SEATTLE, WASH. – February 14, 2011 – Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, is furthering its leadership in cloud automation with a set of usability and security features focused on self-service set-up and management of hybrid clouds. Using the new features, enterprises and software vendors can create and deploy hybrid clouds in under ten minutes. New features include:
- Self-service hybrid clouds with secure networking
- VPN-aware Skytap templates, configurations and snapshots
- Dynamic switching of network connections
These new capabilities come on the heels of Skytap’s $10 million series C round of funding, which is being used to accelerate innovation of the company’s flagship cloud automation platform.
Setting up and configuring a hybrid cloud has been a costly, complex, and time consuming endeavor for most enterprises and software vendors. Current tools in the market require additional investments in either VPN hardware and set-up, or significant configuration, coding and testing. Functional users, which want to use the cloud for development and testing and IT sandbox projects, have limited time and resources to overcome these challenges. They need a simple, secure, and self-service solution.
“Hybrid clouds promise the best of both worlds, i.e., enterprises can manage their cloud resources with the security of internal systems, but with the scale offered by a cloud service provider,” said Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. “However, the complexity of deploying a dynamic hybrid cloud environment presents a barrier to adoption. In order to ease the burden, IT should look for technologies that enable the rapid set-up and operational management of this emerging unified computing infrastructure.”
With this new release, Skytap brings point and click set-up simplicity to enable rapid hybrid cloud deployments. Skytap administrators can manage the cloud as an extension of their data centers and empower functional users to create hybrid cloud environments without adding any IT support burden. Authorized functional users can create and use hybrid clouds with point and click ease. Using the new version, Skytap customers can:
Rapidly Deploy Secure, Self-Service Hybrid Clouds
Skytap accelerates cloud integration with in-house systems by providing administrators a graphical user interface they can use to set-up, test and configure IPSec connections from Skytap to their data centers. Once IT authorizes and provides IPSec set-up parameters, Skytap administrators can set-up, test and enable a hybrid cloud. Administrators can enhance security by restricting those connections to IP ranges permitted in Skytap. They can also explicitly include or exclude specific remote subnets. The new version provides the full visibility and control IT professionals seek to manage cloud environments, eliminates the need for coding to set up a hybrid cloud, and reduces support costs and maintenance time.
Create VPN Aware Skytap Templates and Snapshots With Point and Click Ease
Once set-up, authorized users such as developers and test engineers are empowered to create and connect their Skytap Cloud environments to in-house systems with a point-and-click ease. To ensure a seamless user experience and adoption, Skytap provides persistent connections across its templates, configurations and snapshots. Users can create multiple parallel environments with secure IPSec VPN connections using a template-driven set-up process and persist those connections across suspend/resume operations. These capabilities further accelerate application development and test cycles, improve the security of corporate assets and reduce the support burden on the IT team.
Switch Network Connections Dynamically
Skytap enables network connections to be switched dynamically, eliminating the need to stop a cloud machine to perform this task. This feature enables rapid test and development cycles and reduces a user’s reliance on IT.
“Skytap continues to rapidly introduce new innovations that accelerate enterprise cloud adoption and extend our leadership in delivering the industry’s most usable cloud solutions,” said Sundar Raghavan, chief product and marketing officer at Skytap. “Enterprise users can now secure their cloud environments, easily connect them to in-house systems, and reduce the time, cost, and IT support burden associated with hybrid clouds. We are taking yet another leap forward to deliver on the promise of cloud computing which includes business agility, IT productivity and cost savings.”
