Druva, the leader in cloud data protection and information management, today announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. Working as part of the CSA, Druva aims to educate and help companies make the most of Cloud Computing to secure their data.

Druva is the first company to offer a ‘Cloud-First’ approach to data protection, enabling customers to manage and protect all their critical information in the Cloud while having the confidence that data is secure and managed according to their specific business requirements. As more companies look to migrate their IT systems to the Cloud to reduce costs and ease data management, Druva’s approach supports companies in both using the Cloud for data protection and to protect critical data held in Cloud applications.

AlienVault, the leading provider of Unified Security Management (USM) and crowdsourced threat intelligence, today announced the extension of its USM Anywhere platform with the launch of new AlienApps for Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow and Carbon Black. These join the growing ecosystem of AlienApps, including Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite, Cisco Umbrella, and others, that enable organizations to effectively detect and respond to threats.

The AlienApp for Palo Alto Networks’ Next-Generation Firewall products and Carbon Black Endpoint Security Platform greatly extend the automatic response orchestration capabilities within USM Anywhere to support enhanced threat detection and incident response workflows. The addition of the AlienApp for ServiceNow IT Service Management and ServiceNow Security Operations enables organizations to manage incident response efforts more effectively.

USM Anywhere is the first all-in-one security monitoring platform that integrates essential security capabilities — asset discovery, vulnerability assessment, intrusion detection, behavioral monitoring, and SIEM — to deliver centralized threat detection, incident response, and compliance management for cloud and on-premises environments from a single, unified web-based console. With a highly extensible architecture, USM Anywhere enables the seamless orchestration of new security technologies as they become available, leveraging the power of AlienApps: modular, integrated software components that extend the value proposition of the USM platform beyond the five essential security capabilities.

VMware, Inc. today introduced major updates across its VMware vRealize cloud management platform to improve software-defined data center (SDDC) and cloud operations and accelerate application and infrastructure service delivery across hybrid clouds. New releases include VMware vRealize Operations 6.6, VMware vRealize Automation 7.3, vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3, vRealize Log Insight 4.5 and vRealize Network Insight 3.4, which combine to provide enterprise customers with advanced intelligent operations and automated IT capabilities to more easily stand up and operate a VMware-based cloud. Additionally, VMware is introducing increased support for containers and configuration management solutions to ease moving applications from dev-test to production.

The VMware vRealize Suite enables customers to manage and provision at scale — compute, network, storage and application services across hybrid cloud environments. The platform’s comprehensive management capabilities for the SDDC and across multiple clouds help customers to address three common use cases — intelligent operations, automated IT and DevOps-ready IT — based on thousands of customer engagements.

"VMware is committed to supporting our customers’ digital transformation initiatives by helping them to modernize their data centers as well as integrate their public clouds," said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. "These latest updates to our vRealize platform will help customers get more out of their hybrid cloud investments today, and put them on a path for cross-cloud management of applications and infrastructure regardless of where the workload is running."

HyperGrid, the Enterprise Cloud-as-a-Service leader, today announced the launch of the next phase in the realization of the company’s vision, with a major release of the HyperCloud service, and HyperCloud’s availability as the industry’s only fully managed service in an on-premises “pay as you use” pricing model. It also announced the addition of new and innovative hybrid cloud decision intelligence  features added from the company’s recent acquisition of XOcur, makers of a business intelligence SaaS platform for cloud decision making. Today’s news comes on the heels of HyperGrid’s announcement last year of HyperCloud, the industry’s first on-premises cloud as a service delivered with subscription economics, and of achieving exceptional sales growth in FY16 and even more accelerated growth so far in FY17.

“The market demand for Enterprise Cloud services is growing exponentially; yet, some organizations feel left behind as they are not able to move to cloud as quickly or freely as others”, said Nariman Teymourian, HyperGrid President and CEO. “Delivering unified cloud services, quickly, simply and in a pay as you use model on premises is groundbreaking for the enterprise. I am not aware of any other company in the world that can combine these capabilities with the ability to manage multiple clouds using a single platform. By continuing to grow the capabilities that HyperCloud provides and simplifying how it is delivered, we are bringing our unique service value proposition to an ever-growing base of client use cases.”

