Salesforce Unfurls Heroku Enterprise PaaS Environment

How to Assess Your Critical Cloud Service Providers

With more IT organizations looking to build and deploy applications in the cloud, interest in platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments that provide both the software and hardware needed to run these applications is on the rise. The challenge for many IT organizations is that they operate in environments where the sharing of public cloud services is frowned upon.

To provide cloud services to those organizations that for one reason or another can’t employ public cloud services, Salesforce today added a Heroku Enterprise PaaS service to its App Cloud portfolio.

Brian Goldfarb, senior vice president for AppCloud at Salesforce, says Heroku Enterprise gives IT organizations their own private space on Salesforce AppCloud that can be located in any one of seven data center locations they choose. In addition, Salesforce provides access to identity management tools to provide more levels of security to any of the application code running on Heroku Enterprise, says Goldfarb.

In general, Goldfarb says, going forward, cloud computing by definition is going to be hybrid. But instead of concentrating on a comprehensive management framework to manage it all, that may very well never really exist, Goldfarb says IT organizations should be focusing on the logic layer that will enable them to manage processes as a service. In that context, a specific business process may consist of several applications running both on premise and in the cloud. The goal should be to make it simpler to move data across any given set of processes while using the tools optimized for any specific platform to manage the IT environments that support that process, says Goldfarb.

In the name of business agility, IT organizations have come to embrace cloud computing. The challenge they now face is that, by definition, IT becomes more challenging to manage in a hybrid cloud computing world. Most IT organizations today don’t have all the tools required to rise to that challenge. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be pulling together a strategy for managing those hybrid cloud environments starting today.