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HP launches Cloud Assure
31 March, 2009
By Chris Talbot |
Chris Talbot Blurb: HP has unveiled a new cloud offering that will enable businesses of all sizes to adopt cloud-based services within their organizations.
HP Cloud Assure is made up of HP software and services, including HP Application Security Center, HP Performance Center and HP Business Availability Center. It's being delivered to customers via software-as-a-service (SaaS), and HP will be supporting its Cloud Assure customers with a team of engineers that can perform security scans, execute performance tests and deploy availability monitoring for customers.
Cloud Assure is all about doing business in the cloud, said Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager of software products at HP Software & Solutions. Targeted at early adopters in the business community, Cloud Assure was developed to be a turnkey solutions offered on an annual subscription model (at pricing that HP has not yet released).
"With all that promise of having increased agility on new services faster than your competition ... and the promise of ultra-scalability, there's also risks," Purohit said about cloud computing. Cloud Assure was designed to take those risks out of the equation, he noted.
When looking at cloud computing as an alternative to on-premise IT solutions, customers worry about security, scalability and availability, he noted.
"So for some customers, while there's a lot of promises, the cloud paradigm also feels like a leap of faith," Purohit said.
Cloud Assure was designed to assure customers that the applications would deploy and continue to function the way they're supposed to, no matter from where they're being accessed in the world, he said.
It's targeted at customers that want to deploy applications into the cloud, said Scott Kupor, general manager of HP SaaS at HP Software & Solutions.
"We want to be able to give those customers the same level of confidence ... in the cloud as they do today for applications they run inside the four walls of their IT environment," Kupor said.
Cloud Assure is a packaged offering that requires no setup to take applications to the cloud and perform a series of tests on the infrastructure, he said. It provides control over three types of cloud environments -- infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service.
For HP channel partners, this will represent new opportunities, and the vendor will be supporting them through updates to its HP SaaS reseller program. Kupor noted that HP plans to make announcements soon about the specifics of the channel program updates.
Cloud Assure is available now. |
