With isolated security and a service level promising 99.9 percent availability, the production-ready cloud may be imminent.

The demand for cloud services is skyrocketing, and IBM is poised to introduce a service later this year that will allow businesses to dial in the security and service levels businesses have come to expect from on-premise servers.

Part of its IBM SmartCloud offerings, Enterprise+ will offer a core set of multi-tenant services to manage virtual server, storage, network, and security infrastructure components, including managed operational production services. For now, the operating systems offered will be Windows, Linux, and AIX. Whether IBM i will be offered at a later time certainly is a reasonable assumption, although it has not been announced to date.

IBM maintains that the Enterprise+ SmartCloud service will be so secure and offer such a high level of redundancy that it will provide a guaranteed service availability of 99.9 percent uptime. It's not five nines, but it's highly reliable and is designed to migrate traditional and higher availability applications onto it. Compare that to the recent outage at Amazon, and you might decide the public cloud is not for you.

IBM has an approach toward cloud services that is a little different from many other cloud providers. The company believes in different strokes for different folks. That is, different workloads require different levels of security and isolation, increasing levels of availability and performance, various technology platforms for multiple uses, different degrees of management support and deployment, and, of course, different cost structures so you pay for what you get but no more. The user has a choice of public, private, or hybrid cloud platform depending on the security needed and scope of the application being deployed.

The Enterprise+ service, available later in 2011, is an enhancement to IBM's existing and currently available Enterprise service that still offers excellent availability—99.5 percent uptime guaranteed, with security being virtual with some physical security built in, according to the company.

The IBM SmartCloud Enterprise service is an extension of the popular Development and Test Cloud, in which you provide your own software license and pay as you go; it's free for developer use. With the Enterprise+ service, however, the monthly usage fee or fixed contract will cover the IBM-provided operating system and licenses for provided tools.

Speaking of tools, the company recently announced a new software product that should help businesses more easily build cloud computing services across applications and delivery models. IBM Workload Deployer gives users a graphical user interface to help install applications, configure databases, and set up security for cloud services that they use or provide to their customers. Workload Deployer has built-in monitoring, life-cycle management, and elasticity features that allow the user to scale applications as needed. The idea is to dramatically simplify and speed up cloud deployments. Isn't increased agility one of the major appeals of the cloud anyway?

IBM has invested heavily in cloud technologies beginning about five years ago with the build-out of a global network of cloud data centers. The company expects to see those investments deliver some $7 billion in revenue by 2015 in indirect sales of hardware, software, and services overall. Industry-wide, IDC predicts spending on cloud-related technologies to reach $45 billion by 2013 after recording that it reached $17 billion back in 2009.

IBM has been acquiring cloud-service companies and repositioning many of its Lotus products so they're available from the cloud to where it has quite a large portfolio of services. LotusLive, of course, is a collaboration suite that offers file sharing, Web conferencing, instant messaging, social networking, project tracking, and user communities. Now there is even Lotus Domino Utility Server for Lotus Live, allowing users to host their Domino applications online. IBM Blueworks Live is another collaborative cloud service that helps clients structure and automate ad hoc business services in minutes. IBM Sterling Commerce is a large B2B transaction services company that handles more than a billion transactions annually for many of the top U.S. retailers, banks, and manufacturers. IBM Converged Communications Services offers design and deployment of private unified communications cloud solutions. IBM Cast Iron supports integrating cloud services with enterprise business processes. IBM Tivoli Live offers clients enterprise-class service management capabilities with built-in best practices without the need to buy hardware or software licenses. IBM Unica cloud services, more commonly known as Pivotal Veracity and Marketing Operations OnDemand, give businesses enhanced tools to market their products, while IBM Coremetrics helps marketers optimize their efforts online.

These are all cloud solutions that are available today. The anticipated major solution available later this year on SmartCloud, however, will be IBM SAP Managed Application Services. With "SAP in the Cloud," users will be able to configure and maintain SAP environments far more easily, spending less time than they would with traditional maintenance. According to IBM, users will be treated to automated provisioning of SAP environments that will significantly reduce the cost and labor of SAP database cloning, refreshes, and patching.  Users will have production service levels and, if they choose it, optional 24x7 SAP DBA and SAP Basis support.

IBM says the time savings for performing standard SAP-related tasks will drop dramatically. Instead of installing Oracle over the course of a whole day, imagine being provisioned in about 10 minutes; instead of spending a half day maintaining database libraries, think of eight minutes; instead of spending two or three days cloning a database, do it in 20 minutes.

Yes, folks, the cloud is here to stay, and later this year, IBM will be offering users an enterprise cloud platform that companies will want to take a serious look at with an eye toward migrating any number of production-level workloads up into the virtual sky.

Chris Smith was the Senior News Editor at MC Press Online from 2007 to 2012 and was responsible for the news content on the company's Web site. Chris has been writing about the IBM midrange industry since 1992 when he signed on with Duke Communications as West Coast Editor of News 3X/400. With a bachelor's from the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in English and minored in Journalism, and a master's in Journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Chris later studied computer programming and AS/400 operations at Long Beach City College. An award-winning writer with two Maggie Awards, four business books, and a collection of poetry to his credit, Chris began his newspaper career as a reporter in northern California, later worked as night city editor for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and went on to edit a national cable television trade magazine. He was Communications Manager for McDonnell Douglas Corp. in Long Beach, Calif., before it merged with Boeing, and oversaw implementation of the company's first IBM desktop publishing system there. An editor for MC Press Online since 2007, Chris has authored some 300 articles on a broad range of topics surrounding the IBM midrange platform that have appeared in the company's eight industry-leading newsletters. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..