Category: News

Cisco today announced it is expanding its Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) Solutions portfolio by offering Microsoft Azure Stack on Cisco UCS via an integrated, validated system that enables organizations to deliver Microsoft Azure services from their on-premises data center. The joint Cisco and Microsoft solution provides the tools for enterprises to grow and modernize their applications in a highly flexible and scalable hybrid cloud environment. 

As businesses evolve in response to changing market dynamics, they look for a simple-to-manage hybrid cloud solution that is intelligent and flexible enough to optimize resources and scale on demand, while retaining on-premises benefits. Through Azure Stack, customers receive a solution providing full control over how they manage governance, security, and performance through the combination of Microsoft’s robust Azure cloud platform with the industry-leading Cisco UCS into an integrated system designed specifically for cloud workloads.

Accelerate Business Growth With UCS and Azure Stack

VMKings, a cloud provider for developers, today launched its VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting solution. Due to the private nature of the VPS technology, developers can now be the administrators of their solution without having to worry about maintenance. VPS is customizable, can be upgraded instantaneously, and scaled to match user needs.

Cloud Computing for Developers, By Developers
While other cloud solution providers (CSPs) offer generalized services to all sectors, VMKings, created by a team of highly skilled software developers, targets the software research and development industry with specialized offerings catered to the needs and requirements of the developer community.

"As developers, we saw the industry lacked a solution that catered to the varying workloads of development environments we maintained. A standard virtual server was often provided too much or too little space than was required," said Walid Elemary, vice president, VMKings. "Sometimes we had to add additional security layers, or an acquired server wouldn’t support the Linux OS we utilized for projects. Other times there wasn’t enough throughput available, or a slow network hindered our ability to meet deadlines. These challenges resulted in delayed output, added project costs, lower margins, and a lot of embarrassment."

Legacy systems and processes are still being relied on for a number of mission-critical tasks across businesses, but these outdated approaches are starting to show their age in a lot of ways. Many companies have gravitated toward digital transformation as a means of improving capabilities and ensuring that they are able to keep up with the competition in the future.

However, a majority of these initiatives don’t succeed. Consultancy.uk noted that while 80 percent of managers believe that technology is here to stay, two-thirds of digital transformation efforts fail. With bigger companies investing billions a year on these projects, it’s important to ensure that deliver the expected results. Let’s take a look at the biggest reasons that large organizations fail at digital transformation:

1. Not agile enough

Qualys, Inc., a pioneer and leading provider of cloud-based security and compliance solutions, today announced the opening of three new Secure Operations Centers (SOCs) in the European Union (EU), India and North America. The addition of these new locations in Amsterdam, Pune, India and San Jose, Calif. marks a new milestone for Qualys’ expanding global operations, which now includes six locations on three continents.

Organizations migrating services to the cloud must comply with new and changing global and regional regulations that impact where data resides. Qualys’ expansion will provide its global base of customers worldwide with greater access to a broad suite of cloud-based security and compliance solutions, and enable customers to choose which region best suits their data governance needs. Each of these new SOCs adds the capacity to scan millions of IP addresses at once, significantly increasing Qualys’ capabilities to support the largest organizations.

"This expansion of the Qualys Cloud Platform helps us better serve organizations across the globe and particularly within the EU and across Asia to compete in the new era of business, and increases our capacity to serve our North American customers," said Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO, Qualys, Inc.

Blue Medora, a leading innovator in IT operational analytics (ITOA) for enterprise cloud, database and infrastructure management, today expanded its SelectStar SaaS monitoring platform to support Apache Hadoop and Cassandra clusters.

SelectStar helps data operations and DevOps teams cope with the rapid changes in data platforms and analytics, including the costs, complexity and availability risks created by massive data processing demands from increasingly popular business-critical applications that leverage distributed architectures like Hadoop and Cassandra.

SelectStar presents a comprehensive view of thousands of health, performance and availability metrics for Hadoop and Cassandra clusters and nodes, as well as historical details for in-depth troubleshooting. With SelectStar, data operations professionals pinpoint and resolve issues faster using a dashboard of an organization’s overall data health.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE: LYV), the world’s leading live entertainment and ticketing company, has selected AWS as its public cloud infrastructure provider and is moving its global IT infrastructure to the AWS Cloud. AWS will help Live Nation reliably and securely scale its IT infrastructure for future growth across Ticketmaster and Corporate IT, as well as select parts of its Festival business. Live Nation currently produces more than 26,000 live events per year around the world, including more than 80 festivals, and operates more than 150 venues.

Arrow Electronics, Inc. today announced it will roll out dozens of Microsoft-based hybrid cloud solution bundles over the next year, providing Arrow’s reseller ecosystem with in-demand, easy-to-implement cross-vendor solutions aimed at helping them solve complex end-customer business challenges and increase revenue streams.

Arrow unveiled the first three of its new Microsoft hybrid cloud solution bundles today:

The International Association of Cloud & Managed Service Providers, (MSPAlliance – www.mspalliance.com), has announced that Rob O’Neill, SEAL Team Six Leader, Naval Special Warfare Development Group, will be delivering the keynote speech at the 2017 MSPWorld Conference March 26-28 in New Orleans. MSPWorld (www.mspworldconference.com) is the leading conference for managed services and cloud computing providers world-wide; this year’s conference theme is "The Weaponization of Data."

Rob O’Neill is one of the most highly-decorated combat veterans of our time. He was a SEAL Team Six leader with the Naval Special Warfare Development Group. He has deployed more than a dozen times, and he held combat leadership roles in more than 400 combat missions in four different theaters of war. A highly-trained Navy SEAL, he led the military’s most elite and was involved in our nation’s most important campaigns. With most of his career shrouded in a classified cloak, O’Neill was the man on the ground we have never heard of but know exists.

Simplifying Threat Detection and Response