Addressing Enterprise Cloud Computing Concerns With Sonoa ServiceNet

By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-01-29

Sonoa ServiceNet is a network and virtual appliance that supports enterprise cloud computing by enforcing security, interoperability, and performance policies. I spoke with Scott Regan, their head of marketing. The use of cloud computing is exploding, in part because of the huge potential cost savings.

Many firms are considering working within the cloud but the three issues raised above are often obstacles. Sonoa is designed to address these potential road blocks to enterprise cloud computing. It actually began to support SOA within the enterprise but branched out to the cloud as the popularity of SaaS emerged.

Sonoa addresses several main SaaS issues. First, it allows for visibility to SaaS traffic and performance. This allows for monitoring of policies and compliance issues. This data can help with both governance and performance management issues. Here is a screen shot of Sonoa Analytics.

Second it enables enhanced security and access control. You can implement a flexible, access control policy model that can be applied on global operations down to individual users or clients. There is also a rich set of policies for authentication, authorization, auditing, privacy, and data protection. A user model for collaboration, user isolation, and delegated administration is provided and profile-based policies can be applied to LDAP, databases, or other existing resources.

Third, ServiceNet enables transformation of application through protocol mapping (e.g., SOAP to REST), versioning, and credential mediation. There is also an Eclipse-based development environment for custom transformations and policies. In addition, there is code-free configuration of transformations and policy application via a Web-based console. This allows for the sharing of data across applications.

Fourth, the ServiceNet appliance employs hardware acceleration to deliver networking-level throughput, providing scalability and performance to help meet SLAs with fault and traffic management and load balancing. There is network-appliance architecture for high scalability and availability. Here is a screen shot of Sonoa Control Center for operators to configure policies on services (security, audit, SLA, transformations, etc.).

One use case is a major financial service firm that wants to accelerate customer access to revenue generating web services. At the same time they need to ensure they are staying within banking regulations. IBM ships Sonoa ServiceNet with their rmashup server product to enhance its performance and policy monitoring. Sonoa clients include JP Morgan Chase, Pfizer, and Warner Music. Scott said that like many other enterprise 2.0 and cloud vendors, they are not being affected negatively by the recent economic downturn as they offer a way to manage and enhance cost reductions. This is good news and I can see an increasing need for their services in today's IT market. Here is a short video demo of the analytics product from the Sonoa website.

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About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.