Dialogic has announced that ZVRS chose Dialogic® PowerMedia™ XMS software media server as part of its latest video relay and translation service offering. ZVRS uses Dialogic’s PowerMedia XMS technology to provide a robust solution that supports a broad range of legacy devices and any-to-any video capabilities with its flagship Z70 videophone.
ZVRS selected Dialogic’s solution to facilitate a release of Z70 that met its stringent requirements for legacy device support (H.263 and H.264) with high quality video and any-to-any video capabilities including SIP support. ZVRS solutions provide video relay and interpreting services to deaf and hard of hearing individuals in federal agencies, state government, and large enterprise on a 24x7x365 basis with over 500 American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters.
Monthly Archives: June 2016
Cisco cracks open wallet for $293m CloudLock acquisition
Cisco has announced its intent to acquire cloud security company CloudLock in a $293 million deal which is expected to close in Q1 2017, writes Telecoms.com.
CloudLock specializes in cloud access security broker (CASB) technology which provides insight and analytics focused on user behaviour and sensitive data in the cloud. The move builds on Cisco’s ‘Security Everywhere’ strategy, its initiative designed to provide protection from the cloud to the network to the endpoint.
“As companies are migrating to the cloud, they need a technology partner that can accelerate that transition and deliver critical security capabilities for all their users, apps and data in a seamless way,” said Rob Salvagno, VP of Cisco Corporate Development. “CloudLock brings a unique cloud-native, platform and API-based approach to cloud security which allows them to build powerful security solutions that are easy to deploy and simple to manage.”
CASB technology is an aspect of cloud security which has caught the attention of a number of decision makers in recent months. When we spoke to Intel Security CTO Raj Samani earlier this month, he told us CASB solutions were set to be one of the largest talking points for the cloud security market segment in the next couple of years.
“Companies will find controls and measures to give them a level of trust in a vendor to ensure they can operate effectively,” said Samani at the time. “CASBs will be one of the biggest trends we’ll see in the next couple of years.”
“CASB is the ultimate business case, because you can do things faster and more efficiently – you can actually but an ROI and a TCO next to it.”
The purpose of CASB solutions is to sit between the cloud provider and cloud consumer to consolidate multiple types of security policies including authentication, single sign-on, encryption, tokenization and malware detection. The CASB solution offers a level of assurance for those customers who have concerns over the security provided by cloud providers themselves, as the concept of secure and risk with vary dependent on the company.
By integrating CASB solutions, a cloud consumer can dictate how many additional layers of security are placed on top of a cloud provider’s offering, to allow the cloud consumer to define their own risk profile. The concept of CASB on the whole could go some way to mitigate the security concerns for those companies who have not currently adopted the cloud for more sensitive workloads.
Aside from this acquisition, Citrix has been bolstering its security capabilities through additional purchases, including Lancope for $452.5 million last December. Lancope helps customers monitor, detect, analyse and respond to modern threats on enterprise networks through continuous network visibility and threat analysis.
Citrix is one of a number of tech giants who have been forced to reconsider their primary focus, as cloud computing continued to increase its grip on IT decision making. During the company’s most recent earnings call, IoT was outlined as a target growth segment, though the security business unit was prominent during the financials, growing 17% year-on-year.
Cisco to Buy CloudLock
Cloud giant Cisco has recently acquired cloud security startup CloudLock for $293 million. This $293 million includes cash as well as equity awards. CloudLock will be integrated into Cisco’s Networking and Security Business group under David Goeckeler. The deal is expected to close by November, 2016.
Cisco has utilized acquisition to build its security software and service sector; it paid $2.7 billion for Sourcefire, security hardware and software maker, in 2013 and $635 million for OpenDNS, which helps stop cyber attacks, in 2015. These acquisitions are similar to those of Microsoft, who purchased Adallom for $250 million, and Blue Coat, who purchased Perspecsys Inc.
