The hybrid cloud offers tremendous opportunities for driving operational efficiencies in the enterprise, but poses an equally great set of challenges that the vendor community has yet to address in its entirety. Fast progress is being made on changing that, however. The number of individual barriers holding organizations back from adopting the new paradigm of service delivery is starting to decrease, especially now that DARPA is involved.

The U.S. Defense Department’s research arm has reached a major milestones in its CORONET initiative this week with a successful demonstration of a technology that reduces the time it takes to provision WAN links between data centers from days to mere seconds. At the heart of the solution is a programmable orchestration engine developed by AT&T Inc. that automatically relegates data requests to the most appropriate tier of the network. It also handles the configuration and management of the connections, thereby eliminating the bulk of the manual work that goes into allocating long-distance bandwidth.

The AT&T SDN WAN Orchestrator essentially makes it possible to consume transport capacity from the cloud in the same way remote compute and storage resources can be accessed today. That opens the door for a slew of hybrid use cases that have been either impractical or outright impossible so far, from rapidly moving terabytes of information to another facility in the event of a disaster to maintaining a single version of the truth through continuous synchronization of large datasets across locations.  But in the era of heterologous environments, achieving that requires another level of control that extends beyond the network to the entire organization.

GigaSpaces Technologies Inc. promises to plug that hole with the latest version of its flagship DevOps solution, which attempts to unify on- and off-premise deployments under a single management interface. The newly unveiled Cloudify 3.0 takes that centralized approach to a new level with integrated monitoring and problem resolution functionality that allows admins to define automated policies for addressing specific issues that are triggered any time such an event occurs.

The upgrade also extends the functionality of Cloudify to a host of new platforms, including the Docker containerization engine, Citrix-backed OpenStack contender Apache CloudStack, Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine, which has seen a particular surge of partner interest this week. Hot on the heels of GigaSpaces upgrading its offering, Alert Logic Inc. made its two core security services available for the search giant’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

Alert Logic Log Manager, one of the offerings arriving to GCE, offers visibility into system health and application trends through a web-based interface that packs more than 100 pre-built report templates for tracking infrastructure usage. It’s joined by Threat Manager, which scans that activity for anomalies using a patented “7-factor threat scenario model” that taps into data from third party security companies and the more than 2,400 environments Alert Logic helps protect for more accurate identification of malicious traffic.

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