Grazed from Amazon and Comcast

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that Comcast Cable has selected AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. Comcast Cable will expand its use of AWS by migrating material workloads and building new applications on AWS.

AWS provides important infrastructure and services to Comcast as it focuses on building cloud-native products and services on AWS that adapt and evolve to meet the needs of customers. That focus is reflected in the class-defining X1 Platform, award-winning voice-control technology, and Xfinity xFi, Comcast’s personalized Wi-Fi experience that gives customers pinpoint control over their home networks. Comcast’s primary businesses, Comcast Cable and NBCUniversal, are currently running workloads on AWS which has enabled these businesses to become more nimble and launch new, revenue-generating initiatives in the competitive entertainment industry.

"With the addition of Managed Microsoft Azure Services, Cogeco Peer 1 is offering customers flexible, customizable solutions that enable them to unlock the full potential of Azure to accelerate their enterprise transformation," said Bertrand Labelle, Vice President Marketing and Innovation, Cogeco Peer 1. "These services will power the potential of businesses looking to simplify their journey to the cloud and optimize their investment in Azure. They will benefit from a secured, monitored and optimized Azure environment entirely designed for their specific business needs and managed by our team of experts. This is about optimizing return on investment for customers who don’t always have the expertise or capacity to take full advantage of the power of Azure".

ZeroStack, Inc., creators of a self-driving on-premises cloud, today unveiled new host-based metrics that enable better, more proactive IT management of its cloud platform. Cloud administrators can now define and enable alerting policies based on the status of physical hosts. Alerting policies can be defined on specific host-based CPU utilization, storage, network bandwidth, and other parameters, providing proactive alerting that allows the IT department to control and monitor the cloud environment. This visibility ensures that DevOps workbench users have access to the resources they need without overloading IT infrastructure. DevOps users can also set up their own alerting policies within their workbench for monitoring the virtual resources they are using.

Customers leveraging the integrated solution will experience greater return on their cloud investments. They will be able to automate cloud cost control, simplify management, and consequently free up teams to focus on driving more strategic projects within their organizations.

Start small

Don’t think you need to wait until your company is a behemoth in order to begin worrying about brand management. Even if you are a solo entrepreneur, there are plenty of ways to begin getting your message out, and this will ultimately pay great dividends as your company grows.

Bear in mind that, at this stage, the line between yourself and your company is virtually invisible and that everything you say, whether you intend it to be purely a personal opinion or not, will ultimately reflect on your company. Choose your words with care and ensure you are always in line with the expectations and perceptions of your brand. 

SoftNAS, Inc., a cloud data platform company and leading software-defined NAS provider for the cloud, announced SoftNAS Cloud Essentials version 3.7, optimized for Veeam Availability Suite, is available this month. SoftNAS also announced the achievement of Veeam Ready Archive status, verifying performance for full and synthetic full cloud-backup jobs using SoftNAS Cloud Essentials. SoftNAS and Veeam customers now have access to cost-effective multi-cloud storage options, while simultaneously improving RTPO (recovery time and point objectives) for data archival, backup and storage jobs. This partnership underscores SoftNAS’ innovation as a truly cloud-native, 100% software-defined cloud data platform for enterprise control of any data, any cloud, anywhere.

Enterprises continue to struggle with managing vast amounts of data, including backups. Research conducted by The Taneja Group, found that 41 percent of planned public cloud workloads target backups. Cloud backup is one of the fastest growing technologies being adopted. According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Storage Technology, 2017, "backup of data generated natively in public cloud is an emerging requirement as cloud providers only offer infrastructure high availability and disaster recovery, but are not responsible for application or user data loss."

Risk Reduction and Security

Car and truck owners may like to pimp up their vehicles with dual cat stacks and tinted windows, but those who want to improve the gadgetry in their autos, need to consider security.  According to web security company McAfee, cybersecurity is as important for cars as it is for cell phones and computers.  Cloud-based security can help to keep the car’s technology safe from hackers, keeping it safe from problems.  Users can create a personal encryption key and be notified of any threats before they cause damage to the vehicle in question.

Egenera, a leading provider of wholesale cloud services to the channel today announced the launch of the Xterity Partner Program (XPP), a new program designed to empower the company’s fast-growing network of resellers to capitalize on the exploding demand for cloud services in the SMB and mid-market.

Egenera’s Xterity Cloud Services are sold 100 percent through the channel and deliver a full range of dedicated, managed, private and public cloud services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Backup as a Service (BaaS), and cloud migration.

Egenera’s channel partners already benefit from a wholesale pricing structure that delivers the margins resellers need to develop a profitable and sustainable cloud services business.

Cloudify and Fortinet have established a technology partnership to address the challenges of network functions virtualization (NFV) in order to help organizations quickly, effectively and securely provision and deploy new network services across hybrid environments-brownfield and greenfield-at a fraction of the time and risk.

Cloudify makes open source software used by large telecoms, Tier 1 network operators and large enterprises for cloud infrastructure, applications and NFV automation and management. Fortinet’s award-winning FortiGate network security platform provides end-to-end security across the entire network.

The NFV reality of decoupling network functions from the underlying hardware on which they run is now here. With NFV, many physical network functions-like load balancers and firewalls-are becoming virtualized network functions (VNFs) that are shipped and delivered via software. Because VNFs are deployed only when needed, NFV can substantially improve network cost efficiency, responsiveness and security.