Morpheus Data Cloud Management Platform boosts cloud analytics; expands integrations to reduce hybrid IT complexity

Morpheus Data announced on Thursday a series of enhancements which will help enterprise customers reduce cloud costs and simplify management of hybrid cloud deployments.

Morpheus customers can now boost cloud efficiency and predict future expenses with enhanced analytics, policy-based quotas and consolidated reporting for AWS and Microsoft Azure; simplify hybrid IT management and accelerate digital transformation with updates to existing AWS, Microsoft, Google, VMware, and Nutanix support; and improve visibility of application deployments across multiple clouds with ITSM integration into Cherwell and BMC Remedy.

As cloud management matures, standalone cloud optimization products are giving way to comprehensive approaches such as Morpheus which help enterprises get cloud spend under control while also providing the governance to eliminate future problems.

Morpheus now synchronizes actual costs from both AWS including month-to-date, estimated spend, and last month’s costs. New cost reports and visualizations are broken down by service and tag plus include data on both On-Demand and Reserved hours per EC2 Instance Type.

This same level of accuracy and insight is applied to Microsoft Azure and will soon be extended to enable the application of additional cost-saving recommendations for both cloud providers. Lastly, cost reporting is updated to show budget variance between budgeted amount and actual spending per tenant.

These updates are on top of existing brownfield discovery and guided remediation to improve efficiency across over a dozen cloud platforms. In the past 12 months, Morpheus leveraged machine learning to help customers identify millions of dollars of cost savings. More importantly, these organizations are now able to apply governance and consolidated reporting across projects, teams, and tenants so they can focus less on cost and more on improving IT agility.

Recent research indicates that 68 percent of enterprises will be using more than one cloud platform to provide services but for already overloaded IT departments this means having to learn multiple tools and processes to perform the same activities.

Morpheus eliminates the need to learn multiple tools by providing a standardized approach to automate provisioning of new application environments across over 20 cloud platforms.

Cloud specific enhancements in the recent release include AWS that accelerates onboarding of existing accounts by adding all VPC’s in a region at the same time before applying role-based access to govern use, and seamlessly responds to workload spikes via Amazon scale-groups in addition to native Morpheus scaling. It also integrates with Microsoft to create and manage resource pools in Azure plus more easily and securely manage large-scale SCVMM based on-prem clouds.

It also integrates with Google to take full advantage of Morpheus third-party multi-network integrations for IPAM, DNS and provision Windows VMs; integrates with VMware to manage and deploy applications to a VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) cloud in addition to existing support and certification for vSphere, ESXi and vCloud Director; and integrates with Nutanix. Morpheus is now Nutanix Ready certified plus integration has been enhanced with more robust brownfield discovery, hypervisor console access, and improved Windows provisioning automation.

To help bring the worlds of ITSM and DevOps closer together Morpheus combines a rich automation and cloud orchestration platform with hooks into ITSM tools so customers get better visibility from service request to service delivery. This announcement adds both Cherwell and BMC Remedy to existing integration with ServiceNow.

Morpheus is an official technology partner of Cherwell and initial integration includes the ability to synchronize change requests between Cherwell and Morpheus and coordinate execution of actions.

Morpheus is an official technology partner of BMC and initial integration includes ability to manage the change management database (CMDB) for any workloads Morpheus discovers or provisions.

Morpheus is an official technology partner of ServiceNow with a certified ServiceNow plug-in. Integration points include service catalog, approval workflows, CMDB, and incident management.

“Cloud computing is in its second decade, but enterprises still struggle to fully capitalize because of economic and organizational challenges,” said Brad Parks, VP of Business Development, Morpheus Data. “Today’s updates bridge the gap and set Morpheus apart as the best full-stack provider of agnostic multi cloud management.”

New Quest offering provides control of Active Directory backup and recovery in times of disaster or catastrophic event

Quest Software announced on Wednesday release of Quest Recovery Manager for Active Directory (RMAD), Disaster Recovery Edition, which provides organizations the power to view, backup and restore changes in AD environments all the way to the operating system and bare metal level.

