Nerdio, a provider of cloud IT automation for the public and private cloud, today announced the availability of new security features in Nerdio for Azure on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications and services for use on Microsoft Azure. The new features, also available in Nerdio Private Cloud, are designed to help managed service providers (MSPs) and small to medium-sized corporations (SMCs) with enhanced cybersecurity guidance.

"As new threats are constantly emerging and known vulnerabilities continue to evolve, it’s increasingly challenging for organizations to stay ahead of security issues in an effective and resource-efficient way," said Vadim Vladimirskiy, CEO of Nerdio. "Our new security tools extend the efficiencies and benefits of MSPs and internal IT departments and empower them to be more effective in identifying and implementing which controls will truly serve the organization best."

Nerdio for Azure is an automation platform for pricing, packaging, provisioning, management, and optimization of IT environments. It uses Office 365 with Azure Active Directory ADFS, Azure virtual machines with premium managed disks, Azure Recovery Services for both backup and DR replication, and the latest Server 2016 with its optimized RDP v10 protocol running on top of GPU-enabled virtual machines. Nerdio Private Cloud is a fully integrated platform that delivers comprehensive IT infrastructure.

Rubrik announced the Andes 5.0 release of its flagship Cloud Data Management platform, delivering a single software to protect, automate, and govern applications and data across datacenters and clouds. Rubrik Andes, the company’s fourteenth and most expansive release, accelerates enterprise digital transformation with groundbreaking innovation for mission-critical applications, including Oracle and SAP HANA business data platform, and cloud-native applications, including Microsoft Office 365 and NoSQL databases.

As enterprises drive digital transformation initiatives, they grapple with the fragmentation of business applications and data across multiple datacenters and clouds while adhering to ever more stringent security requirements. To successfully deliver business outcomes, enterprises require a data management solution that can protect applications across datacenters and clouds, automate self-service at scale, and eliminate operational complexity while maintaining governance, compliance, and security against cyber threats such as Ransomware.

"Legacy solutions are not built for digital-minded enterprises to meet compliance and protect against security attacks," said Rubrik Co-Founder and CTO, Arvind Nithrakashyap. "Rubrik’s Andes 5.0 release provides a single software platform to protect and organize business critical information for implementing governance, meeting compliance, and recovering from today’s intensifying security threats. With Rubrik Andes, enterprises achieve business uptime, accelerate development, and leverage the cloud for all mission-critical and next-gen applications – all foundational to digital transformation."

Sysdig, Inc., a cloud-native intelligence company, today announced that Sysdig is available on Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) Marketplace. AWS customers can now purchase and deploy Sysdig Monitor, Sysdig Secure, and the entire Sysdig Cloud-Native Intelligence Platform directly through AWS Marketplace. Sysdig has created one of the first platforms to unify container security, monitoring, and forensics with native Kubernetes, Prometheus, and AWS services.

Enterprises that choose to purchase Sysdig through AWS Marketplace get the peace of mind of knowing that the two are easily deployable together and they can save time by simplifying tasks, including procurement and billing. This announcement comes on the heels of Sysdig being recognized as an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) and demonstrates the commitment by both companies to continue working together.

The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) launched four pilot projects in the last 12 months, emphasizing its expanded mission to help users integrate and operate open infrastructure. The communities driving these pilot projects-Airship, Kata Containers, StarlingX and Zuul-announced substantial progress on new features, technology roadmaps and use cases, and they are accelerating that progress via collaboration with the broader open infrastructure community at the Summit this week, driving their projects forward.

Airship Community Delivers Release Candidate for Declarative Infrastructure Management, 5G Demo at Berlin Summit

Airship makes it possible for users to deploy and manage containers, virtual machines and bare metal infrastructure environments across multiple sites in a repeatable and declarative fashion. The value of Airship for 5G and edge computing is that users can deploy and easily manage the same environment across hundreds or thousands of smaller sites. There also is value for upgrades and lifecycle management in large datacenters. Airship is a user-driven project being developed in production by AT&T and SK Telecom for 5G to NFV, VDI and big data processing.

During the OpenStack Summit Berlin keynote today, AT&T is demonstrating how its 5G commercial deployment is "born in the cloud," powered by OpenStack while deployed and managed by Airship.

TEKsystems Global Services, a leader in full-stack technology services, announced today it will be speaking and exhibiting at AWS re:Invent 2018. AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the global cloud computing community. The event features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to more than 2,000 technical sessions, a partner expo, after-hours events, and so much more.

