The public cloud experienced yet another round of consolidation last week after Canadian hosting bigwig CentriLogic, Inc.. acquired a fellow Toronto-based provider called Advanced Knowledge Networks Inc. to grow its local footprint. One of the main factors behind the deal is the growing competitive pressure from the likes of Amazon Inc., which is likewise expanding worldwide operations in an effort to win over international customers.

The cloud giant and its hyperscale peers are making it more difficult for smaller providers to compete in with every new data center they bring online, a trend that the acquisition of could go a long way toward mitigating. The facilities and customers CentriLogic is gaining through the transaction will help expand its local advantage over the U.S.-based competition and thereby give management additional leeway to find new ways to differentiate. It’s a stark contrast to the strategy vendors from the same weight class are pursuing two steps up the value chain in the software-as-a-service segment, where the incumbents are being actively embraced.

Scribe Software Inc. hopes to seize the phenomenon with a new toolkit announced on the same day as CentriLogic’s acquisition that offers to help providers integrate with major cloud platforms like Salesforce.com more easily. The Fast Connector Framework can enable an application to automatically plug into any of the dozens of services that the company supports out-of-the-box after a one-time setup, which simplifies the process considerably. But there are numerous other factors involved in interfacing with third parties that aren’t nearly as straightforward to address, particularly security.

That’s what a startup called Zenedge Inc. aims to address with the help of the $4 million investment it secured last week from TELUS Communications Inc., Canada’s second largest mobile carrier. The capital will fund the development of additional features for its namesake firewall service, which is used to defend cloud applications from distributed-denial-of-service attacks like the one that was leveled against GitHub earlier this year.

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