Solutions Review compiled the DevOps courses on Coursera for IT and application development professionals of all skill levels.

DevOps continues to grow in popularity in the business world as companies continue to embrace collaborative environments for developers. Cloud professionals in particular often learn DevOps skills in order to successfully integrate cloud applications and solutions into their company. Online courses and training are a great resource who those who want to learn more about DevOps.

With this in mind, the editors at Solutions Review have compiled this list of top-rated DevOps courses on Coursera to consider taking. Each course in its catalog is taught by industry experts in software, creativity, and business skills. Courses are listed in no particular order.

5 DevOps Courses on Coursera

Course Title: Cloud Computing Foundations

OUR TAKE: Course author Noah Gift is the founder of Pragmatic A.I. Labs and a lecturer for the Duke University MIDS Graduate Data Science Program. He has previously written several books on artificial intelligence, DevOps, Python, and machine learning.

Description: “In this course, you will learn how to build foundational cloud computing infrastructure, including websites involving serverless technology and virtual machines. You will also learn how to apply Agile software development techniques to projects which will be useful in building portfolio projects and global-scale cloud infrastructures. This course is ideal for beginners as well as intermediate students interested in applying cloud computing to data science, machine learning, and data engineering. Students should have beginner-level Linux and intermediate-level Python skills. For your project in this course, you will build a statically hosted website using the Hugo framework, AWS Code Pipelines, AWS S3, and GitHub.”

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Course Title: Continuous Delivery & DevOps

OUR TAKE: This course, created by the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, covers everything you need to know to adopt continuous delivery at your business. Instructor Alex Cowan discusses diagnosing delivery pipelines and automation tasks, among many other topics.

Description: “Bringing an organization to the state of the art (or even functional capability) in this area requires strong work in a combination of disciplines and a combination of both technical and managerial skills. There is no single cookie-cutter approach for achieving this capability. Much like agile, the right focus and formulation depends a lot on the facts and circumstances of the team. This course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and taught by top-ranked faculty, will provide you with the interdisciplinary skillset to cultivate a continuous deployment capability in your organization.”

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Course Title: Introduction to Containers w/ Docker, Kubernetes & OpenShift

OUR TAKE: Instructor Alex Parker, an Offering Manager of IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and IBM Cloud Container Registry. has years of experience as a software engineer who releases articles, tutorials, and education materials for those looking to transition to the cloud.

Description: “After completing this course, you will be able to build applications in a cloud native way using containerization tools and technologies, and deploy your applications in any public, private or hybrid cloud at incredible scale. This course introduces you to containers and explains how containers differ from virtual machines. It also covers the importance of containers in cloud computing, as well as the emerging ecosystem of related technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and Istio.”

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Course Title: DevOps Culture and Mindset

OUR TAKE: Part of successfully adopting DevOps is ensuring that everyone in your organization can adopt to the new DevOps culture. This course helps train on everything you need to know about managing DevOps work, continuous development, and quality assurance.

Description: “This course gives you the basic foundational principles of DevOps with a particular focus on culture and the DevOps mindset. Ultimately, we’ll learn key ideas and tactics that you can employ at your own organizations to improve both time-to-market and increase the value delivered for your customers, no matter your product line or industry.”

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Course Title: Fundamentals of Kubernetes Deployment

OUR TAKE: Course author Jim Sullivan is a trainer and practitioner of technical subjects including programming, including Java, agile/SAFe, and blockchain. The course includes a practical Kubernetes demonstration to give you a deeper understanding of Kubernetes.

Description: “This course is designed to give you a deeper understanding of Kubernetes. Over the next few weeks, you’ll learn about several features of Kubernetes, the Kubernetes Architecture, how to create clusters, and different installation configurations. We’ll also explore deployments and how they are scaled, updated, and rolled back. We will discuss clusters, pods, and nodes, and dive into Persistent Volumes as well as Kubernetes Authorization and Authentication.”

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Solutions Review compiled the top cloud security courses for cloud and cybersecurity engineers and professionals of all skill levels.

Cloud security skills are in high demand among organizations that are looking to operate and maintain their organization’s cloud solutions. The pandemic and subsequent ‘new normal’ of remote work are furthering demands for these skills. Many are turning to online learning platforms to up their game and acquire the cloud security skills most likely to help them stand out. And whether you are looking to acquire those skills for work or for play, this collection of cloud security courses will help you learn the ropes so you can pilot some of the most widely used tools in no time!

