What really got me thinking about this was a recent article I read in TechWorld, (Report: Amazon building $600M cloud for CIA) in which reporter Brandon Butler reports on the CIA’s recent contract with Amazon Web Services to build a private cloud for the government agency at a cost of $600M over the course of the next ten years.  In his article, he writes, “AWS has virtual private clouds (VPC), which are infrastructure as a service (IaaS) resources dedicated to specific customers, but it does not have a product for customers to deploy AWS-like clouds on customers own infrastructure.”  Building applications in this scenario is nothing short of vendor lock-in. Forever.

While this is a great business model for Amazon, it is questionable how this lock-in approach benefits the government in the long-term.  In direct juxtaposition to this approach, a proper “managed” cloud operating model drives infrastructure independence and workload mobility — even for applications that have no current intention of running anywhere else.

Though an enterprise might want to run on Amazon today, it doesn’t mean that this will ALWAYS be the case. Laws change, relationships change, people change, costs change, budgets change, technology changes: Everything changes. And in a world of such rapid change, it is simply irresponsible to take advantage of a cloud provider like Amazon for supposed “cost savings” and then spot-weld applications into it forever.  When things change — which we all know they will — the government could very well incur exhaustive costs down the road when they choose to move their welded applications to another operating model.

While the contract was lauded by the GAO as making sense in an environment of shrinking budgets and sequesters, the short-term benefits to the CIA should not be lost to the long-term implications of this lock-in model.  Just like the Toyota commercials, the government is busy looking at their shiny new purchase, and not long-term maintenance costs.

To learn more, watch our On Demand Webinar, From Virtualization to Transformation: What to Know Before You Buy.

You are likely aware of OpenStack, a collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists from around the world focused on producing an open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. OpenStack has had a ground swell of investment and is really becoming the de facto Cloud OS. IBM’s recent investment in OpenStack places VMware under growing pressure as they continue their attempt to push up the management stack. The rocky road ahead is well outlined by analysts who posit that VMware could become the Sun Micro Systems of infrastructure management if IBM’s contribution to OpenStack is as impactful as it was for Linux.

The key takeaway is that OpenStack continues to gain serious momentum.  Rackspace, SUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Cisco, IBM, and Piston all have their own respective OpenStack distributions.  Moreover, they are building an army of OpenStack ‘Ninjas-for-hire’ and fortifying the core code base as they learn from customer implementations. The future of open source cloud is unquestionably bright and the sprint toward OpenStack expertise has already begun.

While infrastructure — and automation of the underlying infrastructure — is required, the application layer is where money is made. As a result, DevOps is another groundswell rolling in from the horizon that fundamentally changes IT. Continuous integration, delivery and deployment accelerate the time to value and agility of an organization to go after new or adjacent market opportunities.

The adoption of automation at scale is really about trust. People have been using CFEngine, Python, Perl and Shell Scripts at scale for a long time, but the solutions were often brittle and were almost always run by an operator.  Puppet, Chef, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) and ServiceMesh Agility Platform, however, have put enough structure around the automation of application build, package, infrastructure orchestration and application deployment that DevOps is becoming the only sane way to manage applications at scale. Capabilities include being able to roll forward/back changes and a|b test incremental functionality, all of which help eliminate long development and release cycles.

Agility Platform enables DevOps to work safely in an enterprise, enabled by extensible, policy-driven control of governance, compliance and security.  As an organization adopts DevOps, this drives better collaboration amongst key stakeholders breaking down walls and inefficiencies between Development, QA, Infrastructure and Operations and forces them to close the loop.  In doing so, an organization finds key business benefits:

• Increased agility and competitiveness
• Faster time to market with new applications and/or services
• Less code rework, firefighting and problem resolution
• Greater security, compliance and governance

Our partners and customers realize ServiceMesh’s vision and the Agility Platform’s role in enabling IT transformation and business innovation.  And we can’t wait to show you what Agility Platform can do to help your organization, too. See this on-demand, free webinar with Forrester Research to learn more about Accelerating Business Innovation with DevOps in the Cloud: www.servicemesh.com/resources/webcasts/

• ServiceMesh was recognized several time by the press, including video interviews by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE on the expo floor. Here’s an interview with our CEO Eric Pulier:

• One of our customers, Andy Brown, CTO at UBS, also spoke to SiliconANGLE (see interview below). He also spoke as part of a keynote general session that introduced EMC’s new software-defined storage solution called ViPR.
  

