Internet services provider Internet Solutions has introduced SkyLight, a service which the company says is the "first aggregated cloud services portal" of its kind.
According to Internet Solutions, SkyLight provides access to local and global cloud platforms through a single portal. With one easy-to-use interface, the portal offers users on-demand access to cloud services operated by Amazon, EC2, Microsoft Azure, Internet Solutions Cloud and Dimension Data Cloud.
This means enterprises can create the virtual environments that are most appropriate for their business through selecting one virtual environment for their entire business, or can select different environments for different departments, deployments or workloads, says the company.
Speaking at the launch of SkyLight in Johannesburg yesterday, Andrew Aitken, Cloud Business Unit executive at Internet Solutions, said organisations no longer need to commit to a single platform that may not be ideal for their requirements, or face the laborious tasks of optimising and collating services across multiple platforms.
"Organisations often struggle to make a decision regarding which cloud service provider to place their business on, and once they've decided, a year later they discover their chosen platform is not exactly meeting their business requirements," he explained.
Secondly, he added, the various cloud platforms themselves continue to evolve.
"An organisation may make a decision on a platform of their choice based on the features and functionality it provides, but in six months' time, they may find that an alternative company has delivered features and functionality that are more relevant to the workload and services which they require," he pointed out.
This is probably the single biggest issue that organisations grapple with when taking their data to the cloud, he continued.
"SkyLight is the answer to these challenges, as it delivers the promise of cloud computing by enabling the ease and flexibility of multiple services that have been lacking, as well as the visibility that enterprises demand.
"Instead of purchasing infrastructure based on requirements and financial projections decided years ago, through SkyLight, an enterprise pays only for the IT services it needs, when it needs it, and at the appropriate scale," Aitken elaborated.
He noted CIOs and CFOs in particular are attracted by the proposition that cloud computing turns the economics of enterprise IT on its head and on-site data centres are prohibitively costly capital investments, whereas the cloud allows consideration of an operating expenditure model because those hard costs are eliminated.
Saki Missaikos, MD of Internet Solutions, said his company has invested more than two years into the development of SkyLight in order to transform cloud computing from a platform-centric to a user-centric service.
"Cloud computing offers enterprises tremendous advantage from a financial, operational and sustainability perspective, but only if their business requirements are central to the design of their virtual environment," he explained.
Missaikos pointed out with user-centric cloud services like SkyLight, enterprises can look forward to a future in which CIOs and IT departments are freed from managing physical assets like servers and data centres.
"Whether users provision a single machine or many, SkyLight enables a range of security and performance management functions across all virtual environments and on all cloud platforms, including monitoring of firewalls, networks, usage and load balancers," asserted Missaikos.
According to Internet Solutions, custom permissions, detailed audit logs and roll-back functionality are built in, making it easy to maintain proper levels of IT governance in the virtual environment.
SkyLight also offers an extraordinary degree of control over the virtual environment through providing an immediate, holistic view of how virtual machines are performing - from both a usage and security perspective. CIOs and IT staff can make informed decisions about how to manage services in the most cost-effective and efficient manner, says the company.
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