With this in mind, the editors at Solutions Review have compiled this list of top-rated cloud security courses to consider taking. Click GO TO TRAINING to learn more and register.

Architecting for Security on AWS

“AWS security architects need to understand how to build security into every AWS deployment at every level. In this course, Architecting for Security on AWS, you’ll learn how to secure your data and your AWS services and resources at multiple levels using a defense-in-depth approach. First, you’ll learn how to protect your AWS credentials using identity and access management. Next, you’ll see how to capture and analyze logs using CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and Athena. Finally, you’ll learn how to implement network and instance security, encrypt data at rest and in-transit, and set up data backup, replication, and recovery. After finishing this course, you’ll be ready to granularly control access to your AWS resources.”

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Azure Security Fundamentals

“Security is often a major concern as companies look to move to the cloud. Cloud platforms like Azure offer a number of security features above and beyond what traditional on-premises environments provide. Unfortunately, most available content on security in Azure focuses on specific components and features, while current training courses are too lightweight and are often quickly out-of-date since the Azure platform changes so much. This three-hour hands-on course gives you a fundamental understanding of managing security in Azure.”

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Cloud Security: Introduction to Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP®)

“Many organizations may make the mistake of skipping architecture and going straight to design. This can be avoided by selecting a cloud service provider that fits with your business requirements. In this course, Cloud Security: Introduction to Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP), you will learn foundational knowledge of how to translate business requirements into selection criteria for a cloud service provider. First, you will learn how to identify which cloud architecture best meets your business requirements. Next, you will discover how to use security architecture to develop a secure cloud consumption strategy. Finally, you will explore how to select a cloud service provider and meet regulatory requirements. When you’re finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge needed to select and consume cloud services securely.”

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Cybersecurity with Cloud Computing

“More and more companies are migrating their applications and infrastructure to the cloud, shifting operational aspects to service providers such as Microsoft and Amazon. However, cloud computing is a shared responsibility, especially when it comes to keeping your data, users, and systems safe. In this course, Malcolm Shore outlines the major forms of cloud technology, its benefits and risks, and the cybersecurity standards and body of knowledge required to mitigate those risks. He introduces concepts such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the different deployment models available. He then reviews offerings from Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Apps. Malcolm also shows the Security as a Service (SecaaS) capability of each platform, which can be used to identify unauthorized access and put cloud security defenses like encryption, logging, and monitoring into place.”

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Ethical Hacking: Cloud Computing

“Cloud resource hardening and monitoring goes a long way in mitigating cloud-based attacks. In this course, which maps to the Cloud Computing module in version 10 of the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) exam, instructor Daniel Lachance explores how to evaluate and harden cloud-deployed resources. Daniel covers how cloud computing relates to the different phases of ethical hacking, as well as common threats that affect cloud computing environments. He also goes over cloud identity management, keeping your IT systems running in the cloud even in the event of an attack or security breach, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to identify anomalies that might indicate that your system is compromised, and more.”

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Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals

“Over the last few years, the cloud has proven itself as a successful enabler for organizations of all sizes to improve agility, scale, reliability, and spend management. It has also made available capabilities that have greatly accelerated the adoption of a wide variety of new types of applications – from big data to Internet of Things. This rapidly expanding set of capabilities can be difficult for anyone to keep up with, and that challenge is further compounded when attempting to map capabilities across different public cloud providers. This course, Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals, provides you with an extensive overview of Google Cloud Platform. While the Google Cloud Platform is a more recent offering than some of its competitors, it draws on years of experience running Google’s massive internal infrastructure and exposes a streamlined set of solution-focused capabilities to help you build great systems.”

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Introduction to AWS Cloud Security

“Every day, more applications adopt the AWS cloud causing an exponential demand for cloud security to protect and scale enterprises. In this course, Introduction To AWS Cloud Security, you will gain the ability to create a secure cloud environment within AWS. First, you will see an overview of foundational AWS service offerings and how they relate to the security of your infrastructure. Next, you will discover how to protect your cloud data and enable secure communication between cloud services. Finally, you will explore how to maintain a secure enterprise cloud environment with cutting-edge logging and monitoring solutions. When you are finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge of AWS needed to create a secure cloud environment.”

