Today, Druva announced Druva Apollo a new service delivered via the Druva Cloud Platform that enables data management for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and  Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud workloads on a single policy control plane. The capabilities offer the ability to protect, govern and provide insights to data that resides within Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), building on Druva’s already existing data management services that span physical and virtual server environments, endpoints and cloud SaaS services like Office 365.

HyTrust, Inc., a leader in workload security solutions, announced findings from its latest cloud adoption survey conducted at VMworld 2017. The survey of 323 respondents assessed deployment decisions for cloud infrastructure, containers and workload security along with risk and compliance from cloud deployments. The most significant result was the large number of companies that are not prepared for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance that takes effect in May 2018.

The European Union (EU) regulation for data privacy not only applies to organizations located within the EU, but it will also apply to organizations located outside of EU member nations if they process and hold the personal data of residents within the European Union, regardless of the company’s location.

Key findings regarding GDPR:

ZTE Corporation, a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, officially released TECS 6.0, the new-generation Cloud Platform, at the OpenStack Summit Sydney. Based on the latest OpenStack Pike, TECS 6.0 features cloud native microservice architecture and edge DC design. It also employs FPGA hardware acceleration technology and boasts powerful ICT convergence resource orchestration capability.

TECS 6.0 has the following characteristics:

ST Telemedia Connect (STT Connect), a Singapore-based private cloud provider, and US-headquartered Armor announced today a partnership to offer end-to-end secure cloud solutions in the Asia Pacific, the fastest growing market for both cloud and security.

The collaboration marries STT Connect’s highly secure, enterprise-grade private cloud infrastructure with Armor’s world-class managed security tools to support enterprises’ need for agility while protecting their business, customers, and IT investment. With combined industry endorsements by PCI DSS, HIPAA/HITRUST CSF, GDPR, ISO/IEC 27001 and MTCS SS 584 Level 3, the two companies will deliver a fully integrated and managed security service with end-to-end protection and 24/7/365 security operations centre (SOC) for cloud workloads and hybrid IT environments.

The October 12th announcement that Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba Group has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program came as a shock to some developers, but it seems a smart move as Red Hat already gets more than 12 percent of its profits from Asia, per the 2016 annual report. This strategic partnership could help revenues in Asia top EMEA levels, at 21.26 percent, in only a few years. 

Joining the Red Hat CCSP ensures that Alibaba Cloud, the largest cloud-hosting provider in all of Asia, is ready to deliver a secure and flexible space for development. The enhanced portability of OpenShift.io and performance of Alibaba Cloud‘s back-end hardware should be very attractive to developers in the quickly growing Asian tech sector. This could mean a wealth of job opportunities, for both expats and teleworkers, but China poses its own risks and hazards for developers to keep in mind.

Surveys conducted by five organizations, including the OpenStack Foundation User Survey, document acceleration of OpenStack adoption across industries and regions, and attest to the open source software’s "essential" role in multi-cloud environments, NFV and IoT/edge computing.

Key Findings:

• In the OpenStack User Survey, respondents indicated that users from 48 percent of deployments are also interacting with another cloud. Additionally, the diversity of users was demonstrated in year-over-year analysis showing growth among non-IT, mainstream industries, including significant growth among the financial and government industries, as well as growth in research, retail and telecom.
• A Cloudify-sponsored survey of nearly 700 enterprise cloud professionals found that OpenStack was the most widely deployed cloud infrastructure. Results also upheld the multi-cloud trend demonstrated in the User Survey, reporting that 51 percent of organizations are deploying more than one cloud and the second most popular two-cloud combination is AWS and OpenStack.
• In a recent SDxCentral report, 87 percent of respondents said that OpenStack would be used to manage edge infrastructure.
• A Heavy Reading survey focused on telecom operators found that 96 percent of those who already deploying an NFV strategy find OpenStack essential or important.
• A SUSE-sponsored survey of more than 1,400 senior IT professionals found that OpenStack is in production in 23 percent of organizations (up from 15 percent in 2015). A total of 82 percent are using or plan to use OpenStack in the future.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open-source solutions, today announced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12, the latest version of Red Hat’s massively scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Based on the OpenStack "Pike" release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 introduces containerized services, improving flexibility while decreasing complexity for faster application development. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 delivers many new enhancements, including upgraded DCI (distributed continuous integration) and improved security to help maintain data compliance and manage risk.

Hundreds of customers rely on Red Hat OpenStack Platform to power their hybrid and private clouds for a variety of mission-critical deployments, including BBVA; Cambridge University; FICO; Massachusetts Open Cloud; Turkcell; IAG;Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Paddy Power Betfair; Produban; UKCloud; and Verizon. And, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is backed by a robust ecosystem of partners, including Cisco, Dell EMC, Intel, Lenovo, Rackspace, and NetApp for enterprise businesses, as well as Ericsson, Nokia, NEC, Huawei, Cisco and others from the telecommunications industry.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is designed for private or public cloud infrastructure, built on the enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 is a tested, certified, and fully-supported version of OpenStack that provides the agility to scale and more quickly meet customer demand without compromising availability, performance, or IT security requirements. Red Hat OpenStack Platform also includes Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat’s multi-cloud management platform, to provide operational visibility and policy-based management across the Red Hat OpenStack Platform infrastructure and workloads. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 maintains tight integration with Red Hat Ceph Storage, a highly-scalable block, object, and file storage solution, designed for scale-out clouds.

Cumulus Networks, the leading provider bringing web-scale networking to enterprise cloud, today at OpenStack Summit Sydney, announced the availability of Cumulus in the Cloud for OpenStack environments.

As the standard for both service providers and enterprises looking to build a cloud environment, over ⅓ of Cumulus Networks’ customer base is already leveraging OpenStack. OpenStack offers a rich variety of components that can be combined to build a cost-efficient, tailored private or public cloud solution, while increasing operational efficiency. Now with Cumulus in the Cloud for OpenStack, a virtual test environment that provides a low-effort way to learn Cumulus Networks’ technologies, operators have access to all the steps needed to develop fully functioning OpenStack environments.

Organizations of all sizes are increasingly dependent upon their applications and are evaluating ways to optimize application performance. Pre-production however, evaluating new IT infrastructure and developing a Proof of Concept (PoC) can be time consuming and expensive, especially for companies bound to restrictive systems from legacy vendors.