Virtustream, an enterprise-class cloud company and a Dell Technologies business, today announced a major upgrade to Virtustream Enterprise Cloud that includes significant cloud automation and security enhancements, which enable enterprises the unprecedented ability to automate key tasks while maintaining security levels - a multi-part process that previously required manual oversight. This technology evolution builds on Virtustream's expertise in delivering highly scalable, secure and high-performance cloud services for mission critical enterprise applications.

The enhancements also feature a foundationally new version of the xStream cloud management software platform including an enhanced architecture and application programming interface (API), in addition to the ability to address many of the specific challenges presented when migrating and managing enterprise applications in the cloud.

"Enterprise applications and workloads require special handling and care," said Deepak Patil, SVP, Product and Technology, Virtustream. "Historically, enterprise cloud customers had constraints that precluded them from flexibility and conveniences- such as quick provisioning-that are leveraged by cloud consumers with less complex use cases. This was primarily due to concerns about security, backups, monitoring and other issues. Virtustream's new enhancements simplify and automate the most complex actions delivering immediate value to customers."

This new upgrade extends automation deeper into previously manual cloud migration and management processes without compromising security or requiring onerous coordination of related operations. The new Virtustream Enterprise Cloud enhancements include the following capabilities:

• Cloud Management: Enhanced cloud management capabilities deliver increased levels of integration through APIs and automation from infrastructure to platform services, reducing time-to-cloud for historically difficult to migrate applications. These enhancements allow enterprise-level customers the ability to self-provision virtual machines (VMs) with host-based automated configuration of security services including anti-malware, intrusion detection, file-integrity monitoring as well as the automated coordination of backup and monitoring in minutes.
  
  This cloud management not only shaves significant time off of the normal process for configuring VMs in an enterprise context, but also reduces the possibility of manual errors during configuration. Additionally, customers can now create, manage and report on VM profiles that pre-define VM parameters, making the self-provisioning process even faster.
• Application Automation: With these upgrades, Virtustream is driving automation capabilities into the application layer. These capabilities include APIs, tools and application specific automation tasks designed to reduce operational processes, reduce the total cost of ownership, and dramatically improve the agility and flexibility of applications running in Virtustream Enterprise Cloud.
  
  For example, with this new release, customers running SAP applications in Virtustream Enterprise Cloud can now automate start/stop operations in the applications within minutes through a self-service portal with automated coordination of the adjacent processes such as monitoring suppression/enablement, backup disabling/enabling and security vulnerability scanning. This allows Virtustream customers the ability to optimize costs by automatically shutting down applications during weekends and maintenance periods without creating custom tooling or management scripts.

• Expanded Reporting, Manageability and Visibility: Also in this release, Virtustream Enterprise Cloud's self-service management portal offers important new features that provide customers tools for viewing application resource consumption and the ability to group and categorize applications for improved billing transparency. Virtustream helps customers to optimize their usage and create cost efficiencies through its industry-leading MicroVM technology, which provides the ability to avoid the use of pre-sized instances and achieve cost savings through a combination of aggregation and pay-as-you-go, usage-based billing.

In addition to these enhancements, Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, a VMware Cloud Verified service, will leverage the power of the latest Dell Technologies portfolio through the use of VMware's hybrid cloud technologies and the latest Dell Technologies infrastructure.

"Enterprises no longer need to be held back by mission critical workloads," said Patil. "There is a place to move them using new cloud operating models that compress processes and provide automation and efficiencies that clear space for new innovations, capabilities and businesses. As a long-standing industry expert in moving mission critical applications to the cloud, Virtustream understands the pressure that enterprise IT leaders are under and is designing solutions that will not only solve these pain points, but also will substantively improve time-to-value for cloud projects and empower our customers to confidently embrace the future."