IBM has made available WebSphere Portal server and Lotus Web Content Management
as an Amazon Machine Image (AMIs) for free if you use it for development or testing.
However, users will need to pay for the Amazon EC2 usage which can go for as little
as $0.10/hr + $0.17/GB of data transfer out + $0.10/GB data transfer in. According to
IBM’s website, the production version of  WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management will be released as beta in the coming months.

With this cloud architecture together with Amazon’s experience in building large-scale systems, developers and administrators would be relieved from worrying about issues such as hardware, backups, cooling, networks or locations to name a few. It is also easy to spawn new instances if the need for more processing power arises.  As far as security is concerned, Amazon thrived to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, privacy of its customer data by leveraging SOX compliance standards, physical security, stateful firewall, signed API calls, backups and instance isolation.

In the network security category, the following network attacks are being prevented :

• DDOS attack by utilizing Syn Cookies and connection limiting
• Man in the middle attack by providing customers with ssl-protected endpoints
• IP Spoofing
• Port Scanning
• Packet Sniffing by preventing the hypervisor from delivering packets not addressed to them

Once we get our hands on IBM WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Mgmt Std Ed using the prebuild Amazon Machine Image, we will continue to write our experience in this blog.