CA To Perform Cloud Assessments with Cloud 360

CA Technologies wants to help enterprises determine what applications may be suited to move to the cloud.

The company launched Cloud 360 at its annual CA World conference, which took place this week in Las Vegas. Cloud 360 is a portfolio of consulting services bundled with CA's software to model and perform cost-benefit and performance analyses of moving apps to the cloud. It also is intended to help customers develop migration plans.

"It lets CIOs determine which apps or services they want to move to the cloud and which cloud they want to move them to, if any," said Andi Mann, CA's VP of strategic solutions. "Some apps and some services will never go to the cloud. This gives CIOs a real deterministic model for understanding what's in their portfolio that they might be able to get a benefit from moving to the cloud."

Among other things, Mann explained Cloud 360 will let CIOs understand what sort of performance, service levels, security and cost and reliability criteria they need to consider. It will match that up against different cloud options -- such as public clouds, private clouds and Software as a Service -- and it will let customers simulate and model their chosen apps and cloud environments to determine if the service they're considering is suited for their requirements, Mann said.

Since the outcome of this will ultimately result in customers buying CA's various software offerings, this service will appeal to customers comfortable with going that route. The offering starts off with an app portfolio analysis consisting of a one-day workshop followed by CA's Application Discovery and Portfolio Analysis conducted by the company's consultants using CA's Clarity PPM On Demand tooling.

Once it is determined what apps will be moved to the cloud, CA will help determine service-level agreement requirements using its CA Oblicore On Demand service-level management software. Among other CA wares to be used in helping simulate and determine capacity and virtualization requirements are CA Capacity Management and Reporting Suite, CA Virtual Placement Manager and CA LISA Suite.

The company also launched two new identity and access management (IAM) security services aimed at providing single sign-on to internal and cloud-based applications. Both are cloud-based services that provide access to apps delivered by online providers such as Salesforce.com as well as premises-based systems.

CA IdentityMinder as-a-Service offers password management, user provisioning, management of access requests and reporting and auditing. CA FedMinder as-a-Service offers the cross-domain single-sign-on capability. It supports the SAML 2.0 standard and has policy management capabilities.

Also at CA World, the company launched the Cloud Commons Marketplace and Developer Studio. The Cloud Commons Marketplace is a portal that lets ISVs put their applications up for sale. "This is essentially going to be an app store for the enterprise," Mann said. "Enterprises can go up onto the cloud commons marketplace and buy them and service providers can host them."

The Cloud Commons Developer Studio is a free service that allows developers to build and test apps using the CA AppLogic platform.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 16, 2011