Rackspace today announced it is driving significant innovation as a managed service provider for the world’s leading hyperscale public clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba. Rackspace’s next generation cloud services now provide flexible and highly customizable offers through Rackspace Service Blocks, Managed Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployments, and expanded multi-cloud capabilities to help customers choose between cloud platforms and provide the ability to manage multiple public clouds with a single control panel. 

Rackspace’s next generation cloud services are the latest example of how the company is fulfilling its strategy to deliver modern IT as a service for its customers by offering unbiased expertise, an unrivaled portfolio of cloud services, a Fanatical Experience and agile delivery of IT the way customers want. Collectively, these new solutions represent a major shift in the IT as-a-service market, changing the way organizations purchase and manage their public clouds.

As enterprises seek to accelerate cloud adoption to realize the flexibility, agility and cost savings of the cloud, their needs evolve. Traditional managed service providers are unable to keep pace with the rapidly growing cloud ecosystem and shifting customer needs, leading to the evolution of next generation cloud service providers. Next gen cloud service providers go well beyond offering traditional managed services, like migrations and day-to-day support, by delivering expert cloud guidance, customizable services and multi-cloud technologies.

Avi Networks today launched Avi SaaS, the industry’s first SaaS solution for multi-cloud load balancing. Avi SaaS provides cloud-managed software to deliver application services including load balancing, web application firewall (WAF), global server load balancing (GSLB), and service mesh for containers across a multi-cloud environment. The solution overcomes the limitations of appliance-based ADCs, which are not designed for the public cloud. Avi SaaS combines the easy deployment of cloud-provider solutions and enterprise-grade features without being constrained to a single environment. Avi SaaS delivers consistent capabilities regardless of infrastructure, accelerates time-to-value, lowers OpEx, and drives operational simplicity.

Avi SaaS complements Avi’s flagship product, the Avi Vantage Platform, by delivering the Avi Controller as a cloud-managed service. Avi’s SaaS model delivers the fastest path to productivity for provisioning load balancers, monitoring application performance in real time, and rapidly resolving application issues. Avi’s central control plane is wholly provisioned and managed for customers by Avi, with the Avi Service Engines (distributed load balancers) deployed close to the applications that enterprises own.

The unique benefits of Avi’s SaaS delivery model and architecture include:

McAfee, the device to cloud cybersecurity company, today released its Cloud Adoption and Risk Report, which analyzed billions of events in anonymized customers production cloud use to assess the current state of cloud deployments and to uncover risks. The report revealed that nearly a quarter of the data in the cloud can be categorized as sensitive, putting an organization at risk if stolen or leaked. Coupled with the fact that sharing sensitive data in the cloud has increased 53 percent YoY, those who do not adopt a cloud strategy that includes data loss protection, configuration audits and collaboration controls, will endanger the security of their most valuable asset-data-while exposing themselves to increased risk of noncompliance with internal and external regulations.

The study found that while organizations aggressively use the public cloud to create new digital experiences for their customers, the average enterprise experiences more than 2,200 misconfiguration incidents per month in their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) instances. Cloud service providers only cover the security of the cloud itself, not customer data or customer use of their infrastructure and platforms. Companies are always responsible for securing their data wherever it is, hence highlighting the need to deploy cloud security solutions that span the whole cloud spectrum, from SaaS (software-as-a-service) to IaaS and PaaS.

"Operating in the cloud has become the new normal for organizations, so much so that our employees do not think twice about storing and sharing sensitive data in the cloud," said Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president of the Cloud Security Business, McAfee. "Accidental sharing, collaboration errors in SaaS cloud services, configuration errors in IaaS/PaaS cloud services, and threats are all increasing. In order to continue to accelerate their business, organizations need a cloud-native and frictionless way to consistently protect their data and defend from threats across the spectrum of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS."

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6, a consistent hybrid cloud foundation for enterprise IT built on open source innovation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 is designed to enable organizations to better keep pace with emerging cloud-native technologies while still supporting stable IT operations across enterprise IT’s four footprints.

According to Gartner, "the landscape of cloud adoption is one of hybrid clouds and multiclouds. By 2020, 75% of organizations will have deployed a multicloud or hybrid cloud model." Red Hat believes that this indicates that a common foundation, one that can handle workloads in a consistent fashion regardless of whether they are running on bare metal or on a public cloud instance, is a key need for enterprises as they embrace a variety of cloud computing models.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 helps to provide this foundation, enabling organizations to deploy applications on a footprint that can best fit their unique needs, with the knowledge that the underlying operating system remains the same consistent and mission-critical-ready platform. The latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 brings enhancements designed to address a range of IT challenges, emphasizing security and compliance, management and automation, and Linux container innovations.

Turbonomic announced a strategic extension of its Partner Program, designed from the ground-up for the top, global partners of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new Cloud Specialization offers partners a differentiated technology and approach to managing today’s workload diversity across multiple customer environments in a single platform, enabling partners to deliver the industry’s fastest and most accurate, AI-powered cloud assessment plans and optimization.

The new Specialty builds upon Turbonomic’s rapidly accelerating partnerships with Microsoft Azure and AWS (awarding Turbonomic with both AWS Cloud Migration and AWS Cloud Management Tools Competencies within a month of each other).

Partners who complete specialization gain access to dedicated technical resources to assist with first engagements, co-brandable customer campaigns and service delivery templates. Additionally, the enablement and training provide partners with the technical acumen to deliver new services at any phase of customers’ cloud journey. More than 30 partners have been onboarded and enabled through the new Specialization.

