With rogue clouds and shadow IT becoming more prevalent in the cloud, enterprises are turning to advanced management platforms as a means to keep on top of things. With the right administration and management infrastructure, IT can provide flexible access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) while ensuring appropriate management controls of the off-premise workloads and virtual machines.

Technology for the cloud is currently in explosion mode with the big players like Amazon, Microsoft, VMware and now IBM. We have several superhighways available but the entrance and exit ramps are still be developed.  This is part of the growing pains of the technology and more and more companies with technologies like HotLink will build and provide the transition between highways.

The entire purpose of constructing an Software Defined Data Center is to allow new services to be rapidly provisioned. Hotlink allows enterprises who have a significant investment in VMware vSphere and vCenter to manage other virtualization platforms like Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat KVM, and Citrix XenServer, as well as public clouds like Amazon EC2 from within vCenter.

HotLink jumped into the scene with a new way of managing hybrid virtualization environments. And if you have been following the company, you know they expanded their coverage from virtualization into the cloud. VMblog recently sat down for an interview with Lynn LeBlanc, the company CEO and founder, to find out more.

HotLink’s Hybrid Express product fulfills the need for a non-disruptive co-existence between an on-premise private cloud and the Amazon public cloud. This is done by integrating the Amazon EC2 account directly into VMware vCenter or in this new release, Microsoft SCVMM.

The management ecosystem has actively embraced the multi-hypervisor world, giving customers a range of choices. HotLink allows customers to manage Hyper-V, XenServer and KVM from within vCenter, migrate VMs between environments, and even use vSphere templates and snapshots across all environments.

Electronic Arts' virtual infrastructure includes hundreds of thousands of VMware and Hyper-V VMs and another 20,000 VMs in Amazon. Electronic Arts deployed HotLink, a VMware vCenter plug-in for managing public clouds and other hypervisors.

When it comes to raising money from venture capitalists, the gender of an entrepreneur matters, According to new research VCs have confidence in a man with a business background leading a tech company, but not in a woman with a comparable profile.  Lynn LeBlanc is an exception to the rule.

HotLink recently added Amazon EC2 plug-in support for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager.  Managed services providers now have the ability to deploy, administer and manage hybrid on- and off-premise resources using existing virtualization management infrastructure.

Going rogue and tapping into public cloud is commonplace for groups that value speed and agility over following the sanctioned and often laborious corporate process of procuring internal IT resources. Though prevalent, the ramifications of unmanaged “shadow IT” are significant for the enterprise.