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Spending on the cloud shows no signs of slowing down. In the first quarter of 2021, corporate cloud services infrastructure investment increased to $41.8 billion, representing 35% year-on-year growth, according to Grand View Research. But while both small- and medium-sized businesses and enterprises admit that theyre spending more on the cloud, theyre also struggling to keep costs under control. According to a 2020 Statista survey, companies estimate that 30% of their cloud spend is ultimately wasted.

The desire to better manage cloud costs has spawned a cottage industry of vendors selling services that putatively reign in companies infrastructure spending. The category grows by the hour, but one of the more successful providers to date is Zesty, which automatically scales resources to meet app demands in real time.

Zesty today closed a $75 million Series B round co-led by B Capital and Sapphire Ventures with participation from Next47 and S Capital. Bringing the companys total raised to $116 million, the proceeds will be put toward supporting product development and expanding Zestys workforce from 120 employees to 160 by the end of the year, CEO Maxim Melamedov tells TechCrunch.

DevOps engineers face limitations such as discount program commitments and preset storage volume capacity, CPU and RAM, all of which cannot be continuously adjusted to suit changing demand, Melamedov said in an email interview. This results in countless wasted engineering hours attempting to predict and manually adjust cloud infrastructure as well as billions of dollars thrown away each year.

Melamedov founded Zesty with Alexey Baikov in 2019, after the pair observed that cloud infrastructure wasnt keeping up with the pace of change in business environments. Prior to co-launching Zesty, Melamedov was the VP of customer success at Gimmonix, a travel tech company. He briefly worked together with Baikov at big data firm Feedvisor. Baikov was previously a DevOps team lead at Netvertise.

Image Credits: Zesty

At the core of Zesty is an AI model trained on real-world and synthetic cloud resource usage data that attempts to predict how many cloud resources (e.g., CPU cores, hard drives and so on) an app needs at any given time. The platform takes actions informed by the models projections, like automatically shrinking, expanding and adjusting storage volume types and purchasing and selling public cloud instances.

To increase or decrease storage, Zesty transforms filesystem volumes in the cloud into a virtual disk with a series of multiple volumes, each of which can be expanded or shrunk. On the compute side, the platform collects real-time performance metrics, buying or selling cloud compute in response to app usage.

The primary tools we use to design efficient automation of cloud resources come from the fields of decision analysis and resource management. Many of the classical techniques used to solve such problems can be slow and not suitable for real-time decision making, where fast response to change is critical, Melamedov said. With Zesty, organizations dramatically reduce cloud costs and alleviate the burdensome task of managing cloud resources in a constantly shifting business environment. Because in a world thats always changing, Zesty enables the infrastructure to change right around with it.

Those are lofty promises to be sure. But Zesty has managed to grow its customer base to over 300 companies, including startups Heap, Armis and WalkMe, suggesting that its doing something right.

[T]he pandemic create[d] a whole new level of demand for our solutions and we have been fortunate to see huge demand growth for our products, Melamedov said. Companies were not only looking to save money, but they were [also] forced to cut staff. Freeing up DevOps and other operational personnel became critically important, and thats where we came in freeing them up from having to babysit the cloud and constantly be on call to adjust cloud resources as needs shifted. The current [economic] slowdown as well has only helped showcase our value even more, now that we have dozens of case studies we can share that show quick and easy return on investment.

Zestys challenge will be continuing to stand out in a field of rivals. Microsoft in 2017acquiredCloudyn, which provided tools to analyze and forecast cloud spending. Then, in 2019, Apptio snatched up cloud spending management vendorCloudability, while VMware, NetApp and Intel bought CloudHealth, Spot (formerly Spotinst) and Granulate, respectively, within the span of a few years. Elsewhere, ventures such as Granulate, Cast AI, Exotanium and Sync Computing have raised tens of millions of venture capital dollars for their cloud spend-optimizing tech.

Melamedov wouldnt go into specifics around Zestys financials. But he expressed confidence in the companys prospects, revealing that Zesty has reached an annual run rate in the tens of millions.

