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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Cloud-based IT lab environment provider Skytap (www.skytap.com) has added new capabilities that enable users to collaborate over the web using cloud-based virtual data centers, enabling teams to collaborate on complex IT environments to deliver business initiatives faster and more predictably.
In the same way solutions such as SharePoint and WebEx enable teams to collaborate on documents, Skytap includes new features to create team projects, manage team roles and security policies, and use Skytap Resource Links to quickly and securely share virtual data centers and machines from any location, while maintaining IT security policies.
"We've long recognized that functional users need powerful collaboration capabilities, and IT operations staff needs policy control over cloud resources," Skytap chief product and marketing officer Sundar Raghavan said in a statement. "With the project management, team collaboration and policy management features included in our new release, we are delivering immediate value to both functional users and enterprise IT."
Skytap provides on-demand testing environments that can support very dynamic IT workloads, needed for various applications from ISVs to consulting companies, as well as helping the rolling out processes such as webpages, SAP and sharepoint migrations.
One of only a few clouds of its kind based on VMware, Skytap supports the many operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Linux variants) that run on VMware, according to Skytap product management senior director Ian Knox. "[W]e can run any IT environment completely unchanged, and that's very different from anyone else," he said. "A lot of the other folks are based on Xen and they run a very limited set of operating systems. With us, you can take anything you've been running and run it on Skytap and test it on Skytap, and then move it backwards and forwards."
In the increasingly globalized world, geographically dispersed teams create a challenge for IT security administrators. Corporate employees and contractors often have different access rights to enterprise IT environments, but need to collaborate using shared resources. In addition to Skytap's existing security capabilities, including encrypted traffic and secure network virtualization technology, Skytap's new release includes new features for policy management and role-based security, ensuring that cloud resources can be secured and isolated, while enabling different levels of access for corporate employees and contractors alike.
"A very good example is when a developer wants to share an environment with someone, they can very easily do that by publishing that," Knox said. "We've also enabled security policies, so this is especially important when you're working with a client or an enterprise that there are some folks who require more access than others." For instance, a developer in India could get just enough information to finish a part of a project and collaborate with developers, but not have access to the full data center environment.
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October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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