Zscaler gets £24m VC fund for increased cloud security

Zscaler, the SaaS cloud security company, has for the first time received venture capital investment to the tune of £24 million ($38m), mainly from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The San Jose startup was traditionally funded internally, but according to Zscaler the money will be used to “further accelerate its go-to-market strategy, and further develop its cloud security offering with a high emphasis on mobility”.

In other words: it’s not because Zscaler needs the cash, more upgrading what it already has.

And according to CEO Jay Chaudhry, it represents a shift in company policy.

“To date, we have resisted outside investment despite inquiries from top-tier investors,” he said, adding: “Our new strategic partners share our vision and are committed to helping Zscaler build a long-lasting business”.

Zscaler’s security solution revolves around a unified SCG (Secure Cloud Gateway) and famously requires no hardware or software to enforce multiple security policies. As Ravi Mhatre, MD of Lightspeed Ventures noted: “Many web security vendors are putting appliances in the cloud and calling it cloud security”.

Given its security credentials, Zscaler is a founder member of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), who recently launched the Big Data Working Group.

Chaired by representatives from Fujitsu – who jointly announced the group with the CSA – eBay and Verizon Wireless, the group will address solutions to current big data challenges.

Plenty of cloud organisations have succumbed to venture capital (VC) money of late. CloudPassage hit £8.8m ($14m) in April from a round of VC funding, while Bit9 made £21.7m ($34.5m) from funding last month.

Zscaler has built up an impressive number of customers – 2600 customers in over 100 countries – as well as a base of clients in its four year history, including Telefonica and Lay-z-boy.

Is this a prevalent trend of cloud security companies taking venture capital funds in order to expand?

Source : cloudcomputing-news[dot]net

Telecom Bharti Airtel Offers Indian SMBs Microsoft Office 365

Telecommunications provider Bharti Airtel will offer Microsoft Office 365 to small and medium-sized businesses in India, according to several reports on Tuesday.

This partnership comes a week after US telecommunications provider Sprint launched hosted Microsoft Office 365, enabled by Parallels Automation.

According to MediaNama, Airtel plans to bundle its Microsoft 365 suite with its DSL and Internet Leased Lines for business. The price of the packages is not disclosed on its website, but it appears that there are specific plans targeted at freelancers as well as small business owners.

The small business sector in India is a target for many web hosts and cloud providers. Most of Go Daddy’s 120,000 customers based in India are entrepreneurs and small business owners. In November 2011, HostGator partnered with Google to offer websites to SMB owners through the Google “Get Your Business Online” program.

Recently, Airtel partnered with HP to offer cloud services for SMBs. Last year, Airtel partnered with Savvis to offer managed hosting and cloud hosting.

“We are delighted to partner with Microsoft to address the growing ICT needs of the SMB segment. The partnership will allow us to become a virtual CIO for our SMB customers,”  Sanjay Kapoor, CEO, India & South Asia, Bharti Airtel said in a statement. “According to industry estimates there is a growing affinity towards technology adoption in this segment and their IT spending is surging at a rate of 15 percent per year. SMB segment has shown a high adoption of Cloud computing especially SaaS – which contributes more than 50 percent to the overall cloud market. With our superior network experience and Microsoft’s dependable technology suite we will be able to offer cost effective and secure cloud services in a high growth SaaS market.”

Under this agreement, customers will be able to create a public facing website with a domain name, access the latest releases from Office 365, anti-virus solutions and access to documents and emails anywhere.

“We are pleased that Bharti Airtel will offer our world-class cloud productivity solution to SMBs in India,” Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India said in a statement. “Agility, focus and cost are the key reasons why businesses are moving to a cloud and hence Microsoft’s partnership will allow Bharti Airtel’s customers to continue to stay ahead of the curve through solutions that truly fit their needs. The agreement will enable SMBs to take advantage of a secure cloud computing environment at an opex model based pricing.”