ControlUp today announced ControlUp Console is available to customers of VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware Cloud on AWS brings together VMware’s enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) software and elastic, bare-metal infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to give organizations consistent operating model and application mobility for private and public cloud. ControlUp delivers total visibility, Machine Learning assisted analytics and fast troubleshooting to customers of VMware Cloud on AWS.

With ControlUp, vSphere administrators can quickly spot application performance issues across multiple layers – from the hypervisors and datastores to connection servers and VMs, all the way to specific processes. Using real-time performance data, ITOps teams can quickly detect AND remediate the root cause of an issue, using the ControlUp console. ControlUp gives VMware administrators access to a rich set of contextual management actions that enable proactive troubleshooting of data-center related issues. Moreover, ControlUp seamlessly aggregates data for historical analysis and offers a plethora of out-of-the-box reports including HW virtual and physical resource consumption, topology flow, application activity, user action, user experience, system health and licensing.

Companies that have invested in multi-cloud deployments can now comprehensively view the health, performance, usage and spend of all public cloud investments, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), in a single view using LogicMonitor’s enhanced LM Cloud solution.

LogicMonitor, the leading SaaS-based performance monitoring platform for enterprise IT and Managed Service Providers, just launched expanded capabilities to LM Cloud to support Google Cloud Platform. GCP joins Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure as cloud platform technologies supported by LogicMonitor’s hybrid monitoring platform.

"Enterprise workloads are moving to the cloud, and more than half now use more than one type of public cloud service. Using multiple cloud providers can significantly decrease risk and costs while increasing security and autonomy," said Steve Francis, Founder and Chief Evangelist at LogicMonitor. "Evolving our multi-cloud monitoring to include GCP gives companies the single-pane-of-glass view that enables them to optimize technical performance and financial management of their cloud resources."

While us who follow cloud computing news know the truth, passersby often look past the technology and miss its future potential. But the way it’s changing the world of business is incredible. All different kinds of industries are taking part in this digital interconnected revolution, from marketing and retail firms to medical professionals using it in their work. Even artists collaborate with each other across state or country lines using it. 

Let’s examine the future uses of the cloud for small businesses everywhere. If you can get ahead of the curve, then you may be able to operate your business on a better level competitively before the rest of the world catches on.

SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced that it is introducing an inside out view into cloud environments to help DevOps professionals gain unmatched visibility across the internal aspects of cloud environments-metrics, traces, and logs, plus an external view of the user experience. The enhanced functionality within SolarWinds’ products Pingdom, AppOptics, Papertrail, and Loggly can be used individually to provide visibility into cloud-based infrastructure and application performance or used together as a DevOps toolkit to maintain 360-degree visibility into cloud monitoring.

"Today’s recognized ‘pillars of observability’ combine metrics, traces, and logs to enable DevOps teams to monitor system and application performance. But, these capabilities provide only limited insights into application performance because they ignore the user’s experience-a critical measure of application performance," said Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products, SolarWinds. "Understanding if a system is slow or unavailable from an end user’s perspective is crucial in today’s digital world even if the metrics are good and there are no alerts. Bringing user experience, metrics, traces, and logs together with an easy-to-use, complementary toolkit provides DevOps teams with unmatched visibility into their environment, so they can seamlessly follow an alert or issue from one product into another to resolve issues quickly and get back to focusing on the more proactive elements of their job."

For example, if support gets a call that a web application is not letting users log in, a DevOps team can open the Pingdom (user experience) dashboard to see the login page has turned red and when the outage began. Jumping over to the metrics views in AppOptics (metrics), the DevOps team sees it’s not a problem with the website response time, therefore not a performance issue, but in the detail view they notice the HTTP status codes are red. Next, the DevOps team uses AppOptics (traces) to trace one of the failed requests and discovers the web application was trying to make a connection to a backend service, but there was an issue with the DNS entry. The DevOps team then jumps over to Papertrail (logs) or Loggly (logs) to see the log data. Here they can filter down to the application host and view when the outage started, discovering the service was stopped. With this insight, the DevOps team can quickly restart the service and get the web application up and running.

WhatMatrix, the independent technology comparison and analysis site, today announced the publication of its second SDS/HCI Landscape analysis report. Over and above providing a snapshot of the current landscape of the burgeoning SDS/HCI market, the latest report includes new use case analysis highlighting the top performers dependent upon specific areas of expertise, such as Data Services, Storage and Server support and Management. The WhatMatrix landscape report provides a valuable alternative view of this technology segments with its unmatched technical focus and free participation for any vendor. 

The report, authored by category consultant Herman Rutten, highlights the SDS/HCI market has gained in maturity, with customer numbers rising across the board. The ‘best’ solution is also very subjective. Although many SDS/HCI solutions appear similar at first glance, they have their own set of pros and cons that differ depending upon an organization’s unique situation and requirements. The Landscape Report is designed to assist organizations in that process and to eliminate the unknowns.

"SDS and HCI solutions have now reached a maturity level that makes them a viable alternative to traditional 3-tier enterprise storage systems. Nutanix and VMware continue to lead the pack in terms of market share. However, on the technology side they are challenged by new entrants in the report – such as Datrium and Pivot3 – to keep their solutions simple and feature rich at the same time," explained Herman Rutten, category consultant at WhatMatrix. "Having thoroughly analyzed the 12 vendor solutions included in this report, it is abundantly clear that the consideration of use cases is critical to the selection process."

The report also identifies the latest key trends: 

• Meshed architectures
• NVMe in hybrid and all-flash compositions
• Erasure Coding without compromise
• Native end-to-end encryption

As with all information and analysis from WhatMatrix, the full report can be downloaded free of charge – with no registration required.