Current awareness

A rather fancy term which essentially involves keeping up to date with news and developments that are relevant to business and your particular niche. The reason it’s so important is that without knowing what’s happening and which new technologies are currently in development, you risk being left behind by the early implementers, and losing both the opportunity to win new business and information that could improve your productivity.

Zadara Storage, a global provider of enterprise-class Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) based in Irvine, Calif., and MEGAZONE Corporation, a Korean cloud-specialized IT company, today announced a strategic alliance. The collaboration between the two companies was designed to meet customers’ needs for sophisticated, high-performance, high-capacity enterprise-class cloud storage solutions. Zadara is an award-winning, worldwide vendor of enterprise STaaS, providing high performance, highly available block, file and object storage with predictable Quality of Service (QoS). Zadara is an Advanced Technology Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN), and MEGAZONE is an APN Premier Consulting Partner.

The Zadara Storage Cloud and software-defined VPSA Storage Arrays deliver elastic, multi-tenant enterprise SAN, NAS and object storage technology for peta-scale primary and secondary storage. With isolated resources, exceptional data security, management control and predictable performance, VPSA Storage Arrays meet the most stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs), even in cloud deployments. Providing a flexible and cost-effective storage infrastructure for enterprises, small to medium-sized businesses and start-ups, VPSAs also are available as fully-managed On-Premises as-a-Service (OPaaS).

Veritas Technologies, a leader in multi-cloud data management, today announced Veritas CloudPoint 2.0, the second release of the company’s snapshot-based data protection technology, now certified by Veritas for the Google Cloud Platform.

Veritas CloudPoint 2.0 adds enhanced data protection to Google Cloud’s native snapshot capabilities, providing joint customers with increased simplicity, improved search capabilities and enhanced protection of new workloads and applications in multi-cloud environments.

A year ago, as part of a global strategic partnership, Veritas announced a number of technology integrations to advance data management capabilities for Google Cloud Platform customers. Today, as more enterprise customers choose Google Cloud for its core infrastructure, data analytics and machine learning capabilities, they also understand the need for an equally advanced and cloud-native way to ensure their data is protected and easily recoverable within Google Cloud.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 provides organizations additional options to protect their data on top of the automatic data replication Microsoft provides across its data centers, as well as native resiliency controls available in Office 365. This combination lets companies have complete control of their data and ensure availability to their users.

RightScale Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise universal cloud management, today announced the results of the RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Survey. In its seventh year, the RightScale State of the Cloud Survey is the largest survey of corporate cloud users, including 997 technology professionals at large and small enterprises across a broad cross-section of industries.

"The RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Survey showed that enterprise cloud spending will grow rapidly over the next year, and yet 35 percent of cloud spend is wasted. As a result, optimizing clouds costs is the top initiative for cloud users in 2018," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "Multi-cloud continues to be the preferred strategy for enterprises, with companies reporting that they use nearly five different clouds on average. With this multi-cloud approach, Azure is now nipping at AWS’ heels and, in fact, is in a dead heat with AWS among enterprises that are just beginning their cloud adoption."

Box, a leader in cloud content management, and Palo Alto Networks, the next-generation security company, today announced the expansion of their existing integration to now automatically classify sensitive content and enforce policies to prevent users from accidentally or intentionally sharing confidential information.

The integration, offered through Box Governance, is the result of partnerships between Box and Palo Alto Networks, as well as other cybersecurity industry leaders. Palo Alto Networks Aperture SaaS security service delivers complete visibility and granular enforcement across all user and data activity within enterprise SaaS applications like Box, providing detailed analysis and analytics on usage without requiring any additional hardware or software.

UShareSoft, a Fujitsu company and leader in Hybrid IT application automation, today launches UForge AppCenter 3.8. The new release further simplifies application delivery in hybrid IT environments, letting customers model, build and deploy applications from a single console. It also makes it faster and easier for customers to move workloads between data centers and clouds.

A recent survey of IT decision makers commissioned by Fujitsu found that over half of them find it difficult to balance agility and control in their technology choices, and lack the in-house skills needed to manage their cloud estate. Moreover, an overwhelming 80 percent want to move workloads between clouds more easily. Organizations are also looking to avoid lock in to a specific cloud platform or vendor.