Integrating hybrid clouds that consist of multiple applications is one thing. But keeping two or more cloud instances running the same application synchronized with each other in a hybrid cloud environment represents a whole other level of complexity.
Back to Basics: Objectives for Successful Cloud Adoption
This week, Skytap is rising to the challenge by adding support for a Network Address Translation (NAT) capability that provides one-to-one mapping of IP and MAC addresses between different cloud instances.
According to Sumit Mehrotra, director of product management at Skytap, this capability is critical for any organization attempting to distribute applications among private, on-premise clouds and any third-party cloud service provider or between multiple data centers managed by the cloud service provider.
In addition to making it easier to keep multiple cloud instances synchronized, Skytap also provides a command line interface (CLI) to help manage applications running on the Skytap cloud. Mehrotra says this capability will give IT organizations more granular control over the Skytap cloud environment.
Finally, Skytap is also adding support for single sign-on capabilities that will make it easier for IT administrators to log in and out of multiple cloud environments.
The best cloud service option is going to be the one that gives the IT organization the most amount of control over the environment. Many cloud service providers, of course, want to limit access to their environments to high-level RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs). But for many IT operations teams, that kind of high-level access to a cloud computing environment just isn’t going to cut it.
In fact, as cloud computing becomes just another tier of enterprise computing, there really is no reason why cloud environments shouldn’t be managed just like an extension of the data center, as opposed to a completely different environment that the internal IT organization has little control over.
