Websphere Portal Server and other IBM technologies on Amazon EC2 Cloud
IBM has enabled WebSphere Portal server v7 to be hosted in a cloud using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMIs) for free if you use it for development or testing. Users will then just need to pay for the Amazon EC2 usage, some marginal fee of $0.10/hr plus change for data-in/data-out.
Currently, a few specialized portal-as-a-service providers or ASPs can do this, but being able to take your own WebSphere Portal servers and move them to a farm is a different level altogether!
With this cloud architecture, developers and administrators would be relieved from worrying about issues such as hardware, backups, networks, licenses etc. It is also easy to spawn new instances if the need for more processing power arises. As far as security is concerned, Amazon ensures that all the essential aspects are taken care of, including SOX compliance.
