CSC, a global leader in next-generation IT services and innovative cloud solutions, and Virtual Clarity, a leading provider of IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) transformation strategy and leadership, today announced an agreement to jointly help enterprises accelerate their transformation to leading cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Under the terms of the agreement, CSC will make an undisclosed investment in Virtual Clarity to accelerate the company’s leading transformation consulting services targeting the Financial Services, Insurance, Telecom, and Manufacturing industries. Virtual Clarity will become a Strategic Affiliate of CSC and will collaborate on joint go-to-market pursuits with CSC.

Virtual Clarity has significant knowledge and experience in helping global clients solve large, complex business problems and building lasting value for customers and partners. Its ClearTransformation service enables companies to accelerate business innovation, overcoming the inertia of legacy IT by transforming the traditional IT operating model to nimble IT-as-a-Service.

Visit CloudMinds at Mobile World Congress, Hall 2, Stand 2E6MR.

VMware, Inc. today announced VMware vCloud NFV 2.0, designed to modernize and transform network architectures and operations for global communications service providers (CSPs). Built from production-proven software-defined infrastructure and management solutions, the vCloud NFV platform can improve economics through accelerated service delivery, operational excellence and lower infrastructure costs. With vCloud NFV 2.0, CSPs will be able to deliver new and differentiated services on an agile, open and secure software-defined architecture today as they evolve their networks to support 5G and the Internet of Things.

VMware vCloud NFV is an ETSI-compliant fully integrated, modular and multi-tenancy NFV platform. The vCloud NFV platform combines a highly available, carrier-grade network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) with Day 2 operations management and service assurance capabilities to drive successful NFV deployments and operations. With vCloud NFV, VMware is delivering openness and choice across the NFV technology stack-NFV infrastructure (NFVI), Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIM), Virtual Network Functions (VNF) and NFV Orchestration (NFVO) — and continues to advance vCloud NFV interoperability across mobile, wireline, Internet of Things, Software-Defined WAN, and security use cases. As virtualization is a prerequisite to 5G network buildout, VMware vCloud NFV delivers a platform for new service development today, with an architecture that will support CSP implementation of 5G implementation in the future.

"In today’s highly competitive environment, CSPs must deliver innovative services faster, with the best end-to-end customer experience and at the lowest cost. Current network architectures, including some virtualized deployments, remain rigid and expensive to build and manage," said Gabriele Di Piazza, vice president of solutions, Telco NFV Group, VMware. "With more than 80 NFV deployments by more than 45 CSPs serving 300 million subscribers worldwide, VMware vCloud NFV enables the transformation of network architectures, services delivery, operations and economics through a more dynamic, agile network built on software."

Datrium, the leading provider of Open Convergence for cloud builders, today announced Datrium Blanket Encryption, an industry-first software product that combines always-on efficient deduplication and compression technology with high-speed, end-to-end encryption: in use at the host, in flight across the network and at rest on persistent storage.

The number of breaches within the US have quadrupled from 2005 to 2015, and the year 2016 accounted for seven of the ten biggest data breaches ever. With threats rising, the requirement to encrypt data everywhere – from host-to-storage, between hosts, and between sites – is becoming standard. However, leading storage arrays and hyper-converged systems only protect data at rest and do not protect against host or network intrusions. Guest operating systems and hypervisors offer encryption at the source, but at the expense of data reduction required by the economics of modern flash storage.

Security and Economics Without Compromise
Datrium offers a fundamentally new and comprehensive approach.  By deduplicating and compressing data, then encrypting while it is still in the application host’s memory (RAM), Datrium Blanket Encryption can then move data across hosts, networks and storage that is always encrypted and efficient. 

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steven J.Vaughn-Nichols.

After Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Northern Virginia datacenter went casters up, you might think about switching your Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud provider. If that’s the case, Cloud Spectator has benchmarked 10 of the biggest public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers based on price and value.

Cloud Spectator tested 10 of the largest, most well-known public cloud providers with North American datacenters. These were: 1&1, AWS, Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink, DigitalOcean, Dimension Data, Google Cloud Platform, OVH, Rackspace, and IBM/Softlayer, aka Bluemix. They examined the performance of vCPU, memory, and block storage along with cost. This gives users the clouds’ CloudSpecs Score…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/article/which-cloud-will-give-you-the-biggest-bang-for-the-buck/

Grazed from ABCNews. Author: Mae Anderson.

Usually people don’t notice the "cloud" — unless, that is, it turns into a massive storm. Which was the case Tuesday when Amazon’s huge cloud-computing service suffered a major outage. Amazon Web Services, by far the world’s largest provider of internet-based computing services, suffered an unspecified breakdown in its eastern U.S. region starting about midday Tuesday.

The result: unprecedented and widespread performance problems for thousands of websites and apps. While few services went down completely, thousands, if not tens of thousands, of companies had trouble with features ranging from file sharing to webfeeds to loading any type of data from Amazon’s "simple storage service," known as S3…

Cyber-threats traditionally targeting on-premises resources – such as ransomware, identity theft, and data exfiltration – are a growing concern for cloud services. As organizations’ adoption of the cloud continues to accelerate, effectively addressing these additional security challenges is a top concern. Mid-market companies are especially challenged. Cloud adoption is more prevalent in the mid-market due to its ease of deployment and low upfront costs. However, mid-market firms typically lack the expertise and resources required to effectively secure their cloud deployments.

In today’s hybrid IT environment, troubleshooting issues related to application connectivity is complex and challenging, especially due to the difficulty in isolating the source of the problem in a network. As you manage your cloud applications, it is also important to have visibility into the virtual network connections between your datacenters, remote office sites, and critical workloads. An unified network monitoring experience that gives you network visibility across public and hybrid clouds, and helps in proactive identification and resolution of potential issues is essential for managing today’s networks.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Network Performance Monitor (NPM), a cloud-aware network monitoring solution in Operations Management Suite Insight & Analytics, that monitors networks for performance degradation and outages. The solution continuously tests for reachability between various points on the network across public clouds, datacenters and user locations, and enables application administrators to quickly identify the specific network segment or device that may be causing the problem.

Scality today announced its new Scality HALO Cloud Monitor, a turnkey 24/7 monitoring solution for the Scality RING object storage platform and S3-focused products. Scality HALO provides customers continuous uptime for their managed private cloud storage environments and delivers transformative analytics to help streamline business operations.

"Our Scality RING system is designed to be 100 percent available and now with Scality HALO we have the cloud monitoring assurance for customers to guarantee 100 percent uptime for their Scality RING and S3 environments," said Daniel Binsfeld, VP of DevOps and Global Support at Scality. "Our customers, both Service Providers and Enterprise companies, must deliver on strong Service Level Agreements to their users. With Scality HALO we provide peace of mind and confidence that downtime can become a thing of the past for everyone."