This release from the Quest Microsoft Platform Management business adds another layer of protection to its Recovery Manager solutions set that already includes AD backup and recovery at the object and directory level across the forest. With RMAD Disaster Recovery Edition, organizations can implement an AD disaster recovery plan and quickly recovery from any disaster caused by mistakes, corruption or full on disasters like ransomware and cyberattacks, with minimal impact on the business.

With cloud adoption on the rise and the explosive growth in data, so too comes the increase in organizational risk to emerging threats. According to Gartner’s February 2019 ‘Infrastructure Availability and Recovery Primer for 2019,’ “In digital businesses, infrastructure and operations leaders must plan for states of reliability, availability, resiliency and recovery across their environments. This requires technology and tools, as well as individual skills to enable this across on-premises, cloud and hybrid IT environments.”

As many organizations take a hybrid approach to AD management, Quest continues to be at the forefront in developing the most complete set of AD management and security solutions for both on-premise and Azure deployments. Thousands of organizations leverage Quest RMAD solutions to maintain maximum uptime, safeguard against data loss, prepare for emerging threats, protect corporate credibility, and reduce costs.

Quest’s Recovery Manager for Active Directory automates an AD recovery at the object and attribute level. Recovery Manager for Active Directory, Forest Edition automates an AD recovery at both the object and attribute level and directory level across the entire Forest. This gives organizations the ability to perform on-premises automated forest-level recovery and create of a fully functional virtual lab environment for complete AD management.

With the new RMAD Disaster Recovery Edition, Quest is extending its AD management capabilities even further for complete AD backup and recovery at the object and attribute level, directory level and operating system level across the entire forest. This ensures the strongest possible security posture across the entire AD infrastructure.

With RMAD Disaster Recovery, users can backup and recovery at the object and attribute level, the directory level and the operating system level across the entire forest for complete disaster recovery; and restore the domain controller’s operating system without depending on other IT functions to reduce downtime and get users back to work quickly.

It also demonstrates and validate the DR recovery plan by building a separate virtual forest test lab with production data to test disaster scenarios and safely test prior to making changes in the production; highlight changes made since the last backup by comparing the online state of AD with its backup or by comparing multiple backups. Accelerate recovery by quickly pinpointing deleted or changed objects or attributes, and, with Change Auditor, identify who made the changes.

It also integrates with Quest On Demand Recovery with a single recovery dashboard that enumerates hybrid and cloud-only objects. Users can run difference reports between production and real-time backups, and restore all changes, whether on-premises or in Azure AD.

“We’re committed to delivering solutions that help organizations protect their Microsoft Active Directory investments and mitigate accidental or malicious business disruptions,” said Brad Kirby, Senior Director, Product Management, Quest Microsoft Platform Management business. “Our comprehensive product offering helps customers recover at every level. The new release of RMAD Disaster Recovery Edition is like an insurance policy for AD that gives organizations the power to prepare for and recover from a scorched earth AD disaster. Now IT teams can build comprehensive recovery plans addressing small object level issues to crippling ransomware or attacks.”

Avaya OneCloud transformation program enables adoption of cloud communications infrastructure

Avaya Holdings introduced on Wednesday its program to assist organizations considering cloud communications delivery models as part of their digital transformation. Avaya’s cloud transformation program makes it easier and removes uncertainty and risk from the transition.

The program provides compelling incentives and the resources of its professional services team to help companies map the most effective and efficient path to implement Avaya OneCloud solutions for public, private or hybrid communications deployments.

The Avaya cloud transformation program helps organizations define and discover their required outcomes for a cloud communications transition; determine the best cloud models for various applications, based on specific business needs; identify key processes and APIs that work within their existing infrastructure and how best to deploy them to a new cloud ecosystem; and begin their cloud transformation with next steps and roadmaps aligned to their specific business goals and based on targeted financial modeling.

Avaya OneCloud solutions for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), provide organizations of all sizes with a fast, convenient and automated path to the benefits of cloud communications. Avaya OneCloud solutions are available in 34 countries. The company will continue to expand its global footprint in the coming months to meet the growing needs of customers worldwide.

Avaya currently has 3.7 million cloud seats between its public and private offerings, and continues to see increased adoption of its cloud solutions across a range of industries.