• ServiceMesh was also a guest speaker for three different EMC Solution Theater presentations in various EMC booths on the expo floor (view one of those presentations below).
  

• ServiceMesh had a press release on May 8^th announcing our support for ViPR.
• ServiceMesh was also featured along with ViPR in different breakout sessions during the week.
• Finally, we received tremendous traffic at the ServiceMesh booth, where we demonstrated the full range of Agility Platform capabilities, including three new demo scenarios featuring ViPR. ServiceMesh was the only cloud management platform to demonstrate integration with ViPR for on-demand storage provisioning at EMC World.

It was clear during EMC World that the future of the software-defined datacenter and EMC’s IT-as-a-Service vision intersects perfectly with the application-centric approach we’ve taken to cloud management and policy-driven governance. In many ways, our rapid integration with ViPR underscores this.

The ServiceMesh ViPR demos were all orchestrated, automated, and governed in our Agility Platform leveraging our policy engine to align application workloads with the appropriate tier of storage (e.g. gold, silver, or bronze storage tiers), or store application code/artifacts for release automation across the SDLC using ViPR-based object stores. The Agility Platform’s speed and flexibility in implementing new software-defined storage (or infrastructure, or networks, etc) is directly related to the power and extensibility of our platform’s orchestration and governance engine.

And while this growth rate will be fueled from several sub-segments of the cloud market, no segment, or individual company is being held in higher regard right now than ServiceMesh. But you don’t need to take my word for it.  Listen to the experts:

• According to Craig Burton, previously founder of the Burton Group and currently distinguished analyst at KuppingerCole, “The need for governance and accountability has grown exponentially with the rise of cloud computing. ServiceMesh’s focus on cloud governance as part of an end-to-end self-service platform illustrates how, with the right foundation, IT can provide a controlled environment where business units, departments, and even project managers can use a full featured IT platform for everything.”
• Torsten Volk, Research Director, Systems Management at EMA on naming ServiceMesh a 2013 Vendor to Watch, “ServiceMesh earned this award for its unique platform that provides the necessary governance layer across the application lifecycle which, in turn, is a key component for any enterprise undertaking the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). Without this governance and lifecycle management control, it is difficult to ensure SLA-compliance, security, general policy compliance, and performance in a heterogeneous virtualization and cloud environment. The EMA Vendor to Watch award rewards vendors that dare to go off the beaten path to define their own product category and market opportunity. This definition fits ServiceMesh precisely.”
• Rachel Chalmers of 451 Group wrote, “For enterprises willing to take on the devops challenge, the rewards can be immense – as ServiceMesh has rather smartly demonstrated with its $100m savings for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.”
• Not to mention our selection as a Codie Award finalist for Best Cloud Application Service or a Red Herring Top 100 Global Award winner.

Shawn Douglass, our new CTO who recently joined ServiceMesh from his role as Managing Director of EMC Ventures wrote, “I have looked at most of the players in cloud application management and the Software-Defined Data Center arena and ServiceMesh is the only player that is fully integrated with the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and enables cloud-based, enterprise-class release automation and DevOps. The stars rarely align like this. Once the large infrastructure players start to realize the significance of the strategic control point enabled by ServiceMesh’s approach, DevOps and the Software-Defined Data Center continue to gain momentum. The implications of this shift in control point will become obvious to all and ServiceMesh will be amazingly well positioned to seize the opportunity. ServiceMesh is at the epicenter of several major trends, has a world-class team and a highly differentiated product. The best bet I could make on ServiceMesh was to join them.”

And, most importantly, world-class IT organizations are in agreement. Our enterprise customers are seeing business-altering results such as:

• 42% total cost of ownership savings for business-critical applications.
  • 78% reduction in time-to-market for provisioning custom enterprise platforms.
  • 97% reduction in time-to-market for provisioning standardized infrastructure services.
  • 84% operating cost savings for IT infrastructure services.
  • Increased IT innovation investment by 48% while keeping the overall IT budget constant.

With global 2000 enterprises counting on ServiceMesh technology for business agility, competitiveness and livelihood, I can’t think of a better reason to declare ServiceMesh the hottest company in the hottest sector around.

