VMware, Inc. today announced key findings from a cloud study conducted by Vanson Bourne on IT management. The study dove deeper into the topic explored by the recent VMware-sponsored survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and found that 69 percent of respondents to the Vanson Bourne survey agree that the management of IT has become increasingly decentralized in the past three years. Findings also revealed that IT isn’t ready for this transition and it may be causing more harm to businesses than good, specifically around security, with 57 percent of respondents agreeing that decentralization has resulted in the purchasing of non-secure solutions.

Business models are being disrupted and digital transformation is critical in enabling organizations to remain innovative, competitive and agile. Cloud computing has been key to this transformation, but IT is struggling to keep up and so responsibility has shifted away from IT. Lines of business are now purchasing IT ‘as a service’ to drive innovation within their domains. With this decentralization comes both opportunities and challenges. While it could empower all business units to drive innovation and ease pressure on IT, it also creates numerous management, security and compliance issues.

CloudHealth Technologies, the leader in cloud service management, today announced increased support for enterprises seeking to manage cost, usage, performance and security in a hybrid environment. The company’s award-winning CloudHealth platform will integrate with on-premises physical and virtual servers to help customers manage across public clouds and data centers, and also offer integrated migration assessment capabilities.

As cloud adoption grows, so does the popularity of hybrid clouds: A recent study predicts that, by the end of 2017, companies will have moved 59 percent of their IT environments to the cloud (either public, private, or hybrid). This creates several challenges:

The new report provides a clear view into the year-over-year rise in workplace cloud usage, resulting in security and compliance lag as companies fail to proactively address emerging risks. For example, despite the average company using 1,427 cloud services to upload an average of 18.5 TB of data to cloud applications each month, less than 9 percent of cloud providers are taking the strict data security and privacy steps recommended for a modern enterprise. Companies specifically struggle with securing employee behavior, accurately detecting threats and enforcing cloud governance.

According to a September 2016 report by Forrester, cloud platform revenues are projected to reach $64 billion by 2020, which is 45 percent higher than projected two years ago, as companies of all sizes continue to rapidly adopt and migrate to the cloud. As more of these workloads are in the cloud, businesses need greater visibility into their dynamic infrastructures. New Relic Infrastructure is a new monitoring product designed to provide deep, real-time visibility into a company’s dynamic cloud and hybrid infrastructure, enabling modern operations teams to move faster, scale and deploy with confidence.

Rescale’s platform provides a software library of over 180+ simulation and machine learning applications that tackle the world’s toughest big data and big compute IT challenges. Now companies can deploy Rescale’s turn-key SaaS platform in any IBM Cloud Data Center worldwide. This also includes running popular deep learning and AI software packages by providing unlimited, pay-as-you-go access to the latest GPUs, enabling organizations to stay on the cutting edge of R&D. Rescale on IBM Cloud enables seamless access and utilization of HPC resources in the cloud, enabling engineers and data scientists to increases efficiency and time to market and providing IT executives increased visibility and control over the full-stack environment.

"The Dome9 Flex for AWS offering from Dome9 will allow AWS Marketplace customers to buy and deploy the Dome9 Arc SaaS platform for end-to-end security and enjoy the benefits of integrated AWS billing," said Barry Russell, GM, global business development, AWS Marketplace and Catalog Services, AWS, Inc. "With businesses ramping up their use of the cloud for mission-critical workloads, security and compliance of cloud environments is a top priority. Dome9 Arc complements the powerful native capabilities of AWS with simplified security management."

Zadara Storage, the award-winning provider of enterprise-class Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) today announced that their Zadara Storage Cloud will offer Intel-based, flash storage solutions providing industry-leading flash performance in a pure-OpEx-based model – however at prices that rival traditional hard disk drive configurations.

As the market continues to abandon traditional CapEx-based storage and move at an increasing rate toward OpEx-based Storage-as-a-Service, Zadara Storage has teamed with Intel to provide new industry-leading flash-enabled solutions to address the insatiable demand for high-performance storage. The new solutions combine Intel PCSD servers, Intel Xeon E5 v4 processors and Intel SSDs based on the new Intel 3D NAND technology with the Zadara Storage Cloud software architecture. The resulting solutions enable both service providers and enterprise customers to enjoy unprecedented flexibility, scalability and performance. In a move that will accelerate market momentum away from HDD-based offerings, Zadara is now offering new flash-based solutions at price-parity with existing HDD products.

Microsoft Office 365 commercial subscriptions have ballooned in 2016, up 40 percent from the previous year to 85 million subscribers. As companies around the world continue to embrace the shift to the cloud, millions of Microsoft Office 365 corporate users now have access to Kaseya AuthAnvil’s patented password management, MFA and SSO capabilities to further secure both employee and customer environments in the cloud.