Key Enabling Technologies for Virtual Private Clouds

Abstract

The concept of a virtual private cloud (VPC) has emerged recently as a way of managing information technology resources so that they appear to be oper- ated for a single organization from a logical point of view, but may be built from underlying physical resources that belong to the organization, an external service provider, or a combination of both. Several technologies are essential to the effective implementation of a VPC. Virtual data centers provide the insulation that sets one organization’s virtual resources apart from those of other organizations and from the underlying physical infrastructure. Virtual applications collect those resources into separately manageable units. Policy-based deployment and policy compliance offer ameans of control and verification of the operation of the virtual applications across the virtual data centers. Finally, service management integration bridges across the underlying resources to give an overall, logical and actionable view. These key technologies enable cloud providers to offer organizations the cost and efficiency benefits of cloud computing as well as the operational autonomy and flexibility to which they have been accustomed.