About CloudLock:
Founded in 2007, Massachusetts based CloudLock currently has about 130 employees. It provides cloud access security broker (CASB) technology that allows enterprises to protect data within their cloud. This platform acts as a control point for users that are attempting to access cloud based applications such as Microsoft 365. This technology allows policies pertaining to data access to be established and enforced. It also allows security administrators to monitor third party applications that enterprise employees may be utilizing without expressed permission of the enterprise.
Essentially, CASB gives administrators a control point for cloud security and visibility. Because of these unique capabilities, the demand for CASB technology is expected to increase sharply in the coming years. This increase is driven by growing utilization of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications such as Office 365.
Comments:
Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco’s M&A and venture investment team: “‘Buy’ has been a key part of our innovation strategy, alongside significant internal product development, to drive towards a fully integrated security portfolio.”
Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Development: “CloudLock brings a unique cloud-native platform and API-based approach to cloud security, which allows them to build powerful security solutions that are easy to deploy and simple to manage.”
Luke Burns, general partner at Ascent Venture Partners:”CloudLock rose to leadership in the cloud security sector with a pure-play approach of being cloud-native while leveraging other cloud platform APIs in a collaborative fashion. They were a trailblazer of this approach while the competition often focused their efforts on extending legacy methods.”
The post Cisco to Buy CloudLock appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
[slides] Storage Analytics Engines | @CloudExpo @FalconStor #Cloud #BigData #Storage
Predictive analytics tools monitor, report, and troubleshoot in order to make proactive decisions about the health, performance, and utilization of storage. Most enterprises combine cloud and on-premise storage, resulting in blended environments of physical, virtual, cloud, and other platforms, which justifies more sophisticated storage analytics.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Peter McCallum, Vice President of Datacenter Solutions at FalconStor, discussed using predictive analytics to monitor and adjust functions like performance, capacity, caching, security, optimization, uptime and service levels; identify trends or patterns to forecast future requirements; detect problems before they result in failures or downtime; and convert insight into actions like changing policies, storage tiers, or DR strategies.
IT skills shortage leading to cybersecurity issues, research argues
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If a security system flags up an issue in your organisation and nobody acts on it, is it even an issue? Many organisations are acting that way, according to a report from Skyhigh Networks and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).
The research found that security budgets continue to rise – more than half (53%) of the 220 IT and security professionals polled expect their allocations to go up in the coming year – and the myriad of tools at teams’ disposals is a growing trend, with one in five companies having more than 10 available to them. Yet almost half (30%) of those polled admit to ignoring alerts because of the frequency of ‘false positives’ – an alert which erroneously flags normal behaviour as malicious.
Part of the issue relates to a lack of IT skills, the report asserts, with respondents saying the most important new IT skill in the coming five years is incident response management. IT workers believe the best solution to a shortage of skills is training current employees, while IT executives think bringing in junior IT workers is the best way forward.
It leads to a worrying pattern; hackers staying one step ahead of organisations and teams unable to cope.
“The frequency and sophistication of cyber threats is exposing a serious lack of the relevant skills needed to maximise the full value of new technology,” said Nigel Hawthorn, chief European spokesperson at Skyhigh Networks. “Businesses are forever playing catch up with hackers who are discovering new ways of probing networks, and firms are turning to more advanced cyber security solutions to compensate.
“To resolve the skills shortage, 37% of businesses believe that hiring junior IT professionals and investing in training is the most effective way,” he added.
The research also found that while Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to be the primary IaaS platform with 37% of respondents citing it, Microsoft Azure (28%) is closing the gap.
Cost or agility: What is cloud’s true purpose?
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Organisations are switching to cloud at a faster than ever pace and with this change key business questions have emerged. Are we using the best vendor? Are we getting premier service levels? Do we get a volume discount? Cloud has many upsides – fast access and more importantly faster time to market—which gives true competitive advantage. Perhaps the most obvious is the benefits to development teams and the fact that cloud gives direct access to the latest, greatest technology. The cloud gives dev teams the ability to design and architect new environments, as opposed to being saddled with “maintenance mode” — what Gartner has now coined mode 1 in a bi-modal world.
