IndependenceIT, a workspace automation software platform that allows IT departments, service providers and ISVs to easily deliver workspaces, applications and data from any cloud infrastructure, today announced Cloud Workspace Suite 5.0. Highlights of the latest generation software include automated cross platform software defined data center deployments and management; orchestration and workflow automation for third-party Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS) platforms; support for Azure Active Directory-as-a-Service across public/private/hybrid clouds, and hyper-scalable application services for the delivery of application workloads.

Technology buyers continue to gravitate toward WaaS solutions to increase business agility and lower costs. However, many challenges still remain with the majority of solutions on the market. Most of the available products are not built for cloud infrastructure, making it difficult or impossible to operate in cross-platform environments. As a result, large capital investments must be made by IT service providers on infrastructure to support distributed deployments. Because the majority of options are extremely complex, there is a steep learning curve that reduces time to deployment and revenue for WaaS providers. Additionally, the fragmented management of infrastructure, hypervisor, OS, application, master image, Active Directory, and end-user environments add extra layers of complexity and risk.

Speakers from OpenStack users including AT&T, OVH, SAP, Workday and Verizon will share how cloud computing has transformed their businesses at the 13th gathering of the OpenStack open source cloud community. More than 7,000 participants from 55+ countries are expected to attend the next OpenStack Summit in Austin, April 25-29, 2016, at the Austin Convention Center. Today is the last day to purchase OpenStack Summit tickets at a discounted rate.

Summit content will emphasize the foundational role that OpenStack now plays in enterprise IT strategies and service provider roadmaps, bridging cloud native software development with the optimization of legacy applications. The theme recognizes OpenStack as an integration engine to automate compute, storage and networking for a diverse set of technologies ranging from virtualization and bare metal to container orchestration like Kubernetes and Apache Mesos.

Whether new infrastructure is spun up in the cloud or whether new applications are launched in a rapid development environment, companies should be implementing security best practices and compliance checks as early and often as possible.  But, is that happening?  To find out more about compliance in the cloud and beyond, I recently spoke with Bart Westerink, senior director of security and compliance at CloudPassage, to dig in deeper and find out what we need to know.

VMblog:  To kick things off, give us some background on CloudPassage and tell us what type of problems you’re solving?

Bart Westerink:  The migration from traditional servers to agile, elastic infrastructure is putting a huge strain on enterprise compliance efforts. Servers and workloads that spin up automatically and on-demand make it difficult to manage and verify access controls, user privileges and security configurations. Implementing continuous monitoring and logging, while maintaining an accurate inventory of systems are also huge challenges. Compliance teams are being forced to expend lots of manual effort to keep up, which threatens to erase the business benefits of moving to agile infrastructure in the first place.

"Migration-as-a-Service is like subcontracting, but without the complexity, lack of accountability and uncertainty around pricing," said Jethro Seghers, lead program manager at BitTitan. "Our approach is fully white-labeled using the partner’s brand, offers 100 percent predictable pricing and includes advanced troubleshooting by the experts who developed the software in the event of any issues."

CloudRouter now includes Linux DPDK kernel enhancements, tested by the CloudRouter team, with throughput in excess of 650 Gig/sec on commodity hardware. The upgrades help network architects with staged deployments of SDN. 

Grazed from ReCode. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Use of the cloud-based collaboration app Slack grew by 77 percent while Microsoft’s Office 365 remained the most widely used cloud application by businesses in the second half of 2015. The findings are contained in a report out today from Okta, which provides a service to help companies manage access to all the cloud applications they use.

To gather the data, Okta tracked the use of more than 4,000 applications across more than 2,500 customers who use its service. Slack led an interesting pack of fast-growing apps in use by Okta customers. Tableau, the business intelligence app, was the second-fastest grower, up 65 percent. New Relic was third, rising 56 percent…

Grazed from 247WallSt. Author: Lee Jackson.

If there is one company in the tech universe that you don’t want to compete with it is probably Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL). Over the years, the tech giant has proven a worthy adversary in almost every field it has entered into, and the company’s increasing focus on the public cloud may prove to be no different.

In a new Merrill Lynch research report, analyst Kash Rangan makes the case that the company is increasing the focus on the public cloud and that Google NEXT last week highlighted the increased commitment to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). While Rangan feels the GCP has a host of positive features, he notes that there is a need to catch up in services offered, global scale and the overall ecosystem…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Authjor: Shirley Siluk.

A growing number of enterprises believe hybrid cloud strategies will help bring their operations and customer service into the digital business era. However, many of them haven’t yet mapped out their plans for achieving those goals, according to a recent analysis by EMC and VMware.

Released last week, "The State of IT Transformation" report draws on comments from more than 660 EMC and VMware customers across 18 industries. The analysis found that more than 90 percent of those enterprises believe it’s important to have plans for IT transformation, although 55 percent have not yet documented their own roadmaps for change…

When is a security alert not a real security alert? With hacks and breaches a daily reality for businesses, security teams deal with a barrage of suspicious and anomalous user behaviors and have little time to isolate and focus on the true threats. Today, CloudLock’s security intelligence arm, The CloudLock CyberLab announced its breakthrough discovery that solves this challenge — the "Cloud Threat Funnel." Following its extensive research of the daily behavior of 10 million users, 1 billion files and 140,000 cloud apps, CloudLock CyberLab detected distinct patterns of user behaviors and developed a new process for isolating truly malicious threats from the noise of other potentially suspicious or unusual behaviors. CloudLock’s findings and methodology are presented in its Q1-16 cloud cybersecurity report published today, "The Cloud Threat Funnel: Suspicious User Behavior That Matters."

The report reveals that 99.6 percent of users accessed cloud platforms from just one or two countries per week. Establishing this as the norm, the team was then able to isolate the long tail revealing anomalies: 1 in 20,000 users, for example, logged in from six or more countries and, within this group, the CyberLab found some users logging in from as many as 68 different countries in a given week — real needles in the haystack. By applying the Cloud Threat Funnel methodology, the CyberLab was able to correlate these anomalous behaviors with other high-risk suspicious user activities and pinpoint compromised accounts.

"Dave was universally loved and admired at Ceridian and in the community," says David Ossip, Chairman and CEO, Ceridian. "The memories and condolences that we continue to receive are a true testament to Dave’s character. He had a tremendous impact on us as individuals and as an organization, and leaves behind a powerful legacy of kindness, integrity and humility. Ceridian grieves Dave’s sudden passing. He will be sorely missed."