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Excellent customer service doesn’t happen by accident. As the global cloud market is growing, cloud contact center solutions help organizations of all sizes be first and stay first in their industry likewise, by empowering customer service teams to move faster and work smarter. By equipping contact centers with the best tools and details they need to win every communication across the customer journey.

Indeed, a Forrester report predicts that the global cloud market will reach $146 billion this year and $236 billion by 2020.

Benefits of Cloud-Based Contact Center

With the promise of success cloud solutions is an ideal choice to choose for businesses, looking to improve their customer service performance with maximum efficiency.

Signal Sciences today announced a partnership with Optiv Security, a market-leading provider of end-to-end cyber security solutions, to bring application, cloud and DevOps security solutions to enterprise-class organizations. Signal Sciences Web Protection Platform (WPP) empowers organizations to enable cloud and DevOps while protecting their most critical web applications, APIs and microservices from security threats. By combining Signal Sciences WPP with Optiv’s technology expertise and comprehensive security services, enterprise application development and cloud security programs become more effective, manageable and measureable.

"The rapid and widespread adoption of DevOps, agile and cloud infrastructure for application development has brought significant security issues for organizations of all kinds," said Andrew Peterson, CEO of Signal Sciences. "We’re incredibly excited to help Optiv reduce the complexity of enterprises’ cloud, DevOps and application security programs while improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of those critical areas."

Virtustream, the enterprise-class cloud company and a Dell Technologies business, and Dell EMC today announced a strategic alliance with Samsung SDS to deliver Virtustream Enterprise Cloud in South Korea. With a growing economy, South Korea is home to several Fortune 500 companies and global enterprises and thus is a region that is primed to take full advantage of Virtustream’s unique capabilities and proven expertise in moving mission critical applications to the cloud. Samsung SDS customers will benefit from superior application performance and efficiency delivered by Virtustream’s enterprise-class cloud platform and Dell EMC’s infrastructure solutions.

Samsung SDS selected Virtustream and Dell EMC to provide enterprise cloud services, because its unique consumption-based billing method significantly reduces costs for its customers and provides high levels of application performance, security and risk management. As a part of this new offering, Samsung SDS will license and implement Virtustream’s xStream® software, which is an integrated cloud management platform that enables service providers such as Samsung SDS to deliver enterprise-class, IT-as-a-Service to their customers.

Cisco HyperFlex: The Power to Simplify More
Other hyperconverged solutions neglect the crucial roles that networking and distributed file systems play in the performance and scaling of clustered servers. Cisco redefined hyperconvergence with a complete end-to-end approach that engineers high performance server and networking technology, with a purpose-built filesystem. The result is industry leading performance that enables customers to efficiently support a broader array of applications, including databases and mission critical ERP workloads. 

Cumulus Networks, the leading provider bringing web-scale networking to enterprise cloud, has closed $43M in new funding in a round led by Telstra Ventures, the investment arm of Australia’s leading telecommunications and technology company, bringing total funding to $129 million. All existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures and Sequoia Capital participated. The company will use the investment to advance its mission: to free customers from expensive proprietary network stacks and bring the automation, agility and scalability of web-scale networks to companies of all sizes.

With the new funding, the company will massively expand its sales force and invest in growing its marketing programs, with a particular focus on reaching new customers in EMEA and Asia Pacific. It will also expand its footprint within Fortune 500 enterprises and service providers, while continuing to focus on bringing innovative networking products to market.

"Telstra Ventures is focused on investing in strategic, value-added businesses that show strong market fit and growth potential," said Mark Sherman, Managing Director, Telstra Ventures. "In this case we had the advantage of being a Cumulus Networks customer first, which gave us several months of first-hand experience working with their products, services and team. After that experience, we were eager to expand our partnership and invest in the company. Open networking is key to growing service provider capabilities and we are thrilled to have Cumulus join our portfolio of strategic, innovative companies."

Big Switch Networks, The Next-Generation Data Center Networking Company, today announced Big Cloud Fabric (BCF), an SDN-based data center network switching fabric, now supports a robust ecosystem of the leading hyperconverged (HCI) solutions, including: VMware vSAN, Dell EMC ScaleIO and Nutanix. 

