Sonian, the leading provider of cloud-based email archiving and insights, today unveiled new survey findings that reveal that 79 percent of managed service providers (MSPs) today feel their greatest competitive threat is cloud providers, as opposed to other MSPs. This represents a significant leap from five years ago, when only 54 percent of MSPs viewed cloud providers as their greatest competition. MSPs of all sizes agreed they lost more deals to Google than any other cloud provider, including Amazon, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Microsoft – and expect Google to be the cloud market leader by 2021.

These findings were detailed in a new report released today, "A New World Order: How MSPs are Trying to Survive and Thrive in a Cloud-first World," based on a Berg Research survey of more than 300 MSPs commissioned by Sonian.

The MSP Market in an Increasingly Cloud-First World

Zenoss Inc., the leader in hybrid IT monitoring and analytics software, today announced the launch of its ZenPack SDK, a new portal that enables anyone to create ZenPacks, or plug-ins, that extend the capabilities of the Zenoss platform. ZenPacks can be created to extend functionality in monitoring servers, networking systems, storage systems, virtual environments, containers, converged infrastructure, applications and more.

"The extensibility of our platform is a key difference between Zenoss and other solutions," said Marcus MacNeill, vice president of product management at Zenoss. "The new ZenPack SDK portal now makes it easier than ever for IT Ops and DevOps teams to customize and extend monitoring and analytics capabilities to cover just about any technology they can imagine."

The Zenoss IT monitoring and analytics platform was architected with extensibility as a key tenet, to meet unique requirements for the largest enterprise and service provider deployments. ZenPacks represent one pillar of this extensibility and enable Zenoss customers to extend their capabilities to monitor new types of systems and applications and to add advanced monitoring functionality for systems and applications that are already covered.

An independent survey commissioned by Zadara Storage, the provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS), has underscored the IT industry’s need for symmetrically scalable cloud storage, that can instantly scale up or down to meet business requirements, as a key challenge to growth in 2017 – and corroborates other recent analyses of IT demands for storage scalability in the coming year.

When asked to share their top strategy for managing their organization’s data storage in 2017, one third of IT decision makers responding in Germany, the UK and the US, ranked "having cloud storage that scales up or down according to my organization’s needs" as their #1 wish in 2017. Scalability was cited by nearly twice as many as those who selected the next highest response, outranking other mission-critical IT demands. The 2017 wish list unveiled by this research included:

Electronic IV Monitors

One of the benefits of electronic monitoring is that it is no longer necessary for nurses to administer intravenous feeds continuously. IV pump infusions provide more controlled medication delivery by ensuring a constant flow of fluids and medications like pain meds on demand (within specified limits). Nurses still check on patients and tend to new issues, but there is no longer a need for nurses to continually make rounds to check on each and every patient every few minutes.

One Identity, a recognized leader in identity and access management, today announced a new Active Roles version that extends best-in-class features to conquer the security and management challenges organizations face as they grapple with the complexities of hybrid Active Directory (AD) environments. With thousands of users already leveraging Active Roles to manage on-premises Active Directory, Active Roles 7.1 delivers a single management console, purpose-built to help organizations overcome the time-consuming burden and functional gaps often presented by disparate and limited native tools for the hybrid AD/Azure Active Directory environment.

Currently, nearly 90 percent of organizations worldwide rely on Microsoft’s Active Directory to authenticate and authorize users on their networks, translating into 500 million organizations, globally. Yet while Microsoft’s launch of the cloud-based Azure Active Directory (AAD) has fueled steady growth in enterprise cloud adoption, many organizations face significant challenges in efficiently managing the security and administration of their quickly growing hybrid environments. Organizations require a solution that addresses these issues in on-premises, cloud-based and hybrid Active Directory ecosystems.

"The steadily rising appetite for cloud-based productivity tools like Microsoft Office 365 and Exchange Online has driven quick adoption of Microsoft’s AAD – yet many adopting the cloud still, by necessity, have their feet firmly planted in on-premises environments, leading to vast inconsistencies in administrative processes and security execution," said John Milburn, president and general manager of One Identity. "Coupled with the shortcomings of native and other third-party solutions, the rise of these hybrid AD/AAD environments has led to millions of enterprises struggling with dangerous gaps in security and crippling inefficiencies. With our release of Active Roles 7.1, One Identity now empowers organizations with precise, unified and consistent administration and security for both AD and AAD from a single point of management, enabling enterprises to embrace cloud adoption without sacrificing security."

