SYS-CON Events announced today that Vivint to exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st Cloud Expo, which will take place on October 31 through November 2nd 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. As a leading smart home technology provider, Vivint offers home security, energy management, home automation, local cloud storage, and high-speed Internet solutions to more than one million customers throughout the United States and Canada. The end result is a smart home solution that saves you time and money and ultimately simplifies your life.
Monthly Archives: October 2017
ECS to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | @ECSRefining #DataCenter #DataSecurity #ITAM #ITAD #DX
SYS-CON Events announced today that ECS Refining to exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st Cloud Expo, which will take place on October 31 through November 2nd 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. With rapid advances in technology, the proliferation of consumer and enterprise electronics, and the exposure of unethical e-waste disposal methods, there is an increasing demand for responsible electronics recycling and reuse services. As a pioneer in the electronics recycling and IT asset disposition space for over 36 years, ECS provides a broad spectrum of solutions to a variety of markets, including recyclers, large enterprises, OEMs, retailers, and consumers.
Datto merges with Autotask aiming to create the largest vendor in the managed services space
Data protection solutions provider Datto has announced it is to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners, with the company being merged with IT business management provider Autotask, another horse in Vista’s stable.
The move is a large one in the managed service provider (MSP) space, with the companies in their own words ‘creating the only complete, global IT business management and business continuity platform built exclusively for MSPs.’
Datto offers business continuity, backup and disaster recovery and network continuity services, while Autotask has traditionally focused on endpoint management, remote monitoring and management, alongside providing cloud backup, and CRM and service desk offerings under the banner of professional services automation (PSA).
Mark Banfield, SVP and general manager of international at Autotask, said Vista has been looking for opportunities to expand Autotask’s vision for a unified platform for ‘some time’. “The merger of Autotask and Datto is a natural next step for both companies who can now deliver tremendous value to the IT channel by providing technology providers with services to increase recurring revenue, grow and expand – all from one company,” he told CloudTech.
Andrew Stuart, managing director of Datto’s EMEA arm, added the company previously had suitors but was unwilling to sell until they found a good fit. “When it came to Vista, they shared our vision to create something meaningful in the MSP market,” said Stuart. “They were already working with Autotask and understood the potential for future growth and that we could make a serious impact in the IT space by combining Datto and Autotask.
“Things went fairly quickly once we realised that Vista could really take Datto to the next level and essentially create the largest vendor in the MSP industry.”
According to the press materials, a combined management team will lead the merged entity, with Austin McChord, Datto founder and chief executive officer, leading the company. Mark Cattini, president and CEO of Autotask, will be a strategic advisor to the board of directors. Regarding future product strategy, it is still early days but according to Stuart, while there will ‘eventually’ be a joint product roadmap it is business as usual for the time being.
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2017. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Announcing @Cedexis to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | #CloudNative #DevOps #DX
SYS-CON Events announced today that Cedexis will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Cedexis is the leader in data-driven enterprise global traffic management. Whether optimizing traffic through datacenters, clouds, CDNs, or any combination, Cedexis solutions drive quality and cost-effectiveness.
For more information, please visit https://www.cedexis.com.
Cloud revenue pushes Microsoft once again
It’s become a familiar story now. The cloud segment of Microsoft is growing at astronomical rates and is pushing the earnings and profits of Microsoft to new levels. But, what is interesting is that the margin of growth grows with every quarter.
According to the earnings report released by Microsoft, earnings from Azure almost doubled, thereby accounting for a year-on-year growth of 90 percent. Though the company doesn’t break down the revenues of Azure separately, an estimate by the analysis firm Canalys, pegs it at a whopping $2 billion.
Revenue from the intelligent cloud business segment rose 14 percent to $6.92 billion. This was higher than analysts’s expectations, which was $6.7 billion. Surprisingly, Satya Nadella kept a target of $20 billion for the cloud business by 2018 and in this quarter itself, it surpassed the target as the total revenue was $20.4 billion. This goes to show that Microsoft is doing great under the able leadership of Satya Nadella.
Cloud was the lifeline that Microsoft was looking for almost a decade now, and it has made the most of it. At a time, when PC sales were plummeting and the company was looking for some direction, the emergence of cloud and the change of leadership to Satya Nadella, both seemed to have weaved the magic again for Microsoft.
