News

HP Selling Cloud Assurance to Enterprises

Helps enterprise IT departments adopt and manage cloud-based services

• By Herb Torrens
• 04/02/2009

HP rolled out a service suite this week to help enterprise IT departments adopt and manage cloud-based services.

The suite, called HP Cloud Assure, is a turnkey package of services and best practices delivered in the cloud and performed "against the cloud," according to Tim Van Ash, director of product strategies for HP SaaS.

HP developed the software as a service (SaaS) bundle in response to enterprise user questions about cloud-based services, particularly with regard to "security, performance, and availability," Van Ash said.

The new SaaS package includes HP Application Security Center, HP Performance Center, and HP Business Availability Center, which are existing HP offerings for testing cloud-based services.

HP Cloud Assure is designed to address those functionalities in most cloud platforms, including SalesForce.com and Microsoft's Azure Services Platform.

"We can test, validate, and monitor user experience in a variety of environments," Van Ash noted. "We monitor environments from more than 80 POPs [points of presence] located around the world, and we deploy load testing that can simulate hundreds of thousands of users."

HP Cloud Assure is subscription based, with modular offerings of one to three months for specific services or a standard package of 12 months.

Van Ash said that HP "owns and runs" its Cloud Assure solution, which is delivered from a network of 45 large commercial datacenters.

HP's engineers perform assessments, ongoing management of service levels and customer support remotely. The "turnkey" package includes network scans, Web application assessments, load tests, network bandwidth tests and other operations that monitor and measure security, performance and availability, according to Van Ash.

The HP SaaS reseller program has been updated to include a "partner-led delivery option" for HP Cloud Assure.

"Currently, partners can provide the performance and availability components," an HP spokesperson explained. "The security component is currently being delivered directly by HP SaaS due to limited expertise in the marketplace around application security vulnerabilities."

Partners are expected to start delivering those two services by year's end.

HP defines cloud computing as "services that can be delivered and used over the Internet through an as-needed, pay-per-use model," according to HP's announcement.

More information about HP Cloud Assure is available here.