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25 head-turning cloud solutions

Most interesting opportunities you might not have seen yet.

By Edward J. Correia on Nov 4 2014, 10:51AM

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1 of 26

The cloud that could

The cloud is becoming an ever-more critical part of today's business strategies. The market is innovating so quickly, it seems that just as companies discover ways to leverage the cloud's ubiquitous reach, new cloud solutions emerge with capabilities that no one ever imagined before. Here are 25 cloud solutions released during the last calendar year that offer new opportunities for cloud-solution and managed service providers.

Rad RAS

One way to run Windows apps from a mobile device is to hope there's a version of the app for Android or iOS. Another is to get 2X Remote Application Server, a remote application server that delivers Windows applications to any user anywhere, regardless of the device they're using. The solution delivers applications, data and virtual desktops via the cloud from a central location hosted by 2X, a privately held company with offices in Malta and the U.S. The reseller-friendly company promises continuous availability, resource-based load-balancing and total network transparency. And since it executes apps remotely over a secure connection, corporate data never leaves the data center.

Actifio Sky

As big data gets bigger, large companies require enterprise-class solutions to manage it. Intended to fill that need is Actifio Sky, which simplifies management of data sets that it gathers, analyzes and protects. This solution employs an efficient data movement protocol that optimizes bandwidth usage by transferring changed data to remote data stores. This reduces network usage by 70 percent, according to claims, and accelerates time to capture, reducing the burden on applications and speeding recovery time in the event of failure.

Resiliency Director

Also from Actifio is Resiliency Director, a cloud-based continuity solution and companion to Actifio Sky that simplifies and accelerates what can sometimes be a lengthy and complex series of manual recovery steps. The tool orchestrates all aspects and phases of the recovery process, including computing, networking, storage, applications, data and VMs. Recovery plans can be executed in parallel and be structured to recover whole vApps, individual VMs or application groups. The company claims that the solution can recover hundreds of VMs in minutes using inexpensive commodity hardware.

ProCloud Wi-Fi

How much Wi-FI is enough for a site? Adtran attempts to make the question irrevelant with ProCloud Wi-Fi, a cloud-based Wi-Fi service that can expand as needed to supplement existing access points or be the sole provider. For a small monthly fee, the virtualized Wi-Fi service can stand at the ready to accommodate special events, and be configured to switch back again when the need subsides, all without interrupting service.

Social Media Analytics

Telephony solutions provider Avaya delves into social media with Social Media Analytics, a hybrid monitoring and response system that integrates Avaya's contact center with social channels. Avaya says the solution is intended to help users of its telephony solutions expand customer engagements, analyze the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, measure brand health and gauge the overall impact of social media toward a company's goals.

Axcient Virtual Appliance

It's a virtual appliance to guard them all. Axcient Virtual Appliance is a software utility that runs within an organisation's virtual environment. It identifies databases, datastores and other physical and virtual systems, and replicates any or all in the cloud. Replicated systems are available and manageable as if they were physical. A recent update reduces its footprint, doubles replication speed and supports AMD processors.

MigrationWiz

Migrating software across hardware platforms is rarely easy, often time-consuming and always subject to complications. Using the cloud to simplify the job is BitTitan MigrationWiz, which automates migration of email, private and shared folders and other data without the need for a local client utility in most cases. A simple conduit tool connects source and destination systems, and data is moved seamlessly from one system to the other through BitTitan's secure server farm. Data is encrypted while in transit but remains available throughout the process.

OfficeSuite PrivateCloud

Why suffer the expense of a physical data center when it can be constructed virtually? That's a question that might be asked rhetorically by Broadview Networks, which in June introduced OfficeSuite Private Cloud, a service that will construct and host a VMware-based hardware and/or software-based data center with redundancy for a fraction of the on-premises cost. What's different about Broadview's solution, says the company, is that customers receive admin-level access and control over all physical assets, including servers, storage, gateways and appliances, along with IOps performance guarantees. Companies can migrate existing hardware or virtual assets to the Broadview data center in any combination based on budget or need.