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Learning Cloud Computing: Cloud Security

“Understand the basics of cloud security—a core component of cloud computing. Beginning with the basics, instructor David Linthicum explains the business case for cloud security and the levels and models available, including infrastructure-, application-, and data-level security; identity and risk management; encryption; and multifactor authentication. He then dives into the services offered by the top three cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. He reviews the compliance issues that affect specific industries, including health care and finance, and reviews the points you need to consider when identifying your security requirements and the security tools, services, and software to best meet those needs.”

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Managing Microsoft Azure Security

“Configuring and monitoring the security of your Azure environment is a challenging endeavor. You want to ensure you are following best practices, finding important events, and taking a proactive stance on security configuration. Microsoft Azure Security Center helps provide a single management point for all things security in Azure. In this course, Managing Microsoft Azure Security, you will learn how to properly leverage the Azure Security Center from Microsoft to meet the advanced security needs of a cloud deployment. First, you will explore how to configure policies and data collection for the resources in your Azure subscriptions. Next, you will learn how to review the recommended actions from Security Center and prioritize which actions to take first. Finally, you will understand how to use the advanced cloud defense features to take your security game to the next level. By the end of this course, you will be able to leverage Azure Security Center to improve your security posture in Azure and assess and remediate vulnerabilities effectively.”

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Solutions Review compiled the top cloud security courses on Coursera for cloud and IT professionals of all skill levels.

Cloud security continues to be an important task for any organization who has adopted a cloud solution. As cloud deployments continue to grow in popularity and more businesses turn to the cloud for vital workflows, keeping your cloud security in check is a critical task. Online courses are a great way to demonstrate your knowledge in a particular subject area, and cloud security is no exception.

With this in mind, the editors at Solutions Review have compiled this list of top-rated cloud security courses on Coursera to consider taking. This is not an exhaustive list, but one that features the best courses and training from trusted online platforms. This list of the best cloud security courses on Coursera below includes links to the modules and our take on each. Courses are listed in no particular order.

5 Cloud Security Courses on Coursera

Course Title: Cloud Security Basics

OUR TAKE: This course makes an excellent starting point for those who want to learn more about security in the cloud. Students will design a simple cloud service and assess levels of risk and vulnerability while applying basic network security principles to the cloud environment.

Description: “This course introduces you to cybersecurity for the cloud. We’ll learn and apply classic security techniques to today’s cloud security problems. We start with a deceptively simple and secure web service and address the problems arising as we improve it. We’ll analyze recent cloud security vulnerabilities using standard, systematic techniques. We’ll build our own web service case studies and construct security solutions for them. Our toolkit contains classic security concepts like Least Privilege and Separation of Duty, as well as more technical cryptographic and access control techniques.”

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Course Title: Cloud Computing Security

OUR TAKE: Offered by the University of Colorado, this course explores the fundamentals of cloud computing through the lens of Amazon Web Services. Through AWS, students gain an understanding of using cloud resources, cloud management, debugging, and AWS EC2.

Description: “In this course, we will learn cloud computing basics using AWS as an example, We will guide you to create AWS account, planning AWS resources for your cloud systems, create AWS EC2 instances, access them and configure the popular LAMP web services with MySQL database. By the end of this course, you should be able to create your own web cluster with MySQL databases, setup your users with credentials to manage your AWS resources/virtual machines either through their management control interface or using AWS CLI API using scripts. You will also learn the best practice in cloud security and debugging service interaction issues may arise in the cloud systems.”

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Course Title: Enterprise and Infrastructure Security

OUR TAKE: This is a more general cybersecurity course, but it includes a section on securing hybrid cloud architectures — making it the perfect training for employees whose organizations are making the jump to hybrid cloud and need to know how to secure it.

Description: “This course introduces a series of advanced and current topics in cyber security, many of which are especially relevant in modern enterprise and infrastructure settings. The basics of enterprise compliance frameworks are provided with introduction to NIST and PCI. Hybrid cloud architectures are shown to provide an opportunity to fix many of the security weaknesses in modern perimeter local area networks.”

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Course Title: AWS Fundamentals: Addressing Security Risk

OUR TAKE: Amazon Web Services users in charge of keeping their organization’s cloud environments and workloads secure should take this course, designed and created by Amazon Web Services experts and instructed by AWS solution architects.