While the reception here is amazing, I am certain that the response will be even greater once users see the pairing of ServiceMesh and ViPR in action in their enterprise.  I’m convinced this is the case because it will allow organizations to use the ServiceMesh Agility Platform’s extensible policy engine to create ViPR-specific policies for selecting the optimal storage resources when deploying applications to the cloud.  Fine grained details such as size, cost and performance can be applied to automatically select the optimal storage resource for the cloud platform or application being deployed.

Agility Platform’s extensible policy engine allows storage tiering and resource optimization and lets enterprise customers better utilize their current storage investments and capitalize on a growing number of public cloud storage options. The great thing is that storage can be managed in the context of the applications, which are the unit of value to the business. We are excited to offer, at the ViPR launch, Agility Platform support for policy-based, on-demand provisioning of storage from it’s virtual storage pools. And EMC is excited as well!  According to Christopher Ratcliffe, vice president, marketing, Advanced Software Division, EMC Corporation., “…The combination of the ServiceMesh Agility Platform and EMC ViPR software gives enterprises the ability to not only manage, but extract new business value from storage in a controlled, governed way.”

Integration with EMC’s ViPR software-defined storage solution further cements ServiceMesh’s leadership position in cloud management and governance.  Enterprises looking to transform IT, drive innovation and provable business value need look no further. Come see us at Booth#703 for the remainder of the conference or at the following times and locations:

Wednesday, May 8th, 10:30-10:45 AM
EMC Select Partner Booth
ServiceMesh Agility Platform Overview, presented by Derick Townsend, VP of Product Marketing, ServiceMesh

Wednesday, May 8th, 12:00-12:15 PM
EMC’s ASD Booth Theater
ServiceMesh Agility Platform: Cloud-Based DevOps with ViPR, presented by Anthony Skipper, Vice President, ServiceMesh

I’ve come to this conclusion because never before have I seen such a convergence of technology trends and the realization by business leaders that their operating models must undergo fundamental shifts to remain competitive. Almost every prospect, customer and partner I speak with shares a similar vision: the IT department is no longer an impediment to pursuing new opportunities, but is a strategic business enabler.

What this means is that the Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) and Datacenter Infrastructure management (DCIM) will become the resource backplane and component controllers, respectively enabling autonomous policy-driven operations. I believe the value is not in the virtualization of disk, compute and storage but in orchestration of those resources in the context of the application lifecycle, provisioning on the right infrastructure at the right time and place, in consideration of power, cooling and cost to meet service level objectives and governance requirements of the business.

The ServiceMesh Agility Platform is best positioned to deliver on this vision, and as a result, customers and leading industry vendors with whom ServiceMesh has partnered, entrust Agility Platform as the control point for their operations. CIOs at these organizations see the power in embracing cloud-operating models, gaining vendor contestability and shifting choice and control back to the business leaders to focus on value creation, not the care and feeding of machines – or hordes of IT professional services people who once roamed freely, building custom one-off “solutions”.

Datacenter refreshes are adopting converged devices. Software-Defined Datacenter and Datacenter Infrastructure Management are redefining the very fabric of resources and resource management. New public and private cloud operating systems are becoming the preferred embodiments for service delivery. And, DevOps is closing the loop from development to production.  All culminate in creating the perfect storm that results in business operating model transformation. ServiceMesh is the capstone of all these technologies and trends.

In our unending effort to lead the market, you may have seen our recent partnership announcements with Cisco and EMC or our Vblock Ready Certification from VCE Vblock Systems. Growing our industry partnerships and expanding Agility Platform’s intrinsic value has placed ServiceMesh on an amazing trajectory. A trajectory recognized this year by Red Herring, analysts at EMA, and the SIIA. Watch this space as there is more to come!

Are you inadvertently robbing your organization of agility? If I were to make the following statement to people from across a variety of corporate business units, I really think there would be negligible debate.

“Accelerating the speed at which the business delivers new applications and services is critical to its competiveness and long-term success.”

While this may seem to be common-sense, many organizations allow a downward spiral among IT Operations, Development and Security to suck the efficiency and effectiveness out of the development and release process that creates these new products and services.  In the process, these teams effectively rob the company of a valued asset: Agility.

High performers not only understand this dynamic, but they work to break it.  How?  By applying the old saying that brakes on a race car actually allow it to go faster. In the same way, they accelerate the application lifecycle through DevOps.  Unleashing DevOps at scale can be a recipe for unbridled innovation, enabling IT to be at the helm of business success.  Without governance, however, IT risks continuing the same pattern between Dev, IT and Security that keeps innovation at bay and politics at the forefront.