One of the highlights of this quarter was the deal that Costco, an Azure customer. In fact, this came along the heels of a deal with Whole Foods that brought it under the Microsoft umbrella.
While this quarter spells good news for Microsoft, it can’t afford to relax. AWS is growing at a much higher rate. It raked in $4.6 billion this quarter, representing an almost 46 percent year-on-year growth. Though AWS missed out on Costco this quarter, it still managed to secure deals with a ton of big names such as Hulu and General Electric.
Other than AWS, Google is also fast catching up with Microsoft. It entered deals with retailers like Kohl’s and payment processing companies like PayPal. ALl this means, Microsoft needs to amp up its efforts to stay ahead of competition.
In other results, revenue from Microsoft’s cloud computing division fell by 0.2 percent to $9.38 billion. Nevertheless, it beat the analysts expectations at $8.81 billion. This quarter also saw an increase in revenue from Surface. In fact, after two consecutive quarters of declines, it saw an increase of 12 percent in revenue.
Such positive results was welcomed by its investors and the share market as a whole. The value of Microsoft’s shares increased by 3.1 percent to end at $81.20.
The post Cloud revenue pushes Microsoft once again appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
AWS remains ‘in league of its own’ as Amazon and Microsoft report latest financials
Amazon and Microsoft have posted their most recent financial results, and again both have delivered with a focus on cloud.
Amazon posted total revenue across all segments of $43.74 billion for the quarter with Amazon Web Services (AWS) contributing just over 10% of that at $4.58bn. The AWS revenue represented at 41% increase from this time last year.
Microsoft posted total revenues of $24.5 billion – and while the company does not give specific numbers for Azure, the company’s ‘intelligent cloud’ segment went up 13% from this time last year at $6.9bn, and the ‘productivity and business processes’ segment going up 28% at $8.2bn. The former refers to Azure and server products, while the latter focuses more on Office 365. The other segment, ‘more personal computing’, saw a 0.1% dip from this this time last year at $9.4bn.
Speaking to analysts following the results, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Azure Compute usage more than doubled over the quarter, with revenue growing 90%, while the number of monthly active users of Office 365 Commercial moved to 120 million.
“To support the emerging intelligent cloud, intelligent edge application pattern, you need a consistent stack across the public cloud and the edge,” he said, as transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “Merely providing colocation services or connectivity between on-premise data centres and the public cloud is not sufficient to meet customer needs. You need consistency across the development environment, operating models and technology stacks.
“Azure provides this consistency across the entire stack, inclusive of identity, data, app platform, security and management at the edge and in the cloud,” Nadella added. “Our hybrid cloud is one of the reasons nearly every Fortune 500 company has chosen to partner with Microsoft.”
Amazon, traditionally a little more reluctant to divulge on earnings day through prepared remarks, revealed some snippets though analyst questions. Brian T. Olsavsky, Amazon CFO, described the quarter as “very strong” for AWS and added the company expected a ‘strong’ Q4, taking into account the previous year focused on price reductions. “Price cuts, and not only price cuts but new products that have lower average cost and can cannabalise more expensive products, is pretty much a part of our business all the time in AWS,” said Olsavsky.
Naturally, the biggest concern for those analysing Amazon was around the company’s acquisition of Whole Foods in August. For the first time, Amazon put sales from ‘physical stores’ in a separate bucket, with that number clocking in at $1.28bn. Olsavsky confirmed this was where the Whole Foods revenue appeared.
So how should these results be analysed? Synergy Research says it is essentially the status quo. AWS remains ‘in a league of its own’, with Microsoft best of the rest, ahead of Google and Alibaba. Growth in the total market for 2017 is at 40%. “There’s still something a little shocking about seeing a business unit the size of AWS consistently growing its revenues by over 40%,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director.
“Microsoft and Google too deserve plaudits for the growth rates they are achieving, while IBM is gaining market share in its sweet spot of hosted private cloud services. It is becoming increasingly difficult for cloud providers outside of the leading pack to make an impression on the market share rankings.”
You can read Microsoft’s report here and Amazon’s report here.
