Nutanix, Inc., a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced the retail findings of its Enterprise Cloud Index Report, measuring retailers’ plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds. The report revealed enterprise workloads are quickly moving off traditional data center infrastructure, dropping from 41% today to just 18% in two years time, as cloud usage accelerates. The retail industry has the second largest penetration of hybrid cloud deployments at 21%; with 93% identifying hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, outpacing the global average for other industries.

Today’s consumer expects a seamless omnichannel shopping experience in store, online and through new avenues such as mobile, in-app or even smart TV purchases. At the same time, retailers need to gather, analyze and keep data secure. This pressure to keep ahead of customer expectations is driving retailers to deploy innovative IT practices faster than ever.

It may not be a surprise that retailers are also embracing public clouds more quickly than their counterparts in other industries, yet their control of public cloud spend is better than peers in other industries. With the seasonality of the retail industry and traffic bursts impacting workload needs throughout the year, retailers have experience in flexing workloads to the public cloud as demand requires. Today, there is 15% public cloud usage in the retail industry compared to a 12% global average; and usage is set to grow to 22% in the next two years, outpacing the global cross-industry average by an even wider margin of 7 percent. Yet the higher than average percentage of retailers who say that hybrid cloud is the ideal IT deployment model (93%) also indicates that public cloud is not a panacea for the retail industry.

WekaIO, an innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data intensive applications, today announced that Untold Studios, an independent creative studio community based in the UK, is using the WekaIO Matrix file system on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to manage its visual effects (VFX) workflow. The company chose Matrix because it is cloud-native, built on AWS, and doesn’t require a big CapEx investment to spin up. A simplified implementation, the elimination of management overhead, and the ability to scale with its business demands, were additional considerations for the studio.

Untold Studios has a rich history in VFX, a workflow that typically has intense resource requirements, including a render farm and huge storage cluster. Most visual effects studios build their IT infrastructure on-premises, but Untold Studios is unique in that 100% of its workflow is managed on AWS. The decision to be 100% cloud-based has freed the company from the business constraints that limit the potential of other VFX studios. Instead, it enjoys the freedom and ability of multiple workgroups and VFX artists to access the content they need from any location, thus allowing it to employ the best creative VFX talent from anywhere in the world.

Quali announced CloudShell Colony – a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud management platform for DevOps. CloudShell Colony automates DevOps environments all the way from development to production, while allowing IT and project managers to govern the use of cloud resources from a single pane of glass.  

This announcement follows the recent news highlighting Quali’s $22.5 million Series-C funding round in December 2018. CloudShell Colony initially being released as controlled availability (CA) software equips DevOps teams, developers and testers with reusable application environments on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure with support for Kubernetes deployments. Quali is providing varying levels of the solution based on company size.

"Setting up environments is error prone, time consuming and difficult to automate and troubleshoot. It’s even more challenging to do it in a scalable way that would serve more than one team, including team members who know nothing about infrastructure, and still work seamlessly with the CI/CD pipeline," said Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali. "CloudShell Colony is designed to deliver IT environments more efficiently, eliminate configuration inconsistencies, and empower all stakeholders in the DevOps value chain by improving pipeline stability with less code and better error handling."

Commvault, a recognized global leader in backup, recovery, the cloud and data management across any hybrid environment, today announced that its IntelliSnap snapshot technology has been tested and validated to work with Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged systems to protect application workloads, file systems and virtual machines (VMs) without the need for third-party tools, providing customers with control, simplification and flexible architecture options that will meet their business needs now and in the future.

ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS expands many of the capabilities of the Cisco HyperFlex platform with backup and recovery. With the broadest ecosystem of integrated public cloud providers, ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS plus Cisco HyperFlex is a true multi-cloud platform. Delivering proven support for enterprise applications like SAP HANA – for which Commvault is certified – ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS allows customers to run mission-critical applications on Cisco HyperFlex with the confidence their data and applications are backed up and available. Pairing ScaleProtect with Cisco UCS with Cisco HyperFlex provides a hyper-converged, scale-out solution that delivers enterprise-class backup and recovery for end-to-end protection of the software-defined data center.

Rubrik, the Cloud Data Management Company, today announced a $261 million Series E investment at a $3.3 billion valuation with new investor Bain Capital Ventures, and with strong participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, and IVP. This brings total equity raised to more than $553 million.

