GIMME Cloud control

Internet Solutions (IS) has added another arrow to its quiver with the launch of SkyLight, a product it believes is the first aggregated cloud services portal and which it is calling the world’s biggest cloud.

Essentially, users can access both local and global cloud platforms from a single SkyLight account. Currently, they include IS Cloud, Dimension Data Cloud, Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure, and more will follow.

A tech user can use SkyLight to deploy new cloud environments or manage existing ones from one spot. Instead of selecting a provider that is a near-best fit for most of your needs and workloads, you can deploy multiple, fit-for-purpose, scalable virtual environments.

This could mean different options for your customer relationship or human resources Web tool, and another for mail, or websites, for example. And all this without the escalating admin and learning curve of managing diverse environments through multiple accounts with different providers.

Among other things, SkyLight lets you monitor usage, the status of firewalls, and up-time per resource. It also lets you turn virtual machines on and off instantly, and access and download reports for these metrics.

For business and finance personnel, it’s easier to plan and see what you are spending. The built-in cost tracking is able to show not only what your financial commitments are to date, but also where you might be underutilising environments so you can trim the fat.

Because IS is local, your invoices arrive in rands, sent from a single company. The last word on the finance side: there is no lock-in contract.

Finally, from a risk and compliance perspective, SkyLight also gives great granular security and permissions control. You can set permissions per user or add users to a group with fixed permissions. There are audit logs so you can see what changes are made and by whom.

Over and above the cloud services themselves, SkyLight’s key benefit is greater visibility and control — whether you’re a tech teamster, bean counter or risk manager. And, to a degree, it negates the push-and-pull that naturally results between these job functions, with operations teams wanting flexibility and finance teams requiring predictability of spend.