The view from the cloud on the people and processes below became much clearer last week after Adobe Systems Inc. teamed up with Microsoft to make customer information stored in its service more accessible from outside the marketing organization, and in particular for the sales personnel charged with the crucial task of turning leads into deals.

The alliance will see high-level statistics on the behavior and preferences of different audiences made available through the operating system maker’s Dynamics CRM platform to provide a framework for interacting with prospects. That can help determine what to upsell and when, based on previous successes as well as deeper historical insight gleaned through Adobe Analytics, which Microsoft in turn plans to integrate with its business intelligence service.

While the software titans are collaborating on helping organizations gain a better understanding of their customers, SolarWinds, Inc. aims to help administrators extend that view to their infrastructure with the acquisition of rival Papertrail, Inc. for $41 million. The landmark deal will enable the company to provide monitoring capabilities comparable to that of its homegrown on-premise logging software in the cloud, saving organizations the trouble of setting up and running a dedicated installation.

But it’s not just mundane operations like keeping track of infrastructure that are moving outside the four walls of the data center. The cloud is also disrupting critical processes such as encryption, which HashiCorp, Inc. hopes to simplify in the kind of hosted environments where organizations increasingly handle that task with the latest addition to its DevOps toolkit.

Vault, as the open-source technology is called, launched on the same day as SolarWinds announced its latest acquisition with the promise of streamlining security for off-premise applications that handle sensitive information beyond the reach of traditional controls. The software automatically secures data requests to popular cloud sources such as Amazon’s hosted S3 object store and provide administrators with the ability to quickly revoke access permissions from a service if they suspect a compromise.

Photo by Paul Hamilton via Flickr
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