Micro Focus is extending its Enterprise Cloud Services to support Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), allowing businesses to shift their existing Cobol applications to Amazon's infrastructure.
The move, announced on Tuesday, follows Micro Focus's launch in October of support for Microsoft's Azure Services Platform. Azure and EC2 are both cloud services platforms, which let companies run their applications on remote servers — something advocates say can be substantially less expensive than maintaining the servers locally. Another example of a cloud services platform is Google's App Engine.
With Micro Focus's Enterprise Cloud Services, businesses can make their applications available either as private services (accessible only to the company that generated the application) or as public applications (available to the general marketplace).
The service is available on Amazon's US and European availability zones, which are localised regions set up to bring the computing resources closer to the customer's geographic location. Amazon initially offered only US availability zones, but added a European zone in December.
Micro Focus's service uses an enterprise's existing encryption keys for security on both the network and cloud-based storage.
The software provider said shifting to the cloud should be considered a cost-cutting measure by businesses to help them deal with the current economic crisis. "To innovate in today's tough economic climate, enterprises must embrace flexibility and cost-effective modernisation strategies," said Mark Haynie, Micro Focus's chief technology officer for application modernisation, in a statement.
A developer survey by Evans Data this week found fewer than 10 percent of developers worldwide are currently using cloud services, but more than one-quarter said they planned to use cloud services at some point.
Microsoft introduced Windows Azure, the cloud operating system powering the Azure Services Platform, in October.
