Zetta, a leading provider of high-performance business continuity solutions, today announced that it has been awarded a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office that covers the mechanics of how it makes direct-to-cloud data protection fast and efficient. It also includes protection for technology processes that enable direct-to-cloud backup, without any intermediary appliance or staging area, in addition to concurrent local copies.

The latest in a series of Zetta patents, the new Patent 9,483,359, protects systems and methods which enable Zetta data protection technology for backup and disaster recovery to be applicable to even more customers and use cases, by increasing network transport efficiency. The technology is based on enterprise replication methodologies, which provide state consistent snapshot replication. Like incremental backups, it only transfers changed data segments, but unlike traditional incremental backups it isn’t susceptible to a single bad backup invalidating all subsequent backups.

SolarWinds MSP, a global leader in delivering comprehensive, scalable IT service management solutions to MSPs, today announced that users of its MSP Anywhere powered version of Take Control can now access Mac devices remotely. This latest release allows IT pros to provide full support to their Mac customers in the same way as Windows users.

MSP Anywhere allows IT service providers to remotely connect to machines to solve IT issues quickly and easily. It gives the ability to connect quickly to a machine, open live chat with customers, transfer sessions to other technicians, ask questions in group chat or silently transfer files in the background without disturbing customers.

This enhancement enables MSPs to provide Mac users full access to comprehensive features such as executive reports, LOGICcards and use of real-time architecture to:

InterChange allows Akumina’s customers to meet all the core requirements of a modern intranet, or ‘digital workplace’ including communication, information delivery, systems integration, collaboration and personalization.

Using InterChange developers can build collaborative, personalized and targeted digital workplaces, powered by an organization’s intelligence inside Office 365 and other market leading cloud applications, to create compelling digital experiences. Once deployed, the InterChange AppManager ensures internal business users and subject matter experts can easily manage these applications. The AppManager SDK and InterChange DevFramework allow for the extension and customization of InterChange-based applications by Akumina’s partners and customers.

The end of 2016 marks the strongest year yet for Cloud Service Management pioneer CloudHealth Technologies. After posting a 130 percent year-over-year revenue increase, more than doubling its customer base, and securing a $20 million Series C round in May, the company enters 2017 as business momentum is accelerating.

"CloudHealth has become an integral component of our customers’ day-to-day operations," said Dan Phillips, CloudHealth Technologies CEO and co-founder. "It’s extremely gratifying to see the platform solve their complexity challenges and deliver such strong business value. We continue to push customer-driven enhancements and services, which has been a key factor in our year-over-year growth."

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Chris Burt.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) acquired San Diego-based cybersecurity firm harvest.ai for a reported $19 million sometime in early 2016, investor Fred Wang has confirmed. Wang, a general partner with harvest.ai investor Trinity Ventures, declined to confirm the terms of the deal, but told GeekWire “it was a good win for the investors and for the management team.”

“The company works in an area called data-leakage prevention,” Wang said. “At one time a lot of companies got into it, but most of them didn’t get much traction. Harvest.ai automated looking at file-access patterns to detect which are normal and which are not.” It does this by using neural nets, natural-language processing, and other AI algorithms, and tracking data storage and access, and components, applications, and users on the network…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Paul Krill.

Microsoft is shifting its licensing for its Azure cloud service, eliminating the pay-as-you-go option for new Azure customers using MPSA (Microsoft Products and Services Agreement) as of Feb. 1. Instead, they will be steered toward the company’s CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) program.

Geared to organizations with at least 250 users, MPSA is Microsoft’s simplified agreement consolidating purchase of cloud services and software. The move detailed today follows on Microsoft’s decision to not proceed with its proposed Enterprise Advantage program, which was meant to allow customers to buy organization-wide on the MPSA…

Grazed from OilPrice. Author: Irina Slav.

Oil and gas is hardly the first industry that springs to mind when one mentions cloud computing. The tech that has been expanding at a breakneck pace, disrupting business models and enabling innovation across industry boards, has not really met with a lot of enthusiasm in the energy industry—at least not yet. But this may be about to change.

The silver lining of the 2014 oil price collapse is making itself increasingly obvious: energy companies have had a wake-up call: They must change the way they play the game. Enhancing operational efficiency, keeping costs low, and approaching new projects more cautiously and flexibly are among the changes we have already witnessed…

Panzura, the leader in hybrid cloud storage, today announced a new $32 million growth capital round led by Matrix Partners and joined by Meritech Capital Partners, Opus Capital, Chevron and Western Digital as well as an undisclosed strategic investor. The new financing will be used to scale Panzura’s leadership in leading the massive transformation of the $32B on premise storage market spend to a cloud first storage model. The monies will also be used to expand Panzura’s hybrid cloud storage offerings for high performance database and virtual workloads, big data analytics and Internet of Thing (IoT) applications.

Panzura had record growth in 2016, including adding over 100 new enterprise customers and expanding its channel and alliance presence with leading cloud providers AWS, Google, IBM and Microsoft Azure. Panzura added over 26 new petabytes of enterprise storage in 2016 and its hybrid cloud NAS, archive and collaboration storage products were deployed in over 33 countries across multiple industries and governments.

Today, Redis Labs, the home of Redis, announced new integrated billing with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Redis Cloud is currently available on AWS globally, and enterprises can now access the Redis Cloud via AWS Marketplace and pay for their Redis Cloud subscriptions on their AWS bill.

AWS customers can simply click to select Redis Cloud on AWS Marketplace, and Redis Cloud charges will be added to the AWS bill without any additional payment processes required, making it even easier for organizations to seamlessly purchase SaaS solutions. Redis Cloud is one of the first database-as-a-service (DBaaS) providers to be made available through AWS Marketplace. The Redis Cloud pricing model is simple, attractive, intuitive and based on a pay-as-you-go model so customers only pay for the amount of data they consume on an hourly basis at a gigabyte level granularity.

WSM International will provide migration services for organizations interested in easily, safely and quickly moving their IT infrastructure to LeaseWeb’s range of hosted and cloud services. 

WSM is the leading provider of cloud migrations services, with a 14-year history of and experience with migrating workloads from onsite to hosted cloud services.   In working with the world’s leading hosting and cloud services company, WSM has successfully completed tens of thousands of migrations, from the simplest web sites to complex enterprise IT workloads. 

LeaseWeb provides global Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and on-demand hosting solutions including dedicated servers, cloud-based servers, colocation services and hybrid cloud offerings.