Vordel Offers On-Ramp to the Cloud

Vordel's Cloud Service Broker enables businesses to aggregate services between public and private clouds, and those of partners. Vordel officials say the product reduces businesses' concerns around trust and reliability when using cloud services by bringing together services from the multiple domains and enabling companies to monitor and manage them.

Vordel is looking to make it easier for businesses to adopt cloud computing.

Vordel, known for its governance products, is rolling out its Cloud Service Broker, a tool designed to manage multi-domain services across enterprises, their partners and cloud service providers.

The company unveiled the product Nov. 5 at its VordelWorld user conference in Ireland.

"Cloud [computing] is happening, it's real," Vordel CEO Vic Morris said in an interview. "It's a megatrend. Customers are asking us about it."

The problem comes when customers want to use the cloud services in conjunction with their own internal SOA (service-oriented architecture) and those of their partners, Morris said. Aggregating the services across multiple domains-such as public clouds, like Google and Amazon, as well as private and community clouds-and applying policies to them raise issues of trustworthiness and reliability as businesses access services outside of their control.

That's where Vordel's Cloud Service Broker comes in, he said. The tool-which can be bought in an appliance, as software or as a virtualized service in the cloud-essentially is an "on-ramp to the cloud," Morris said.

The product, which will be available in the first quarter 2010, registers services from all domains into a single repository, enabling businesses to more easily monitor and manage them, and apply policies to them.

The Vordel Service Broker not only offers the Multi-Domain Registry Repository, but also analytics capabilities that gives businesses an audit trail on the cloud services they use. In addition, the product includes content analysis capabilities to guard against data loss, caching to reduce cloud costs by servicing some requests itself, traffic throttling, event alerts and SLA monitoring.

Developers also will be able to use the Cloud Service Broker to link local applications with cloud-hosted apps.