The use of virtual environments has become an established practice over the past few years. A 2016 survey by Spiceworks reports that 76% of respondents have adopted server virtualization, and Gartner estimates that server virtualization rates in many organizations already exceed 75%. This strong adoption of virtualization is easy to understand: virtual environments are easy to deploy, improve IT efficiency, provide better business continuity, and – most importantly – reduce costs. 

Unfortunately, these benefits can be negated if proper security measures are not taken. A 2015 global survey by Kaspersky Lab reveals that businesses pay twice as much to recover from a security breach if virtualized infrastructures are involved. The figures are quite worrying: $60,000 per incident for SMBs and $800,000 for enterprises. The report attributes these high costs to the complexity of securing virtualized environments, a failure to properly understand the risks, and the increasing reliance on virtualization for mission-critical operations.

Today, HyTrust Inc., a leading workload security provider, announced findings from its latest cloud survey conducted at VMworld 2016, in Las Vegas. The survey of over 400 respondents assesses the current use of public cloud vendors, the industry shift to utilizing a multi-cloud model, and how enterprises are protecting data in these cloud environments.

The results, which highlight enterprise preferences for key public cloud providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and VMware’s vCloud Air, also found that more than a quarter of organizations deploying data, applications, and workloads to public cloud ecosystems are not using any form of encryption, leaving sensitive data vulnerable to breaches. As we see more and more enterprises move critical data to multiple clouds, the lack of data security and encryption is not only counter to security being named the leading concern, but it may become even more of an issue with broader negative consequences.

Cloud Foundry is the world’s only multi-cloud platform. Founded by Pivotal, who donated the core cloud platform technology to the Cloud Foundry Foundation in 2013. Today, the open source cloud platform is collectively developed by Cisco, EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, and leaders in manufacturing, telecommunications, and financial services.

SoftWatch, a leader in Application Usage Analytics, announced today that it is now offering CloudIT Premium, a new SaaS solution that assists enterprises with their transformation to cloud based IT infrastructure, platforms and applications. The unique service is the only one of its kind which enables profiling of enterprise applications according to both their resource consumption and end user activity.

SoftWatch believes that while enterprises have substantial incentives to move their enterprise applications to cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform or to available SaaS solutions, they need to carefully plan and execute the transition. This is a gradual process that poses substantial risks and requires deep understanding of the current IT environment, evaluating alternative solutions and managing a change over a considerable transition period.

Disaster recovery solutions provider Zerto announced today that is has made some significant changes and updates to its Zerto Alliance Partner (ZAP) Program. The updates have been put in place to better meet the needs of Zerto’s partner network since experiencing extreme growth; from 33 partners in 2012 to more than 1,500 reseller, cloud service provider (CSP) and system integrator partners today. Looking at more recent figures, Zerto has seen 50 percent year-over-year (YoY) growth in its partner network and 112 percent YoY growth in partner certifications. The program refresh, according to Zerto, is based directly on feedback they have received from partners as they’ve experienced this growth, and focuses on providing extra simplicity, an equal rewards approach regardless of partner type and a unique rewards-based training method Zerto calls "gamification." 

"The Zerto partner program is simple, far more simple than any other program we’ve been a part of -it just works," said Stephen Johnson, President, Corus360. "It’s easy to get to the Zerto team and resources that we need, which allows us to focus on designing and deploying DR solutions and services in the field. The new Zerto partner program changes the way we do business and enables us to be more successful in growing our data recovery and business continuity opportunities." 

PCI (short for Payment Card Industry) compliance is a list of practices that administer data security across credit/debit card payments. Businesses need to comply with the requirements outlined by the PCI Security Standards Council in order for their merchant account to stay in good standing. 

Every business that accepts credit/debit cards must obey with these Payment Card Industry standards, no matter what processing method they use. BluePay has compiled a slideshow answering some frequently asked questions as well as debunking a few myths regarding PCI compliance.

Today at OpenStack Day UK, OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce offered a sneak preview of speakers committed to the next OpenStack Summit, the must-attend cloud computing event, taking place October 25-28 at the Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona (CCIB) in Barcelona, Spain. Approximately 6,000 attendees from 50+ countries are expected to attend the Summit to discuss how the OpenStack open source cloud platform is helping companies increase agility and save money as software becomes more strategic to their business.

Featured speakers include OpenStack users and community members at Banco Santander, CERN, China Mobile, Comcast, Constant Contact, Crowdstar, Deutsche Telekom, Folksam, Google, Mesosphere, Sky UK, Snapdeal, Swisscom, Telefonica, United States Army, Verizon, Walmart and many more. View the full schedule, follow updates and register to attend at https://www.openstack.org/summit/barcelona-2016/.

Blue Medora, a leading innovator in enterprise cloud and data centre management, today announced SelectStar, a new IT operational analytics (ITOA) platform that combines comprehensive database and cloud infrastructure monitoring to help organisations track and optimise critical database performance and availability metrics.

The solution is available as a comprehensive Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that deploys in less than 15 minutes. SelectStar delivers a normalised view of more than 90 percent of production cloud-native or on-premises databases and their underlying cloud or virtualised infrastructure, ideal for multiple database architectures.

Nimbix, a leading HPC cloud platform provider, today announced a new capability, PushToCompute is a method for rapid cloud deployment and monetization of containerized compute intensive applications.  This capability is built into the JARVICE platform which powers the Nimbix Cloud.

Through the added feature on the JARVICE platform, developers are able to import the latest version of their application into an existing workflow in the Nimbix Cloud and make it available for consumption at scale immediately.  The application, along with its dependencies, executes in JARVICE’s container runtime environment, which provides superior performance and scale.  This includes sub-second launch times, faster execution, seamless access to advanced computational accelerators (such as GPUs and FPGAs), automated heterogeneous data management, and rapid workflow deployment across multiple compute nodes either in a parallel or distributed paradigm.

5nine Software, a Microsoft Gold Partner and the leading provider of Hyper-V security and management solutions, today released 5nine V2V Easy Converter 7.0, a VMware to Hyper-V conversion solution that enables enterprises to quickly and efficiently migrate VMware virtual machines to cloud-based Microsoft Azure and on premises Hyper-V infrastructures.

5nine V2V Easy Converter 7.0 simplifies and accelerates VMware to Microsoft migration projects, enabling enterprises to more quickly realize the economic value of virtualizing their IT infrastructure on Azure and Hyper-V. The solution performs fast, non-intrusive conversions with the highest ratio of success in the market.