Description: “This course will give you an overview of security best practices when developing and managing applications on AWS. The course, created by AWS experts and delivered by AWS Solutions Architects, uses video lectures, hands-on exercise guides, demonstrations, and quizzes to dive deep on concepts about security on AWS. You will learn about the concept of “least privilege” and the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, as well as view demonstrations of Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Secrets Manager, and cross-account access.”

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Course Title: Understanding Google Cloud Security and Operations

OUR TAKE: For Google Cloud users who need to learn how to securely operate the service, this is the course for you. Students will learn about financial governance in the cloud, DevOps and SRE principles, shared responsibility, and cloud resource and application management.

Description: “This course examines cost management, security, and operations in the cloud. First, it explores how businesses can choose to maintain some or none of their own infrastructure by purchasing IT services from a cloud provider. Next, it explains how the responsibility of data security is shared between the cloud provider and the business, and explores the defense-in-depth security built into Google Cloud. Finally, it covers how IT teams and business leaders need to rethink IT resource management in the cloud and how Google Cloud resource monitoring tools can help them to maintain control and visibility over their cloud environment.”

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Source: Acceleration Economy Network

The Cloud Wars Expo is a three-day hybrid event focused on the latest innovations in the cloud and featuring insights from key influencers.

What is the 2022 Cloud Wars Expo?

The Cloud Wars Expo is meant to act as a chronicle for why enterprise cloud is the greatest growth market the world has ever known. The goal is to help organizations make great decisions for their cloud and digital strategy by understanding more completely the aspirations and capabilities of the world’s leading cloud providers. Cloud Wars Expo is hosted by the Acceleration Economy Network.

Key Speakers

Key speakers for 2022 include:

• IBM’s Head of Hybrid Cloud Howard BovilleS
• AP’s Chief Marketing and Solution Officer Julia White
• Microsoft’s Senior Director of Sustainability and Product Marketing Rosie Mastrandrea
• Oracle’s Executive Vice President of Vertical Industries Mike Sicilia.

Why Attend?

The 2022 Cloud Wars Expo is a three-day event featuring hundreds of speakers and the biggest cloud companies on the planet. The expo offers cloud education on key topics like ERP migration, Zero Trust, Metaverse, digital transformation, data and AI, supply chain, and more. Cloud Wars also touts 6 vertical industry tracks, a variety of distinct innovation paths, and experiences like Cloud Battleground modules.

FAQ

What: The 2022 Cloud Wars Expo

When: June 28-30, 2022

Where: Hybrid event (see registration page for more details)

Register for the 2022 Cloud Wars Expo Virtual FREE

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This is part of Solutions Review’s Premium Content Series, a collection of contributed columns written by industry experts in maturing software categories. In this submission, Silk CTO Derek Swanson offers his take on how to modernize healthcare through the cloud computing paradigm with examples.

The Covid-19 pandemic heightened the need for healthcare organizations to aggressively adapt to a more patient-centric model for care, especially in a setting where people are often at their most vulnerable. It did not take healthcare leadership long to realize the need to expedite the existing but slow-moving upgrade initiatives around modernizing and personalizing the traditional healthcare experience.

Frankly, the change was long overdue. Fewer than one-third of patients rate their healthcare experiences highly. Factors like cost transparency and effective communication directly impact patient satisfaction, and 84 percent of patients indicate wait times are a significant factor when considering overall experience at a doctor’s office. It may have taken a global pandemic, but healthcare leaders now recognize cloud platforms as the most promising pathway for overcoming the technical barriers to implementation and improving the patient experience.

Until now, healthcare has been among several industries that have lagged behind in adopting the cloud to modernize practices and deliver excellent patient care. So, how does a traditionally risk-averse industry migrate complex workloads such as databases and electronic health records (EHRs) to the cloud successfully when there’s so much at stake?

Solving Sentara’s Cloud Challenges

Sentara Healthcare, a not-for-profit healthcare organization, operates 12 acute care hospitals across Virginia and North Carolina. It offers an in-home managed-care plan which accounts for one million patients in the region with cancer and cardiac facilities and employs more than 30,000 people, including 3500 providers and medical staff at over 400 care facilities.

