Amazon Web Services announced pay-per-session pricing for Amazon QuickSight. Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered, business analytics service that makes it easy for all users within an organization-regardless of their technical skill-to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data. With pay-per-session pricing, any user can have read-only access to interactive, data driven dashboards in Amazon QuickSight and pay only when they've accessed these dashboards. This makes Amazon QuickSight an even more cost-effective way for customers to make personalized business analytics available to everyone, whether they have tens, hundreds, or thousands of users. Pay-per-session pricing for Amazon QuickSight dashboards starts at $0.30 per session up to a maximum of $5 per user, per month, and is available in Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition in all supported AWS regions. With pay-per-session pricing there are no upfront costs, no annual commitments, and no charges for inactive users. To get started with Amazon QuickSight, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/QuickSight.

Grazed from Rackspace

Rackspace today announced that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Financial Services Competency status. This designation recognizes Rackspace for leveraging its deep expertise to implement effective solutions that help financial services organizations manage critical issues such as risk management, core systems implementations, data management, navigating compliance requirements, and establishing governance models. Rackspace delivers true transformation as a service across applications, data, security and infrastructure.  Achieving the AWS Financial Services Competency is an important step in Rackspace's broader effort to support financial services organizations with their digital transformation. 

According to a recent report from the Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF), 72 percent of U.S. finance executives were either using cloud-based solutions in 2017 or they planned to do so in the future. While many banking, insurance, investment firms and other financial services organizations are moving to the cloud at an increasing rate, most lack the resources and expertise needed to navigate this digital transformation on their own. 

Turbonomic today announced a major update to its workload automation software, delivering on the promise of application-aware infrastructure and making any type of workload - virtual, cloud and container - SMART (self-managing, anywhere, in real-time). Innovations in Turbonomic v6.1 include continuous usage automation of AWS Reserved Instances; a new integration with Cisco AppDynamics; new continuous optimization of container platforms; and a next-generation, AI-powered Decision Engine. Collectively, today's news extends Turbonomic's industry-leading workload automation, enabling customers to continuously automate trustworthy decisions for any type of workload anywhere (on-premises, in the cloud, and in containers) and at any time.

As organizations continue to accelerate digital transformation and IT modernization initiatives, the resulting high volume of dynamic workloads distributed across a decentralized hybrid cloud infrastructure leads to management complexity that is beyond the scale of manual control or monitoring tools. Only software automation, powered by AI, can ensure that applications continuously get the resources needed to perform at the lowest possible cost, while maintaining compliance with business policies.

Liquidware, the leading third party provider of platform-agnostic end-user computing solutions, today announced the release of v6.7.6 of ProfileUnity, its User Environment Management (UEM) solution. This latest version breaks new ground with its universal object-based cloud storage for Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.  Liquidware is now the only company capable of moving a user profile from Microsoft Windows to object-based cloud storage, or multiple clouds, without the use of a Server Message Block (SMB). 

The new functionality enables organizations, agencies, and enterprises to fully leverage the cloud in their end user computing strategies, reducing the reliance on costly, complex, and commodity based legacy storage solutions.  

Chaos Sumo, a cloud-based log data retention and analytics service for object storage, today released the findings of The State of Object Storage 2018 Report: The Emergence of the AWS S3 Data Lake. As object storage such as AWS S3 continues to gain widespread enterprise momentum, with over 70 percent of companies reporting to use it today, it offers untapped opportunities for promising new use cases such as historical log analytics, and application and media hosting. More than one third of respondents in a recent survey, conducted by Chaos Sumo in December-January 2018, are also looking to object storage to streamline and enable data lake usage for historical trend analysis and machine learning. The study also found that the top barriers preventing S3 innovation are the lack of tools today that enable data access and visibility, and costs of moving data around in order to analyze the growing volumes of disparate object storage data with accuracy and scale.

"The current inability of businesses to perform consistent, longitudinal and easy trend and predictive analysis in object storage, including log analytics, is resulting in critical business information being thrown away or archived in an inaccessible manner," says Thomas Hazel, founder and CTO of Chaos Sumo. "This hidden culprit - the increasing costs of storing data for real- or near-time analysis, is the core impediment to doing more with the growing amount of data stored in object storage such as AWS S3, and Chaos Sumo is here to tackle this head on."

Now U.S. government agencies, System Integrators (SI) and private sector contractors can move, manage and use cloud-based data and workloads with increased security, speed, flexibility and reliability. The Commvault Data Platform can help AWS customers with sensitive workloads meet their requirements of data protection.

Public and private sector IT organizations are increasingly challenged to protect, manage, and access business-critical data. Rapid data growth is driving capacity requirements. Increased data retention and regulations often require critical data be kept for years or even decades. Threats from ransomware are demanding faster and more flexible disaster recovery procedures.  

Built with the needs of security-conscious organizations in mind, the Commvault Data Platform offers comprehensive data protection and management capabilities for government customers. Commvault Data Platform provides data backup, recovery, management, e-discovery and disaster recovery with data protection across files, applications, databases, and hypervisors.

To support companies moving to a cloud architecture, today, Kaspersky Lab has launched its new Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security offering, expanding the company's virtualization and cloud security portfolio. The new solution is the next generation of hybrid cloud protection for businesses of all sizes, integrated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Organizations that struggle to deal with the speed of business process automation and growth of corporate data are turning to the hybrid cloud to expand their infrastructure. At the same time, more than half (59%) of businesses feel they cannot fully trust its data to cloud services because it could introduce new risks to their IT security. Their concerns are authentic with the lack of visibility in hybrid cloud ecosystems today - making them even more vulnerable to cyberattacks.

By enabling organizations to seamlessly integrate leading cloud offerings such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure into FileCloud, and adding a secure, collaborative layer, FileCloud solves the compliance piece of the puzzle that has eluded standardized SaaS solutions.

"No other enterprise file sharing platform on Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure offers similar breadth of features to support GDPR," said Madhan Kanagavel, CEO and co-founder, FileCloud. "FileCloud offers incomparable levels of flexibility and compliance so organizations can choose their vendors and methods of infrastructure support for their unique data."