Bluelock, provider of Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) for complex environments and sensitive data, is expanding its IT security footprint with a new series of features to enhance clients’ overall security posture. The first of these initiatives is the launch of a comprehensive dashboard that increases visibility and auditability across clients’ security services.

As cybersecurity threats continue to grow in the digital age, Bluelock Portfolio provides clients visibility into the depth of security with which their applications and services are guarded, with the ability to easily add additional protection services. Clients can access a comprehensive, searchable log of those who have accessed and modified systems, as well as quickly request documents for response to auditors.

Armor, a leading provider of managed cloud security, has been named by Momentum Partners, an advisor and dealmaker in cybersecurity, to Momentum’s Watch List: Q4 2016. Each quarter Momentum identifies ten companies after carefully weighing feedback from their industry network and considering a variety of growth and innovation factors.

"Last year was significant in terms of expanding our product set to encompass an offering that would help our customers fulfill their shared security obligation on public cloud platforms," said Jared Day, president, Armor. "In addition to our secure hosting offering, we now provide a comprehensive approach to protecting a variety of cloud and virtualized environments. Being included in this list reinforces Armor’s strategic direction and we look forward to sustaining and accelerating this momentum even further as we enter 2017."

Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, today announced that Riverbed SteelConnect, an app-defined SD-WAN solution that simplifies networking for the cloud-centric enterprise, now offers instant and easy provisioning of SD-WAN connectivity into Microsoft Azure cloud networks. SteelConnect is transforming legacy hardware-based approaches to networking with a software-defined and application-centric solution that delivers the agility, visibility, and performance that businesses need to deliver real business impact in a cloud-first world.

As applications continue to move to the cloud, performance and security remain critical concerns for the enterprise. SteelConnect delivers automated, secure connectivity to Azure cloud networks with a single click. As a result, enterprises can be more agile, while maintaining the same level of performance delivered from the cloud across the entire hybrid network.

"Riverbed has a long-standing relationship with Microsoft to provide fast and secure access to users’ applications and data, wherever it resides," said Paul O’Farrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Riverbed’s SteelConnect, SteelHead, and SteelFusion business units. "With the seamless integration of Microsoft Azure with Riverbed SteelConnect, we’re taking this a step further, ensuring that connectivity to the cloud itself is simple, instant and secure."

Platform9, the open-source-as-a-service company making cloud infrastructure easy, today announced the general availability of its Managed Kubernetes service, the industry’s first infrastructure-agnostic, SaaS-managed offering. Unlike legacy software distribution models, Managed Kubernetes is deployed and managed entirely as a SaaS solution, across on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. The company also introduced Fission, a new, open source, serverless framework built on Kubernetes. These offerings feature a drastically simplified operational and consumption model that eliminates the steep learning curve currently associated with Kubernetes, and allow DevOps and IT teams to focus on solving core business problems.

In OpenStack jargon, an Instance is a Virtual Machine, the guest workload. It boots from an operating system image, and it is configured with a certain amount of CPU, RAM and disk space, amongst other parameters such as networking or security settings.

In this blog post kindly contributed by Marko Myllynen we’ll explore nine configuration and optimization options that will help you achieve the required performance, reliability and security that you need for your workloads.

ManageEngine, the real time IT management company, today announced the opening of its two new ISO 27001-certified data centers in the EU – one in Amsterdam, Netherlands and another in Dublin, Ireland. This announcement is a part of its efforts to help IT teams move operations seamlessly to the cloud while adhering to the data privacy and security standards of the EU.

With cloud adoption in Europe on a trend of high growth, software vendors are taking steps to protect customer data. To remove security concerns associated with the cloud, the new ManageEngine data centers are certified Service Organization Controls (SOC) Type II and reinforce the company’s efforts to facilitate cloud adoption by IT teams in the EU.

"Our European customers are subject to some of the world’s strictest data privacy regulations, which apply to both on-premises and cloud applications," said Rajesh Ganesan, director of product management at ManageEngine. "Our on-premises apps have maintained the highest degree of data privacy and regulatory compliance for years. With our new EU data centers, we’ve set the same standard for our cloud apps and eliminated the privacy barrier to adopting our cloud-based IT management solutions."

Zscaler, Inc., the leading cloud security company, announced today that effective November 23, 2016, it has become certified under the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Certification Framework (the "Privacy Shield"). Zscaler customers can be assured that any personal data transferred from the EU to the United States will be protected by the safeguards set by the Privacy Shield and fully compliant under EU law.

Following the invalidation of the Safe Harbor Framework, the Privacy Shield was jointly designed and approved by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the European Commission in July 2016 to provide companies with a mechanism to comply with EU data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the EU to the United States in support of transatlantic commerce.

CloudPassage today announced the release of a Slack integration toolkit for Halo, the company’s award-winning automated security platform. The open source community-supported tool, called Don-Bot, lets people use Slack to communicate with Halo using natural language queries and get replies as if Halo were another Slack user. Thousands of teams large and small including many DevOps and IT security personnel have made Slack their communication medium of choice. Implementing Don-Bot helps them streamline workflows and work more efficiently.

“Slack’s speed and convenience help DevOps teams communicate; now Don-Bot will help them work more efficiently,” said Sami Laine, principal technologist, CloudPassage. “The Slack integration provides users easy access to the most essential functions of Halo.”