Sentara’s internal IT team is responsible for overseeing the management of its significant EHR databases. An industry leader in system modernization, Sentara strives for excellence in customer experience. To take patient experience to the next level, Sentara initiated an internal campaign to establish a new digital front door to its EHR by migrating the platform to Microsoft Azure. Migrating a massive workload like an EHR to the cloud is huge, and early attempts did not achieve the vertical scale or the data performance needed to drive a transformational user experience.

Beyond modernization, Sentara sought to improve the availability of its SQL-based EHR reporting engine during the overnight database extract, transform, and load (ETL) process. On average, this took about seven to ten hours, during which time the database was inaccessible, leaving providers and patients in the dark. Outside consultants had also projected that the company’s current cloud spend would grow 10 percent YoY after the migration, bloating the company’s operating (OPEX) expenditure. Sentara needed a solution to provide ultra-fast performance, increase availability, and contain its OPEX budget.

Sentara explored a cloud data platform known for accelerating cloud migration and supporting complex mission-critical workloads. Using a lift and shift approach, the platform activated the power of Microsoft Azure immediately while Sentara worked behind the scenes on an eventual full refactor to cloud-native. The integration of enterprise data services like deduplication and instantaneous zero-footprint snapshots allowed the IT team to quickly copy and move big datasets instantly while reducing its cloud footprint, helping to keep cloud-spend under control.

The platform Sentara selected sits invisibly between the public cloud infrastructure and its workloads, offering maximum agility, reliability, resilience, and far greater performance to support large, complex, mission-critical workloads. Results included 3x faster performance compared to cloud-native elements. A benefit of its new data reduction capabilities, Sentara’s cloud data footprint was reduced by 50 percent, driving a 20 percent decrease in costs. By taking advantage of the platform’s rich data snapshot capabilities, Sentara reduced downtime from over seven hours per night to less than 15 minutes, giving providers consistent access to patient data, even during the nightly ETL process.

Sentara is one of the first large-scale healthcare organizations to embrace a complete cloud transformation, implementing a fully cloud-based program and practice workflow. The promise of real-time patient responsiveness and improved provider collaboration can potentially alter the current patient care paradigm completely. The universal availability of data offers providers and frontline workers the real-time data needed to deliver a truly compelling patient-centric experience, underscoring the value of migrating previously “untouchable workloads” to the cloud.

Challenges and Best Practices

New forecasts expect digital transformation projects will exceed $79 billion in the next five years. The CDC has initiated a new multi-year collaboration with the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) to strengthen data quality and information technology systems in state and local health departments to ensure pandemic‑ready IT systems should the need arise. Not all data is created equal, and IT leaders realize that cloud migration is more straightforward for some workloads than others, as a one-size-fits-all solution often causes more problems than it promises to solve.

The effort is worthwhile: a successful migration translates to improved operational performance and agility, reduced risk, increasingly sound post-migration monitoring and upkeep, and minimal interruption. Risk, particularly in an industry that leaves little room for error, is enough to pause the idea of a fundamental shift of its legacy data infrastructure. The real risk, however, is the implications of inaction. It’s time to capitalize on the momentum generated by the pandemic and speed up implementations of valuable technology and operational upgrades. From patients to providers, everyone across the organization benefits from the peace of mind knowing that critical workloads are operating on the best platforms and achieving optimum performance.

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Gartner’s newest research highlights four 2022 Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing that offer innovative alternatives in the marketplace.

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. has released its newest research highlighting four emerging solution providers that cloud leaders should consider as compliments to their existing architectures. The 2022 Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing report features information on startups that offer some disruptive capability or opportunity not common to the marketplace. Gartner analysts Laurence Watson, Sid Nag, and Arun Chandrasekaran compiled materials for the report.

Solutions Review’s editors have read the complete report, which is available here, and want to take the opportunity to provide a brief, independent introduction to each of the cool vendors listed. Though Gartner’s process for selecting Cool Vendors is somewhat mysterious, we believe our unique view of the space can help you to better understand how these analytics solutions will fit into the marketplace as time goes on.

Prosimo.io

Prosimo delivers multi-cloud infrastructure for distributed enterprise cloud. This stack combines cloud networking, performance, security, observability, and cost management—all powered by data insights and machine learning models with autonomous cloud networking. Prosimo is venture-backed by marquee investors such as General Catalyst and WRVI Capital.