Carbonite Appliance HT10

Carbonite pioneered a cloud-based backup with its automated replication client for individuals, and then for small businesses. The company now offers the Carbonite Appliance HT10, an on-premises caching device that's sold only through resellers. HT10 acts as a local cloud, accepting the realtime backup tasks of a company's automated LAN clients while maintaining a second image in the Carbonite cloud. It supports file-by-file restore, as well as bare-metal recovery. An all-inclusive price covers 500 GB of cloud storage, 1 TB of local storage and the appliance itself, along with 24/7 support.

Cirius Secure Messaging

While some might question the effectiveness of "Time to Get Cirius" as a slogan for a security product, the Cirius Secure Messaging Platform has some pretty serious implications. In essence, the tool provides a simple interface that allows organizations to monitor and encrypt email communications and attachments sent and received to prevent leaks of confidential or proprietary information, intellectual property or other corporate assets. The white-labeled solution is reseller-friendly, can differentiate between business-to-business and business-to-consumer security, and works on all devices.

ClassLink LaunchPad

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. ClassLink LaunchPad lets teachers leverage the student BYOD craze instead of constantly battling it. The tool uses the cloud to connect teachers with students to share curriculum, open courses, assignments and other documents stored within the LaunchPad account or on Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and other commercial cloud storage sites through Android and iOS mobile devices, as well as Mac and Windows PCs. A collaboration tool provides one-on-one and one-to-many sessions and enables student-to-student cooperation and virtual study groups.

CliQr CloudCenter 3.2

What would it take to move an enterprise application to the cloud? With CliQr CloudCenter, it takes just a few clicks of the mouse. At least that's the claim of app management company CliQr, which says that the latest version of its cloud-app building and migration tool includes a topology builder with a point-and-click UI that permits modeling of complex web apps with an unlimited number of vertical and horizontal tiers.

MyCloudIT

Built on Microsoft Azure, MyCloudIT is a cloud-based Windows network for small businesses. Browser-based tools automate the creation and management of virtual servers and Windows desktops with modifications done through a simple dashboard. A pay-by-the-hour pricing model maximizes cost efficiency, and the company will even purchase unused customer equipment to deter the cost of the first month of service.

CYREN WebSecurity

For resellers and managed service providers seeking an off-the-shelf security solution they can call their own, CYREN WebSecurity might be worth considering. Intended for small and midsize businesses, this Security-as-a-Service is designed to protect critical business data on any device anywhere it's used. According to the company, its browser-based software presents a simple dashboard for configuring otherwise complex security policies on devices with "just a few clicks." Behind the scenes, CYREN's WebSecurity uses a recurrent pattern detection algorithm that it says analyzes 12 billion Internet transactions every day to identify threat activity in realtime.

dinCloud webHVD

Testing the limits of Chrome and its HTML5 rendering engine is dinCloud webHVD, a clientless web application extension and back end that permits the provisioning and execution of Windows-based desktops that render through the browser. Desktops provide multilevel authentication, can integrate with Microsoft Active Directory and support resolutions of up to 2,560-x-1,600. Admins have access to a virtual private data center for managing security, software-defined networking, virtualized storage and compute power, including CPU, memory and disk settings. Desktops can run under ChromeOS, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

eFolder Cloudfinder

It's one thing to back up data in the cloud. It's quite another to have access to a full-text search when restoring becomes necessary. That's where eFolder Cloudfinder comes in. Acquired by eFolder in June, Cloudfinder provides backup, instant search and restore, plus full reporting across multiple commercial cloud storage services, including Box, Google Apps, Office 365 and Salesforce. And Cloudfinder is friendly to resellers and managed service providers.

