This past week in the cloud has been a fairly interesting one, in light of the Azure outage and other developments. We also got a glimpse of the new era of increasingly supplicated cyber attacks, and how the cloud can play different roles for what is realistically a rising trend.

First off is SugarSync. The company is one several mobile service providers out there that focus on your data instead of entertainment and syncs files across multiple devices and platforms. Its business model is also a freemium one, which is evidentially a good combination based on its  $15 million Series D financing yesterday.

Next up is the Azure outage. One of the downsides of cloud platforms is that, just like the on-premise infrastructure, they go down every now and then. These types of incidents happen considerably less often in the cloud when compared to legacy deployments, but the sheer user base of services like Azure and AWS means that there’s going to be some bad PR. Azure faced several difficulties with its cloud service earlier this week, attributed to what was described as a backend outage.

The last two tidbits are security related.  The first piece of news is a team-up between VMware and security software maker Symantec to integrate security components from the latter’s portfolio into VMware’s virtualization product family. The areas the partnership will cover include data and end point protection, policy compliance and other standard stuff.

Our second security update doesn’t involve any new code or change within the enterprise, but instead concerns the dark side of Cybersecurity. Our own Kit Dotson looked into some newly revealed info by CloudFlare, the cloud-based web protection provider that hosted LulzSec’s site.