SingleHop, a global provider of on-demand hosted private clouds and managed cloud services, today announced a collaboration with ThousandEyes, a leader in Network Intelligence, to enable greater visibility beyond its five data centers in North America and Europe. The ThousandEyes platform provides insights into networks anywhere around the globe, enhancing SingleHop’s ability to provide the always-available and high-quality service required by SaaS, gaming, Hosted Voice and Communications, and other service provider customers.

"Customers rely on us to power their mission-critical applications with zero downtime and minimal latency," said Mike Davis, director of network operations at SingleHop. "Armed with the Network Intelligence gained from ThousandEyes, our network engineers are able to see upstream and across our WAN and the internet to mitigate performance-degrading events with higher precision and greater speed."

Databricks, provider of a leading Unified Analytics Platform and founded by the team who created Apache Spark, today announced it has become a partner with Microsoft to expand the reach of its Unified Analytics Platform and address customer demand for Spark on Microsoft Azure. Databricks’ Unified Analytics Platform will be offered as an integrated service within the Azure Portal as Azure Databricks. The new Azure service, introduced today at the Microsoft Connect 2017 conference, makes it easier for organizations around the globe to derive value from their Big Data and realize the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

John ‘JG’ Chirapurath, general manager of Data Platform Marketing, Microsoft Corp. said, "Our work with Databricks and the development of Microsoft Azure Databricks has been driven by customer demand. Azure users will benefit from the fast and collaborative Apache Spark based analytics platform optimized for Azure, and through the integration with other Azure services, such as Microsoft Power BI, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Active Directory."

Lacework has also introduced security controls targeted at AWS S3 buckets, enabling AWS customers to rapidly identify S3 buckets at risk or compromised due to misconfiguration. Through a targeted auditing of S3 configuration, Lacework ensures that all buckets are configured with best practices for logging, encryption and versioning, then provides continuous monitoring with AWS CloudTrail events and workload activity analysis.

"Deploying new initiatives to the public cloud brings a spectrum of new security challenges that many organizations are not yet familiar with," said Dan Hubbard, Chief Security Architect, Lacework. "Starting with the daily validation of the AWS configuration (AWS accounts and AWS resources such as S3 buckets), to the continuous monitoring of workloads deployed on AWS, the Lacework cloud security platform enables organizations to safely migrate data to AWS and deploy applications in AWS."

VirtuLocity Networks, a software acceleration platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company, today announced a free 15-day trial of its patented congestion control solution, VLNCloud, on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Available on AWS Marketplace, VLNCloud can be installed here. The company’s patented solution, which launched last month at Mobile World Congress Americas after successful beta trials with CDNs and mobile operators, demonstrates improved cloud connections throughput and data payload transport time by up to 80 percent, which can be seen on the website here.

"End users attempting to access video-based real-time applications have long experienced sub-par network conditions due to packet loss, delay, and jitter – an issue that is only getting worse as wireless and mobile usage becomes more ubiquitous," said Mike Sapien, Chief Analyst at Ovum, Global Research and Advisory firm. "Some SD-WAN technologies have been built with complex, costly options to address improved application performance with features such as virtual rerouting, DNS steering, and edge caching, but there is actually a large market opportunity to tackle the issue directly with basic WAN and internet connections themselves."

CloudHealth Technologies today announced the CloudHealth Container Governance Module, the industry’s first ever container governance offering, enabling customers to unleash the full business potential of containers without sacrificing governance or visibility.

Container adoption is skyrocketing. Gartner predicts more than 50 percent of enterprises will be running containers in production by the year 2020.¹ Hand in hand with containerized deployments is the move toward serverless and functions-as-a-service, with adoption of offerings like AWS Lambda climbing rapidly. Yet a containerized, serverless world, for all its speed and flexibility, also presents significant challenges — such as loss of visibility. In the shifting sands of this "black box" environment, enterprises struggle to determine which services and apps are consuming resources and driving cost, and to understand consumption and utilization.

