The past week has seen a number of announcements from all across the cloud, and several segments and companies in particular got the spotlight.

Platform-as-a-Service is a growing market, and as such, competition and venture capital are plentiful. Open-source PaaS provider OpenLogic launched CloudSwing, a platform that puts a big emphasis on avoiding vendor lock-in by allowing developers to customize and change stacks based on their needs.

Three other PaaS startups also had some new developments, with all three closing a funding round this week. There’s CloudBees raising $10.5 million, while AppFrog, a platform-as-a-service for PHP apps and Apprenda, that offers a similar offering for .NET, raised $8 million and $10 million respectively.  Ignition Partners led the last two rounds.

Virtualization giant VMware is also venturing into PaaS with its open-source Cloud Foundry offering, currently in beta.  The company announced the first fruits of its acquisition of Rabbit Technologies last year:  it integrated RabbitMQ, the open system communications engine the company developed, into Cloud Foundry. This integration represents a step forward because, while the platform itself will remain free after it hits general availability, VMware will offer paid add-on services that will have to connect to Foundry.

This week also features some security cloud news, an area growing in importance by the day. The Google Apps productivity suite and the platform-as-a-service both received the SSAE 16 certification, making Google one of the first cloud companies that obtained the licensing.  In light of the recent hacking campaigns we’ve been hearing out, and the fact the internet giant has been a target of cyberattacks before, this announcement couldn’t come at a better time.

Collaboration is one of Google Apps’ main advantages, although hit does have its fair share of competition. The company made it to Forrester’s list of the top 13 services in the mobile collaboration space. Cloud storage provider Box was ranked no. 1.