"Rubrik has won the trust and loyalty of large enterprise customers around the globe by offering a simple and reliable solution that solves the challenge of protecting and managing data in a hybrid cloud world," said Enrique Salem, former CEO at Symantec and Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. "When we met Bipul, we were instantly impressed with his vision as well as the skill and tenacity of his team. Given my experience leading the largest enterprise data protection company, we are confident that Rubrik is positioned to win and be the market leader in enterprise cloud data management."

"Our previous fundraising in 2017 was focused on global expansion and increasing our reach into the enterprise market. Now, with thousands of customers around the world, industry-leading customer satisfaction ratings, and numerous analyst and industry awards, we have customers asking us to solve new challenges," said Bipul Sinha, Co-founder and CEO at Rubrik. "This new capital will speed the introduction of exciting new products in 2019 that will solve those customer challenges and significantly expand our strategic footprint in the enterprise."

Zix Corporation (Zix), a leader in email security, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire AppRiver, a leading provider of cloud-based cybersecurity solutions for $275 million in cash.

AppRiver is a channel-first provider of cloud-based cybersecurity and productivity services, serving more than 60,000 companies worldwide and supported by a 4,500-strong Managed Service Provider (MSP) reseller community. AppRiver launched its flagship spam and virus service in 2002, and has since bolstered its suite of cloud-based security offerings with web protection, email encryption, secure archiving, and email continuity solutions. AppRiver also provides Microsoft Office 365 and Secure Hosted Exchange services, which serve as an effective lead generation tool for the company’s security solutions. For more than 15 years, AppRiver has helped drive industry-leading customer value through its award-winning 24/7 customer service and a single centralized platform to manage all cloud-based security solutions.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining standards, certifications and best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, today released the findings from the first research survey on "Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Applications and Cloud Adoption." The study offers greater insight into cloud preparation and migration, the features and benefits gained, and the security and privacy challenges for ERP systems in a cloud environment.

According to the survey, 69 percent of organizations are migrating data for popular ERP applications to the cloud, moving to major cloud infrastructure-as-a-service providers, with the overwhelming majority, almost 90 percent, stating that these applications are business-critical.

In line with the top three migration concerns – moving sensitive data followed by security and compliance – the research finds that attackers are evolving, too. Over half of the survey respondents stated that they expect security incidents in the cloud to increase in the next year.

Zyxel Communications, a leading provider of secure broadband networking, Internet access and connected home products, today announced the expansion of its versatile, high-performance Nebula Cloud Network Management Solution with the addition of two new tri-mode access points, a host of additional cloud management features, and a security gateway. The expanded Nebula solution is designed to meet increasing network challenges faced by managed service providers (MSPs) and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). 

High-Performance Access Points Provide Maximum Versatility

Two new Zyxel NebulaFlex Pro access points support three management modes – standalone, controller-managed and cloud-managed via the Nebula Cloud Management platform. NebulaFlex Pro WAC6303D-S 802.11ac Wave 2 Dual-Radio Unified Pro Access Point and NWA5123-AC HD 802.11ac Wave 2 Dual-Radio Unified Access Point deliver high-performance business solutions that adapt easily into existing network infrastructures, and provide the flexibility to be used in either on-premise managed or cloud-managed installations.

Both WAC6303D-S and NWA5123-AC HD feature 802.11ac Wave 2 technology to connect with more client devices at higher speeds. Next-generation Transmit Beamforming (TxBF) technology provides reliable Wi-Fi connectivity in high-density environments. WAC6303D-S is also equipped with smart antennas to overcome Wi-Fi interference in busy environments.

All NebulaFlex Pro APs come bundled with a three-year Nebula Professional Pack license.

According to the 2016 Cost of Data Center Outages report, partial unplanned shutdown has cost organizations $499,800 while total outages cost a staggering $946,788, or an overall average cost of $740,357. Downtime means lost of revenue and business disruption which could severely damage reputation. What is even worse? The possibility of losing that valuable data forever.

Cloud-based disaster recovery provides organizations a way to secure data, recover, and even implement a failover in the event of a disaster, whether man-made or natural, by storing and maintaining electronic data in a cloud environment. While an organization may survive and recover data after a disaster by utilizing traditional data recovery resources, there are specific benefits to business that a cloud-based disaster data recovery service can provide.

InterSystems, a global leader in information technology platforms for health, business, and government applications, today announced the availability of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform in the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. AWS Marketplace availability will allow developers and customers to instantly access and use InterSystems IRIS with "one-click" provisioning. InterSystems IRIS Data Platform is available as a free Community edition, as well as a "Bring Your Own License" option.

InterSystems IRIS is now available on the three largest cloud providers, building upon recent deployments in the Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure marketplaces.