How to get control of rogue cloud services use

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

Software-as-a-service and cloud computing services are ideas whose times have come. The trouble is, business users have figured that out, at times subscribing to public cloud services without IT's knowledge -- and that, of course, gives rise to management challenges.

It's a big problem, especially in large enterprises, says Julie Craig, director of application management research at Enterprise Management Associates. "They end up with customer and possibly sensitive business information or information subject to regulation in the cloud and IT often doesn't know anything about it," she says.

FAQ: Cloud computing, demystified

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Software-as-a-service and cloud computing services are ideas whose times have come. The trouble is, business users have figured that out, at times subscribing to public cloud services without IT's knowledge -- and that, of course, gives rise to management challenges.

It's a big problem, especially in large enterprises, says Julie Craig, director of application management research at Enterprise Management Associates. "They end up with customer and possibly sensitive business information or information subject to regulation in the cloud and IT often doesn't know anything about it," she says.

FAQ: Cloud computing, demystified

"I imagine there are a lot of CIOS are out there who are concerned about what, for example, their sales and marketing organizations or even departments in certain parts of the world are doing as far as enterprise data is concerned," Craig adds.

Jamcracker, which has been providing services delivery management tools to services and technology providers since last decade, aims at easing those concerns. Earlier this month, it entered the enterprise arena with Jamcracker Platform, a services delivery and life-cycle management product that provides a central point of control for cloud services. In essence, the company says, Jamcracker Platform can turn IT into a cloud services broker.

Using a provided toolkit, enterprise IT can integrate user provisioning, administration and single sign-on functions for private or public infrastructure, platform or SaaS offerings. Once that's completed, IT can provide users a catalog of services and then centrally and consistently manage provisioning, access, administration, security, audit and chargeback processes for those offerings, the company says.

As enterprises strive to achieve operational maturity, a la the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best-practices framework, tools such as Jamcracker Platform could provide considerable help, Craig says. "A services catalog is a pivotal ITIL concept, and that's exactly what Jamcracker is doing with the ability to provide service-level management and other capabilities."

It's got a pretty cool value proposition, she adds. "Jamcracker can enable cloud to come out of its adolescence and enter adulthood in terms of production-grade services," Craig says.

Jamcracker Platform is available now. Jamcracker offers a term license fee for the base platform, pricing for which starts at around $300,000, as well as tiered pricing based on the number of service units. The company defines a service unit as the number of cloud services being delivered and managed from the Jamcracker Platform multiplied by the number of subscribed users. Additional fees apply for add-on modules, integration services and the like.

Are you finding the need to rein in cloud services use? Let me know how you're managing the challenge by dropping me an e-mail at bschultz5824@gmail.com.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.