ServiceMesh Reins in "Shadow IT" and Automatically Enforces Governance Over Rogue Cloud Usage

SANTA MONICA, CA--(Marketwire - Aug 9, 2012) - ServiceMesh, provider of the industry's only enterprise-grade cloud management platform, today announced the availability of Agility Platform 8.0, with innovative new features to govern and manage private, public, and hybrid cloud usage across the enterprise through flexible policy definition and enforcement. The Agility Platform provides Global 2000 enterprises with a single, consolidated platform for the consistent management, governance, orchestration and delivery of cloud applications, platforms, and services. The Agility Platform allows companies to leverage these cloud services in on-demand, self-service IT operating models that dramatically compress IT service delivery times, lower IT operating costs, and increase investments in IT innovation.

Enterprise customers are seeking solutions to the dual challenges of making their current IT organizations more responsive to business change, while also ensuring that business users will not circumvent IT operating processes and controls. "Shadow IT" refers to corporate IT users who get around internal IT resource constraints and delays by selecting an unauthorized external cloud provider's self-service, pay-as-you-go IT resources to meet their needs. Unfortunately, this practice can expose enterprises to costly financial penalties and business reputation damage if not governed appropriately. 

A Single, Policy-Driven Control Point for Cloud Governance, Security, and Lifecycle Management

The ServiceMesh Agility Platform provides market leading capabilities in policy-based governance, security, and lifecycle management that allow organizations to accelerate the adoption of cloud services across the enterprise and move business applications safely into the cloud with complete governance and control. The Agility Platform automates the deployment and management of cloud applications and platforms and ensures the portability of these services throughout their lifecycle independent of the underlying private, public, or hybrid cloud environment. The Agility Platform was specifically designed for the stringent security, governance and compliance needs of global enterprises, and leverages an extensible policy engine that enables the creation and enforcement of an unlimited range of custom policies.

Global 2000 customers are using the Agility Platform today to achieve the following benefits:

• Increase IT innovation investment by 48 percent while keeping the overall IT budget constant.
• 42 percent total cost of ownership savings for business-critical applications.
• 78 percent reduction in time-to-market for provisioning custom enterprise platforms.
• 97 percent reduction in time-to-market for provisioning standardized infrastructure services.
• 84 percent operating cost savings for IT infrastructure services.
• One month from PoC start to production deployment of enterprise cloud applications.

Agility Platform 8.0 Extends These Benefits with New Product Innovations and Market Firsts:

• Automatically discover and import existing Virtual Machines to enforce immediate governance control. Agility Platform 8.0 includes wizard-based capabilities to discover and automatically import existing virtual machines (VMs) deployed from other third-party provisioning tools in either private or public cloud environments. Upon VM import, the Agility Platform enforces user specified policies on those VMs to ensure the desired governance, security, and control. Existing VMs can be imported in bulk, with governance and security policies applied systematically upon import or applied manually with fine grain control after import is complete. Once imported, VMs can be published through Agility Platform's service catalog, monitored via Agility Platform's operations console, and otherwise leverage the full range of capabilities provided by the Agility Platform.
  
  
• Complete visibility into cloud provider performance with new Cloud Provider Benchmarking. Agility Platform 8.0 includes industry-first cloud monitoring and benchmarking capabilities to monitor the performance of a broad range of private and public cloud providers, putting enterprise customers in the driver's seat to monitor cloud provider performance, adherence to SLAs, and to accurately compare different cloud services. You can benchmark and monitor a range of different cloud provider operational parameters, such as average VM provisioning time, number of failed or degraded instances, maximum number of concurrent provisioning requests executed, and others. Thresholds on cloud providers can be continuously monitored, and you can utilize various Agility Platform alerting mechanisms, including email and SNMP, to generate custom alerts and notifications when conditions change.
  
  
• Expanded Support for Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center. The Agility Platform supports hybrid cloud strategies by enabling workload portability across a broad range of heterogeneous private and public cloud technologies. The latest release extends these capabilities with support for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and Microsoft Hyper-V. 
  
  
• Fine Grain Governance Controls for Resource Sharing and Scheduling. Agility Platform 8.0 further improves its extensible policy-based governance controls with new policy types to govern the sharing of pay-as-you-go IT resources within large corporate settings, including new options to control IT resource scheduling, sharing, leasing, and chargeback. 
  
  
• Extreme Platform Scalability. Agility Platform 8.0 employs a cloud-native architecture that dynamically scales to meet system demand, using only the amount of resources needed to rapidly execute provisioning requests, orchestrate auto-scaling operations, and perform other management functions. Agility Platform 8.0 has been proven to support the concurrent provisioning and management of tens of thousands of workloads from a single Agility Platform instance, with organizations able to deploy multiple instances of the Agility Platform as desired.
  
  

QUOTES AND MULTIMEDIA:

"Enterprises are likely to end up with many cloud services spread across different internal and external cloud environments. Although hybrid cloud environments can deliver significant economic, performance, and scalability benefits, these advantages can be jeopardized when robust cloud governance and compliance models are not in place. IT organizations should ensure that their cloud management platforms provide extensible, policy-driven governance controls to manage the diversity of cloud services and environments, and get the ultimate value out of internal and external cloud services."

- Donna Scott, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner

"More enterprises are realizing that they must evolve toward a self-service, on-demand IT operating model to increase their ability to innovate and address new market opportunities quickly. The ServiceMesh Agility Platform is specifically designed to address the needs of large enterprises by empowering business units with fully governed, self-service access to the IT resources they need to deliver solutions at the speed of market change. The latest release of the Agility Platform introduces yet another wave of product innovations to enable our customers to further accelerate their enterprise cloud adoption with complete governance and control."

- Eric Pulier, CEO, ServiceMesh

Learn more about the ServiceMesh Agility Platform.

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Join Cloud IT transformation discussion on the ServiceMesh blog.

About ServiceMesh
ServiceMesh provides the industry's only enterprise-grade cloud management platform that enables on-demand, self-service IT operating models for Global 2000 clients. Enterprise customers select the ServiceMesh Agility Platform to automate the deployment and management of enterprise applications and platforms across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. The Agility Platform provides a single, integrated control point for governance, compliance and security across the customer's cloud applications and environments, empowering the business with fully governed, self-service access to applications, platforms, and services. Some of the world's largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care and other highly regulated industries rely on ServiceMesh to deliver applications and services at the speed of market change, streamline bureaucratic and inefficient IT operating models and transform IT into a strategic business enabler and competitive advantage.

To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.