Along with my colleague, Lori Salow Marshall, I’ve been working at both ends of the IT stack, so to speak — working on building out CSC Trusted Cloud Services offerings in the realm of infrastructure at the bottom, and orchestration at the top.

With cloud infrastructure, we’re trying to develop a point-click-and-buy service for virtual machines. Not every enterprise client can take advantage of this type of service from, say, Amazon or other public cloud providers of virtualization because of security or regulatory compliance mandates.

What I’ve been trying to do is sort out the network control plane, so that one customer gets one bill, for example. Another project is integrating this into CSC’s managed services.

CSC also really wants to put a focus on the orchestration layer — or the manager of managers, if you will. This is the layer that sits on top of all your enterprise applications. To support the Trusted Cloud Services brand for CSC, we have to provide a means to assure the integrity of these IT operations and security policies within the particular cloud. Along with this comes measurement, monitoring and other issues such as billing and service level agreement (SLA) attainment.

It’s interesting and exciting work at the same time, and we’ll have a lot more news in this area as the year goes on.

Randy Arthur is CTO of CSC’s Trusted Cloud Services. You can follow him on Twitter: @randydarthur.