As I mentioned in my last blog post, the promise of cost reduction is compelling many enterprises to move their workloads into the Cloud but many IT leaders are reluctant to do so, for fear of compromising the security and availability of their services. These concerns are well-founded but the benefits of Cloud are too great to ignore. To obtain these benefits, companies must adopt techniques that protect against the attendant risks, without compromise.

Many people are familiar with Layer 7’s industry-leading security functionality, so it’s no surprise that I’d recommend using our Gateway technology to protect connections from on-premise infrastructure to off-premise Cloud services. The flexibility of deployment options we offer makes it possible to create a network of secure on- and off-premise endpoints to meet the most stringent requirements. This covers security but what about availability?

People seem to be less familiar with Layer 7’s routing capabilities. Our Gateway technology is optimized to perform flexible, content-based routing with negligible impact on overall transaction times. In the context of the Cloud, this means that traffic proxied by a Layer 7 Gateway can be re-directed using intelligent algorithms and even dynamic, state-based awareness. This routing capability, which I call “API-aware traffic management”, brings huge benefits in ensuring availability when connecting to multiple API instances – on-premise, off-premise, in multiple Clouds… anywhere on the hybrid network.

I’ll be discussing this topic in detail at the upcoming Cloud Expo 2012, June 11-14 in New York City. This promises to be a great event, so I hope you can make it and attend my discussion!

In this latest installment of From the Vault, our series of posts on classic Layer 7 resources, we’re going to focus on another webinar featuring Forrester Research, Inc. (It seems like a good time to do this, with a new Layer 7 webinar featuring Forrester Research, Inc. – A Practical Guide to API Security & OAuth for the Enterprise – coming up on October 12.)

Dating back to June of this year, Managing the Cloud was presented by Layer 7 CTO and Chief Architect Scott Morrison and featured input from Chenxi Wang, PhD, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. As with all our webinars with Forrester, this was a particularly popular and enlightening event.

Managing the Cloud will teach you how to create a Cloud adoption roadmap for your organization. The webinar examines the concept of the “Cloud broker” – a service or device that acts as an intermediary between the enterprise and Cloud – and explains how a Cloud broker facilitates the management of Cloud adoption by:

• Simplifying integration with the Cloud
• Securely migrating enterprise workloads to the Cloud
• Abstracting integration details and presenting a consistent user interface
• Providing SSO services, implementing security and enforcing compliance

You can find out more about Managing the Cloud and download it by clicking here or just watch it in the player below, courtesy of the Layer 7 YouTube Channel.

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