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Cloud computing is a game-changing capability that can improve business agility and reduce costs. By adopting Skytap's technology, we've streamlined our own business and gained leading-edge skills which empower our clients to adopt cloud services. - Tony Rojas, President of Slalom Consulting

As an IT professional, you understand the need to ensure new software patches and upgrades are properly tested before going into production. Too often the IT sandbox that supports this work can be a distraction because it's difficult to provision, and doesn't support collaboration between internal teams or external vendors or partners.

Skytap's IT Sandbox solution provides a scalable, on-demand cloud platform that keeps pace with the demands on the IT sandbox. And because Skytap is delivered as a service, you can be up and running with Skytap immediately. With Skytap you empower your development and IT test teams to create environments and increase the speed by which they complete projects. Additionally, Skytap IT Sandbox solution provides IT administrators full control to ensure collaboration occurs within budget, access rights, roles, and security policies.

Key Benefits:

  • Provision new IT sandbox environments instantly
  • Enable collaboration across global teams
  • Resolve defects with configuration snapshots
  • Focus on production uptime (rather than non-production IT support)
  • Dramatically reduce administrative overhead and server sprawl
  • Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for IT environments

Provision new IT sandbox environments instantly

Skytap enables IT operations and test teams to create pre-production environments and 'check' them into a configuration library. When a change needs to be tested, an IT professional or tester can instantly start the environment and test updates before rolling them into production. This enables patches, software updates and application changes to be safely and thoroughly tested before releasing to production environments. Skytap supports efforts for in house developed applications or commercial off-the-shelf applications.

Enable collaboration across global teams

With the rise of global business, it's likely you have IT operations and administration team members working in different parts of the world. Skytap offers distributed teams a common test and development environment eliminating the challenge of inconsistent test plans or teams conflicting over resources. Skytap also has a rich user access model to enable teams to isolate external contractors in specific work areas.

Resolve issues with configuration snapshots

Skytap has the ability to snapshot a complete, running multi-machine stack including VM memory state, network configuration, and storage. This essentially solves the 'no-repro' problem where an IT professional has to painstakingly try to reproduce an issue from scratch. Instead, a user can snapshot the issue at the point of failure and include a Skytap Resource Link in an issue report. IT professionals can then spin up the environment at a later time to debug the issue, share the issue with developers, or engage a vendor in troubleshooting.

Focus on production uptime (rather than non-production IT support)

IT professionals often say dynamic workloads are 30% of the IT footprint but 70% of the work. The dynamic nature of pre-production, testing and training environments requires that IT operations teams are frequently tasked with provisioning, set-up and tear-down work which is often manual and time consuming. Adopting Skytap frees up IT operations teams to focus on production systems rather than spending cycles on pre-production and end-user support.