While analysts indicate that DevOps can require a wholesale restructuring of the IT organization, leveraging the cloud is an opportunity to develop a long-term strategy that creates a virtuous cycle between Dev, IT and Security by automating and governing key aspects of the Dev-to-Ops lifecycle. With the ability to provision platforms on demand, embed standard operating environments upstream for earlier dev and test use, automate application and service configuration, and manage security and operational SLAs across each stage of the Sofware Development Lifecycle (SDLC), cloud-based DevOps enables IT to respond faster to business and market demands.

Inserting governance into the DevOps process across the SDLC allows development to produce more code and conduct less rework; central IT sees fewer severity one outages, resulting in fewer fire fights; and security and audit teams are assured that policies are appropriately applied across each stage of the application lifecycle.

At ServiceMesh, we strive to help global enterprises speed innovation. So much so, we were recently named an EMA 2013 Vendor to Watch for our Agility Platform, which was called, “a conclusive solution for today’s DevOps challenges”.  While that sounds lofty, let me explain how ServiceMesh Agility Platform helps drive DevOps initiatives, and with it business innovation:

• ServiceMesh allows development teams to perform their development and test work on high fidelity, production-like environments that are available, self-service and on-demand. With this approach, development removes itself from worrying about application stack configuration, or administering underlying infrastructure and platforms. As a result, development can spend more time coding, getting new products and services to market faster.
• IT Operations likes the ServiceMesh approach because it allows them to govern and control the common application platforms development uses in the coding process. Operations can use a robust policy engine to create, apply and enforce the use of specific standard application platforms and environments in specific use cases. Similarly, security teams can create, apply and enforce fine-grain governance and security controls to take full advantage of any organization’s private, public and hybrid cloud strategy.
• Last, ServiceMesh Agility Platform allows all teams to streamline and automate the development-to-operations lifecycle. In this way, high performers keep pace with change by automating and standardizing tasks that are done manually today.

High performing organizations don’t just know that agility and innovation are important to the business they proactively embrace their role in it. ServiceMesh Agility Platform plays a vital role in enabling Global 2000 Enterprises to adopt DevOps, in turn becoming drivers of business innovation – and business success.  If you’d like to read further about an enterprise that has begun this journey: http://www.servicemesh.com/resources/take-aways/.

This is what 451 analyst Rachel Chalmers wrote when describing the competition to ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform 9.0, and just one reason of many I’m so excited to publicly unveil ServiceMesh Agility Platform 9.0.  Since we believe neither startups in the cloud management space, nor the big vendors mentioned here have the capabilities we do to accelerate the software release process through hybrid cloud (nor will they any time in the near future), we feel this quote is especially insightful.

We’ve been working hard to add a variety of new features and functionality to Agility Platform and I’ve never seen our development team so excited about getting a new product into your hands. More than working on features, though, we have been building a platform for business innovation/business success.  Talking to customers and prospects who are leaders in their industries, we have heard time and time again about the need to drive business agility in order to compete more aggressively in the market.  Large enterprises are talking about competition from more nimble market entrants who are unencumbered by industry regulation or legacy systems and processes and as a result are able to take the fast lane to first-mover status.

Knowing that Global 2000 enterprises need a platform to drive business innovation that helps them move at the speed of the market was the motivation behind Agility Platform 9.0.

The vast majority of workloads under management within central IT are development related, with the greatest variance and support needs. In addition, development is responsible for creating the products and services (or at least seriously updating them) that are the engine of growth for the business.  Taking these two things into consideration, it makes logical sense that dev is the best place to start, and where organizations can achieve the largest gains, from the Agility Platform.

Focus on Accelerating Application Releases and DevOps Initiatives

In Agility Platform 9.0, we’ve combined application blueprints and configuration management to bring full-featured application lifecycle orchestration to enterprise IT.  The two work together to speed application releases and adoption of DevOps methodologies, all the while ensuring consistency and enforcement of Standard Operating Environments. By removing multiple software bottlenecks, minimizing downstream defects and errors, Agility Platform 9.0 helps accelerate the accuracy, pace and frequency of software releases.

