This past in the cloud featured some very significant updates, and one of the main highlights was the SAP SAPphire 2011 conference. The conference’s focus was mainly on the cloud and big data, and a lot of the companies who attended took the opportunity to announce their new developments and quite notably, partnerships.

Among these companies were NetApp, Cisco and Microsoft, who announced an integrated and fresh out of the box cloud infrastructure offering. NetApp joined Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program with a private cloud offering called the NetApp Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track with Cisco datacenter architecture.

The offering is designed for scalability, and to enable a great deal of automation as well as self-provisioning. When breaking it down to its noteworthy components, the infrastructure is composed of Cisco USC servers and switches, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V R2, a software bundle by NetApp and some additional components.

Microsft is greatly focusing on the private cloud, considering it has made not one, but two private cloud launches this week. In partnership with Fujitsu, the software maker introduced the latest expansion to their joint offering. The Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, which consists of Fujitsu servers, storage and networking as well as software by both companies can now come in a fully preconfigured form. This means that enterprise customers need to invest significantly less at the deployment stage – an aspect NetApp has also been focusing on.

Also this week VMware, made yet another acquisition. Not long after the SlideRocket deal, the virtualization giant announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Shavlik, a developer of SaaS IT management solutions aimed for the SMB market .

Lastly, privacy and security – two major and constant considerations in the cloud – were in the highlight. Dropbox has suffered some serious criticism due to reports claiming that its employees are be able to access data users stored using the service in an unencrypted form, something that has the potential to lead to a major security breech.