Virtuozzo, a provider of integrated container, virtual machine, and software-defined storage technology, today announced a partnership with Rebel.com that demonstrates how companies can improve economies of scale while delivering more value to customers by adding Virtuozzo 7 to their Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) environments.

Rebel.com, an Ottawa, Canada-based hosting solutions provider, migrated its infrastructure to Amazon EC2 several years ago. But as the company’s business grew, it needed a way to increase the size of its Amazon EC2 instances without impacting their performance. By leveraging Virtuozzo 7 on top of them, the company was able to improve server performance by 4X.

IGEL, a world leader in endpoint management software for the secure enterprise, today announced that it is building on its relationship with AMD by upgrading the IGEL UD3 software-defined thin clients to the second-generation AMD Embedded G-Series system-on-a-chip (SoC), the GX-424.

"AMD continues to be one of our top strategic partners," said Simon Clephan, Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Alliances, IGEL. "We are proud to be teaming with them to disrupt the end-user computing experience by providing our customers with a powerful, rich multimedia computing experience and security that goes well beyond what they would typically expect from their endpoints."

New research released today by WinMagic shows that 87% of ITDMs limit their use of the cloud because of the complexity of managing regulatory compliance. A quarter (24%) said, it meant as a result, they only work with a single cloud vendor in their infrastructure, rather than exploit the benefits of a multi-cloud environment, such as cost effectiveness, flexibility, reliability, security and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Hands tied by management tools

The survey, which spoke to ITDMs in Germany, India, the UK and US, also noted that 63% felt the need to use multiple infrastructure management tools was also a hugely restricting factor in their use of multiple cloud vendors.

Looking specifically at managing security compliance across the enterprise, over a quarter (28%) stated they would "not be completely confident" IT systems met all the required processes and standards if an audit was called "today". 7% went as far as to say there was "a high risk of them failing."

Rackspace announced the launch of Rackspace Colocation, a new service that allows customers to deploy their own hardware in Rackspace data centers. Leveraging resilient critical infrastructure, network and on-ground support services, Rackspace is focused on delivering true transformation as a service across applications, data, security and infrastructure. The new Rackspace Colocation offering enables organizations to reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO), while improving scalability, strengthening disaster recovery capabilities, reducing application latency and helping IT meet stringent security and compliance requirements.

According to 451 Research, the colocation market will grow at a 12 percent compound annual growth rate through 2020. Enterprises are using colocation to kick off their cloud journey by getting out of their self-managed data center to lower their TCO as they seek to optimize their IT portfolio across public and private clouds. Beyond the financial implications, businesses are also adopting colocation solutions to achieve geographic diversity, forge strategic low latency connections with cloud services providers, augment disaster recovery strategies and to ensure their workloads are running in facilities that meet specific security and compliance mandates.

Embotics, the hybrid cloud automation and orchestration company, today unveiled the new version of its award-winning vCommander platform. In its new release, Embotics vCommander v7 delivers next-generation hybrid cloud management software built for automation, orchestration and governance of both traditional and new microservice-based applications while facilitating DevOps.

Research from the Ponemon Institute released today identifies a gap between decision-makers’ views that DevOps and microservice enablement are important and their confidence in their organizations’ ability to deliver them today – a gap that is costing the average enterprise $34 million each year. With so many enterprises struggling to deliver microservices-based applications and enable DevOps methodology (74 percent and 67 percent, respectively), the report also identifies a gap between the capabilities of current Cloud Management Platforms (CMP 1.0) and what organizations turning to cloud native applications need.

VMware, Inc. announced VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition 3.0, the next generation of the company’s production-proven network functions virtualization (NFV) platform for communications service providers (CSPs). With this new version of vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition, which will include VMware Integrated OpenStack-Carrier Edition 5.0, VMware will be able to deliver breakthrough improvements in network performance, new carrier-grade networking capabilities, and intent-based service assurance to help improve the total economics of software-defined, open standards-based 5G and multi-cloud telco networks.

"VMware’s NFV solution is deployed in more than 50 CSPs globally supporting a wide variety of use cases and more than 300 million mobile subscribers. And with the imminent arrival of 5G, a new approach to the telco network and cloud is required to solve for the hyper distribution of virtual network functions, applications and data," said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president and general manager, Telco NFV Group, VMware. "With VMware vCloud NFV-OpenStack 3.0, service providers will be able to build software-defined, programmable, highly-distributed Telco Distributed Clouds based on open standards to deliver new advanced services to consumers, and quality-of-service-based network slices to serve the application needs for a wide variety of industries."

Rubrik today announced the release of Alta 4.2, the latest advancement in its Cloud Data Management platform. With Alta 4.2, Rubrik reinforces its market-leading position as a single control plane for the enterprise hybrid cloud, with further support for private cloud, public cloud, and traditional data center workloads. Rubrik users now have the ability to protect a broad set of cloud-native AWS EC2 workloads and traditional enterprise platforms like AIX and Solaris with the same data management software, helping organizations bridge the gap between existing and future infrastructures.

Most enterprises are interested in developing a hybrid cloud computing strategy to exploit the benefits of public cloud infrastructure as a service/platform as a service (IaaS/PaaS) for better elasticity, agility and overall operational efficiency. According to polling results from Gartner’s Data Center Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit, 32% of IT leaders reported that developing a private/public/hybrid cloud strategy is the largest data center (DC) challenge they face. Enterprises adopting the hybrid cloud look for flexibility to easily migrate workloads across environments based upon economic or business requirements.

Sysdig, Inc., the cloud-native intelligence company, announced today it will work with IBM to support the Sysdig Cloud-Native Intelligence Platform in IBM Cloud. Sysdig offers unified security, monitoring, and forensics for containers and microservices, giving users a robust view of the health of their cloud apps. By delivering its platform with the IBM Cloud, Sysdig plans to enable developer teams with tools to easily develop, deploy, and secure cloud-native apps, existing workloads moving to the cloud, and hybrid cloud architectures. These capabilities include easily managing container lifecycles, gaining real-time visibility into the health and performance of microservices, and the ability to better catch potential security risks.

This collaboration stems from many developers organically realizing the benefits of tapping Sysdig technologies on top of IBM Cloud, and will expand this integration for a more seamless experience, higher efficiency, and to help teams rapidly achieve a broad range of operational requirements. The announcement of the addition of Sysdig into IBM Cloud’s growing ecosystem of partners was made this week at DockerCon North America, and folds into other advancements IBM is making to deliver a cloud best designed for new workloads in AI, machine learning, and IoT. For more information, visit the IBM Cloud blog, "Building a Cloud for AI with Kubernetes, DevOps and Scale."

Article Written by Avery Phillips

Among the many industries that have been revolutionized by cloud computing and virtual software services, perhaps unexpectedly, is finance. For businesses in particular, abandoning legacy systems and upgrading to cloud resources can significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of financial operations. 

It’s pretty much a win-win, reducing bulk (both in terms of on-site IT and time spent), and reducing a company’s reliance on outdated software and expensive overhauls. 

Here’s how it works, and what’s in store as cloud services continue to advance.