IBM announced a hybrid-cloud solution that builds on its acquisition of Cast Iron and its Tivoli cloud management software. The solution enables enterprises to manage their in-house resources and resourced deployed in public clouds, while applying universal policies to all.

With WebSphere Cast Iron, customers can define policies, quotas, limits, monitoring and performance rules for applications deployed in the public cloud the same as for their on-premise resources. This allows users to access all their resources through a single service catalog.

Robert LeBlanc, senior VP for IBM's middleware software business, said the hybrid model was emerging as a strategy to quickly get business value out of data resources.

"IBM's new solution will expedite and secure this process to help clients of all sizes access key business applications securely, no matter where they reside," he said.

Other capabilities of the solution are better user-access control through automated synchronization of user directories of on-premise and cloud applications. This means users can only access information they are authorized to access.

The solution also offers dynamics provisioning to support cloud bursting, or dynamic relocation of workloads from in-house environments to public clouds during peak-usage times.