A few notable updates in the past seven days including dotCloud’s big update to its platform  Services – the first item on our list.

The PaaS provider expanded its platform with three new environments and a more developer-friendly payment model. dotCloud Sandbox is a free testing tool, Live is a scaling utility that makes it easier to maintain apps over time (and to keep developers from using another service), and Enterprise is a corporate-grade environment that combines elements from the previous two.

The idea is to make big data more accessible to organizations that may not be able to afford a standard deployment, as well as companies that merely want to extend their existing infrastructure more cost-efficiently. There are small-scale services that offer such capabilities to SMBs and even individual developers, but it looks like MapR is hoping to raise the bar.

Also this week, NetApp updated its ONTAP software. The latest version of the so-called storage OS features a number of security enhancements in addition to new features specifically meant to boost virtualized environments: data is automatically prioritized and tiered based on usage statics, and it’s also split on another level to ensure more protection.

Bromium is tackling virtualization as well, although from a completely different angle. The startup launched out of stealth this week with $26 million in funding and a premise to revolutionize virtualization software. Microvisor, as the solution is called, installs on an Intel end-device, tracks vulnerable processes and places them in isolated VMs that act much like the sandboxes many antivirus programs offer nowadays. The only difference is that the main focus is on policy enforcement rather than just virus detection.

Last but not least is Xeround’s announcement. The cloud database service optimized its flagship product for the Joyent Cloud, the latest name in a very lengthy list.