HP Delivers New Hybrid Cloud Solutions

HP announced a suite of new products and services this week, aimed at helping businesses and governments leverage the power of the cloud while ensuring they meet required levels of security, performance and availability.

While cloud computing delivers benefits such as faster deployment of new services, reduction in IT headcount and a pay-as-you-go model, it has traditionally lacked in areas that enterprises need, such as security, availability and ease of integration. HP’s new “HP Hybrid Delivery” solutions are designed to help in those areas by providing the benefits of enterprise-grade cloud computing, while meeting the specific needs of businesses and governments.

HP Hybrid Delivery Cloud Solutions Include:

HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute delivers “private cloud as a service” from HP’s state-of-the-art data centers. Governed by specified policies for service, performance, security and privacy, it provides clients with rapidly deployed, secure computing with scalable IT capacity. Built on HP’s leadership in Converged Infrastructure and the breadth of HP’s software portfolio for automation and management, it delivers all the resources necessary to access a hybrid private cloud.

HP CloudSystem is a complete, integrated system to build, manage and consume services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. It combines HP’s Converged Infrastructure with HP Cloud Service Automation software to deliver unified security, governance and compliance across applications, as well as physical and virtual infrastructure.

HP CloudSystem also supports HP Cloud Maps, which provides preconfigured catalog objects to automatically provision the optimized application and infrastructure resources. Cloud Maps are imported directly into client cloud environments, enabling customers to rapidly build a catalog of cloud services for the business and get them up and running in short time.

Last year HP launched CloudStart, an all-in-one solution designed to simplify and accelerate private cloud deployments, and claiming it can deploy an open and flexible private cloud environment within 30 days.

Along with the new cloud solutions, HP is hosting “Cloud Discovery Workshops” to help organizations develop strategies and establish an optimal path for leveraging the cloud, as well as helping customers understand business model implications and security. Customers can also utilize HP Financial Services to help build clouds environments while minimizing capital requirements.

Dimitri McKay, a security architect and technology evangelist at LogLogic and SecuityWeek columnist, says that depending on what type of service or data you’re dealing with, you’ll want to compare the different options of what private, public and hybrid can offer. “A hybrid cloud offers a variety of public and private options with multiple providers. By using a hybrid approach, you’re able to spread things out over a number of providers to keep each aspect of your business in the most efficient possible environment. The major downside here is having to keep track of multiple security platforms and make sure all aspects of your business can communicate with each other,” McKay writes.

More information about HP’s new offerings is available here. What type of Cloud is right for your business?