Category: News

Virtustream, the enterprise-class cloud company and a Dell Technologies Business, today announced that its enterprise cloud platform and services for mission critical applications are now available in the Asia-Pacific region including Australia and Japan. This offering includes Virtustream’s innovative cloud technology and unique consumption billing model.

The need for enterprise cloud services in the region is increasing. According to published research, by 2020, "IDC predicts the Cloud Systems Infrastructure Services revenue in Asia/Pacific including Japan will reach $12.9 billion."

"The pent up demand for enterprise-level cloud services in the Asia-Pacific region is tremendous as organizations are eager to globally scale their operations at a rapid pace; while also managing the complexities of migrating their existing systems of record to the cloud," said Frank Gens, IDC senior vice president and chief analyst. "Add to that regional needs such as data sovereignty, and it narrows the playing field of providers significantly."

Huawei and Canonical today announced they are expanding their cooperation in enterprise and telecom clouds to announce that they have completed the integration of CloudFabric Cloud Data Center Network Solution and Canonical’s Ubuntu OpenStack. The joint solution integrates the Agile Controller, Huawei’s SDN controller, with Ubuntu OpenStack to improve the efficiency of deploying and maintaining multiple data center networks. A large number of controller nodes can be deployed in minutes to interoperate with the cloud platform quickly. Enterprises or telecom cloud platforms that are using or plan to use Ubuntu OpenStack platform can directly connect their OpenStack platform with the Agile Controller to enable quick, flexible service deployment and integration in multiple data centers.

In the past month both AWS and Microsoft Azure have experienced lengthy outages due to issues with the storage supporting the cloud. These outages have flooded through companies globally and brought into focus the potential downsides of putting all your eggs into the public cloud basket. After both of these incidents, the question is, how reliable is the public cloud and what options and alternatives are available?

A few technology experts have offered their opinion:

The best of both worlds is a multi-cloud strategy

IBM and Red Hat, Inc. announced a strategic collaboration designed to help enterprises benefit from the OpenStack platform’s speed and economics while more easily extending their existing Red Hat virtualized and cloud workloads to the IBM Private Cloud.

As part of this new collaboration, IBM has become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, giving clients greater confidence that they can use Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud when the offering launches for general availability at the end of March 2017.

Additionally, as part of the agreement, Red Hat Cloud Access will be available for IBM Cloud by the end of Q2 2017, allowing Red Hat customers to move eligible, unused Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions from their data centre to a public, virtualized cloud environment in IBM Cloud Data Centres worldwide.

SailPoint, the leader in identity management, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has recognized SailPoint’s innovative approach to empowering enterprise employee and partner populations to manage their network access credentials, even when located remotely and locked out of the corporate network. This new patent award enables SailPoint to uniquely provide a solution that ensures security for the enterprise and ease of use for both remote workers and office-based employees and partners. SailPoint’s patent number 9,600,656, entitled ‘System and Method for Domain Password Reset in a Secured Distributed Network Environment’, is another example of the company’s innovative approach to securing identity data for global enterprises.

Typically, company-issued laptops and other mobile devices don’t allow users to recover from forgotten network passwords while away from the office and disconnected from the company domain servers. This presents a challenge to anyone who works remotely or travels as part of their job responsibilities. Should they happen to forget their network password while disconnected from the corporate network, until now there has been no way to reset the password without employing duplicate local accounts or physically connecting the device to the main company domain server and network. In this situation, remote employees are effectively locked out and must ship their laptop to the company’s IT staff so they can reset the password and then ship it back. In the case of the business traveler, they must wait until they return from their business trip to re-attach to the corporate domain server. This all leads to a significant loss in productivity and end-user dissatisfaction.

The cloud market will accelerate in 2017 as enterprises seek to gain efficiencies as they scale compute resources to better serve customers, noted a Forrester Research blog.* As companies migrate applications from on-premises to the cloud, application security itself must become hybrid to support the combination of both on-premises and cloud appliances along with cloud services. However, within the enterprise application portfolio, there is usually uncertainty surrounding which applications will move and when, how they will be rearchitectured, and what happens if an app needs to be migrated back on-premises or moved to a different cloud. By giving customers the flexibility to use Incapsula and SecureSphere, regardless of where an application is initially deployed or migrated, Imperva FlexProtect directly supports dynamic hybrid cloud deployments and provides needed investment protection to manage this transition.