Last few months saw the proliferation of Cloud Computing into all parts of US federal government, aided by a cloud friendly policy of Obama administration. In my opinion, government’s jump into Cloud Computing is a strong validation for the cloud based services. Rhetorically speaking, if the government can trust the clouds, what is the problem with the enterprises?
Two weeks back, we came across the news that CIA, America’s spy agency, was comfortable with the use of cloud technology but only in the form of internal private clouds. Knowing the sensitive nature of the business, it is quite understandable that certain aspects of Government like intelligence gathering, defense, etc. will always stay inside the firewalls. But, by tapping the cloud architecture, they can take advantage of some of the benefits of cloud computing making them more agile and efficient. Yesterday, Appistry (See Cloud Ave’s previous coverage here and here) announced that they have partnered with NJVC to help Department of Defense (DoD) build private cloud for their consumption. NJVC is the largest information technology provider, including distributed technical services, for US DoD. By joining hands, Appistry and NJVC will develop a joint cloud computing solution addressing the unique security requirements of the intelligence and defense communities.
The defense cloud built by Appistry and NJVC will solve the problems associated with delivering mission-critical applications via their existing legacy data center architectures. The private cloud built with Appistry CloudIQ Platform, the IT departments of defense and intelligence agencies will be able to transform networks of commodity-grade servers into an agile cloud environment that can be easily scaled and managed to support sophisticated Web, SOA and analytical applications.
Appistry seems to be having a very busy month of October. Two weeks back, they released CloudIQ Platform 4.1 which was designed to further simplify enterprise cloud computing. This new version simplifies support for cross-datacenter private clouds, hybrid clouds, and the migration of multi-tier enterprise systems to the cloud by using what is known as Appistry Network Bridge, which enables customers to more easily deploy private cloud environments across network boundaries. The role of the bridge is to simplify the unification of a single private cloud, usually belonging to an enterprise, to various external datacenters and, also, to the public clouds. This completely takes away the pain of managing the disparate resources while providing the advantages of a cloud. Moreover, this also ensures easy disaster recovery and continuity of operations. Their CloudIQ Platform community edition is a free download for upto 5 servers (10 processors).
Cloud Computing is taking both the enterprises and government departments by a storm, maximizing reliability while minimizing costs, and companies like Appistry are accelerating the adoption by developing solutions that makes implementations easier. We are just starting to see the advantages of Cloud Computing in both enterprise and government. With the further maturation of technologies and advances on the security front, exciting things are going to happen completely changing the way IT is done inside these organizations.
