Whether it’s on premise or in the cloud, deploying applications is always a cumbersome task fraught with error and risk. The challenge that cloud applications add is that they are usually being deployed on top of IT infrastructure with which the internal IT organization has little to no familiarity.
To narrow the divide between IT and the cloud, Appcara recently unveiled the AppStack Express Appliance, a 3u appliance on which Appacara has deployed cloud application management and modeling tools that automate the process of deploying and provisioning applications on public or private clouds.
According to Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer for Appcara, the basic idea is to automate the management of cloud applications to the point where the average small-to-medium (SMB) organization can start taking advantage of cloud computing in the most frictionless way possible.
It’s compatible with Amazon Web Services and Citrix Xen environments, and Speciale says that while organizations with a lot of IT expertise now routinely take advantage of the cloud, the average IT organization finds deploying and managing applications on third-party cloud platforms to still be fairly challenging. The AppStack Express Appliance essentially eliminates the need to learn the lower-level tools that cloud service providers usually make available to prospective customers that wish to host applications on their services.
In addition, the AppStack Express Appliance comes loaded with a range of cloud applications that IT organizations can access via an Appcara app store that currently supports 85 packaged applications.
On premise or in the cloud, the ability to manage something starts with being able to control it. For a lot of IT organizations, cloud computing services remain beyond their control, so as far as the average IT organization is concerned, those services might as well not exist.