"Running a containerized environment helps us maintain our incredibly high standard of agility of feature velocity," said Ben Chess, Director of Engineering, Yelp. "At the same time, transparency is a must, so we can measure resource consumption and allocate costs appropriately across our hybrid environment. CloudHealth lets us maximize the value of our container deployment by telling us how well utilized it is and whether our clusters have the right mix of supporting resources. That insight is pivotal: It enables us to make informed, strategic business decisions without additional overhead."

BlueData EPIC software uses Docker container technology to help simplify and accelerate the deployment of Big Data analytics and data science environments in the enterprise. Together, Dell EMC and BlueData provide a comprehensive solution to accelerate time-to-value and reduce TCO for Big Data infrastructure. With Dell EMC and BlueData, enterprises can deliver exceptional simplicity, speed, efficiency, and performance for their Big Data implementations.

Dell Technologies Capital is an early investor in BlueData, and an active member of their Board of Directors, providing valuable business guidance and access to the broad Dell Technologies ecosystem. This latest agreement deepens the go-to-market relationship between BlueData and Dell Technologies and is an important step in helping the company to continue to scale its business.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of the SAP Vora solution on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, an integrated solution that pairs enterprise-grade Kubernetes with actionable big data insights. The combined technologies help enterprises to orchestrate data of nearly any volume, velocity, and variety to drive faster and smarter business decisions as a component of a consolidated, enterprise big data hub.

SAP Vora on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a continuation of the strong collaboration between Red Hat and SAP to support a variety of enterprise applications and big data scenarios. Running on Kubernetes clusters and Linux containers powered by OpenShift, SAP Vora provides containerized analytics engines and services and collects big data via Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, and directly from cloud environments to use for actionable business intelligence. Red Hat OpenShift delivers a scalable platform upon which these capabilities can run, integrating containerized services and SAP Vora resources for a unified, flexible offering.

Key features of the integrated offering include:

Skytap, Inc., a global cloud provider, today announced Skytap Cloud integration with third-party cloud services, which will enable enterprises to select services from IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and other public clouds to extend the value of traditional applications. These new capabilities will be delivered in the first half of 2018, further differentiating Skytap Cloud as a direct path for enterprises to iteratively modernize mission-critical applications without disrupting business operations.

The company also today announced it appointed Neil Holloway to its executive team as senior vice president of business development. Tapped to continue expanding Skytap’s partner ecosystem, Holloway joins the company during a period of sustained growth and momentum. Skytap’s business continues to accelerate with five of the company’s top ten customers closing this year and existing customer upgrades growing nearly 300 percent year over year (YoY) in Q3.

Financial organizations who want to include cloud services within their trading infrastructure can now benefit from a new connectivity solution from Transaction Network Services (TNS) which addresses the mission-critical requirements of the global financial markets.

TNS Secure Cloud Connect has been designed to provide secure, resilient and easy access to a range of cloud services, including those from the major cloud providers. It facilitates connectivity to the cloud as well as from a firm’s presence in the cloud to TNS’ vast global financial community which includes more than 2,000 endpoints. Where cloud providers use a regional set up, TNS Secure Cloud Connect enables cross-region connectivity to help make the infrastructure more efficient and redundant.

Alex Walker, Executive Vice President and Managing Director of TNS’ Financial Services Division, said: "Cloud services are rapidly expanding and it’s no surprise that financial organizations have now begun to deploy these services. The cloud can provide greater flexibility and allow cost savings, but these benefits can be undermined by using unreliable and insecure public internet connectivity.

Cyber security is one of the biggest threats to small business we have right now. Of course, big businesses deal with a lot of cyber security threats as well. But the difference is a giant and established business can take a hit from cyber security threats more so than smaller businesses who may not have all of the resources to recover, or the finances. 

The cloud has without a doubt changed the way we store and safeguard our information, but with new opportunities come new threats. Here are some ways that cyber security applies to small businesses and affects them in the most crucial ways, even in the age of the cloud and increased cyber security. And it may be a bigger deal for you small business owners than the corporate giants. 

Why Small Business?