Prepress
HP Unveils “Cloud Assure” to Drive Business Adoption of Cloud Services
Tuesday 31. March 2009 - Also expands HP Software-as-a-Service partner program to help resellers better service customers
HP today announced HP Cloud Assure, a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering designed to help businesses safely and effectively adopt cloud-based services.
HP also introduced updates to its HP SaaS reseller program that allow partners to provide added services and value to customers.
Cloud computing is a term used to describe services that can be delivered and used over the Internet through an “as-needed, pay-per-use” business model.
The promise of cloud computing is appealing because it can reduce business costs and provide greater flexibility and scalability of services throughout the enterprise. However, IT organizations unable to ensure the security, performance and availability of the cloud services they provide or consume may be putting their businesses at risk. This uncertainty can be an impediment to wider adoption of cloud services by enterprises.
“Whether providing or consuming cloud services, enterprises should be as ready to manage the risks as they are to reap the significant rewards of the cloud model,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst, IDC. “HPs new offering is aimed at addressing what IDC has identified as the top three concerns of cloud computing among enterprises – security, performance and availability.”
HP Cloud Assure consists of HP services and software, including HP Application Security Center, HP Performance Center and HP Business Availability Center, and is delivered to customers via HP SaaS. HP also provides customers with a team of expert engineers that performs security scans, executes performance tests and deploys availability monitoring.
HP Cloud Assure helps customers validate:
Security – by scanning networks, operating systems, middleware layers and web applications. It also performs automated penetration testing to identify potential vulnerabilities. This provides customers with an accurate security-risk picture of cloud services to ensure that provider and consumer data are safe from unauthorized access.
Performance – by making sure cloud services meet end-user bandwidth and connectivity requirements and provide insight into end-user experiences. This helps validate that service-level agreements are being met and can improve service quality, end-user satisfaction and loyalty with the cloud service.
Availability – by monitoring cloud-based applications to isolate potential problems and identify root causes with end-user environments and business processes and to analyze performance issues. This allows for increased visibility, service uptime and performance.
“HP helps Akamai validate to our enterprise prospects and customers the performance and availability improvements we provide in the cloud,” said Willie M. Tejada, vice president, Application and Site Acceleration for Akamai Technologies, a Massachusetts-based service provider for accelerating content and applications online. “HP SaaS confirms the benefits of our dynamic Web acceleration services and will be important to us as we continue to introduce additional functionality that helps businesses effectively optimize the cloud.”
HP Cloud Assure provides control over the three types of cloud service environments:
For Infrastructure as a Service, it helps ensure sufficient bandwidth ability and validates appropriate levels of network, operating system and middleware security to prevent intrusion and denial-of-service attacks.
For Platform as a Service, it helps ensure customers who build applications using a cloud platform are able to test and verify that they have securely and effectively built applications that can scale and meet the business needs.
For Software as a Service, it monitors end-user service levels on the cloud applications, loads tests from a business process perspective and tests for security penetration.
“There is no question that cloud computing is providing a new set of opportunities for businesses, but it presents new risks as well,” said Scott Kupor, vice president, Software as a Service, HP. “With over nine years of SaaS experience and a leading portfolio of solutions in security, performance and availability, HP is uniquely positioned to help assure our customers can leverage the promise of cloud while removing risk from the equation.”