By Colin Barker, 2 April 2009 09:27
NEWS
HP has launched Cloud Assure, a suite of three applications available as cloud services, in an effort to forestall user concerns about trusting their own applications to the cloud.
Worries about the technology are "an impediment to wider adoption of cloud services", HP said in a statement on Tuesday. "IT organisations [are] unable to ensure the security, performance and availability of the cloud services they provide or consume."
For that reason, the company said, it has moved three of its standard applications into Cloud Assure: Application Security Center, Performance Center and Business Availability Center, and made them available as software-as-a-service (SaaS).
HP is backing up the services with a team of "expert engineers", according to HP, which will perform security scans, executes performance tests and uses availability monitoring.
Cloud Assure will give access to and control over three types of cloud-service environment, the company said. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) aims to ensure there is sufficient bandwidth, along with the most appropriate network, operating systems and middleware security. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) aims to help customers who are building application test and verify that they have the correct security, and are building the right applications that can scale correctly. And finally, HP SaaS will monitor end-user service levels of the cloud applications, apply load tests for a business process and test for security penetration, the company said.
HP SaaS will be available through the company's channel partners and is not available for users to buy, according to HP. The company did not release any pricing details but said that Assure is available from Wednesday.
Comments
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1. Ian Farrell
As large corporates dying of liquidity problems and high speed web connections destined only to reach large conurbations as telcos cut back on investment, perhaps this is not the right time to be trusting the cloud, which is after all just a collection of servers buried in a building somewhere.
Coupled with a number of high profile on-line storage providers either loosing user data or cutting off services I would have thought that this was the moment to be rolling out faster, less power hungry servers and selling large UPS and alternative power supply technologies.
2. James Button
Have the directors and senior management of HP put up suitable bonds to cover my losses should I not be able to access the data and facilities within the 'cloud'
I ask this because the current laws do not protect me from having someone purchase the 'cloud' storage devices, or even the entire organisation.
And - the first thing 'receivers' tend to do with organisations they 'manage' is sell off the client lists and the physical assets.
Indeed, most countries laws seem to require them to do that