Today the OpenStack Foundation announced that Brian Stevens of Google, Mercè Crosas of The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University and Junwei Lu of China Mobile are among the speakers committed to the next OpenStack Summit, the must-attend open infrastructure event, taking place May 8-11 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. OpenStack users at Bloomberg, eBay and the US Army Cyber School are also among the first round of confirmed speakers. The call for presentations is open through February 6, and the full agenda will be published in March.

More than 6,000 participants from 60+ countries are expected to attend the OpenStack Summit to discuss how open infrastructure is helping companies increase agility and save money as software becomes more strategic to their business. Headline sponsors are Intel, Mirantis, Deutsche Telekom and Red Hat.

Stevens, vice president of cloud platforms at Google, will discuss how open source is the vehicle for hybrid cloud and is also enabling new use cases such as machine learning. Crosas, chief data science and technology officer at Harvard IQSS (Institute for Quantitative and Social Science), will discuss the Cloud Dataverse collaboration with the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) to host datasets, supporting thousands of researchers at more than 500 worldwide institutions using Dataverse, in the MOC’s OpenStack cloud.

ZeroStack, the leader in making self-driving private cloud affordable for all companies, today announced its roadmap and first suite of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities derived from machine learning. These capabilities build the foundation for self-driving clouds, making deploying, running, and managing on-premises cloud as ‘hands off’ as using a public cloud. Aimed at empowering application developers, other on-premises clouds require major investments in IT infrastructure and internal skills. ZeroStack’s intelligent cloud platform leverages self-healing software and algorithms developed from over one million datagrams. This economic disruption unleashes businesses to choose clouds for application development based on data locality, governance, performance and costs without technology adoption restricting their choices.

"With ZeroStack’s vision for automated cloud, and this first release of real capabilities, I believe they are the only credible cloud vendor to employ artificial intelligence in the service of enterprise customers," said Torsten Volk, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "Given the increasing complexity of IT operations, deploying AI is an optimal way of managing costs."

Carbon Black, the leader in next-generation endpoint security, today unveiled "Streaming Prevention," a cybersecurity technology that redefines the Next-Generation Antivirus (NGAV) market by combining a breakthrough prevention model with market-leading detection and response to stop both malware and non-malware attacks.

"Streaming Prevention" is the core technology powering Cb Defense, Carbon Black’s NGAV solution, which can prevent, detect and respond to the most advanced cyber attacks, including non-malware attacks.

Non-malware attacks gain control of computers without downloading malicious software. Instead, they use trusted, native operating system tools, such as PowerShell, and exploit running applications, such as browsers, to "live off the land." These attacks pose a bigger risk than malware attacks because they are harder to detect and cause more damage. Virtually every organization was targeted by such an attack in 2016, according to Carbon Black research.

In protecting against non-malware attacks, "Streaming Prevention" is a fundamentally different approach to endpoint prevention than taken by Cylance, McAfee, Symantec and other antivirus (AV) vendors.

Since there are many companies today that has offices around the world and they have a lot of employees who travel back and forth from one office to another, their business methods need a lot of changes in order to make it work. 

Besides the fact that their offices are separated by thousands of miles, they still need to be able to communicate, share information and ideas in order to come up with coordinated business incentives. Additionally, most of those scattered business organizations have a lot of things to consider and they require sophisticated solutions that will allow them to function properly. 

This is where an online wiki software comes into play. It allows organizations to share different types of information between them in a simple, yet very effective way. Still, this is not the only thing you can do with cloud-based wiki software and we will focus upon that a bit more. 

Grazed from CIO.com.  Author: Mary Branscombe

When Microsoft first showed off its disaster recovery service on Azure in 2014, it was called Hyper-V Recovery Manager and was an extension of a System Center tool for failing over Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) to another location, using the public cloud to coordinate testing and managing recovery between your data centers.

Today, Azure Site Recovery (ASR) lets you fail over into the cloud as well to another location, from physical and virtual servers, and it handles far more workloads than just Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (or even VMware and vSphere, which it also supports).