In a recent article for ReadWriteWeb, Matt Asay talks about the very real need for IT to have security and control without becoming a bottleneck.
From the article:
It’s hard to believe, but just 10 years ago open source was considered “communist,” an anti-American cancer and the terror of corporate legal departments everywhere. Now, as a recent Harvard Business Review article reports, it’s business as usual. Mundane, even. Developers are to blame. Getting projects done proved far easier with open-source software than protracted licensing negotiations for proprietary software.
Now this same human desire to evade bureaucracy and foster productivity is driving broad adoption of cloud services, and this time it’s not just developers driving adoption. Lines of business executives are also encouraging Shadow IT to skirt enterprise policies. The catch is that it is also introducing all sorts of security and management quandaries.
The cloud is here to stay—and with good reason. IT organizations know that using on-premise resources to serve unpredictable usage patterns, frequent setup and tear-down requirements, and minimal change management processes can result in wasted capacity or under provisioning. This then leads to cost inefficiencies, pervasive shadow IT across organizations, and a lack of visibility and control over cloud deployments for virtual environments.
So how are IT organizations taking on these challenges—gaining security and control without becoming a bottleneck? Many are turning to a hybrid cloud strategy.
A hybrid cloud strategy creates opportunities for IT to align costs with resource allocation, and maintain visibility and control of users, policies, applications, budget, and security. Using Skytap Cloud, for example, these objectives can be achieved by leveraging a secure VPN connection (via IPsec), quickly created using Skytap AutoNetworks™ technology. And because Skytap Cloud serves as a secure extension of on-premise infrastructure, users can migrate additional resource elements into the cloud, easily and securely.
Skytap Cloud provides IT with full visibility and control of resource allocation, usage, alerting, and reporting. IT maintains full control of network security, access, and authentication policies, and the creation and assignment of cloud computing resources to users, groups, and projects.
Enterprises can move workloads like development and testing, virtual training, and Demo/POC environments to a secure hybrid cloud, thereby creating a seamless and secure extension to their own existing internal IT infrastructure, resources, and processes. The end game: IT can achieve complete governance and reporting, giving teams visibility and control across a global pool of computing resources, projects, profiles, and build artifacts.
