Cloud Computing Expo at Ulitzer

Vordel, a provider of governance products for Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) announced at VordelWorld, its annual user conference in Dublin, Ireland, the release of the Vordel Cloud Service Broker. The Vordel Cloud Service Broker aggregates and manages multi-domain services. This creates a trusted environment for enterprises to leverage the benefits of Cloud Computing.

Organizations who wish to use Cloud services in conjunction with their own SOA and those of their partners face major issues related to reliability and trustworthiness. One significant challenge is aggregating services from multiple domains including Public, Private and Community Clouds - into coherent composite services and applying policies to them. The Vordel Cloud Service Broker solves this multi-domain problem by registering services from all three domains into a single repository – the multi-domain registry repository - enabling monitoring, management and policy enforcement. Additionally, the Vordel Cloud Service Broker offers value-added services such as caching, acceleration, and transformation saving enterprises time and money while creating a trusted and reliable environment.

A Packed Showroom at the 4th International Cloud Computing Expo Floor held at the Sta.Clara Convention Center, CA

Gartner commented that “The future of cloud computing will be permeated with the notion of brokers negotiating relationships between providers of cloud services and the service consumers. In this context, a broker might be software, appliances, platforms or suites of technologies that enhance the base services available through the cloud. Enhancement will include managing access to the services, providing greater security or even creating completely new services.”¹

Vordel CEO, Vic Morris, speaking about the company's Cloud Service Broker news said "Trust is a major barrier to Cloud adoption particularly among enterprises. It's clear that many organizations see the value of incorporating Cloud Services into their IT infrastructure, but they also have concerns about the reliability and performance of these services outside their domain of control. The Vordel Cloud Service Broker addresses these issues by providing a trustworthy and reliable onramp to Cloud services allowing businesses to monitor and manage them in the same fashion as their own internal services. This means that composite applications can be built in a completely seamless fashion offering users full visibility, trust and control".

Key valued added services provided by the Vordel Cloud Service Broker include:

Multi-Domain Registry Repository

The Multi-Domain Registry (MDRR) aggregates together services across domains. These domains include not only Cloud providers such as Amazon and Google, but also local on-premises services, and business partner services. In this way, all of the services on which a business depends are managed in one place. This becomes a single point at which compliance to Service Level Agreements, compliance to privacy and security mandates, and usage statistics can be viewed.

Analytics for visibility

Organisations require a record of how they are using Cloud Computing, not least because they will be billed for this usage. The Vordel Cloud Service Broker provides an independent audit trail of Cloud service usage. Analytics of Cloud Computing usage includes not only raw usage information, but also information about service quality, patterns of usage over time, and identity of users. In this way, an organization can understand how they use Cloud Computing.

Content Analysis

All content sent to Cloud services must be analysed for leaked data, in order to enable Data Loss Prevention. In addition, content-level threats must be detected and blocked. This includes application-level attacks at the API and payload level.

Caching

Caching protects the enterprise from latency associated with connecting to the Cloud service. Cloud Service Broker’s cache saves the organization money by allowing some requests to be serviced by the broker itself, removing the need for a (billed) connection up to the Cloud provider.

Composition

Vordel Cloud Service Broker allows developers to link together local applications with Cloud-hosted applications. The local applications may be accessed via Web Services interfaces, via database calls, via message schemes such as MQ or JMS or simply via the file system.

Content transformation

Content sent to the Cloud service may need to be transformed, for example in order to mediate between different versions of applications. In addition, many Cloud services use REST API interfaces whereas internal services may use SOAP, JMS or older technologies such as COBOL. Vordel’s technology includes an accelerated transformation engine which allows data to be transformed at speed.

SLA Monitoring

Vordel Cloud Service Broker complements the Cloud Service providers by offering a comprehensive Service Level Agreement monitoring to monitor the response time of the Cloud service, and the entire transaction throughput time.

Traffic Throttling

Throttling is the “surge protector” of Cloud Computing. If an application makes a high number of calls to a Cloud service then a Cloud Service Broker can deflect a portion of the calls to back-up service, newly provisioned for this purpose.

Event Alerting

Events such as Cloud outages must be alerted, so that remedial measures can be put into place.

Extensibility 3^rd Party Valued Added Services

Organizations may wish to add their own value-added services from 3^rd party sources, or indeed add their own pluggable modules.

Vordel Cloud Service Broker will be available in Q1 2010.