• Application-level configuration management – With our Puppet Labs integration, IT can now enforce configuration compliance policies on operating systems, middleware stacks and the application artifacts themselves, across different stages in the application lifecycle and all associated cloud environments.
• Graphical application blueprints – Agility Platform Blueprints simplify the design and deployment of complex multi-tier applications and platforms using a drag-and-drop graphical editor. Agility Platform allows enterprises to model complex, cloud-portable applications and platforms and optimize deployment decisions including detailed “what if” scenarios based on real-time cost and resource capacity information. Application blueprints developed with the Agility Platform are independent of the underlying cloud API or hypervisor. Their deployment can be optimized based on policy controls at deploy time.

We’ve also included a more powerful, easy to use service catalog store that provides greater visibility into costs and use.  We expanded our SDK, supporting Microsoft® Azure IaaS, VMware vSphere® 5.1 and VMware vCloud® Director™ 5.1. Customers and partners can also use the ServiceMesh toolkit to build their own adapters for bare metal provisioning, realizing the full benefits of policy-based governance in a single architectural control point.

We are excited to bring you ServiceMesh Agility Platform 9.0 because we believe that accelerated innovation is accelerated business success.  Here’s to our innovation supporting – and accelerating – yours! For a demo of the new Agility Platform, please see our video or join our webinar.

While at EMC, I had the opportunity to work with partners, incubate new businesses/technologies in the CTOO and help create EMC Ventures. Over the last ten years, this gave me the opportunity to partner with most of the enterprise players, participate in countless acquisitions and make quite a few strategic investments. I covered Cloud, Software-Defined Data Center, OpenStack and Big Data investments working with EMC’s internal business units, as well as the entrepreneurial and venture communities.

Watching several major trends converge to redefine IT is certainly exhilarating; however, as a corporate investor, my objectives were to make strategic bets on startups to gain insight/access to the markets/technologies/teams, while providing a return on the money I’d put to work. This charter creates a healthy tension with the business units as you bring forward investment opportunities that may be strategic, adjacent or disruptive to their core businesses. The insights gained are often leveraged in partner, buy or build decisions, competitive gaming and strategy discussion. Leading this activity gave me a deep understanding of the respective ecosystems, players and competitive differentiation across the industry. With this insight, you would believe large companies would enjoy a tremendous competitive advantage, however being big also means you have legacies to worry about and politics and prior investments often create “not invented here” syndrome that causes conflict on how to achieve goals.

Cloud and OpenStack represent a significant opportunity/challenge for EMC/VMware as they aspire to push up the stack into management, while at the same time expand from server virtualization to network and storage virtualization with their Software-Defined Data Center strategy.

Virtualization has increased server utilization and enabled mobility, severing the physical bindings of operating systems to device.  This trend continues with networking and storage, so application-centric infrastructure orchestration enables composition of the virtualized elements of the Software-Defined Data Center to deliver the highest value. If Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) was designed to increase business value, then the best way to align interests with the business is to orchestrate the underlying infrastructure in context of the application and abstract the underlying implementation details.  In the enterprise, doing this while maintaining governance, compliance and security policy is non-trivial without ServiceMesh.

I championed ServiceMesh as a strategic investment, seeing it as a potential architectural control point for the Software-Defined Data Center and a key enabler for hybrid cloud. My thinking was that enterprise grade cloud management, enabling faster release cycles and accelerating DevOps, was essential for realizing the vision of the Software-Defined Data Center and was a requirement for large enterprises utilizing private, public and hybrid cloud environments. More often than not production infrastructure is being managed as one system or a group of geographically distributed systems as opposed to individual infrastructure components. I believe the element managers and workflow-based automation tools have been played out and are quickly consolidating into the hands of the incumbent infrastructure providers as they try in fill their management gaps (e.g., ManageIQ to Redhat, DynamicOps to VMware, Cloupia to Cisco and Gale Technologies to Dell). What these companies are missing is that the real value to the enterprise is in application-centric management of infrastructure.

Enterprise-grade cloud management must be application centric. Orchestrating the management of infrastructure in context of the application, across the development lifecycle, significantly enhances the value to the business delivered by XaaS. The application is the reason infrastructure exists. Just look at how quickly customers on Heroku, EngineYard and Cloud Foundry can take an idea from initial concept to production without worrying about underlying infrastructure, but instead focusing on the business value the application aspires to create.