For Avaya customers, the company will provide credits for perpetual licenses and reduced per-seat cloud pricing, as well as remove termination penalties on current support services contracts for those that implement an Avaya OneCloud solution.

Avaya customers can also take advantage of Avaya cloud transformation workshops at reduced or even zero cost. These workshops bring Avaya professional services cloud experts together with an organization’s key decision makers for a working session to understand the breadth and depth of a cloud transformation with the Avaya OneCloud deployment model that best meets their needs, develop an implementation timeline, and define what is required to achieve desired outcomes.

“Communications is foundational to digital success, driving improved collaboration and improving the customer experience, and cloud has become the new operating model for digital businesses,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. “For business leaders digitally transforming their communications via the cloud, it is important they find solutions that fit their workflows and a solution provider that offers a range of options. Avaya OneCloud offers the broadest selection of cloud options across every segment, and Avaya’s cloud transformation program will help organizations find the right solution that fits their unique requirements.”

Aligned Energy introduces Aligned Access, its software-defined, carrier-neutral connectivity offering

Aligned Energy launched on Wednesday its Aligned Access offering, software-defined, carrier-neutral connectivity solution that extends customer reach across Aligned’s data center network and beyond with accessibility to Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud and Salesforce; and IT service and network providers.

Aligned Energy is an infrastructure technology company that offers adaptable colocation and build-to-scale solutions to cloud, enterprise, and managed service providers. Its infrastructure enables it to treat data centers like a utility — accessible and consumable as needed. By reducing the energy, water and space needed to operate, its data center solutions, combined with patented cooling technology, offer businesses a competitive advantage by improving reliability and their bottom line.

The Aligned Access portfolio of carrier-neutral connectivity solutions includes Aligned Cloud Access, a secure, private and cost-effective hosted or dedicated direct connectivity to leading CSPs. Services can be provisioned from 1Gbps to 100 Gbps instantly from Aligned Energy’s data centers in Ashburn, Dallas, Phoenix and Salt Lake City. 

It also features Aligned DCI Access, its secure, low-latency, high-resiliency and cost-effective Data Center Interconnect (DCI) Access, enabling connectivity from customers’ own facilities or managed infrastructure, to and between all Aligned data centers and connected CSPs.

The offering also includes Aligned Transport Access – Carrier-grade Layer 2 and Layer 3 transport service offering blended or dedicated IP and point-to-point, high-speed, low-latency connectivity through a variety of wholesale partners. 

Available in 10 Gigabit Ethernet increments as dedicated protected or unprotected circuits. Aligned On-net Access is a seamless, carrier-neutral provisioning and turn-up for highly reliable and low latency connectivity to customers, partners and service providers with no monthly cross-connect fees.

As an intuitive, Software-Defined Network (SDN), Aligned Access allows customers to seamlessly adapt their hybrid IT needs and expand their network service capabilities and footprint with highly reliable connectivity and low-latency transport.

“Aligned Energy is committed to providing carrier-neutral and open connectivity to extend the reach of our customers to the cloud, to their customers, partners and providers, and beyond,” comments Andrew Schaap, CEO of Aligned Energy. “These ideals, along with our powerfully-built services, ultimately promote better outcomes for customers both today and in the future, empowering critical expansion while facilitating a new path forward for data center connectivity.”

QTS deploys Ciena’s Waveserver Ai platform for multi-use interconnection; supports software-defined interconnection platform

QTS Realty Trust announced on Wednesday that it will deploy Ciena's Waveserver Ai platform to support growing bandwidth demand and meet wire-speed encryption requirements for highly secure in-flight data protection.

This deployment will also support QTS’ recently announced Switchboard interconnection platform. Switchboard enables self-service ordering and fast, one-to-many provisioning of local, metro, carrier, long-haul, and cloud services via a single port. This innovative platform offers rapid and secure connectivity for QTS’ 1,100 enterprise and government customers and serves nearly all network use cases.

As a provider of data center solutions, QTS leverages its software-defined technology platform (SDP) on which Switchboard resides to deliver secure and compliant colocation and hyperscale data center solutions, robust connectivity, and premium customer service to technology companies, enterprises, and government entities.

