"Business leaders are moving quickly to leverage the cloud to drive digital transformation while reducing security risks," said Andrew Conway, General Manager of Product Marketing for Microsoft Enterprise Mobility & Security. "We are pleased to work with Acalvio as they build their innovative cloud-based Advanced Threat Defense on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to deliver security capabilities that give companies greater confidence in their security posture."

BlockApps, the first Blockchain-as-a-Service platform and a leading provider of Ethereum blockchain enterprise software, is collaborating with Red Hat to make it easier for enterprises to build production blockchain applications that can be deployed in production across hybrid cloud environments — spanning both public and private clouds.

Some of the biggest barriers to enterprises adopting blockchain technologies have been the complexity of quickly developing solutions that can scale from proof-of-concepts (POCs) to enterprise-level production environments.

VMware is upgrading its Horizon virtual digital workspace portfolio to make desktop-as-service (DaaS) more viable over low-bandwidth networks and for those requiring high performance. The company said it is implementing new protocols and deployment options including several different hyperconverged appliances and support for IBM’s SoftLayer Cloud.

The company announced three new additions to its end user computing set of offerings: the new Horizon Cloud Service, Horizon Apps, and Horizon 7.1 desktop and apps delivery platform.  The new offerings take advantage of new protocols VMware has acquired and optimized to boost performance, making it more suitable for various virtual client and app environments, including Microsoft’s Skype for Business. These improvements to Horizon are currently rolling out at the technology preview stage, according to VMware.

Many organizations already run at least part of their operations in the cloud, while others are seeking to accelerate their migration strategies – with industry research predicting that up to 80 percent of workloads will run on a cloud architecture by 2024. Migrating from the data center to the cloud introduces different cyber security considerations, particularly associated with securing privileged user and application credentials used to manage consoles, enable applications to connect with sensitive assets, and dynamically scale elastic production environments.

For enterprises migrating to the cloud, CyberArk helps customers seamlessly extend and consistently enforce the security policies they have in place today on their on-premises infrastructure into their emerging cloud and DevOps environments.

Prioritize Risk Reduction in AWS Environments

Cisco today announced it is expanding its Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) Solutions portfolio by offering Microsoft Azure Stack on Cisco UCS via an integrated, validated system that enables organizations to deliver Microsoft Azure services from their on-premises data center. The joint Cisco and Microsoft solution provides the tools for enterprises to grow and modernize their applications in a highly flexible and scalable hybrid cloud environment. 

As businesses evolve in response to changing market dynamics, they look for a simple-to-manage hybrid cloud solution that is intelligent and flexible enough to optimize resources and scale on demand, while retaining on-premises benefits. Through Azure Stack, customers receive a solution providing full control over how they manage governance, security, and performance through the combination of Microsoft’s robust Azure cloud platform with the industry-leading Cisco UCS into an integrated system designed specifically for cloud workloads.

Accelerate Business Growth With UCS and Azure Stack

VMKings, a cloud provider for developers, today launched its VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting solution. Due to the private nature of the VPS technology, developers can now be the administrators of their solution without having to worry about maintenance. VPS is customizable, can be upgraded instantaneously, and scaled to match user needs.

Cloud Computing for Developers, By Developers
While other cloud solution providers (CSPs) offer generalized services to all sectors, VMKings, created by a team of highly skilled software developers, targets the software research and development industry with specialized offerings catered to the needs and requirements of the developer community.

"As developers, we saw the industry lacked a solution that catered to the varying workloads of development environments we maintained. A standard virtual server was often provided too much or too little space than was required," said Walid Elemary, vice president, VMKings. "Sometimes we had to add additional security layers, or an acquired server wouldn’t support the Linux OS we utilized for projects. Other times there wasn’t enough throughput available, or a slow network hindered our ability to meet deadlines. These challenges resulted in delayed output, added project costs, lower margins, and a lot of embarrassment."

Legacy systems and processes are still being relied on for a number of mission-critical tasks across businesses, but these outdated approaches are starting to show their age in a lot of ways. Many companies have gravitated toward digital transformation as a means of improving capabilities and ensuring that they are able to keep up with the competition in the future.

However, a majority of these initiatives don’t succeed. Consultancy.uk noted that while 80 percent of managers believe that technology is here to stay, two-thirds of digital transformation efforts fail. With bigger companies investing billions a year on these projects, it’s important to ensure that deliver the expected results. Let’s take a look at the biggest reasons that large organizations fail at digital transformation:

1. Not agile enough

Qualys, Inc., a pioneer and leading provider of cloud-based security and compliance solutions, today announced the opening of three new Secure Operations Centers (SOCs) in the European Union (EU), India and North America. The addition of these new locations in Amsterdam, Pune, India and San Jose, Calif. marks a new milestone for Qualys’ expanding global operations, which now includes six locations on three continents.

Organizations migrating services to the cloud must comply with new and changing global and regional regulations that impact where data resides. Qualys’ expansion will provide its global base of customers worldwide with greater access to a broad suite of cloud-based security and compliance solutions, and enable customers to choose which region best suits their data governance needs. Each of these new SOCs adds the capacity to scan millions of IP addresses at once, significantly increasing Qualys’ capabilities to support the largest organizations.

"This expansion of the Qualys Cloud Platform helps us better serve organizations across the globe and particularly within the EU and across Asia to compete in the new era of business, and increases our capacity to serve our North American customers," said Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO, Qualys, Inc.

Blue Medora, a leading innovator in IT operational analytics (ITOA) for enterprise cloud, database and infrastructure management, today expanded its SelectStar SaaS monitoring platform to support Apache Hadoop and Cassandra clusters.

SelectStar helps data operations and DevOps teams cope with the rapid changes in data platforms and analytics, including the costs, complexity and availability risks created by massive data processing demands from increasingly popular business-critical applications that leverage distributed architectures like Hadoop and Cassandra.

SelectStar presents a comprehensive view of thousands of health, performance and availability metrics for Hadoop and Cassandra clusters and nodes, as well as historical details for in-depth troubleshooting. With SelectStar, data operations professionals pinpoint and resolve issues faster using a dashboard of an organization’s overall data health.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE: LYV), the world’s leading live entertainment and ticketing company, has selected AWS as its public cloud infrastructure provider and is moving its global IT infrastructure to the AWS Cloud. AWS will help Live Nation reliably and securely scale its IT infrastructure for future growth across Ticketmaster and Corporate IT, as well as select parts of its Festival business. Live Nation currently produces more than 26,000 live events per year around the world, including more than 80 festivals, and operates more than 150 venues.