Cloud to Jumpstart Staging and Collaborative Workflow Testing

For savvy CTOs, integrators and consultants serving external and internal constituencies, CloudShare provides a cloud-based, extended VMware environment to build and share sophisticated IT solutions for complex application-driven IT environments. More importantly, the next wave of virtualization projects will see a shift in the focus of IT from opportunistic consolidation projects to the complex application-centric issues of critical business processes. New virtualization projects will involve multiple virtual machines (VMs) and must meet rigorous Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for process availability and continuity.

IT projects of this scope raise significant issues with respect to provisioning hardware and software for the pre-production environment. In addition, IT providers must be able to demonstrate that a solution is able to support a business process to a level that is acceptable to line of business executives.

Using CloudShare, IT providers are able to collaborate with customers, partners and colleagues in a way that goes well beyond point-and-show presentations that characterize standard webinars. CloudShare provides users with true hands-on interaction with a dedicated production-class instance of a complete IT environment.

What distinguishes the CloudShare user experience from that of typical cloud-based VMware environments is CloudShare’s ability to virtualize an independent copy of an entire workflow—VMs, storage, networking and preinstalled software—and present it with an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop user interface. Virtualized on-demand workflows also boost development capabilities by allowing software teams to freeze entire workflows to track subtle integration problems that can degrade a process workflow without actually introducing a traceable error. As a result, any IT provider can now lay a foundation for rock-solid excellence by delivering over the Web robust, agent-less solutions for pre-production tasks such as development, testing, QA, staging and back-end training sessions.