For full visibility and control of all your cloud communications

Linking Applications to Cloud Services

The combination of the high availability of Cloud computing infrastructure at a low cost and innovative Cloud computing services means that organizations are seriously considering turning to cloud computing to save time and money. Cloud computing platforms such as Amazon, Force.com, and Google offer significant flexibility and cost savings to businesses who seek to leverage cloud computing within their own corporate applications. However, whilst delivering on the vision of utility computing, enterprises will not migrate their entire application stacks to Clouds overnight.

The emerging consensus is for a "hybrid" model which mixes local applications with cloud computing resources. Vordel 5 Cloud Edition enables this hybrid model. Available as an "onramp" appliance for onsite use or as a virtualized software appliance in the cloud, Vordel delivers on the need to mediate the connection between local applications and cloud-based services; control access to internal applications and monitor the usage of the cloud service.

Controlling your use of the cloud
Enterprises need to consider a number of key issues when adopting cloud-based computing services. Here are some guidelines to consider when reviewing how to best manage this latest utility.

Mediate between externally and internally hosted applications
Integrating local on-site application with offsite cloud services (e.g storage services, sales force automation, queuing mechanisms etc) to leverage greater time and cost savings requires the ability to mediate between both applications. To mediate requests to cloud computing platforms, firms need to log all traffic to and from the cloud, as well as ensuring that sensitive data is not shared with the cloud computing platform. Additionally, transformation and protocol mediation may be applied between the internal applications and the cloud.

Out of the box connectors to Cloud Services
Avoid time consuming and costly hard coding by enabling engineers to drag and drop links to quickly hook internal applications into cloud services with no coding required. The example below shows a connection to Amazon Queuing Services pre-programmed into Vordel Policy Studio. This is just one of a range of connectors available.

• Monitor cloud service availability and responsiveness using Service Level Agreements (SLA)
  Ensure that you are paying for what you receive. If your business reputation depends on the integrity and availability of your service, you need to be able to monitor your cloud provider's conformance with their SLA performance deliverables.
• Safeguard and classify confidential data
  The same regulatory rules apply in the cloud as outside, e.g. SOX, HIPPA, Basle II & US Patriot Act, so companies need to enforce controls for privacy and data integrity policies when communicating using cloud services. This means enterprises need to be able to classify data according to sensitivity and protect accordingly by selective encryption or removal.
• Meter and alert cloud service usage and costs
  As firms monitor their power and telecoms consumption charges, so too will the finance department need to have full visibility of the costs and usage of the cloud computing utility service. Data transfer to cloud computing environments must be controlled, to avoid unwarranted usage levels and unanticipated bills from over usage of cloud services. By providing local metering of cloud services' usage, local control is applied to cloud computing by internal IT and finance teams.
• Conserve network bandwidth and increase performance and decrease costs
  Cache frequently accessed and transmitted data to mitigate against the threat of cloud network outages and provide a level of redundancy protection. Furthermore by caching data, this removes some of the traffic required to pass to the cloud, which instead are retrieved from the local cache, thus decreasing response times, reducing latency and allowing users to save on cloud usage costs.
• Control access between the organization and the services hosted in the cloud
  Data should only be exchanged with trusted providers.
• Audit and archive interactions with the cloud services
  From a regulatory standpoint, enterprises need to be able to offer a full traceability of each and every transaction conducted. This requires the ability to archive and audit all data.
• Secure data transfer
  Traffic to cloud computing environments uses Web and XML technologies, which have been shown to include threats. It is important to scan incoming and outbound data sent to the cloud for malicious data. Any data stored on cloud platforms needs to be encrypted as it is a common computing environment with multiple users accessing the same utility computing resources.