Crosscheck Networks Helps Ease Enterprise Cloud Migrations

BOSTON, April 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Empowering enterprises with actionable information to make strategic decisions about cloud computing, Crosscheck Networks, Inc. today unveiled a first-of-its-kind cloud simulation product.

The new product, CloudPort, delivers the ability to simulate services in the cloud prior to implementation. Capitalizing on actual metrics of cloud providers and enterprise data centers, organizations using CloudPort can more confidently align their infrastructures with business requirements for enhanced reliability and risk mitigation, and ensure seamless enterprise-to-cloud integration.

In the absence of quantifiable data, enterprises are challenged to make well-informed choices when it comes to migrating to the cloud. Instead, they often find themselves forced to make these strategic decisions based on ad-hoc or partial information. This is a risky and unproductive approach, especially when a typical migration process requires moving numerous service components – including database and application servers, Web services and identity stores – to the cloud. Once a full reference system is deployed, the behavior of the enterprise applications interacting with the cloud-based components must be tested – using customized production code. This is an expensive, time-consuming and potentially error-prone proposition.

With CloudPort, enterprises benefit by never having to touch production code – while eliminating the substantial time, capital and IT staff resource expenses related to building a distinct cloud test environment including:

• A full-scale, redundant architecture that involves acquisition hardware and licensing costs;
• Hiring dedicated development teams to perform testing and benchmarking; and
• Custom hand-coding "What if" scenarios to determine error conditions related to latency, performance, scalability and security.

Crosscheck Networks enables enterprises to make more informed decisions when selecting a provider for, and prioritizing which applications to migrate to, cloud computing. CloudPort arms IT organizations with information about cloud providers including: performance metrics, geographic latency and service initiation/"spin-up" times; failures, outages and application error states; and security, capacity and interoperability. A pre-requisite for migrating mission-critical applications, CloudPort's "single pane of glass," centralized console offers ease of modeling scenarios across cloud providers and data centers to rapidly validate trading-partner integration; analyze provider performance characteristics for precise SLA measurement/management; and ensure effective cloud migration – without impacting production systems.

"Organizations are bombarded with messages that moving some or all of their infrastructures to the cloud will deliver benefits ranging from faster integration with partners, reduced capital expense and increased IT flexibility," said Mamoon Yunus, CEO of Crosscheck Networks. "But, they lack real-world data about how their data centers would perform once they're integrated with the cloud. As a result, enterprises struggle with confidently determining if and what to move, and once decided, prioritizing when to move it."

"CloudPort addresses these needs by allowing for granular 'what-if' scenario planning that proactively establishes business risk, ultimately facilitating reliable, secure migrations and reducing costs," Yunus continued. "Importantly, it enables post-migration monitoring so organizations can ensure that everything continues to run the way it was envisioned – or quickly flag and correct should an issue arise."

For maximum deployment flexibility, Crosscheck Networks offers a pay-as-you-go subscription model. Leveraging cloud instances from Amazon EC2, OpSource Cloud, GoGrid and Rackspace, enterprises can achieve cost savings of up to 60 percent when compared to reference architectures, while compressing the services lifecycle and reducing time-to-market.

Additionally, CloudPort ensures seamless integration by providing quantifiable metrics on corporate-wide Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) interfaces regarding adherence to corporate rules such as service naming conventions, data types, data structures and protocol bindings. Also, it ensures that both consumer and producer development teams adhere to corporate mandates regarding message security and interoperability – for example, WS-Encryption and SAML must be used for message-level privacy and identity. Additionally, CloudPort allows organizations to govern policies within their own enterprise as well as with their trading partners to guarantee message integrity – before going into production.

CloudPort is an integral component of Crosscheck Networks' comprehensive Web services "lifecycle" suite. The products can be deployed together or seamlessly integrated with organizations' existing infrastructure. In addition to CloudPort, the company's enterprise-class offerings comprise:

• SOAPSonar – Provides modes for functional, multi-client performance, compliance and security testing of SOAP-, XML- and REST-based services. SOAPSonar offers enterprises the unique ability to test functional and performance characteristics of unlimited-sized Web services attachments via streaming of structured and unstructured data based on industry standards such as MTOM and MIME. And with support for WS-Trust, SAML 2.0 and WS-identity tokens, SOAPSonar ensures a best-practices approach to Federated Identity Management.

• Forum Sentry – Simplifying business communications through secure integration across networks and business boundaries, the FIPS- and DoD-certified Sentry XML Gateway ensures preemptive risk mitigation of business transactions exposed via SOA by enabling the ability to develop and deploy robust and reliable SOAP- and XML-based Web services. Empowering more secure, efficient and seamless information exchange among back-office applications, Web services, and customer and partner portals – the hallmarks of SOA Federation – Forum Sentry affords users more control of their Web interactions.

• Forum STS – Offers secure, accelerated and consolidated identity enforcement, controlling privileges without requiring the custom code that can frequently introduce risk. Performing comprehensive mediation, authentication, and authorization of identity exchange among customer and partner portals, Web applications and XML-based Web services, Forum STS provides businesses with a simplified model for identity management and the framework for Federated SOA. And through Federated SOA with trusted business units and external trading partners, organizations can successfully navigate the regulatory and compliance barriers related to information security, integrity and privacy, and establish a solid foundation for their cloud computing initiatives.

Pricing and Availability

CloudPort is available immediately. Deployment models include floating, instance-, and cloud-based licensing as well as subscription or perpetual pricing. Pricing starts at US$4999.

About Crosscheck Networks

Crosscheck Networks and its wholly owned subsidiary Forum Systems deliver solutions for deploying robust, resilient, secure and reliable Web services. The company's integrated, holistic product suite streamlines and optimizes resources throughout the Web services lifecycle, ensuring reduced time-to-market and more rapid return on investment. Crosscheck Networks is the only company with HP Enterprise Management Alliance Program (EMAP) certification for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) testing with native HP Quality Center Integration. For more information, please visit www.crosschecknet.com.

All names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE Crosscheck Networks, Inc.