The bottom line is that infrastructure is only as valuable as the applications that run on it. Application-centric infrastructure orchestration across private (VCE), public (Azure/AWS/Rack-space/HP) and hybrid clouds becomes the new architectural control point for the management of the Software-Defined Data Center. Enabling enterprises to efficiently develop and run applications on any private, public or hybrid cloud and easily move between them based on customer-defined policies is where demand is evolving. The VMware vCloud Suite bundles eight disparate technologies to provide a VMware IaaS offering. However, customers considering the vCloud Suite need to understand that there is little integration across the products today and quite a bit of overlap in feature/functionality with no concept of an encompassing policy model. Even if successfully integrated in the future as promised by VMware marketing, the offering is still too infrastructure-centric, provides no DevOps tool-chain integration or release automation and lacks an application level policy engine. The ServiceMesh Agility Platform, with its built-in release automation and DevOps acceleration, enables a true policy-based approach to governance that is at a higher level than that provided by the vCloud Suite.

I have looked at most of the players in cloud application management and the Software-Defined Data Center arena and ServiceMesh is the only player that is fully integrated with the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and enables cloud-based, enterprise-class release automation and DevOps.

Customers are demanding a single platform solution for application-centric cloud management. Of course, BMC, HP and IBM are attempting to cobble together platforms with piece parts of acquired software, but right now they require a ton of services to implement and maintain. ServiceMesh provides a purpose-built platform that enables EMC Services (or any other services company for that matter) to deliver solutions to customers today and own the new control point for enterprise application management. I believe the market has matured enough that within the next 18-24 months most enterprise CIOs will be expected to provide on-demand, self-service delivery of applications and application platforms and that this will become competitive differentiation for their companies. ServiceMesh’s product is way out in front of the other players and is the only solution that is a unified platform, proven in its ability to serve enterprise-grade customers at scale.

The stars rarely align like this. I believe that once the large infrastructure players start to realize the significance of the strategic control point enabled by ServiceMesh’s approach, DevOps and the Software-Defined Data Center continue to gain momentum. The implications of this shift in control point will become obvious to all and ServiceMesh will be amazingly well positioned to seize the opportunity. ServiceMesh is at the epicenter of a several major trends, has a world-class team and a highly differentiated product. The best bet I could make on ServiceMesh was to join them, so here I am!

The reality is that data centers are static and workloads are mobile. They face common, but also unique security threats and both can be secure…using different strategies. What it boils down to is control and what types of controls are needed for various activities.Decisions about what type of cloud to deploy various applications in and what kind of policies must be in place is a critical step in the security process. But bringing theory into reality is another matter.

Experienced enterprise IT professionals know too well the issues associated with manual configuration. Who hasn’t been there when bad firewall rules were accidentally published into production, or a fat finger caused an errant guest firewall rule change?

Today, ServiceMesh announced an extension of our Agility Platform that gives enterprises more control and assurance over cloud security, compliance and governance, and provides businesses with an increased ability to innovate to meet new opportunities without worrying about threats to core business.

The ServiceMesh cloud management platform will now integrate with Cisco Virtual Network Management Center (VNMC), to provision firewall policies to the Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) appliance, interacting with the VNMC, to configure VSG with Agility policies. With this integration, we are extending the ServiceMesh Agility Platform’s policy management capabilities to manage security policies in an automated, uniform way across Cisco firewalls.

A policy-based, standardized delivery approach to network and security configuration reduces risk and increases control.  More than just erasing fat finger mistakes though, is the confidence you get when you know that you have policies that map directly to business requirements as they relate to line-of-business applications and implementations in the VNMC.

Everyone from CIOs to in-the-trenches IT has a common concern: ensuring the end-to-end security protection in the same platform that provides holistic cloud management. Agility Platform helps says good bye to fat fingers, the inconsistency of manual configuration and stale firewall rules and instead allows you to embrace:

• The ability to securely provision applications across hybrid cloud environments
• True  automation of firewalls and network configuration
• Standardized and automated firewall configurations that ensure security profiles are constantly managed and maintained, leading to a reduction in misconfiguration errors
• Automated, policy-based configurations that speed application delivery by eliminating lengthy change board wait times

The reality is that conditions may vary, but a core, policy-based security strategy, whether in a public or private cloud environment, can be even more secure than a static environment and should lift the barrier to cloud adoption.