New features expand enterprise governance, security, and cost management capabilities

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Sept. 24 — RightScale Inc., the leader in cloud computing management, today unveiled a suite of features for the RightScale cloud management platform that provide users with new enterprise-grade controls for security, management and governance. As enterprise cloud adoption shifts from individual projects to a CIO-driven strategic initiative, organizations need better ways to manage their portfolio of cloud-based resources to meet their financial, governance and security requirements. RightScale's new features deliver the added controls enterprises need to manage their cloud applications.

"Whether enterprises are leveraging public, private or hybrid clouds, they need a cloud management platform that provides them with seamless management and control over cloud security, governance and costs," said Thorsten von Eicken, chief technical officer at RightScale. "Our new enterprise features provide the critical cloud management capabilities organizations need today, and will also grow with them as they continue to expand their use of cloud infrastructure."

Enterprise Identity and Security

RightScale now offers expanded security features that allow enterprises to provide single sign-on (SSO) to the RightScale platform by leveraging their existing directory services or identity management solutions, including Active Directory. RightScale has also partnered with Ping Identity to provide out-of-the-box identity federation.

Enterprise customers can now benefit from the following security features:

• Single Sign-On (SSO) support
• Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) support
• Manage authentication to RightScale via LDAP or Active Directory

In addition, RightScale has expanded its security capabilities to provide enterprises even more fine-grained control over access to cloud deployments and related data. For example, enterprises can restrict who has access to maintain security access policies for the servers in a deployment, increasing security and compliance.

With these new features, RightScale customers can now federate identities from internal directory services all the way down to the cloud instance and define granular permissions to fully customize access for any individual or group in the company. 

Enterprise Cloud Cost Management

RightScale now includes a new Enterprise Reporting capability that allows customized reporting on usage and costs across multiple clouds, accounts, business units, applications and functions. Reports can be used for "showback" or "chargeback" accounting to departments, application owners or business units. Customers have the option to automatically schedule reports and export them for integration with internal accounting systems. 

While it is easy for users within the enterprise to spin up servers in the cloud, enterprises find it challenging to track costs and provide chargebacks across accounts and applications. RightScale allows users to tag cloud resources with department, application, type, or any other value they choose. With Enterprise Reporting, RightScale customers can leverage those tags to see who is using what in the cloud and then allocate those costs to individual departments. 

In addition, customers can also use PlanForCloud, a recently announced cloud cost forecasting tool from RightScale, to budget for future cloud spend based on anticipated growth or changes in usage patterns.

Long Term Support for ServerTemplates

RightScale also announced Long Term Support (LTS) for RightScale-provided ServerTemplates with an 18-month assurance of bug fixes and backward compatibility. ServerTemplates are pre-built, customizable templates that allow customers to quickly create multi-tier architectures in the cloud of their choice, using the most popular databases, applications servers and web servers. ServerTemplates include multi-cloud base images with Linux or Windows operating systems tuned for each cloud, as well as out-of-the-box scripts that automate server operations.

The new LTS versions of ServerTemplates offer customers a long-term stable platform for building cloud applications with the assurance of RightScale support for bugs and technical issues. By using LTS ServerTemplates, customers can get their cloud applications deployed more quickly while also leveraging ongoing maintenance from RightScale.

RightScale's new enterprise features are now available. To learn more about RightScale and chat with a cloud management expert,  visit http://www.rightscale.com/products/governance-controls.php.

About RightScale

RightScale Inc., cloud management enables organizations to easily deploy and manage business-critical applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds. RightScale provides efficient configuration, monitoring, automation, and governance of cloud computing infrastructure and applications. Since 2006, millions of servers have been launched with the RightScale solution by leading enterprises including the Associated Press, CBS Interactive, Intercontinental Hotels Group, PBS, and Zynga.

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Source: RightScale