In May, Microsoft launched its Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure startup incubator program in India. In addition to mentorship and resources, startups will be able to work in the Microsoft Bangladore office to develop their business.

Talk back: Do you have many customers in India? What kinds of services do you offer these customers? Let us know in a comment.

Related posts:

1. Cloud Brokerage Ingram Micro to Sell Netmagic Cloud Services

Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/telecom-bharti-airtel-offers-indian-smbs-microsoft-office-365

Linux Vendor SUSE Releases OpenStack-Based Enterprise Private Cloud

Linux vendor SUSE announced on Wednesday at CloudOpen 2012 that it has launched its first commercially supported private cloud solution based on OpenStack.

SUSE Cloud is an automated cloud management platform that allows enterprises to deploy and manage an IaaS private cloud. It integrates with SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager so enterprises can deploy, adapt and manage applications and workloads across private and public clouds.

SUSE Cloud supports all components of the OpenStack Essex release, while future versions of SUSE Cloud will continue to track the six-month cycle of OpenStack upstream releases, according to the press release.

This launch comes a week after Piston Cloud released Airframe, a “slimmed-down version” of its cloud management platform and OpenStack distribution, Piston Enterprise OpenStack.

As OpenStack picks up momentum, several companies have launched free OpenStack distributions, including Linux vendor Red Hat earlier this month. Red Hat says it has increased its OpenStack participation and contributions “over time.” In April 2012, Red Hat was named the third overall contributor to OpenStack, and announced its intention to become a Platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation.

Linux distribution Ubuntu also supports OpenStack Essex, and plans to support it for the next four upcoming releases of Openstack.

In an interview with PC Advisor, Peter Chadwick, senior product manager of cloud at SUSE, admits that OpenStack is a “crowded space” but it will capitilize on its 20-year track record with the open source community. He says SUSE is more heterogeneous than Red Hat because it fully supports both Xen and KVM hypervisors.

“Over the past twenty years, we’ve accumulated the strength, capabilities and resources to build a solid foundation our customers can rely on in order to succeed in the next twenty years and beyond in three strategic areas: enterprise Linux, cloud, and integrated systems,” Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager, SUSE said in a statement. “SUSE Cloud is driven by our customers’ desire and need to increase business agility and reduce costs through a cloud solution. We are delivering on our cloud strategy by combining the advantages of an open cloud platform with our history of world-class support and our reputation for working with a broad, diverse ecosystem of partners.”

SUSE Cloud also integrates Dell’s Crowbar software framework that simplifies deployment and ongoing administration of the cloud infrastructure. The WHIR spoke to Joseph B. George, director of cloud and big data solutions at Dell, about its work with OpenStack in May.

Talk back: Do you think OpenStack is becoming “too crowded”? How will SUSE separate itself from Red Hat? Let us know in a comment.

Related posts:

1. Cloud Brokerage Ingram Micro to Sell Netmagic Cloud Services
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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/linux-vendor-suse-releases-openstack-based-enterprise-private-cloud

Citrix survey: Is the cloud confusing?

A survey from Wakefield Research for virtualisation experts Citrix has shown that, for consumers, many Americans are unaware of what ‘the cloud’ entails.

32% of respondents stated that cloud was “a thing of the future”, while 95% of those surveyed who thought they weren’t using the cloud actually were, for such simple tasks as online banking and social networking.

The research, which garnered responses from over 1000 American nationals, found some surprising and eye-opening results. Highlights included:

• 40% of respondents stated an advantage of the cloud was being able to access work information in their “birthday suit”
• A quarter of those surveyed said the cloud was great for keeping embarrassing videos off the hard drive
• A third of interviewees said they faked knowledge of the cloud at work, with 14% pretending to know for a job interview and 17% winging it on a first date

Thankfully, Americans did see other benefits from cloud computing other than the freedom of working in the nude.

Economic benefits were frequently cited, with the most recognised benefits being lowering costs, being a catalyst for SME growth, and improving consumer engagement for businesses.