However, behind the attractiveness of cloud and the efficiency it creates is the inevitable growing cost. When the bill comes in at the end of the month and contains unexpected line items, this harsh reality can water-down many of those gains.
Rackspace and Microsoft debated the first goal advantages of cloud with Forrester analyst Bill Martorelli in a recent podcast. Agility and speed are certainly top of mind during their conversation, but business proof and resulting value are key questions that need addressing. I’m sure it’s screamingly obvious to you as you read this that any type of technology investment needs some proof of value or demonstrable return.
The real question is, how to go about proving that value and how patient do you have to be? Added to that challenge is the fact that cloud is a pay-as-you-go asset so finance teams are now presented with an entirely new model or new way of assessing any return. It was much easier in the old days when you acquired the asset and just amortised it over the lifetime of said asset. Whether you pick three or five years it was a pretty easy adjustment on the spreadsheet. Different cloud services have different unit prices, vendors charge differently and by the way, prices fluctuate widely, even from a single vendor. Finance needs to take a new accounting course to even keep up. Cloud is still relatively new. The consumers of cloud are still figuring it out! That of course doesn’t give finance a whole lot of confidence when it comes to efficiency, let alone being frugal.
“As you architect for the cloud, you often feel like an orchestra director satisfying many internal and external customers”, stated our very own chief architect, Dan Hunter, during this podcast. On the one hand, you have to satisfy internal business stakeholders such as the product teams, while at the same time you must have an eye on external customers that are relying on that app or environment you are running in the cloud.
Security, uptime, and performance are the most obvious concerns. If you are leveraging the latest cloud services, you are under constant pressure from all stakeholders to get it done faster. The good and the bad about cloud is that many have come to expect it to be completed sooner and you continually have to balance quality and speed. “Adhering to standards doesn’t even really exist. Many are feeling their way as they go. Containers and micro-services are all fairly new technology capabilities to improve portability, performance, and scale” and often it feels like trial and error. If you are architecting your way to the cloud, don’t feel alone. I encourage you to listen to this podcast and you may learn from others in the same boat.
Regardless of how many services you are running in the cloud today, the likelihood that the number will rise is pretty certain according to recent survey results from summit where 92% are using public cloud today with 95% claiming increased usage. If you ignore the cost equation, you will be in for some rude awakening and it will certainly stir things up internally with your finance team and line of business owners.
Scale-out just doesn’t happen fast enough, especially if you are trying to be more cost effective. Leveraging cloud services, you get a lot of technologies immediately available, but it is cost prohibitive to do it “properly” and so you have to be more agnostic where you can, say, deploy to an internal or private cloud. “Generally speaking, cloud maturity is lacking in some areas.” It would be wonderful to be much more portable and move applications to truly achieve hybrid. The benefits of the cloud—agility and competitive advantage – must not be set aside if your business is diligent about how they consume services. In fact, the two go hand-in-hand. You must show value and a return on your investment but you also need to figure out a way to show business agility. That takes patience and rigour around how you control as you go.
Recall the dark ages when you had to provision or rather acquire services to be installed in your own data centre. Remember how long those cycles took? Now, consider the speed and agility by which you can develop today without having to look at a physical storage rack ever again. By applying more rigor to your cloud services consumption and architecting for the long-haul, efficiencies will pay off. The end game is all about business agility and you cannot afford take your eye off that target.
Oracle and BT team up to conquer the cloud
Oracle has announced a new partnership with BT as the company continues its efforts to redefine its offering and penetrate the cloud computing market segment, reports Telecoms.com.
Through the new partnership customers will be able to use several features of BT Cloud Connect environment to gain direct connectivity to the Oracle Cloud. The offering will provide options for connectivity from hybrid enterprise data centres to the Oracle Cloud, of which there are currently 19 spread around the world.
“Direct and reliable access to data and applications hosted in cloud environments has become critical to organisations as they embark on their digital transformation journeys,” Luis Alvarez, CEO of Global Services at BT. “We are accelerating our drive to be the world’s leading cloud services integrator and I am proud that BT is becoming the first global network services provider to offer direct access to the Oracle Cloud.”