Ciena’s Waveserver Ai will provide up to 2.4Tb/s of capacity with high-speed connectivity and scalability. QTS customers will be able to transport workloads to data centers and access bandwidth-hungry content, applications, and services.

Waveserver Ai will also improve the performance of QTS’ network and deliver higher capacity wavelengths while reducing power consumption and increasing efficiency of operations.

This deployment also positions QTS to offer Layer 1 encryption capabilities with Ciena’s FIPS-compliant encryption module, which is offered on the Waveserver Ai platform. These services will enable opportunities for QTS to attract new federal government and other high security-sensitive customers.

“Our customers require quick access to network capacity and flexible interconnection services that are cost-effective and capable of protecting sensitive information,” said Clint Heiden, Chief Revenue Officer, QTS. “Ciena’s Waveserver Ai platform solidifies our mission to serve the current and future needs of our hybrid colocation and hyperscale customers while protecting their critical assets.”

“As QTS continues to advance its connectivity strategy through the Switchboard platform, Waveserver Ai’s ability to meet evolving network use cases will support current and future interconnection requirements,” said Jason Phipps, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing, Ciena.

Site24x7 introduces CloudSpend cost analytics platform for public cloud environments

Site24x7 announced on Wednesday general availability of Site24x7 CloudSpend, its cost analytics solution for public cloud platforms. The new solution is aimed at bridging the gap between capacity planning and cost optimization for resources running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.

CloudSpend's business intelligence (BI) insights enable businesses to visualize runaway expenditures and implement effective budget controls, while reducing operational expenditure across multiple accounts.

Site24x7 empowers IT operations and DevOps with AI-powered performance monitoring and cloud spend optimization. Its capabilities help troubleshoot problems with end-user experience, applications, servers, public clouds, and network infrastructure. Site24x7 is a cloud offering from Zoho, which has offices worldwide, including the Netherlands, United States, India, Singapore, Japan, and China.

Site24x7's CloudSpend addresses these cost optimization issues with a holistic view of cloud expenditures across multiple accounts from a single console. CloudSpend also provides IT teams (IT financial planners and cloud service providers) BI insights for addressing cloud cost adjustments that achieve priority-based resource allocation, and thus helps in reducing overall operating expenditure.

Public cloud adoption has witnessed exponential growth in recent years, and according to IDC, spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to reach $210-billion in 2019, an increase of 23.8 percent over 2018. The market is forecast to achieve a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.5 percent with public cloud services spending reaching $370-billion in 2022.

With public cloud being cost effective and easy to set up, businesses tend to leverage them to digitize their services and achieve their business goals faster. This often leads to complexities that arise due to unmonitored, underused or idle cloud resources on various platforms in multiple accounts, resulting in overspend. To eliminate these undesired expenses, organizations need a solution that can help monitor and optimize their cloud costs without impacting their services.

The new addition, along with the existing full stack monitoring insights, reiterate the company's commitment to help customers run more efficiently in the cloud. The company also plans to extend the Site24x7 CloudSpend capabilities to other cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, in the near future.

"With pay-as-you-go pricing models, public cloud platforms are strategic drivers for digital transformation. Since digital transformation is largely a process and not the end goal, businesses not only want to embark on their digital transformation journey, but also want to optimize it to reap greater results," said Srinivasa Raghavan, product manager, Site24x7. "CloudSpend's addition to our AI-driven monitoring capabilities not only streamline and enhance performance of their applications on AWS but maintain an equilibrium when it comes to cloud spending, thus creating a win-win situation for DevOps and IT teams."

For all customers and managed service partners looking to optimize their AWS costs, Site24x7 CloudSpend is available at online, free of cost for AWS bills less than $3,000 per month. Site24x7 CloudSpend is planned to be priced at 0.5% of AWS bill amounts greater than $100,000, and 0.8% of AWS bill amounts between $3,000-$100,000.

New Code42 data loss protection offerings helps speed detection and response to insider threats

Code42 announced on Wednesday its Code42 next-gen data loss protection solution that now includes advanced data exfiltration detection. A policy-free alternative to traditional data loss prevention (DLP), Code42’s enhanced solution offers security teams even more visibility into file movement. The file focus makes it quicker and easier to detect unauthorized or accidental data exfiltration and insider threats.