Conversely however, 35% of those who responded claimed a benefit of the cloud was being able to communicate with people they’d rather not interact with in person.

Cost was the main deterrent from using the cloud, with 34% of those interviewed citing this as the main reason they’re not using cloud services.

Security (32%) and privacy concerns (31%) were second and third respectively, with lack of knowledge on the cloud and already owning software which does the job also cited.

Yet there evidently appeared to be some misunderstandings among consumers.

Kim DeCarlis, Citrix VP of corporate marketing, said: “This survey clearly shows that the cloud phenomenon is taking root in our mainstream culture, yet there is still a wide gap between the perceptions and realities of cloud computing”.

However, DeCarlis added: “The most important take away from this survey is that the cloud is viewed favourably by the majority of Americans, and when people learn more about the cloud, they understand it can vastly improve the balance between their work and personal lives”.

Does this lack of consumer knowledge about cloud computing worry you? Or is it a case of wait and see for more tangible benefits to those who don’t work in IT?

Source : cloudcomputing-news[dot]net

Flexiant Study Challenges Private Cloud Adoption, Pushes Public Cloud

European cloud orchestration software Flexiant announced on Tuesday it has published a whitepaper titled “Seven Business Reasons Why Moving Private Clouds to a Service Provider is a ‘No Brainer.”

The move comes a month after the HostingCon 2012 session where Flexiant founder and SVP of product Tony Lucas discussed how service providers can find their niche in the cloud.

In the paper, Flexiant CTO Alex Bligh makes the argument that the popular belief of the private cloud having multiple advantages over public cloud in the areas of data security, location and jurisdiction guarantees, is simply flawed.

He says the private cloud actually enables organizations to avoid compensating a service provider for their profit margin, along with the cost of having another party involved.

Flexiant’s whitepaper further investigates what economic and organizational business aspects drives the adoption of various cloud technologies.

The paper also looks at how the emergence of new cloud technology in IT purchasing budgets and how they directly influence service providers. The whitepaper also educates service providers on the advantages and disadvantages of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions.

Ultimately, Flexiant makes a strong case for the business advantages of a public cloud solution.

Those interested in reading the whitepaper can download a copy on Flexiant’s website.

Earlier this year, Flexiant raised an investment of $1.5 million and named John Pocock as chairman and George Knox as CEO.

Talk back: Are you currently offering a public cloud server platform with varying levels of performance? Is this something your clients are asking for? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Related posts:

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/flexiant-study-challenges-private-cloud-adoption-pushes-public-cloud

Bullet-proof your web service with the right monitoring setup

My enterprise web service must be monitored all day, every day, for its whole life. A service must be monitored to satisfy one of my 12 principles of operational readiness.

If you get monitoring right, you will be able to prove how wonderful your service level is, track down errors before customers notice, fix incidents faster, and have a full set of measurements for system performance.

Expectations

There are usually clear expectations of an enterprise service shared by everyone involved. During the design and build phases of a project, expectations come from an initial list of business requirements, from a growing familiarity gained during the project and from nailing down a formal SLA (Service Level Agreement). During the operational lifetime, expectations are adjusted as applications are updated and adapted to provide a better customer service.

• End-user experience. What is the user seeing? Are a client’s transactions keeping customers happy?
• Behind the scenes. What is happening behind the scenes? How are the components of the application doing? Do I have enough resources to keep the application running?

What’s happening client-side?

A monitoring application uses synthetic users to check the front end of a service. Synthetic users continually run transactions and collect data. The monitoring application records the time taken for these users to send a request to a web service and receive a response. The monitoring application can check these response times are within SLA and can graph these times for management reports.

The monitoring application can run a simple check on the home page to make sure no-one has defaced it. The app can run a complex transaction that works all the components of an application.

