Stratoscale’s 360 degrees partner program, PartnerFirst, was created with an all-inclusive approach to maximize partner’s technology, products and services with the goal of bringing mutual benefits to customers and partners. By partnering with Stratoscale, Asiasoft Solutions is bringing new innovation to market and delivering value to its customers by leading them into the next generation of private cloud data centers.

InvestCloud, Inc, the first of its kind Digital Applet Platform for the financial services industry, supporting 660+ advisors and institutions with $1.5 trillion on platform, announced today the launch of their most advanced group of applets, BB8. This next generation of financial service applets consist of a fully integrated CRM, Pipes, and a full-suite of Client Communication, Client Management, and Client Automation capabilities on the InvestCloud Digital Platform.

At the firm’s annual global user conference in Las Vegas today, InvestCloud announced that it is taking its mission of any investment manager and financial institution can have a first-class integrated platform in the cloud much further. InvestCloud is delivering an integrated client experience with every member of the client’s relationship team such as portfolio managers, middle/back office professionals, and financial advisors into one platform. InvestCloud is significantly enhancing and streamlining every aspect of a client’s digital financial relationship from prospecting and onboarding to portfolio implementation and relationship building.

Zadara Storage, the provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS), and WebHouse, Inc. today announced that the award-winning Zadara Cloud platform is now available as part of a new WebHouse Storage-as-a-Service offering.

According to the 451 Research 2016 Storage Outlook, organizations’ top three storage pain points are: 1) dealing with data/capacity growth, 2) capacity planning/forecasting, and 3) high cost of CapEx storage. These storage challenges are causing a significant migration from rigid capital expense (CapEx) storage to flexible and cost-effective operating expense (OpEx) storage solutions.

RightScale found in its 2016 State of the Cloud Report that Docker use has doubled in the past year to 29 percent of enterprises, and that Docker could soon become the most popular DevOps tool. RightScale has recently migrated its own SaaS platform to Docker containers, and RightScale customers have also been increasing their usage of containers.

Zerto, setting the standard for protection, recovery and migration of data in cloud and virtualized data centers, today announced a new business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) solution in IBM Cloud. The new solution offers turnkey BC/DR capabilities that protect critical IT infrastructure, and supports multiple use cases including data center migrations. Running in IBM Cloud this solution automates all aspects of disaster recovery for the virtual workload to create an advanced, and flexible disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) using Zerto Virtual Replication.

Customers with production workloads running in a virtualized infrastructure can now achieve application recovery time objective (RTO) of minutes using the dedicated IBM Cloud infrastructure. Additionally, a recovery point objective (RPO) of seconds can be achieved to maintain complete control over DR, with full automation and orchestration and on-demand recovery and DR testing. Further, usage based pricing eliminates additional capital costs.

Scale Computing, the leader in hyperconverged technology across the mid-market today announced the integration of flash-enabled automated storage tiering into its award-winning HC3 platform.

This update to Scale’s converged HC3 system adds hybrid storage including SSD and spinning disk with HyperCore Enhanced Automated Tiering (HEAT). Scale’s HEAT technology uses a combination of built-in intelligence, data access patterns, and workload priority to automatically optimize data across disparate storage tiers within the cluster.

"Hyperconvergence is nothing if not about simplicity and cost. But it is also about performance, especially in the SMB to mid-size enterprises where most, if not all workloads will simultaneously run on a single cluster of nodes," said Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst of the Taneja Group. "Introducing flash into a hard disk based system is easy; the question is how do you do it so that it maintains low cost and simplicity while boosting performance. This is what Scale has done in these new models. The only decision the IT admin and the business user need to make is to determine the importance of the application and its priority. After that flash is invisible to them. The only thing visible is better application performance. This is how it should be."

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Gulf Air, the national carrier of the Kingdom of Bahrain, has created a private cloud IT environment with Red Hat solutions. As part of this project, Gulf Air has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), and Red Hat Storage as the platform for its innovative big data solution, Arabic Sentiment Analysis.

Established in 1950, Gulf Air is one of the Middle East’s first commercial airlines and today it is a major international carrier, with a fleet of 28 modern aircraft serving 39 cities in 22 countries across three continents. The company prides itself on offering traditional Arabian hospitality and is committed to being an industry leader in developing products and services that reflect the evolving needs and aspirations of its passengers. In the age of social media, that also entails monitoring and analysis of online conversations about Gulf Air.

Grazed from CSO. Author: Brian Dye.

With enterprises moving to hybrid cloud environments, IT architectures are increasingly spread among on-premises infrastructure and public and private cloud platforms. Hybrid models offer many well-documented benefits, but they also introduce more complexity for securing data and applications across the enterprise. And this added complexity requires an increasingly diverse skill set for security teams.

That’s a challenge, considering the growing cybersecurity skills shortage. In one recent study, 46% of organizations said they have a “problematic shortage” of cybersecurity skills – up from 28% just a year ago. One-third of those respondents said their biggest gap was with cloud security specialists. Modern security teams require a broad and deep mix of technology skills, ranging from twists on traditional network and OS technology all the way to security on data itself, to address a rapidly evolving threat landscape…

Grazed from BDLive. Author: Shira Ovide.

THE web’s biggest spenders have mostly started splurging again. I wrote six months ago that Google, Microsoft and Amazon — among the world’s biggest operators of internet technologies and cloud-computing services — had slowed or reversed their perky growth in spending on huge server farms and other capital projects. I did not expect the breather to last — and for the most part, it has not.

Collectively, capital spending by those three giants and Facebook has risen 23% this year after a collective decline of 0.9% last year. Only Google’s parent company Alphabet has bucked the capex-growth rebound. Buying and maintaining their gigantic computing networks represent a big chunk of the tech superpowers’ overall bill…