Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest – Issue #11

Update 2019: We’ve been busy working on some great training content around security, check out the Cloud Academy library to prepare on all-things cloud security.


Welcome to the Cloud Technology and Security Alert News Digest. This week we’ve got some strategic collaborations by the big cloud industry players that could eventually make a big difference for anyone using or managing cloud infrastructure, a glimpse into the enterprise service management software market, some analysis on trends in cloud deployments and, more generally, the shape of Silicon Valley innovation…and no new major security threats. Not even one!

What does the enterprise cloud look like these days?

Canonical has released its sixth annual Ubuntu Server and Cloud survey of how the enterprise cloud, including open source cloud tools like Ubuntu Server and OpenStack is being used. Continuing last year’s trend, more and more mission-critical infrastructure deployments are being trusted to clouds – often private – and more and more of those deployments are in service of increasingly interactive devices like those in the Internet of Things. Take a look.

Microsoft and Linux

Who would have thought we’d ever use the words “Microsoft” and “open source” in the same sentence? But the one time monopolist Redmond WA. The company has been partnering and actively contributing to a number of open sources Linux projects, including SUSE and Ubuntu, for some years now, and has made some of its own development tools – like Orleans – open source. What’s up? According to ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, it’s all part of Microsoft’s plan to embed Windows and Windows Server into as much of the cloud as possible.

Think bigger

The next big thing in computing? Silicon Valley has mobile app’ed itself into irrelevance by ignoring all the big, world-changing opportunities that animate London and China. Or maybe not. Maybe Silicon Valley incubaters are actually quietly positioning themselves – the way they always have – to innovate in entirely new ways leading to unexpected change (and opportunity). Which is it? Read this fascinating article in Technology Review to get a better idea.

Service Management Software: poised to explode

Keep your eyes on platform-as-a-service providers of enterprise service management software as more and more internal enterprise tasks – like employee on-boarding – face automation. ZDNet reports on the entrance of ServiceNow into this rapidly growing market, joining Salesforce and Workday.

Google teams up with VMware

With its eyes on the enterprise cloud market, Google has partnered with VMware to allow for integration of Google’s Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Datastore, and Google Cloud DNS with VMware’s vCloud Air. This will, according to Charlie Osborne at ZDNet, help Google compete with the Big Data giants, AWS and Azure.

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