Future-proofing IT for the fourth industrial revolution: How hybrid cloud fits the bill
Philip Hammond proclaimed in this year’s Spring Budget speech that the fourth industrial revolution is “well and truly under way.” Building on the third industrial revolution that saw the rise of electrons and IT to automate production, this new digital wave is characterised by a fusion of technologies that blurs the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres.
As noted by Hammond, everyone will need to be “agile and bold” to embrace this revolution. But what does this really mean for companies and IT teams with regard to daily activities, and how might it affect the bottom line as budgets are being set for 2018 spending?
From a technology perspective, the far-flung-future forecast will see current emerging technologies such as Artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), automation and big data play a key part of this digitally-led revolution. The potential to transform business models as well as IT operations by changing the way we work and the applications on which we depend is tremendous.
In the more immediate future however, benefits of the ‘fourth wave’ that organisations can reap at an operational level will depend on their adoption and use of cloud technology. This is already happening – IDC forecasts that public cloud spending alone will reach $122.5 billion in 2017, which is a huge increase of 24.4% over 2016 and promises to continue expanding exponentially in 2018.
The transition and journey to cloud from the more ‘traditional’ technology is not one that happens overnight, and although Gartner’s latest CEO survey found that 42% of CEO’s have already begun their digital business transformation journeys, it’s important to still protect legacy infrastructures while integrating cloud implementations. That said, investing in cloud-first plans will go a long way towards future-proofing infrastructure. Gartner predicts that by 2020, a ‘no- cloud’ policy will be as rare as a ‘no-internet’ policy is today.
So with large, long-term investment in mind, which solutions may fulfill budget criteria and aid the transition to cloud while bridging this gap at the same time?
The cloud has come a long way in its evolution from a basic data storage model to a powerful, cost effective platform for increased agility and responsiveness. A technology expansion that started with mass adoption of virtualised environments over the last decade has now progressed to cloud infrastructure, and focuses on enabling IT to play a bigger part in overall business goals by leveraging scalability, performance, development and budgeting.
Many companies are however understandably cautious of fully depending on the cloud for IT requirements right from the get go, which could explain the current popularity of a cloud hybrid model. A hybrid model allows each workload to sit in the appropriate infrastructure – on-premises, private or public cloud – to optimise performance and meet budgetary requirements.
The adoption of cloud – and hybrid cloud environments in particular – brings about a new iteration of an age old IT issue, that of how to combine legacy infrastructure with new technologies. Whether it is because it takes time to fully migrate to the new technology or that the combination of new and old is the best plan moving forward, the process can be a complex, ongoing one to manage.
To combat this issue, businesses and CTOs must evaluate management tools for both current needs and future requirements, including considering vendor lock-in, development cycles of the product itself and the prospect of the vendor being at the forefront of supporting technology trends.
In summary, if the fourth industrial revolution really is well and truly upon us, then companies should align IT budgets to accommodate the new technology that will continue to penetrate both the business landscape and consumer markets. Hybrid cloud is an ideal IT model for cost saving and offers greater business benefits through its ability to scale and take advantage of the continuous data output of applications.
As we look forward to 2018, it is becoming increasingly important to invest in software that can support hybrid cloud models to deliver seamless delivery and continuous uptime. And possibly most importantly, organisations need to make provisions for the innovations of the far-flung-future, which may not be so far away.
Eight Crucial Strategies for Strengthening Network Security
Strengthening Network Security
Strengthening network security is vital to your organization. Check out the tips below to ensure you are well protected.
Leave no host forgotten, know your hosts (all of them)
Any and every device capable of wired or wireless access with an IP address should be known in your environment. This goes beyond desktops, laptops, servers, printers, IP phones, and mobile devices. The “Internet of Things” presents a larger potential footprint of hosts including environmental monitoring and control devices, security cameras, and even things like vending machines. IoT devices all run operating systems that have the potential to be compromised by hackers and used as a platform for performing reconnaissance of your network for more valuable assets. Ensure inventory lists are valid by performing routing network scans to identify unknown devices.
Understand your users’ behavior
Knowing the culture and habits of users, like when and where they work, is important for establishing baseline behavior patterns. Also, the types of work they do online such as researching, downloading software, and uploading files will vary greatly by industry. For example, users at a law firm are not going to have the same internet usage behavior as users at a software development company. Even within an organization, there will be differences between administrative and technical engineering user behavior. Knowing the behavior of your users will make it easier to identify what is normal versus abnormal network traffic.