Designed for scalability, in seconds the solution can search an entire organization for file movement across common data loss vectors, including cloud and non-cloud locations such as employee computers and desktops. It monitors files in folders that are synchronized with cloud services, such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud and Microsoft OneDrive; file activity on external devices, including hard drives or removable media, such as flash drives; and files that are opened in apps commonly used for uploading, including web browsers, chat clients, FTP clients and Slack.

Code42 Next-Gen Data Loss Protection helped one customer save $9 million in a lawsuit, apart from helping another customer detect 90 gigabytes of sales data leaving its network via an external drive.

According to the “2018 Insider Threat Report” by Cybersecurity Insiders, two-thirds of organizations consider malicious insider attacks or accidental breaches more likely than external attacks. The longer it takes to detect these insider threats, the greater the risk and cost to the company. 

According to The Ponemon Institute’s report, “2018 Cost of Insider Threats: Global Organizations,” the average cost of an insider threat annually is $8.76 million.

Code42 Next-Gen Data Loss Protection enables security teams to more quickly and easily protect their cloud and endpoint data from loss, leak, misuse and theft. Unlike traditional DLP, Code42’s cloud native solution works without requiring the strict prevention policies that can block employee productivity. Instead, the solution clears the way for innovation and collaboration by providing visibility to every version of every file. 

Backed by this file focus, the solution quickly lets security teams see where data lives and moves, when it leaves their organization, and who has access to it. This approach allows them to monitor, detect, investigate and respond to suspicious file activity in near real-time.

“Valuable data is leaving companies every day — proof that traditional DLP is not working. With its hyper focus on policies and blocking, legacy DLP is overwhelming to manage, and encourages shadow IT, making it slower and virtually impossible to effectively detect risk to IP,” said Vijay Ramanathan, Code42’s senior vice president of product management. “Code42 Next-Gen Data Loss Protection offers a simpler policy-free way to secure cloud and non-cloud data. By providing visibility to every version of every file, we are making it quicker and easier to detect and respond to data exfiltration and insider threats.”

“From Google to USB drives, digital transformation is moving unstructured, sensitive data beyond an organization’s servers. And the proprietary data that gives your organization a competitive edge is often the most difficult data to protect,” said David Chiang, IT system engineer at MACOM, the Massachusetts-based analog semiconductor company. “Code42 has given us unified visibility into where our data lives and moves. Their data loss protection solution has become a key component of our security program.”

VMware Cloud portfolio updates extend infrastructure and operations across private cloud, public cloud and edge environments

VMware announced on Tuesday advancements to VMware Cloud that further the company’s vision for delivering the essential, ubiquitous Digital Foundation to support customers’ and partners’ digital transformation. These advancements include updates to VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vCloud Director, and CloudHealth by VMware, and increased access to Cloud Foundation-based services via new VMware Cloud on AWS regions in Canada, Paris, and Singapore, and more VMware Cloud Verified partners globally.

Every organization is on a multi-cloud journey. According to Gartner, “by 2020, 75 percent of organizations will have deployed a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model.” This journey is being supported by two primary cloud strategies: hybrid cloud and native public cloud. While each approach is unique, they are complementary, and most often exist simultaneously within the same customer. Each path is intended to open new opportunities for a business in a way that is differentiating, and to deliver tangible business outcomes.

Looking for the best path forward on this multi-cloud journey, VMware’s research shows that 83 percent of cloud buyers are seeking consistent infrastructure and operations from the datacenter to the cloud.

VMware Cloud Foundation enables hybrid cloud to expand the definition of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) by unifying the essential cloud infrastructure capabilities of compute, storage, networking and integrated cloud management.

Cloud Foundation is a full-stack solution delivering consistent infrastructure and operations to help customers modernize their data centers; rapidly migrate applications and entire data centers to the cloud; scale on demand for disaster recovery, global expansion and seasonal spikes; and deploy next-generation applications in modern data center environments.