Both companies have launched new initiatives to capitalize on the burgeoning cloud computing industry. BT’s Cloud of Clouds offering was launched last year in April as part of the company’s new technology roadmap to move customers onto a cloud platform. The Cloud of Clouds offering allows customers to integrate BT’s private, public and hybrid cloud services, as well as services from partners including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce and Cisco.
Oracle’s journey to the cloud has been a more varied experience, though the team would appear to be prioritizing the market segment for future growth. The tech giant was seemingly very sceptical over the implementation of cloud initially, as Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said in an analyst briefing in 2008, “The computer industry is the only industry which is more fashion driven than women’s fashion. I was reading W and it said that orange is the new pink. Cloud is the new SaaS.”
Since this comment the company has changed its direction, acquiring several cloud vendors to boost its position in the market. Oracle has however taken a slightly different approach from others in the industry, targeting organizations which have a vertical specific cloud offering. Opower, a company which provides customer engagement and energy efficiency cloud services to the utilities industry, was acquired for $532 million in May, and Textura, a provider of construction contracts and payment management cloud services, was bought for $663 million in April.
Although Oracle has been late to the party, the company has committed heavily to the new market. During the quarterly call earlier this month Ellison claimed Oracle is in a strong position to grow in the IaaS, having invested heavily second generation data centres. Telecoms.com readers would appear to agree with Ellison’s confidence as we asked in a flash poll whether the company could break AWS, Microsoft and Google’s dominance in the IaaS market; 64% agreed it could in time.
Oracle has committed heavily to the cloud computing market in recent years after an initial period of denial, which could be linked back to the company’s reliance on revenue driven from non-cloud products. The partnership would appear to be a move to justify the company’s position in the cloud market as Oracle lean on BT’s credibility to push its cloud offering to BT customers.
AWS expands footprint in India with new data centre
AWS has expanded its reach in the Asia Pacific region, opening two new Availability Zones in Mumbai, taking the total globally to 35.
The company already has 75,000 customers in the country, which is one of the fastest growing economies worldwide. According to the CIA World Factbook, India is listed as the 12th fastest growing nation with a 7.3% real GDP growth rate, as well as a population growth rate of 1.22% per annum. The new region will support numerous services including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as well Elastic Block Store (EBS), Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing.
“Indian start-ups and enterprises have been using AWS for many years – with most Indian technology start-ups building their entire businesses on AWS, and numerous enterprises running mission-critical, core applications on AWS,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “These same 75,000 Indian customers, along with others anxious to start using AWS, have asked for an AWS India Region so they can move their applications that require low latency and data sovereignty.
“We’re excited to make this available today, with the same pay-as-you-go pricing, ability to get started immediately without having to negotiate enterprise agreements or wait days for access, and unmatched functionality that customers enjoy in AWS Regions worldwide – all of which allows customers to go from idea to launch faster than ever before was possible.”
Although India is one of the company’s fastest growing markets worldwide, AWS have been slower to market than its competitors. Last year, Microsoft has brought online three cloud data centres in India for its Azure offering, and IBM opened its first data centre in Chennai for Softlayer. Google is yet to gain traction in the market.
Making the announcement through the official blog, the team also announced numerous local partners ranging from Managed Service Providers such as Spruha Technologies and Consulting Partners including HCL, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro.
Running a Parallels Desktop VM from an external drive (yes, for real!)
Guest Parallels support staff author: Sasti Kumar Velupillai Muniappan Running a Parallels Desktop virtual machine from an external drive (yes, for real!) With the rising trend of cloud storage, computer users are seeing a gradual increase in file size for…everything! Would you have imagined holding a 1 TB thumb drive 10 years ago? Not […]
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Parallels Attends HPE Discover 2016
Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) Discover 2016 Last week came and went, and with it went the Hewlett Packard Enterprises Discover 2016 event, a conference that was incredibly engaging and enriching to all who attended. It was a resounding success for us at Parallels, who were there actively promoting our cost-effective VDI and application virtualization solution, […]
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