I confess that the last time I looked at Amazons cloud, which was not that long ago, it was offering a very limited hosting service. Reviewing the Cloud over the past few days, I was very impressed with the services being provided. In the EC2 environment, Amazon will provide you with Linux or Windows 2003 servers - and you pay per hour, for what you use.

The main area that caught my attention was the number of major software companies that are offering their products in the Amazon cloud as pre build Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). For example,  you can now spin up AMI's for a number of IBM products including Lotus, DB2 and most recently a Linux image running ITM 6.2.1.

Given the recent focus on Appliances - is this the the first IBM TIvoli Virtual Appliance ?

As if the proposal was not already attractive - IBM support the transfer of existing distributed IBM licenses to the Amazon Cloud. Speaking to IBM this week - its all about ensuring customers have the same range of trusted technology within the Cloud - but licensing keeps Tivoli firmly inside the cloud, not permitting the management of systems outside.

For further info :

IBM AMI's - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/cloud.html

Licensing - http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/passportadvantage/pvu_for_Amazon_Elastic_compute_cloud.html

Here's a brief synopsis of what you get - but its essentially a Virtual Appliance. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/tiv/tivolimonitoring/faq-ec2-tivolimonitoring.html

The Elastic Cloud : http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

When talking to our enterprise customers we see a number of common challenges in securing business critical applications. As we look across the services provided to the organisation, we see an array of different security solutions – sharing the same common goal, but each independently designed. Some implementations are as a result of acquisitions, some just a result of different projects teams. One thing is clear, the non-standardised approach results in inflexible security solutions - and a significant support and maintenance workload.

Pirean have developed a solution to address this problem, called the WebSphere Standard Login Module. This solution delivers centralised access control for all of your WebSphere applications - flexible enough to support application specific authorisation requirements, multi-level authentication and intelligent workflow based user validation.

Once the application has succeeded in completing the appropriate authentication service, it offers the feature of extracting additional information from a range of sources, such as Active Directory, LDAP Servers or external Databases. This additional data will be associated with the current user’s session and can be used to drive access control decisions and personalisation within the chosen Business Application.

Providing an intuitive web based configuration interface, security components such as two factor authentication become simple building blocks for the security layer that can be quickly rolled out across the application landscape. Delivering two factor authentication for all applications takes the same time as delivering it for one application – it becomes a security layer that is simply plugged-in.

The solution is so simple to control, that the security teams can define the authorisation models and the project teams just pick the layers they want to protect their application and assign weightings to control the order.

In addition, from a compliance perspective the securely signed logs provide a view of access across the WebSphere application estate. Detailing who accessed which application, when they accessed it and from where.

The solution provides a single point of control for security across the entire WebSphere estate.

Take a look at www.Tivoli-Foundations.com - Pirean have created a site dedicated to the Appliances. Lots of information relating to the two new Appliances - as well as an interesting Analyst Paper from FreeForm Dynamics.

Friday saw the official launch of the IBM Tivoli Foundations Appliances for Application and Service Management. Having worked with IBM technology since the days of Courier and Sentry, I have seen a number of product launches and initiatives to provide the midmarket with a targeted solution – in truth the fact remains that there is no such thing as a typical customer and the balance between feature rich and ease of deployment is a fine one.

Pirean were fortunate to be a part of Appliance discussions in their early stages, and as a participant of both Beta programmes I have worked closely with the teams and technology. The leveraging of the Lotus Foundations platform was a very important move, and it provides a solid base on which to deliver this ground breaking technology. The simplicity of installation, and the time to value is truly impressive.

From the customer’s perspective, I belive that the Tivoli Appliance initiative is significant on two fronts:

First, IBM have managed to take the Enterprise Class feature rich products from the Tivoli Portfolio and deliver user friendly products that essentially walk customers by the hand through the delivery of the services supported by the appliance.

Secondly, unlike other offerings in the market, the technology has not been crippled or ‘dumbed down’ from the enterprise solutions. In truth, the solution’s have actually been enhanced in the areas of automatic discovery and ‘web replay’ training – features I suspect we will see soon in the Enterprise editions. For any customer who wants to extend the scope of the appliance and customise it to their environment there is no restriction - other than a limit on the physical systems being managed in the case of the Application Manager, or the number of Users in the case of Service Manager – and even these numbers have been increased on previous midmarket offerings to ensure the scope to address most midmarket organisations.

From personal experience, with Tivoli Foundation Service Manger I had a fully functional service desk up and running in under 20 minutes. My experience with Application Manager demonstrated a high performance, low maintenance Business Service Monitoring solution.

This is true enterprise class software, packaged for the mid-market.