The Armor Guardian Partner Program announced today six additional partners, increasing its international presence and channel partners that hold a number of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft partner competencies. Armor, a cloud security service provider, offers a community-powered approach to security with the industry’s first threat prevention and response platform, Spartan, designed for private, hybrid and public cloud environments including AWS and Azure.

"In the last twelve months, revenue through our channel efforts has accelerated by 400 percent and we look forward to carrying that momentum into the new year with the expansion of our presence in the United Kingdom, France, Poland and Greater Toronto area," said Chris Drake, founder and CEO of Armor. "Partners that are advising, migrating and managing important customer applications in the cloud recognize Armor’s unique ability to accelerate their business by taking the burden of cloud security and compliance away from clients."

Druva, the global leader in cloud data protection and management, today announced the results of its Druva 2017 AWS Cloud Data Protection Survey, which reveals a disconnect between the perceptions of cloud data protection and its reality. The survey solicited insights from IT professionals across 20 industries, including technology, energy, financial and healthcare, regarding the state of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud adoption, enterprise secondary storage, data protection and archiving needs.

Turbonomic today announced that it has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), further advancing its commitment to bring self-managing systems to the cloud-native community and accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes. CNCF is committed to sustaining and integrating open source technologies like Kubernetes and Prometheus.

"CNCF is thrilled to have the support of organizations across the globe, like Turbonomic, contributing to diverse industries – each collectively focused on fueling more rapid adoption of cloud-native computing through open source technologies," said Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of the Alibaba Group, announced today that it had completed its assessment for the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalogue (C5) set out by the Federal Office for Information Security in Germany, also known as Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI). Alibaba Cloud is the world’s first cloud provider to achieve this attestation with the additional requirements. The attestation covers Elastic Compute Service ("ECS"), Relational Database Service ("RDS"), Object Storage Service ("OSS"), Content Delivery Network ("CDN"), Server Load Balancer ("SLB"), Virtual Private Cloud ("VPC") and Alibaba Cloud Security available on Alibaba Cloud’s regions in Singapore and Germany.

Alibaba Cloud’s commitment to applying the highest levels of compliance in controls and security is shown by meeting the C5 standard that serves not only as a benchmark for the German market, but also increasingly as a benchmark for institutions across Europe. With the attestation, customers in German states can leverage the work performed under this BSI audit to comply with stringent local requirements and operate secure workloads using Alibaba Cloud services.

C5 is intended primarily for professional cloud service providers, their auditors and customers of the cloud service providers. It has 17 distinct control requirements that the cloud providers either have to comply with or meet defined minimum standards. It is a required assessment for working with the public sector in Germany and is being increasingly adopted by the private sector. The philosophy behind C5 is to unify the currently fragmented certification of cloud provisions that are measured against no agreed standards and possess no coherent oversight.

A new LogicMonitor survey of nearly 300 industry influencers predicts that enterprises will migrate the majority of their IT workloads from the data center to the cloud by 2020. Fueling this transition will be the 20.8 billion IoT devices Gartner predicts will come online, and the rapid maturation of AI and machine learning technologies. The Future of the Cloud Study also finds that while Amazon holds a dominant leadership position in the public cloud market, Microsoft and Google are closing that gap.

LogicMonitor, the leading SaaS-based performance monitoring platform for Enterprise IT, sponsored the survey, polling both AWS re:Invent attendees and industry analysts, media, consultants and vendor strategists to explore what the landscape for cloud services will look like in 2020. "Our customers continue to ask for guidance in planning their cloud migration strategies," said Jeff Behl, Chief Product Officer for LogicMonitor. "We designed our survey to gather feedback from some key industry influencers to understand their predictions, and to provide our customers with insights and answers."

Symantec Corp., a world leading cyber security company and Gold-level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), today announced that major cloud security components of its Integrated Cyber Defense Platform, including Control Compliance Suite, Data Center Security, Data Loss Prevention, Endpoint Protection, Cloud Data Protection, and Protection Engine solutions, are now available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

Symantec’s cloud security solutions deliver capabilities such as infrastructure hardening and protection, protection and management of confidential data, business-aware security and risk visibility, industry-leading malware and threat detection, and endpoint protection.

Talend, a global leader in cloud and big data integration solutions, today announced new courses designed to help advance developers’ skills with cutting-edge cloud and big data technologies. Available immediately, the new courses are based on practical exercises that maximize employees’ expertise with tools for data mapping and data preparation in the cloud. The new courses demonstrate Talend’s commitment to cultivating a skilled workforce that will thrive in the new information age and help further companies’ digital transformation initiatives.

"Keeping pace with modern technologies is challenging for companies of all sizes. While innovation fuels powerful business opportunities, it also creates skills gaps in areas such as cloud and big data–where the demand for skilled workers is especially high," said Carrie Anderson, VP of Enablement at Talend. "Data-driven companies need to develop their workforce to keep pace with rapidly evolving market needs and emerging technologies. Thus, training courses that give developers hands-on experience with the latest cloud and big data tools help give companies a competitive advantage."

To increase business agility without incurring long-term capital costs, companies around the world are embracing cloud services, while seeking secure strategies to make their journey to the cloud. To help business customers tackle these challenges and fully embrace the benefits of flexibility and scale that are possible through cloud services, Citrix, a Gold level member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), announced that Citrix Cloud-based XenApp and XenDesktop services are now available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

The ability to access Citrix Cloud services like XenApp and XenDesktop on Oracle Cloud Marketplace enables business customers to provide their workforce with more secure access to critical business apps and data on any device, while taking advantage of the scale, power and reliability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Datadog, the essential monitoring service for modern cloud environments, today announced Forecasts, a new feature that predicts when performance and stability issues will occur within cloud applications. While traditional monitoring solutions alert IT operations and engineering teams after a problem has already impacted user-experience and revenue-generating operations, Forecasts leverages artificial intelligence to alert teams days, weeks, or months in advance.  

In highly distributed and dynamic cloud environments, planning for future performance issues and avoiding downtime can be difficult and labor-intensive. By applying machine-learning algorithms to massive amounts of data, Datadog can generate predictive analytics on everything from application performance to custom business metrics. This will reduce uncertainty and increase efficiency for businesses, putting the focus on actionable insights instead of troubleshooting problems after customers have already been impacted.

"Today, DevOps teams often receive critical alerts after their customers have been negatively impacted," said Brad Menezes, Datadog’s Product Manager for artificial intelligence and machine learning. "Our forecasting algorithms have been fine-tuned based on trillions of data points across hundreds of thousands of servers daily. We can predict where a metric will be in the future, taking into account historical patterns, and notify users with plenty of time to prevent any negative impact. This directly translates into dollars saved and better user experiences – something every organization needs."

VMware, Inc., a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, in association with MIT Technology Review Custom, today revealed findings from a new global study focused on the adoption of multi-cloud environments. The research, "After Deployment Storms, Skies Turn Sunny For Multi-Cloud Environments," analyzed the attitude of more than 1,300 global IT decision makers in large enterprises toward cloud adoption.

A multi-cloud strategy is becoming more commonplace across a variety of organizations, regardless of the industry. Complications around vendor lock-in, data sovereignty, innovation and the need for workload-specific services are driving organizations to leverage multiple clouds to achieve business success. The study finds that while there are inherent challenges in deployment, the benefits are too consequential and only get better over time.