Last week marked a big milestone for the cloud after business intelligence giant MicroStrategy Inc. made the latest iteration of its widely-used analytics platform available on a subscription basis through Amazon Web Services. The launch comes only a few short months after the flagship on-premise version made its debut.

The relatively short delay between the two releases, which is not exactly typical for a traditional vendor, reflects exactly just how important cloud services have become even for legacy players that have historically made most of their living behind the firewall. The cloud port of MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise holds special significance due to the fact that a full six years passed since the previous major release.

MicroStrategy used that time to add a slew of new features to its platform, including, as the product name suggests, security functionality to help organizations safeguard the vast amounts of data that their users are analyzing. The company shares that focus with Google Inc., which also made a splash in the cloud last week with the introduction of access controls for its popular file sharing service.

Google Drive now lets authors disallow others from downloading, printing and copying their documents. Developed with sensitive files in mind, the feature is designed not so much to physically block access (the restrictions can be easily bypassed with a screen capture tool) but rather deter innocuous users from unknowingly distributing the content when they’re not supposed to.

The addition highlights the fact that data can become impossible to track down after moving beyond an organization’s reach in the cloud, a challenge, that, at its core, also applies to the underlying technologies driving the trend. And in particular, applications containers, which are typically deployed in large clusters numbering upwards of hundreds of instances that are often spread across multiple environments.

An emerging monitoring provider called Ruxit hopes to address that with Deep Docker Monitoring, a new service launched a couple of days after the upgrade to Google Drive that offers to provide visibility into how container clusters operate. That insight can useful in implementing modifications and tracking down technical issues that would otherwise require manual log analysis to find.

Photo via Roger Grant