Stacklet

Stacklet offers a commercial cloud governance platform. Stacklet is built with an open core model around the popular open-source project Cloud Custodian. The Stacklet founders are the creative team behind Cloud Custodian. Stacklet provides best practice operations of Cloud Custodian, access to pre-built policies and, in the future, a fully hosted version of Cloud Custodian. Cloud Custodian is an open-source cloud security and governance project that came out of Capital One’s journey to the public cloud.

Stateless

Stateless offers network automation for hybrid and mult-cloud. Stateless is the recipient of the Inno on Fire Award, Best Colorado Companies to Watch award, is a Best Company to Work For for the last two years, and was featured in CRN’s publication of the 10 Hottest Networking Startups of 2021.

Upbound

Upbound is the company behind open-source Crossplane – the cloud-native alternative to Infrastructure as Code. Upbound’s product offerings are available via a subscription model that currently has two tiers. The first is a free tier catering to individuals getting started with control planes and who need tooling to debug and share their Crossplane providers and configurations. Upbound’s enterprise tier unlocks additional value across the product portfolio.

Read Gartner’s 2022 Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing.

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Accenture

Accenture is a managed service provider for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offering cloud services and cloud-based solutions involving strategy, consulting, and operations. They provide help with security, scalability, migration, and agility, as well as defining support roles and using automation to infuse intelligence into IT service delivery. Accenture’s cloud services range from general-purpose for all enterprises to vertical-specific solutions that are tailor-made for businesses in different industries, with a reach that spans across the globe.

Founders Intelligence’s team combines their experience and commercial expertise with deep relationships with the technology start-up ecosystem. Leveraging this combination, Founders Intelligence has a record of setting strategies and delivering growth for FTSE 100 companies and other global organizations. Their team of 35 professionals will join Accenture’s Innovation practice.

In a press statement, Lucy Cooper, Innovation Lead for Europe at Accenture, said, “businesses have embraced new technologies to emerge stronger from the pandemic and are now laser-focused on using innovation to drive growth. With Founders Intelligence part of Accenture, together we can help our clients create the growth initiatives that have a lasting impact on their future. Founders Intelligence’s venture-inspired approach and deep insights have garnered respect among C-suite leaders and will enhance our network of innovators that deliver significant value for our clients.”

CEO and co-founder of Founders Intelligence, Rob Chapman also added, “being part of Accenture will provide enormous opportunities for our people and clients as we combine our entrepreneur-led growth approach with Accenture’s global innovation ecosystem and delivery capabilities. Rob Haines and I built Founders Intelligence to empower our entrepreneurial talent to have impact at large corporates and we’re thrilled to be able to do this at even greater scale.”

This is the latest acquisition Accenture has made to help clients harness innovation in Europe. Accenture also acquired ?WhatIf! and Bow & Arrow in 2019.

To learn more about Accenture, click here.

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Gartner’s newest research highlights four 2021 Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing that offer innovative alternatives in the marketplace.

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. has released its newest research highlighting four emerging solution providers that Chief Information Officers (CIOs) should consider when modernizing and updating their technology. The 2021 Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing report features information on startups that offer some disruptive capability or opportunity not common to the marketplace. Gartner analysts Arun Chandrasekaran, Sid Nag, and Lydia Leong compiled the materials for this report.

Solutions Review’s editors have read the complete report, which is available here, and want to take the opportunity to provide a brief, independent introduction to each of the cool vendors listed. Though Gartner’s Process for selecting Cool Vendors is somewhat mysterious, we believe our unique view of the space can help you to better understand how these solutions will fit into the marketplace as time goes on.

Concourse Labs

Concourse Labs offers a multi-cloud, developer-centric continuous compliance automation (CCA) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) tool designed to be integrated into continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. The vendor’s tool is truly multi-cloud and supports Open Policy Agent (OPA), as well as policies that span multiple clouds. This capability is especially useful for policies that restrict how applications communicate with other applications in different cloud environments. Concourse Labs markets to enterprise users in highly regulated industries that tend to have a wide array of policies for different applications and complex environments.