The introduction of HCI technology has fundamentally altered the enterprise storage landscape by offering increased performance, enhanced data services, lower CapEx, and simplified operations. The network simplicity and automation introduced via Big Cloud Fabric, which leverages an SDN-based leaf/spine Clos fabric and open networking hardware to enable rapid provisioning of networks for HCI scale-out deployments and high performance for large clusters, is ideal for HCI environments. Big Cloud Fabric automates the provisioning of network resources through seamless integration with HCI orchestration systems and provides full visibility of HCI environments to network teams, thus becoming the "networking easy button" for IT teams deploying modern storage solutions and software-defined data centers (SDDCs). Additionally, BCF reduces networking TCO by deploying on industry-standard switch hardware from Dell EMC open networking, Edgecore white box, and the HPE Altoline family.

Acronis, a global leader in hybrid cloud data protection and storage, today released Acronis Ransomware Protection, a free, stand-alone version of its unique AI-based Acronis Active Protection technology, which stops ransomware attacks in real-time and helps users to recover data without paying the ransom.

Recent ransomware attacks exposed the vulnerability of endpoint devices, showing that new strains of ransomware can easily bypass traditional anti-virus software to encrypt user data. Acronis Ransomware Protection provides an additional level of defense that can be used together with other data protection solutions already installed on the device, such as anti-virus and backup software. It monitors system processes in real-time to automatically detect and stop the attacks other solutions can’t. In event of a ransomware attack, Acronis Ransomware Protection blocks the malicious process and notifies the user with a popup. If any files were damaged in the attack, it facilitates the instant recovery of those affected files.

CloudPassage, the leader in cloud and container workload security, today announced availability of their award-winning security automation platform Halo and the Server Secure cloud workload security solution on AWS Marketplace. Customers subscribing to Halo Server Secure on AWS Marketplace can now purchase it as part of the new AWS Enterprise Contract program. The Enterprise Contract program standardizes the contract between CloudPassage and the customer, helping them simplify their security budgeting and streamlining payment – CloudPassage Halo will simply appear as a line item on their AWS bill.

"Now AWS Marketplace customers can buy and deploy Halo Server Secure for high-performance cloud workload security in a highly predictable and cost effective way – via a single integrated AWS bill," said John Janetos, director, business development, CloudPassage. "As global enterprises rapidly embrace the cloud for mission-critical workloads and DevOps for application development, automated security that can operate at speed and scale is becoming a critical path. The AWS Marketplace helps eliminate protracted negotiations to make it easy for our customers to securely embrace the cloud."

Veeam Software, the Availability for the Always-On Enterprise innovator, today announced the immediate availability of Veeam Recovery to Microsoft Azure with Veeam PN (Powered Network). This new, on-demand turnkey solution ensures Business Continuity that is fast, easy to use, simple to deploy and affordable. It includes the new FREE product, Veeam PN, an easy to use, light-weight software defined networking (SDN) solution to eliminate complicated VPN installation and simplify network configuration to create the ultimate recovery site on Microsoft Azure.

Businesses depend on IT to have a plan in place to maintain operations when disaster strikes or outages occur. According to Gartner, "although there’s no magic answer on how much impact downtime will have on your business, current industry surveys have shown that the average enterprise estimates an impact of approximately $5,600 for every minute of unplanned downtime in its primary computing environment." This adds up to over $300,000 per hour. Unfortunately, for many enterprises, backup and recovery contingencies are insufficient. For one thing, the cost of maintaining and supporting a remote recovery site for a mirrored system with duplicate hardware and software is prohibitive given the high capital expense. For another thing, backup and recovery is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming.

Sumo Logic, the leading cloud-native, machine data analytics platform that delivers continuous intelligence, today announced it has acquired FactorChain, an early stage security company with a Security Investigation Platform that makes transformational improvements in speed and depth of threat investigations, enabling resolution of complex threats spanning both IT and security in minutes instead of hours. Combined with Sumo Logic’s machine data analytics strength across the cloud infrastructure, platform and application layers, this acquisition accelerates the development of a new class of converged IT ops and security solutions, which are essential for modern application delivery in the cloud.

"We are seeing more and more digital businesses struggling to adapt traditional security models to cloud and modern application delivery," said Ramin Sayar, CEO of Sumo Logic. "Resolving which threats to assess in the avalanche of alerts and how to quickly resolve them is a challenging enough problem in traditional IT environments. However, in the dynamic large-scale cloud environment, this problem can’t possibly be answered without new thinking in security analytics and operations. The FactorChain acquisition accelerates our vision of a new model that converges operations and security in the cloud and provides innovative solutions to persistent challenges in investigation workflows at cloud scale. We’re thrilled to welcome the team onboard to drive our shared vision and disrupt traditional legacy SIEM markets moving too slowly to keep pace with accelerating cloud transitions."