualization is setting the standard for next generation datacenters and cloud computing
So far, application virtualization has been confined to the desktop. Now Windows server based applications can benefit from application isolation and mobility, as well as lower lifecycle costs, freeing businesses to run applications wherever they want.
“Serve-side application virtualization is setting the standard for next generation datacenters and cloud computing,” said Greg O’Connor, AppZero president and CEO. “So far, application virtualization has been confined to the desktop. Now Windows server based applications can benefit from application isolation and mobility, as well as lower lifecycle costs, freeing businesses to run applications wherever they want.” AppZero for Windows 4.0 offers a dramatic step forward by allowing server applications to work without an operating system, providing freedom from licensing restrictions, while offering an easy on ramp to the cloud, O’Connor said.
Benefits for the Enterprises, ISVs and Cloud Providers
AppZero is a critical component in the next generation datacenter, providing a wide range of benefits for enterprises, ISVs and cloud computing providers, with dramatic cost savings in application lifecycle, server and application management costs, as well as unprecedented application mobility and support for dynamic workloads in the cloud.
For Enterprises:
* A risk-free way to move applications to the cloud with no modification to applications and without cloud lock-in
* Makes disaster recovery of second-tier applications a near-zero cost option
* Dramatically reduces the application lifecycle costs
For ISVs:
* Automated proof-of-concept engagements that are instantaneous and error free
* Eases and accelerates ISVs moving to a SaaS model
* An appliance distribution model that works for Windows
For cloud providers:
* Speed and cost-efficiency in provisioning server-side applications allow cloud providers to offer higher value/margin services to clients
* Seamless cloud on- and off- ramp drives adoption without fear of cloud lock-in
Key AppZero for Windows 4.0 feature improvements include:
* 64-bit infrastructure support for Microsoft Windows 2003 and 2008 Server
* Remote run from centralized storage over the network
* No installation or copying required for running
* VAA mobility - Application can be provisioned and moved between servers, from the datacenter to the cloud, cloud to cloud, or from the cloud to the data center.
AppZero is available immediately through channel partners. Suggested retail pricing for AppZero starts at $500 per VAA instance per year.
About AppZero
AppZero develops software for creating, controlling and maintaining Virtual Application Appliances (VAAs), server-side application appliances that make provisioning of applications as services almost instantaneous: across a network, on any server (physical or virtual), in the datacenter, hosted, or in the cloud. For more information, visit www.AppZero.com.
