IPsoft offers cloud management as a managed service

IT services firm IPsoft has introduced a cloud management service designed to offload the management of cloud infrastructure from customers, and which features autonomic self-management capabilities to automate processes as much as possible.

Available immediately, IPcloud is a managed service through which IPsoft can take on most or all of the routine management of cloud-based infrastructure for customers, including services running on private or public clouds, according to the firm.

Terry Wallby, IPsoft UK managing director, said that many companies are moving to a hybrid IT model where many applications are still on-premise, but some newer infrastructure is in a private cloud and some is being pushed out to public clouds such as Amazon.

"The role of the IT department is thus becoming quite difficult in managing all these modes of delivery," he said.

IPcloud builds on IPSoft's existing management technology based on expert systems, which automates processes and has the ability to learn as it goes along.

"We have some very clever technology that provides management of clients' infrastructures irrespective of where it is located, and a library of automation knowledge that has been built up over the life of our organisation," Wallby said.

The whole concept is to clone processes that would normally be carried out by a support engineer and integrate these into the expert system so it can do them automatically instead, he explained.

IPcloud is able to monitor a customer's cloud infrastructure and automatically take remediation steps as necessary, such as provisioning new resources when application performance thresholds are passed.

This is integrated with a change approval process so that IPcloud has limits placed on how many additional resources it is allowed to allocate, Wallby said, which is important in the public cloud where customers will incur additional charges for every extra resource used.

IPcloud integrates with the management layer of virtual infrastructure platforms such as VMware and Citrix for private clouds, while on the public cloud side it is currently accredited by Amazon to manage infrastructure using Amazon Web Services, but is looking at extending support to cover other public cloud platforms such as Microsoft's Windows Azure.

Wallby said the ability to monitor and manage applications in the public cloud is a key capability for IPsoft.

"It's difficult to get cloud providers to give enterprise-class service levels about the availability of your application, because they are not managing it, you are. It's down to you to as the client, and we felt this is hindering adoption in some cloud environments," he said.

On the subject of licensing, IPsoft provides a scalable service charge related to the size of the infrastructure being managed. Wallby said that this makes it difficult to give indicative pricing, but insisted that IPcloud is designed to be competitive against alternative management methods using staff.