Monitoring an application from a remote client site is great for figuring out what kind of user experience they are having. If a customer wants to argue that the performance is garbage, the account manager can use measurements that come out of this kind of monitoring to head off arguments. Remote monitoring can also expose service weaknesses. Do I need a CDN to speed up the service for faraway users? Is a problem reported by one user caused by their ISP, or my cloud service?

Unfortunately, suppliers can’t install monitoring applications at many customer offices, so they use the services of a company with a widespread network presence. At the bargain end of the monitoring services market, I used the free tier of Monitor.us in an earlier post. At the premium end, Compuware run services all over the world.

What’s happening server-side?

A monitoring application uses all sorts of OS metrics to check the back-end of a service. Every cloud-based application is built from thousands of virtually moving parts.

I want monitoring to check the layers of hardware, networking, OS and applications. These must all be monitored. Cloud services are multi-tenant - my application’s performance is affected by how busy the other tenants are.

I want to check all the application components. The application itself is probably distributed across a few tiers - perhaps a front tier that the client sees, most of the business logic in the middle, and data sources at the back. These must all be monitored. I want to know if any component starts to suffer, such as the database creaking under the strain of a busier site, or a program update introducing inefficient code. I installed cacti to check the OS when I was working on service reliability.

All the remote services that an application connects to must also be monitored. No enterprise service is an island. Monitoring is required for all the back-end integration. I can’t stop someone else’s service occasionally going slow, but I can collect measurements I can throw at the owners of those services.

What’s happening over time?

The measurements collected form trends that can expose some problems and head off others.

• The usage profile will change over time. If the service is attracting more customers over time, owners will be pleased. If it is slowing down over time, owners will not be pleased.
• Trends can be used to predict what will happen. If increasing amounts of system resources are being used over time, someone needs to know that the bill is going to get bigger.

Comprehensive monitoring

The performance of an application needs to be measured, and so does everything that can affect its performance, including the platform it is running on, the network connecting the application to the customer, and any other systems it relies on. Monitoring a cloud-based web service is not just a matter of regularly pinging it from your in-house monitoring application.

Creating comprehensive client-side monitoring is tricky. It’s easy to install an open source application like Nagios on your in-house system yourself, but to get a decent spread of remote monitoring locations you have to use a geographically distributed service like Monitis or Gomez.

Creating comprehensive server-side monitoring is tricky, especially for enterprises with components spread across many geographical locations. You can add server-side monitoring yourself by stringing together some excellent and free open source monitoring applications, or you can rent the instant services of a company like LogicMonitor, New Relic or BMC.

If anyone expects anything of a service, then those expectations must be described in a way where success or failure can be measured. A service must be monitored from the outside, (where the clients are) and from the inside (all the server nuts and bolts). Monitoring continues for the life of the service.

Source : http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/bullet-proof-your-web-service-with-the-right-monitoring-setup/5764

Amazon's Has A Whopping 600 Job Openings For Its Cloud

Amazon's Web Services is clearly the biggest, baddest cloud computing option available. But the company doesn't disclose much about it, like how much revenue AWS generates.

It likely brings in $1 billion a year in revenue, Quentin Hardy at the New York Times reports. That's not huge for Amazon, which brought in $50 billion last year. But given that AWS is the same cloud that Amazon uses for its own IT needs, that's impressive all the same. Most companies view their IT departments as sheer overhead.

And we can expect this to grow by leaps and bounds in the next few years, as startups and enterprises alike use the cloud, particularly Amazon. Amazon is facing a lot of competition, from the likes of Google, HP, Rackspace, Microsoft and others. But there will be plenty of growth in the cloud computing market to go around.

AWS is run by Andrew Jassy, a long-time Amazon employee who has been working with Amazon's cloud almost since its inception. He started at AWS in 2006 with about three dozen employees. Amazon won't say how many employees work for AWS. But it has more than 600 job openings.

And it plans on expanding into four more regions in addition to the seven it has now: three in the U.S. (Virginia, Oregon and California) and four other countries, Japan, Ireland, Singapore and Brazil.

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-cloud-600-job-openings-2012-8