For this survey, channel leaders were asked how they see the cloud transforming their channel business in 2016. More than 17% of MSPs surveyed for this study reported "high availability" as being the most important opportunity when it comes to cloud computing in the coming year. By ensuring applications will always be available despite any application or server level failure, their customers can continue business as usual without interruption. Similarly, disaster recovery was cited by 15% of MSPs as being the most important cloud computing consideration in 2016, followed by recurring revenue at 14% as one of the biggest advantages.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced the general availability of OpenShift Dedicated, a new cloud-based service targeting enterprise IT and development teams. OpenShift Dedicated includes the Docker container and Kubernetes orchestration technologies included in the recently-released OpenShift Enterprise 3.1 and builds on OpenShift Online, Red Hat’s offering for individual developers to build, launch and host their applications in a shared public cloud, supported by Red Hat.

According to a recent IDC MarketScape report, Red Hat has become a major player in the cloud application platform space. Since it’s launch in November 2011, there has been a notable increase in the number of applications created on and developers using OpenShift Online. The general availability of OpenShift Dedicated presents a third consumption model for Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering:

"We are very pleased to be offering dozens of new enhancements that will help our customers meet greater compliance standards and have better insight into their own security operations," said Symon Perriman, VP of Business Development at 5nine Software. "With the new 5nine Cloud Security v7, users can benefit from collective knowledge of security teams from around the world with the industry’s leading intrusion detection engine from Snort, and rest assured their Hyper-V infrastructure is protected."

"OpenStack cloud environments are an attractive choice for many organizations because it gives them flexibility to accelerate innovation by rapidly deploying emerging technologies such as network function virtualization (NFV). We have teamed with Mirantis to give organizations next-generation security as a virtual network function (VNF) needed to operationalize OpenStack and effectively prevent successful cyber breaches."
— Marc Benoit, vice president of technical business development, Palo Alto Networks

"This was an exciting year for Faction," says Luke Norris, Chief Executive Officer for Faction. "To better convey our identity and our cause — cloud the way you want it — we changed our company name to Faction and expanded our cloud portfolio, all the while delivering the superior engineering expertise that drives value for our customers. Being Faction means our customers are in the driver’s seat. They have full control and deep access into their platforms, as well as highly flexible cloud solutions for their hybrid IT environments. Embracing our cause definitely paid off as shown with our strong growth in 2015. This new round of funding will enable Faction to continue on its rapid growth trajectory, serve a wider customer base and introduce additional, innovative products to the market."

The report reveals which industries have made the most progress in migrating from on-premises to public cloud applications and highlights which of these industries are following security best practices.

2015 Corporate and Product Milestones include:

• Customer Success – In August, Kaseya rolled out a comprehensive, global-wide Customer Success Program designed to enable customers to derive maximum value from their relationship with Kaseya and to help them drive maximum revenue growth and profitability from their Kaseya product investments. The program included an initial investment by Kaseya of over $6M and has received an overwhelmingly positive response.

  Over the past several months, the company’s executive team has met with more than 300 customers, gathering a vast amount of valuable feedback on the changes made thus far and learning what customers want to see from Kaseya in the future.

  The team has also revised and relaunched the company’s former customer advisory group, rebranding it as Kaseya’s Customer Success Council. This group comprised of Kaseya customers gives participant members face-to-face communication with Kaseya executives in order to effectively represent customer wants and needs. The most recent US Customer Success Council was held in Miami in November and an EMEA version of the council will be held in Amsterdam in January of 2016.

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Editorial Staff.

As platforms and processes evolve, IT management has a responsibility to distil user preferences upwards and build an IT stack that is capable of reflecting the way people want to work on the devices that people want to work with. At the same time, corporate users are becoming more tech-savvy and many non-technical workers are even becoming aware of the way cloud computing works.

Once people know more about the back-end elements of IT, it seems reasonable that they will want to do more with the front end on their own devices. Ten years ago, businesspeople didn’t use the term ‘application’ in the same way that they do nowadays – largely thanks to the popularisation of the term ‘app’ which was first used to describe software on tablets and smartphones…