(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.