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Zesty lands $75M for tech that adjusts cloud usage to save money - TechCrunch

Tintri has announced a big push to the cloud, which will see a supplier that started life as VM-aware storage aim to provide on-demand capacity for the containers and microservices era of application deployment.

Tintri.io will be Tintris storage in the cloud, with availability in AWS planned for December, Microsoft Azure in February 2023 and Google Cloud Platform in Q2 of 2023.

The announcements come as part of Tintris next and Virtual Series strategy branding, marking a push to the cloud with a heavy emphasis on microservices-based application deployment, based around Kubernetes and VMwares Tanzu container management platform.

Kubernetes etc are just workload schedulers, like Tivoli job controller was in the 1980s, said Phil Trickovic, senior vice-president at Tintri. What were aiming for is pay-as-you-use across the stack, but were not there yet.

Tintri began life selling VM-aware storage hardware nodes, in which its claim to uniqueness lay in not using block storage LUNs, but provisioned capacity to VMs as separate datastores. It has a core appliance-based product offer, with the latest in the T7000 seriesannounced in February as an all-NVMe on-premise hardware appliance line and Tintris eighth hardware generation.

Now, said Trickovic, the aim is that Tintri goes from being VM-aware to being containers-aware and eventually application-aware, with storage that is built to provide capacity in the optimum way for these ways of working.

Its three to five years down the road, but what we want to offer is that you only pay for the virtual machine as you use it, he said.

Tintri.io which has so far only been available internally or as a requested customer demo will be available via a cloud provider catalogue. Different service levels are likely, but the company couldnt commit to that now.

The company envisages Tintri.io will not be used for high-value tier one workloads but mostly as secondary storage and data protection, including backups, replication and snapshots, which can also offer file-level restores on-site or in the cloud.

Ransomware threats are also addressed with algorithm-driven scans for suspicious activity with systems or parts of systems quarantined while investigations are carried out.

Kubernetes support will be on a limited basis for the time being. Tintri doesnt have its own ratified CSI drivers, but these are expected in mid-2023 or early 2024. The company does, however, have full support in VMware Tanzu.

Tanzu is where the market is, said Trickovic. We are in close collaboration with our customers and partners, and understand the challenges they continue to face as data and application implementation becomes more distributed. Because of our unique architecture meant specifically for virtual data sets, we are perfectly positioned to meet these new customer challenges.

Tintri was originally formed in 2008 and gained its first prominence initially during the big waves of server virtualisation in the early 2010s. By the end of the decade, however, it had slumped. In 2018 following an IPO the company ran out of cash andfiled for bankruptcy. It was acquired by Data Direct Networks in 2018 and now forms part of DDN.

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Tintri pushes for cloud and container storage with Tintri.io - ComputerWeekly.com

The cloud is changing, and not just mildly. As enterprises increasingly adopt hybrid cloud, multicloud and edge technologies, the ways in which to secure data within all these infrastructures are becoming increasingly intricate.

Problems with securing data and other critical assets within the cloud have subsequently increased as organizations refactor their strategies to accommodate in-demand technologies like AWS S3.

The big thing that were seeing is thatcustomers are blind to the fact thatthe data itself must also be protected and looked at, saidEd Casmer (pictured, left), founder and chief executive officer of Cloud Storage Security. And, eventually, we find these customers who do come to therealization that it needs to happen.And so, really, the blind spot is the factthat we find most customers not looking atwhether that data is safe to use.

Casmer andJames Johnson (pictured, right), associate vice president of research and development at iPipeline Inc., spoke with theCUBE industry analystJohn Furrier at the Cybersecurity Detect and Protect Against Threats event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Medias livestreaming studio. They discussed the areas organizations must begin to pay attention to as they run large swathes of cross-infrastructure, cloud-based data. (* Disclosure below.)

iPipeline, a leading purveyor of cloud-based software for the insurance and financial services industry, is also one of CSSs customers. The company is in the process of fleshing out its digital ecosystem in the cloud, away from the traditional data center implementation. In doing so, iPipeline has had to rethink its approach to file storage and vulnerability scanning, according to Johnson.

