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?

SignalFx, a leader in real-time operational intelligence for data-driven DevOps, today announced an integration for comprehensive global monitoring for Google Cloud Platform. This integration allows enterprise-class Google Cloud customers to leverage the real-time, end-to-end operational intelligence of the SignalFx solution. Global organizations can get alerts in real-time from SignalFx’s streaming analytics platform across their entire technology stack. From infrastructure to applications critical information will be uncovered every second of every day so unwanted issues can be instantly fixed. The integration currently is live across many Google Cloud Platform services.

RightScale Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise cloud management, today announced that, if left unchecked, wasted cloud spend over the next year will top $10 billion. For more details, read the companion RightScale blog: Where Is the $10B in Waste in Public Cloud Costs?

"Cloud providers claim they are getting better at helping companies reduce some of their cloud spending. For example, AWS recently claimed it saved AWS users $500 million by alerting customers when they were overpaying," said Kim Weins, VP of Cloud Cost Strategy at RightScale. "Unfortunately, this is just a drop in the bucket. RightScale has seen that companies waste, on average, 35 percent of their cloud spend. This equates to $6.4 billion in annualized wasted cost for AWS alone. For the top three public cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform), this represents annualized waste of $10 billion."

RightScale Optima Statistics on Wasted Cloud Spend 

Rescale, the global provider of HPC in the cloud, today announced that NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators and NVIDIA NVLink high-speed interconnect technology are now available on Rescale’s ScaleX turnkey cloud platform for AI and high performance computing (HPC). The new GPUs are hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and as dedicated bare metal nodes by SkyScale, a Rescale partner. All resources are accessible on an hourly basis with Rescale’s more than 200 pre-installed and pre-tuned HPC applications.

With the addition of the Tesla V100 to the ScaleX platform, Rescale users gain instant, hourly access to the fastest, most powerful GPU on the market. Based on the highly efficient NVIDIA Volta GPU architecture, the Tesla V100 is a big compute powerhouse, delivering 3x the training performance compared to its predecessor.

Today, SoftwareONE announced cloud management enhancements for PyraCloud – its end-to-end platform for managing software portfolios from on-premises to the cloud. The latest enhancements provide insights on cloud consumption based on customer’s business context and create a culture of accountability when using public clouds, such as Azure and AWS. It is critical that organizations discover and consistently track budget and spend across cloud providers in order to control costs. PyraCloud will enable organizations to manage cloud costs within budget across business units, cloud providers and applications.

According to IDC, the average business works with 13 different cloud service providers, and Gartner reports that organizations are finding public cloud bills to be two to three times more expensive than expected. PyraCloud’s enhanced Cloud Management Module is designed to address this reality. The new capabilities give organizations visibility into the cloud assets being used, and by whom, facilitating better governance, budget management and spend across all cloud providers. With the latest enhancements to the PyraCloud platform, organizations can meet the business requirements of accountability, cost control and chargeback of cloud usage across business units.

The new enhancements to the Cloud Management Module offer four key benefits:

Electric Cloud, the leader in Adaptive Release Automation, today announced a new version of its flagship ElectricFlow DevOps Automation platform, which includes enhanced capabilities to better manage, deliver and report on applications in both microservices and zOS mainframe environments.

"Today’s applications are complex – from mobile, distributed, cloud, microservices, to mainframe – often all at the same time," said Carmine Napolitano, CEO of Electric Cloud. "Delivering these applications smoothly and ensuring everything works together can cause a lot of anxiety and friction. The new functionality in ElectricFlow helps eliminate toolchain and process silos among these various groups. This means that mainframe teams can now fully participate in a company’s digital transformation efforts. It also means it’s both safe — and easy — for developers and downstream operations teams to adapt to and adopt modern technologies, like microservices."

Comprehensive Mainframe Integration

Barracuda Networks, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-enabled security and data protection solutions, today announced it has acquired privately held Sonian Inc., a leading provider of public cloud archiving and business insights. This acquisition will deepen Barracuda’s cloud archiving, and email security and management capabilities, as well as expand Barracuda’s channel reach with the addition of key OEM partners.

Sonian’s archiving and analytics capabilities enable customers to preserve, access and act on communications data, and apply these insights to their business to reduce risks and increase productivity. Using those insights, businesses can identify potential threats in communications data before they escalate into larger problems, which has become increasingly important in today’s dynamic threat environment. Adding these capabilities to Barracuda’s security platform deepens the security and data protection offering to customers in their Microsoft Office 365 and other cloud environments.

Dimension Data, the global technology solutions and services provider, and NTT Communications, the ICT solutions and international communications business within NTT Group, will create a single ‘cloud powerhouse’ by bringing together their cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities under the management of NTT Communications to deliver transformative, cloud-based solutions and innovation to clients of both organizations around the world.

Dimension Data and NTT Communications employ some of the most highly-skilled, sought-after cloud experts in the market. Bringing together these experts under the management of NTT Communications means the combined capabilities will have the power to drive innovation into the market and deliver the services that today’s organizations demand.