Cloud Suite

Here's another platform for managing cloud software. Egenera Cloud Suite combines the company's Pan Cloud Director, Pan Manager and Pan Domain Manager modules to simplify the design, deployment, management and security of software and/or hardware assets to its IT-as-a-Cloud service using a point-and-click environment. There's also a means of selecting SLAs, getting realtime price quotes, creating role-based access for admins and end users, and for tracking usage for charge-backs. The reseller-friendly service is amenable to multichannel service providers and white-labeling.

Equinix Cloud Exchange

Why settle for just one cloud when you can access them all? That's what Equinix Cloud Exchange makes possible, and it does so without that pesky Internet. The Equinix Cloud Exchange is a private interconnection solution that enables seamless, direct access to multiple clouds and networks in any region of the world on-demand. Whenever it's needed, a virtualized, secure connection is established through a single physical port that, according to the company, "bypasses the Internet to provide better security and performance" than anything being done on the public web today. It's currently available in 18 major markets with APIs that include AWS and Azure.

ESI Cloud PBX

Telephony solutions were among the first to migrate to the cloud. Estech Systems was established in 1987, and its Cloud PBX combines features of desktop phones controlled by hardware PBXes with a software PBX that provides a realtime view of business communications across an entire organization. The system is configured and maintained using a simple browser-based dashboard accessible from anywhere.

Exoprise CloudReady

Keep track of all the cloud-app packets flying through your organization with Exoprise CloudReady, an application-performance-monitoring tool that provides realtime performance and availability data for many of today's commercial cloud products, including AWS, Google Apps, Office 365 and Azure, and Salesforce.com. CloudReady proactively monitors cloud services from user access points and enables IT teams to analyze measurements from their service locations against global and regional crowd data, helping to quickly identify and fix performance-impacting issues regardless of where they happen.

FlexCloud Platform R2

Based on Windows Server 2012 R2, Hostway's FlexCloud Platform R2 permits quick and easy deployment of fully virtualized or hybrid systems running Windows Server 2012 R2. FlexCloud permits organizations running WS2012 or Microsoft Cloud Server to connect with public, private and on-premises cloud systems using a single platform.

IBM Enterprise Cloud System

Uniting IBM software, storage and server technologies into a simple, flexible and secure factory-integrated solution is the IBM Enterprise Cloud System. According to the company, the Enterprise Cloud System gives cloud-service providers an easy way to deploy secure and scalable environments based on Linux and OpenStack, with qualities of service on par with mainframe systems. The versatile system can scale to as many as 6,000 virtual machines in a single footprint at a cost that's half that of public cloud or x86 private cloud alternatives, says IBM.

IBM Mobile Push Notification

With IBM Mobile Push Notification, app developers and solution providers can deliver contextually relevant, engaging, personalized messages to mobile consumers based on rules, location, CRM data, demographic, user preference and behavioral specifications. The solution is designed to overcome the limitations of SMS and email and engage mobile users with enhanced, multichannel messaging. Recent updates add location triggers for enter and exit events, and a Cordova plugin for adding more functionality to iOS Android hybrid apps.

Intermedia AppID

With the number of mission-critical apps and web services growing faster than West African Ebola patients, it's getting harder and harder to keep track of all those passwords. Helping keep those access codes off the sticky notes is Intermedia AppID, a single sign-on portal that improves security with two-factor authentication and provides one-click access to all apps from a single password. The site offers a five-nines availability guarantee and 24/7 expert support. Helping to make its case, Intermedia claims that 76 percent of network intrusions are due to weak or stolen passwords, and that 55 percent of small businesses have experienced a data breach.

SecuriSync

Also from Intermedia is SecuriSync, a cloud-based collaboration solution that keeps files and folders in sync across multiple devices and simplifies sharing those files inside and outside of any company. The system integrates with Microsoft Office and Exchange, and includes full auditing and control of corporate files, encryption, remote wipe capability and a five-nines uptime guarantee. SecuriSync is managed using HostPilot, a centralized control panel that works with all Intermedia services.

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cloud solutions

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25 head-turning cloud solutions

Most interesting opportunities you might not have seen yet.

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Most popular tech stories

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