TEKsystems’ deep cloud experience offers a full-stack perspective that can help organizations maximize their cloud strategies and provide tailored solutions that fit the specific needs of their business. With over 100 cloud, application re-architecture, data warehouse migration and DevOps automation projects completed; over 1,000 on-premises workloads migrated to the cloud; and a 60 percent decrease in provisioning time for new builds delivered to a client, TEKsystems has a proven track record in accelerating their clients’ success to meet the demanding pace of digital transformation.

Protecting your business doesn’t always require you to spent six figures on security infrastructure or perform hundreds of penetration tests. As with many things in life, it’s the little things that really count. Here are a few things you can do right now to enhance your business’s security posture – and they won’t cost a thing.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the cybersecurity space. It seems like you can’t even read the news without hearing about some terrifying new black hat organization, or some highly-sophisticated malware that’s bringing businesses to their knees across the world. It’s hard not to adopt something of a fatalist outlook amidst all that chaos.

After all, if these large enterprises with their million and billion dollar security budgets can’t fend off hackers, what chance do the rest of us have?

A pretty good one, actually. See, while it’s certainly true that there are a ton of well-funded, extremely advanced hacking groups out there, the chances that one of them will directly target your business are extremely slim. Likely as not, anyone who goes after you is simply taking a shotgun approach to their hacking – throw a bunch of attempts at the wall and see which ones work.

Univa announced a significant advancement in the migration of HPC workloads to the cloud with the release of Navops Launch 1.0, the latest version of the most powerful hybrid HPC cloud management product. Navops Launch meshes public cloud services and on-premise clusters to cost-effectively meet increasing workload demand.

The Navops Launch platform helps HPC organizations manage cloud spending and audit usage. This latest product uses an automation engine that integrates cluster and cloud management systems with end-user defined metrics to fully inform intelligent cloud workload placement actions. With Navops Launch, organizations can take advantage of the virtually unlimited scalability, lightning-fast cluster creation and the pay-per-use economics of hybrid HPC cloud computing with fully automated control of spending and policies.

Navops Launch automation tightly integrates with Univa Grid Engine and its workload status and metrics collection to respond to changes in workload demand and cluster utilization by expanding or contracting the cloud footprint in a dynamic fashion. Once configured, administrators have full control over tying cloud resource usage to a corresponding budget without having to intervene manually. Built-in monitors report the efficiency, use, spend and status of workloads placed in the cloud.

Aviatrix, the pioneer in software-defined cloud routing, has teamed with the digital skills management platform, Cloud Academy, to teach technology professionals how to build and operate software-defined public cloud networks for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

The course, called "Managing Cloud Networks at Scale," is a series of informal "chalk talks" and demonstrations that teach software-defined cloud routing, and look at the architectures and issues teams face when managing multi-cloud implementations.

"While compute and storage are relatively easy to do in the cloud today, networking is not," said Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing at Aviatrix. "Our courses on Cloud Academy will help cloud operations teams learn how to simplify networking and secure connectivity between their data centers and public clouds, and between multi-cloud environments."

Among the specific topics covered in the course are:

To continue supporting enterprise IT infrastructure and connectivity needs, TierPoint and CenturyLink, Inc. announced that CenturyLink’s Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections will be offered out of TierPoint data centers across the United States.

Thirty-five of 43 TierPoint data centers are now connected with fiber to CenturyLink’s global network, with the majority already enabled with the SDN capability. This allows enterprise customers to quickly and easily establish highly scalable Ethernet connections directly to major cloud service providers and their enterprise locations.

Enterprises using TierPoint can turn up and down dedicated Ethernet connections to Amazon Web Services (AWS) locations across the globe, ranging in size from 10 Mb/s to 3 Gb/s in just a few minutes, and only pay for the time the network is used in hourly increments. If customers keep the connection up, it automatically reverts to a lower monthly billing rate. In addition, the connections can be scaled up and down dynamically as bandwidth needs fluctuate.

Elastifile, a pioneer of enterprise-grade, scalable file storage for the public cloud, announced the availability of an Elastifile Qwiklabs learning module along with new enhancements to its cutting-edge data management platform.

The Elastifile Qwiklab provides a commitment-free, hands-on introduction to the company’s storage solution and leads users through a guided tour of the Elastifile experience. Any user can easily create and test an Elastifile Cloud File System in minutes, with no prior experience required.