One of my roles at Sun Microsystems was to manage a project to integrate OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2. Traditionally, for engineering and development projects, you procure systems, install them in labs and have IT manage them on an ongoing basis. This was obviously a different kind of installation which required a cloud service such as Amazon EC2 rather than internal IT systems. At that time, the only option available was to use a credit card for billing and then submit an expense report with the Amazon EC2 usage bills. We soon realized we were not the only engineering team at Sun using Amazon EC2 and expensing bills.

For this particular Amazon EC2 integration project, submitting an expense report wasn’t an issue, but for other development projects within an organization it may be. There are several hundreds of developers in a large organization that could use personal credit cards and expense cloud usage bills which don’t get accounted for as IT expenses and don’t show up in the IT budget. More importantly, there is the possibly of having substantial sensitive data and code that gets sent over to the clouds putting the enterprise at risk not only for sensitive data but also for precious source code and IP. And all this may happen without IT being knowledge and involvement.

That’s why one of our main goals at CumuLogic has been to give control back to IT organizations while removing barriers for developers to quickly gain access to cloud resources whether private or public clouds. With CumuLogic solution, IT can set up an enterprise-wide master account on EC2 with Access Controls, quotas and hard/soft limits on cloud resources for users and departments to be able to manage capacity, usage, security and compliance. The User Management feature can be integrated with enterprise LDAP, Active Directory or Identity Managers. Besides providing control, this feature also allows for Usage Reporting and charge back to the Departments for the use of IT resources.

We believe this functionality puts back the control in IT hands and allows enterprises to leverage cloud resources while providing flexibility for application developers and QA/testing teams, in addition to maintaining security, compliance and controlling expenses in a manageable fashion.

We would like to get your input and suggestions on this feature.

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