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.

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.