VMware also announced VMware Cloud Foundation 3.7, which  is expected to be available on Dell EMC VxRail in VMware’s Q1FY20, offering customers jointly engineered, hybrid cloud infrastructure stack integrated with VMware’s flexible, full stack HCI architecture, ready for line-of-business applications.

Cloud Foundation on VxRail demonstrates the tight integration between Dell EMC and VMware, incorporating unique, jointly-engineered features that simplify and streamline operations, and deliver full stack, end-to-end lifecycle management, through an automated hardware-through-software management experience.

Optimized for performance, scalability, user experience and TCO savings, Cloud Foundation on VxRail can lower capital and operational costs while providing unrivaled resiliency, predictability and ease of deployment. New networking flexibility and integration, as well as deployment options including appliance and integrated rack offerings give customers flexibility when choosing Cloud Foundation on VxRail.

“VMware is helping customers leverage the cloud to build, deploy and deliver the applications that drive their business, and no other vendor spans the cloud industry as broadly or as comprehensively as VMware,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit, VMware. “VMware provides customers the ability to operate in this multi-cloud reality, providing consistent infrastructure and operations to help them match the needs of applications to the best resources available, without compromise.”

“Demonstrating the strength of Dell Technologies, this unique integration between Dell EMC VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation builds on the history of co-engineering to offer our customers an experience unlike any other infrastructure running VMware Cloud Foundation,” said Gil Shneorson, senior vice president and general manager, Dell EMC VxRail, “With this combination, we have enabled the fastest, simplest and most seamless way to deploy and operate a hybrid cloud with VMware.”

Additionally, the new Cloud Foundation 3.7 release supports fully automated deployment of VMware Horizon 7 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Cloud Foundation accelerates the delivery of Horizon 7 benefits by providing complete infrastructure automation for Horizon 7 environments, including the installation of Horizon 7, App Volumes, User Environment Manager, and Unified Access Gateway. Cloud Foundation couples ready-to-use infrastructure with line-of-business application deployment, enabling customers to deliver infrastructure and applications to business customers at the speed of cloud.

The VMware vCloud Director 9.7 release will allow cloud providers to further differentiate their hybrid cloud offerings and deliver new services through centralized global cloud management, expanded scalability, and an enhanced extensibility framework. The vCloud Director platform will unify private and multi-tenant cloud management across a cloud provider’s global footprint of VMware-based environments, simplifying monitoring and management from on-premises vSphere environments to multi-tenant provider clouds.

The updated extensibility framework will enable cloud providers to offer new, differentiated services on their multi-tenant platform from industry-leading third-party solutions from ecosystem partners such as Cohesity, Dell EMC and Rubrik.

The VMware vCloud Availability 3.0 will unify onboarding, migration and disaster recovery services to and between multi-tenant clouds, helping cloud providers offer new availability services with compelling economics. The native integration with vCloud Director and a modern user interface will provide a simple customer experience for rapid service delivery and management.

Enterprises turn to the cloud for its promise of agility, security and faster time to market, but all too often cost challenges derail these efforts and prevent businesses from capitalizing on the cloud’s full potential for transformation. With more than 4,000 customers, CloudHealth by VMware enables customers to manage, operate and better secure their multi-cloud environments.

With CloudHealth, customers collaborate across lines of business to make intelligent decisions related to cost management, security, and governance while scaling their multi-cloud environments. CloudHealth delivers next-generation cost management capabilities that can increase return on investment in cloud by showing customers where budgets are spent, which applications consume the most resources, and how to right size their environments – even as they rapidly scale.

New features in CloudHealth will expand on the platform’s cost management functionality, and will include enhanced multi-cloud reporting, multidimensional reporting, workspaces reporting, enhanced amortization, convertible Reserved Instance (RI) exchanger automation, container cluster visibility, and cross-family rightsizing for Amazon EC2. Additionally, the CloudHealth platform now integrates with the Wavefront by VMware cloud analytics and monitoring platform.

Through this integration, CloudHealth customers can access Wavefront cloud performance metrics via their CloudHealth platform for rightsizing and performance optimization via a business lens. By using CloudHealth and Wavefront together, CloudHealth takes advantage of Wavefront’s vast real-time, highly granular, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) infrastructure usage metrics, and provides effective recommendations for cost savings to customers.