• Visibility of all workloads, whether on-premises or in AWS and Azure environments;
• Acceleration of public cloud migration;
• Lowering of public cloud bills on average by 30 percent;
• Control of workloads to assure performance and deliver service levels; and
• Enforcement of compliance policies across a hybrid cloud.

Grazed from Information-Age. Author: Ben Rossi.

The adoption of cloud computing has been on the up since as far back as 2008, when a survey conducted by the Pew Research Institute found that cloud services were used by nearly 69% of Americans. Since then, the industry has experienced hyper-growth and exceeded the already vast predictions of how big it would become.

IDC predicts that the cloud computing market in 2017 will be worth $107 billion and, according to Gartner, by 2020 a corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy will be as unusual as a ‘no-internet’ policy would be today. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine an organisation in 2017 that did not use webmail, file sharing and storage, and data backup…

1) Wearable Devices

Wearable devices come in many forms and do many things. Fitness trackers, smart watches, head-mounted displays, smart jewelry, and smart clothing are changing both the quality of our lives and how we access information. Other devices, known as implantables, are implanted under the skin to treat heart conditions. Because of this flexibility, wearable devices have caught the eye of manufacturers. When used with the cloud, such devices could transform manufacturing as we know it.

Take Google Glass, for instance. This pair of glasses can allow workers to access critical data without leaving their stations. It can also replace scanners and barcode readers by collecting and sending data to servers and cloud-based applications. Employees can then use the time they would have otherwise spent doing data collection on something else, thereby increasing their productivity. Smart devices also increase safety in the workplace. They warn drivers, especially those driving heavy machinery when colleagues are in the drivers’ blind spot.

Azure specializes in offering luxury holiday properties at the Golden Sands Resort and Spa in Malta, and had plans to expand its member base in Europe to include Germany, Norway and Italy. Azure needed a robust communications platform that would allow it to scale rapidly. 8×8’s innovative communications cloud solutions fulfilled both requirements, offering a platform that will grow alongside the business with all the advantages of investment in latest technology, but without the capital outlay.

“When we set out to select a VoIP and contact center system we were looking for a provider that’s innovative, has a scalable and reliable product and can support our complex operations without being overly complicated as a system. 8×8 ticks all the boxes,” said Marthese Vella, Chief Information Officer, Azure. “We’re looking forward to working in a more unified and coherent way as an organization to give our customer service agents the tools they need to continue delivering excellent service. They are a close-knit and knowledgeable team and 8×8’s technology will enhance their expertise. We have ambitious growth plans in the future and we’re confident 8×8 will be able to support us every step of the way.”

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Today’s cloud computing architecture resembles 70s mainframes. The heavy lifting happens in dense data centers that act as the central point of gravity. In both the scenarios, applications share the underlying infrastructure. While this architecture works for the majority of the scenarios, the emerging use cases demand a different approach.

Edge computing fundamentally changes the cloud by making it distributed and decentralized. With edge, the core building blocks of cloud such as compute, storage, and the network will move closer to the applications. Cloud providers will move abstract layers such as machine learning models, serverless computing, and lightweight databases that run on the core infrastructure to the edge…

Grazed from IHS. Author: Liz Cruz.

With digitization transforming and disrupting businesses everywhere, there is tremendous pressure to change and adapt, especially for enterprise information technology (IT) departments. A key part of change is the need for greater agility and faster adoption of new technology. Both of these agents drive the off-premises cloud market, while also altering the architecture of on-premises data centers or private clouds to include orchestration for the automatic deployment of workloads. To achieve success, a key takeaway for businesses is to rethink IT, shifting reliance from traditional data-center models to new mechanisms like the cloud.

Growth all around

In assessing just how fast transformation is occurring within the space, one only has to look at the rate of growth projected for the next few years ahead. The market for off-premises cloud services is forecast for solid revenue growth of approximately 30% year-over-year in the near term, with strong expansion to continue through 2021. The market’s increase is due to larger portions of enterprise IT budgets being allocated to off-premises cloud services…

Read more from the source @ http://blog.ihs.com/off-premises-cloud-computing-services-gain-traction-are-multi-clouds-next