It was really necessary for us to identifya solution that both solved for thesevulnerability scanning needs,as well as enabled us to leverage the capabilitiesthat we get with other aspects of our move to the cloud things like being able to automatically scale based and need, he said.

Speed and scale were the main drivers for iPipelines decision to move to CSS, according to Johnson. As the companys infrastructure requirements increased, it began to feel like it needed a cloud-native solution that could perform dynamic security scans without worrying about manually spinning up new engine instances.

Being able to scan dynamically andalso being able to move that out of the application layer is crucial for us,basically doing it all behind the scenes, Johnson stated. We are now able to scan with the file saved in S3, allowing us torelease the fileonce its been deemed safe, rather thanblocking the user while they wait for that scanto take place.

With solutions providers that bear custody of corporate data at any level, theres always the question of compliance and auditing. They are answerable to two tangentially different stakeholders: their customers and the regulatory bodies.

Traditionally, weve looked at that compliance requirement as endpoint dataand the data that you see in your on-premise world, Casmer explained.It doesnt translate as directly to cloud data,but its certainly applicable.And if you want to achieve SOC 2or you want to achieve some of these other pieces,you have to be scanning your data as well.

A solution like iPipelines will inevitably have to ingest data from a vast multitude of sources. And the onus is on the company to ensure the data from all these disparate sources are risk-free, according to Johnson.

As we ingest that data,theres minimal impact toeach one of those integrations,because everything comes into the S3 bucketand is scanned before it is available forconsumption or distribution, he explained. This allows us to ensure thatno matter where that data is coming from,we are able to verify that it is safebefore we allow it into our systems orallow it to continue on to another third party, such as a customer.

Security solutions for cloud data have been available for a while. However, the reason why the enterprise keeps falling prey to malicious actors is that the floor keeps shifting beneath companies as malicious actors change approaches, according to Casmer.

It is a moving target, he said. As new technology becomes available,that opens additional attack vectors.The challenge is keeping up with the changing world,including keeping up with the new ways that people are findingto exploit vulnerabilities.

Heres the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLEs and theCUBEs coverage of the Cybersecurity Detect and Protect Against Threats event:

(* Disclosure: Cloud Storage Security sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cloud Storage Security nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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Securing data within the cloud: Common problems enterprises are facing ... and solutions - SiliconANGLE News

According to BNY Mellon interviews and survey, securities lending has regained a degree of momentum as a part of front-office investment activity, with the most sophisticated investors making it a core component of the total portfolio approach.

Among institutions already engaged in securities lending, some plan to liberalize lending guidelines and review existing lending agreements. These shifts counter the retreat from securities lending programs following the 2008 financial crisis, when a lack of transparency, concerns about short selling and perceived links to market volatility steered many public asset owners away.

Securities lending is moving beyond these concerns. Growing regulatory support, front-office control and governance, flexible platforms and technology, and alignment to broader principles and mandates may create a supportive backdrop and foster a more positive attitude.

Recent initiatives focusing on transparency and reporting seem to have reinforced institutional confidence. For example, the European Unions Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR) introduced granular transparency for securities lending transactions.4 In November 2021, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed similar reporting rules for securities lending participants.5 Regulators are also considering mandatory clearing to strengthen securities lending.6 Central clearing could increase utilization and revenue for public asset owners while potentially reducing risk.

Based on interviews, institutions increasingly see securities lending as part of front-office investment activity rather than merely an offset for administration and custody costs. One official in the survey who relies heavily on external managers explained, The most sophisticated investors see securities lending as a component of a total portfolio approach alongside their investments.

Interviews revealed that public asset owners have more flexibility in securities lending than previously. For example, they can tailor lending for a given spread or focus only on a limited set of high-value securities. The industry is also increasing its flexibility by extending the range of acceptable collateral. Ultimately, however, its the overall features of a collateral set, such as concentration limits, minimum capital requirements and minimum share price levels, that are recognized as more important than the inclusion or exclusion of a specific security. Additionally, fintechs are also offering so-called fully paid securities lending, allowing intermediary banks or brokers to act as a counterparty for higher value/spread trades. Finally, securities lending platforms can increasingly integrate with institutions operations for better visibility alongside other portfolio data, using APIs, for instance.

