Sunday 14 March 2010
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.
While the survey was far from comprehensive, it did uncover a few silver-lining facts. IT spending budgets will not be cut, with 98% saying they will generally maintain or increase their planned investment. Nearly 2/3 say the economy has created reason to invest more in one or more areas of technology. And of those, virtualization, security, systems management and cloud computing are the areas of choice. One-third of 1,200 organizations (33%) plan to convert their application environments away from a traditional, client-server model to one based on virtualization and cloud computing.
The U.S. was the hardest hit in some respects from the economic downturn but also has the opportunity of coming back faster. Nearly 70 of the IT pros we surveyed believe that their investments in IT will drive revenue growth and become a competitive advantage over the next three years.” However, one of the more surprising areas was that U.S. companies were allocating less budget toward “innovation,” and more toward maintenance than their international counterparts, said Microsoft’s Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing in an online press conference.
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.
