Cloud Platforms: enStratus
What is it?
enStratus is a software-as-a-service platform for cloud infrastructure management across multiple providers. Furthermore, as a governance service, it provides a comprehensive audit of the following providers: Amazon Web Services, Cloud.com, Eucalyptus, Google Cloud Platform, GoGrid, OpenStack, Rackspace, ReliaCloud, Terremark, VMware, and Windows Azure.
Pros
The product has a number of advantages.
- With enStratus, a user can establish proper control over financial operations in a cloud environment—with attributes such as billing codes, quotas, and reporting. This can help cloud administrators to efficiently track expenditures across multiple accounts of a cloud environment. Furthermore, enStratus can perform an audit of cloud resources and associate them with distinct infrastructure budgets.
- enStratus enforces security, encrypting customers’ cloud environment. Under this mode, only managers having specific digital keys can access the cloud. Keys are stored outside the cloud environment to guarantee a high level of security so only those with permissions can access the infrastructure.
- enStratus supports multiple currencies, so users can pay for their cloud services in the most suitable way.
Cons
The challenges a company may encounter include the “no-sharing-keys” policy, cloud provider coupling, and potential issues with hosting back-ups.
Recommended use
The enStratus cloud management platform is a good fit for providing cloud security and availability management. Its patent-pending security architecture ensures the separation of security keys from encrypted data and keeping user credentials outside the cloud.
Further reading
- Cloud Tools: Zeus Traffic Manager
- Cloud Tools: Hardware Monitoring with Server Density
- Cloud Tools: A Pluggable Cloud Storage with ScaleDB