Interviews showed that sustainability considerations can raise concerns about conflicts with an institutions mandate and objectives. Further, public asset owners in the Middle East and parts of Asia want to ensure that securities lending counterparties are Shariah-compliant. Malaysia became the first market to adopt a Shariah-compliant securities lending framework in 2017.7 Still, others interviewedstruggle with the ethical implications of perceived downward pressures on markets. As a result, securities lending platforms are evolving to accommodate a broader set of principles, affording public asset owners better tools to understand the implications of their securities lending programs. Emerging solutions are also allowing clients to see the ESG implications of their collateral and to control prohibited short-selling.

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Meeting the ESG Imperative Holistically - Institutional Investor

[Author: Arnold Rogers]

As an experienced business consultant, Arnold Rogers has advised businesses across many industries in areas of lead generation, customer experience, service development, and small business cash flow and financial management. He has experience in handling diverse industries, from fast-moving consumer goods to business-to-business hardware retailers.

Many businesses are switching to the cloud for their day-to-day operations, and you should too. Todays business climate keeps changing. You should be able to access data on your phone, tablet, or computer, whether in the office, home, or field. This will help you remain competitive. Cloud technology allows employees to access files and work platforms from any place in a secure way. Read on to find out why businesses are switching to the cloud.

Any data you store in the cloud is encrypted, making it safe. And since cloud technology is frequently updated, the cloud hosting company will implement the latest cybersecurity measures, ensuring your data isnt at risk. This is particularly important when you have a lot of customer information you wouldnt want to lose. Integrating your digital marketing strategies from Digital Spotlight into cloud computing can ensure your tricks remain safe with your business.

By switching to the cloud, you free up your staff members to focus on other important things. For instance, if you have hired an IT team, they can now focus on helping other employees with IT needs. Cloud computing also tends to boost employees productivity. Users can successfully focus on the task at hand without mixing different software bundles to accomplish tasks.

One of the advantages of cloud computing is the flexibility it offers. Your employees can work from whichever location, at whatever time. Considering that 1 in 3 remote employees may quit if asked to return to the office, cloud computing can protect you from such an inconvenience. On the other hand, a business can reduce workstations in the office, saving rental costs. As long as you have fast internet, youll continue monitoring your business and employees work from whichever corner of the world youre in.

Cloud hosting companies allow businesses to scale depending on their current needs. That means you only pay for what you need. As the business continues growing and your needs change, you can scale up quickly. For instance, you may not need data analysis tools or CRM immediately when youre a startup. But as you continue expanding, your cloud technology will have to include CRM programs. When that happens, contact your provider, and they will upgrade your package in a few minutes.

While it may seem counterproductive, hiring a third party to manage your IT infrastructure is cheaper than hiring an in-house team. With an in-house team, youll need to buy hard drives, software, and mobile devices and add workstations. The level of expertise and infrastructure needed to match that of a cloud computing company is expensive. Its much cheaper to work with a hosting company because you only call them when necessary. At the same time, businesses can save 30% to 50% by switching to the cloud, ultimately saving their running costs.

In the past, computing systems would need backup plans for large amounts of data. Understandably, a company will suffer a financial loss if theres no backup storage and disaster strikes. When storing data in the cloud, you dont need any such means to back up your data. That data will always be there whenever users need it. They only need to have internet, and they are good to go. In fact, the cloud itself is your backup plan because the data stored there is safe.

There are different cloud computing models which let you choose the option that fits your business. The main models include:

Business owners know just how important collaboration at work can help propel the company forward. One of the ways to boost team performance is through cloud computing. Employees can easily share information and collaborate on projects even when in different locations. Field workers can upload data in real-time, allowing those at the office to get updates. This saves time and eliminates redundant tasks like data re-entry. This level of efficiency increases productivity and saves money.

If you have yet to switch to cloud computing, start looking for a provider. Ensure its the right one, as your ability to enjoy the benefits outlined will depend on the provider you go with. You can ask for referrals from businesses that have already switched to cloud computing.

More:
9 Reasons Why Businesses are Switching to the Cloud (as told by a business consultant) - JD Supra