ProsperOps

ProsperOps provides an artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps)-based service for enterprise cloud financial management. The vendor leverages a unique financial optimization methodology, as opposed to other providers in this market that focus on engineering optimization, passive reporting, or broker reserved instances. Key differentiators for ProsperOps’ solution include algorithms that dynamically manipulate commitments to generate high compute discounts while managing risk, and the use of real-time cost and usage telemetry coupled with constraint-based algorithms to arrive at optimized pricing. FinOps professionals looking to elevate to financial optimization should take note of ProsperOps.

Replicated

Replicated gives software vendors the ability to distribute commercial Kubernetes applications to customer-controlled environments, satisfying enterprise requirements for data security, reliability, and digital transformation. The provider’s solution enables SaaS-first companies to expand their total addressable market and increase enterprise adoption by embracing multi-premises distribution. This makes Replicated a good fit for SaaS vendors looking to sell to a larger market, as well as traditional on-prem software vendors that want to modernize their applications and customer application distribution process.

Tetrate

Tetrate offers a service mesh solution across multi-cloud environments to deliver comprehensive application connectivity, security, observability, and reliability. The vendor’s flagship solution, Tetrate Service Bridge, is delivered both as a self-managed and SaaS solution. Additionally, the product is based on popular open-source projects including Istio, Envoy, Zipkin, and Apache SkyWalking. The solution supports deployments in AWS, Azure, and GCP, with native integration with cloud providers’ Kubernetes managed services. Tetrate is well-suited to cloud architects looking to provide a global service mesh across multi-cluster, multi-cloud environments.

Read Gartner’s 2021 Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing.

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Avanade

Avanade, founded in 2000 by Microsoft and Accenture, is a professional services and managed service provider for Azure. The company runs independently of both of its parent companies and assists customers in getting the most out of their Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Azure. Avanade boasts that it has more Microsoft Certified Professionals working on Azure than any other company, delivering a set of managed Azure services and years of knowledge in designing, building, and deploying enterprise-grade solutions for the platform.

In a media statement, Andy Gillett, General Manager for Avanade UK and Ireland, said, “Microsoft continues to make strong investments in Dynamics 365 as a key pillar of digital transformation. With QUANTIQ and its strong reputation as a trusted Micr partner, we see a huge opportunity for Avanade to quickly scale up to meet the growing need for solutions that help organizations realize, much needed business efficiencies, agility, and resilience, and also help overcome barriers to growth.”

Stuart Fenton, CEO of QUANTIQ, also added, “QUANTIQ is excited to be joining Avanade, a business that shares QUANTIQ’s commitment to clients, employees, and partners, as well as the belief in the power of Microsoft technologies to drive business transformation. Avanade represents an opportunity for QUANTIQ to expand its client offerings, making use of its entire range of technologies and service capabilities, as well as gain access to a global network of Dynamics professionals to help serve our international client base.”

The financial terms of the transaction are not being disclosed. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions.

To learn more about Avanade, click here.

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Accenture

Accenture is a managed service provider for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offering cloud services and cloud-based solutions involving strategy, consulting, and operations. They provide help with security, scalability, migration, and agility, as well as defining support roles and using automation to infuse intelligence into IT service delivery. Accenture’s cloud services range from general-purpose for all enterprises to vertical-specific solutions that are tailor-made for businesses in different industries, with a reach that spans across the globe.

Advoco’s goal is to form trusted advisor partnerships with clients across industries. The vendor specializes in configuring and integrating Infor EAM software with companies’ existing enterprise and operational systems, and EAM training programs. The services and solutions provided by Advoco are designed to assist users with enhancing the reliability and extension of the overall lifecycle of their critical assets.

In a media statement, Nigel Stacey, global lead for Accenture Industry X, said, “many of our clients are looking to leverage Infor EAM when embedding more intelligence in their asset management to drive the performance of their most critical assets. Advoco is highly respected for its talent, expertise, and training program in this space. Together, we will bring Infor EAM capabilities to clients at scale to take advantage of a growing market opportunity.”

This is the latest in a series of 24 acquisitions Accenture has made since 2017 to build out its Industry X capabilities. Recently completed acquisitions include international engineering consulting and services firm umlaut, operations technology provider Electro 80, industrial robotics and automation services provider Pollux, operations consultancy Myrtle, and technology consultancy SALT Solutions.

To learn more about Accenture, click here.

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