Management Toolkit

HP service aims to strengthen trust in the cloud

Colin Barker ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 01 Apr 2009 16:50 BST

HP has launched Cloud Assure, a suite of three applications available as cloud services, in an effort to forestall user concerns about trusting their own applications to the cloud.

Worries about the technology are "an impediment to wider adoption of cloud services", HP said in a statement on Tuesday. "IT organisations [are] unable to ensure the security, performance and availability of the cloud services they provide or consume."

For that reason, the company said, it has moved three of its standard applications into Cloud Assure: Application Security Center, Performance Center and Business Availability Center, and made them available as software-as-a-service (SaaS).

HP is backing up the services with a team of "expert engineers", according to HP, which will perform security scans, executes performance tests and uses availability monitoring.

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Cloud Assure will give access to and control over three types of cloud-service environment, the company said. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) aims to ensure there is sufficient bandwidth, along with the most appropriate network, operating systems and middleware security. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) aims to help customers who are building application test and verify that they have the correct security, and are building the right applications that can scale correctly. And finally, HP SaaS will monitor end-user service levels of the cloud applications, apply load tests for a business process and test for security penetration, the company said.

HP SaaS will be available through the company's channel partners and is not available for users to buy, according to HP. The company did not release any pricing details but said that Assure is available from Wednesday.