Understand what talks to what and why
The network traffic patterns in your organization should represent the usage of critical business applications that users need to do their job. Understanding these traffic flows is critical to building effective security policies for ACLs, stateful firewall policies, and deep packet inspection rules on network security devices. This applies to traffic within your internal private networks, what is allowed in from the outside, and especially the type of traffic allowed to leave your organization.
Control what is running on your hosts
The more applications and services running on a host, the more potential for exposure to software vulnerabilities. Software updates are important for bug fixes and new features but security related fixes to applications are critical. Limit the types of applications users may install to reputable software vendors that take security updates seriously. Staying current with operating system security updates is even more important. Situations when legacy applications require older EOL operating systems to run on your network should be monitored very closely and if possible should be segmented to dedicated VLANs.
Know your data & control your data
Understand the data that is critical to your business and classify that data into different levels of sensitivity. You must ensure that encryption is used when transmitting highly sensitive data across the network as well as limit access to sensitive data to only those who require it. It is important to implement effective logging on all devices that store and transmit sensitive data and perform routine checks of your backup solutions to ensure the integrity of critical data backups.
Monitor and control your perimeter (egress too!!)
The network perimeter of your organization includes Internet and WAN connections but also wireless access points. All three of these perimeter pathways need to be protected with the highest levels of access restrictions. Next-generation security appliances should be deployed on all perimeter segments to provide deep packet inspection, content filtering, and malicious URL inspection. Centralized logging of network and security devices using a security information event management (SIEM) solution is vital for analysis and correlation of logging data.
Train your users: they are your weakest link and your best defense
Deliver routine end-user security awareness training to keep users up to date on ways to recognize suspicious email content and websites. Perform routine experimental phishing campaigns to determine how well users are able to identify suspicious emails. Review policies with users on how to manage sensitive data. Make sure users are aware of non-technical methods used by hackers such as social engineering tactics to extract information about your organization.
Implement strong authentication controls
Use multifactor authentication for wireless and VPN remote access whenever possible. Restrict the usage of local user accounts and require complex passwords that must be changed regularly. Implement 802.1x security on wireless LANs as well as wired network connections that are accessible to common areas in your facility.
Utilizing the tips above can go a long way in strengthening network security, reach out to your account manager or contact us to find out more about strategies to strengthen your network.
By Kevin Dresser, Solutions Architect
Infoblox to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | @Infoblox #DataCenter #DNS #DDI #DX
Infoblox delivers Actionable Network Intelligence to enterprise, government, and service provider customers around the world. They are the industry leader in DNS, DHCP, and IP address management, the category known as DDI. We empower thousands of organizations to control and secure their networks from the core-enabling them to increase efficiency and visibility, improve customer service, and meet compliance requirements.
Yet more cloud shared responsibility misunderstanding apparent in new study
The clue is in the ‘shared’ part of shared responsibility: customers and providers have to work together to secure cloud data, yet new research shows two thirds of organisations polled export full responsibility for data protection, privacy and compliance on their cloud service providers.
The study, from Veritas, found that more than eight in 10 (83%) of the 1,200 global business and IT decision makers polled who plan to use infrastructure as a service (IaaS) believe their cloud service provider takes care of protecting their data in the cloud.
69% said they can place all responsibility for their data security in the provider’s hands, while more than half believe it is the cloud provider’s responsibility to securely transfer data between on-premises and cloud (54%) and back up workloads in the cloud (51%).
56% of those polled said they operate with a ‘cloud first’ mentality, compared to 43% who say they consider on-premises first before considering cloud. More than two thirds (67%) say they either already use or plan to use two or more cloud providers, with 42% at least aiming for three or more and 16% looking for five.
When it came to barriers against cloud implementation, lack of in house skills – cited by 38% of respondents – was most frequently cited, ahead of complexity with migration (37%) and limitations of legacy technology (36%). For factors which impacted cloud provider selection, data privacy, security and compliance, workload performance and uptime were key.
Yet the issues around what shared responsibility means have raised their head again. Let’s take Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, the two largest vendors, as an example.
“Security and compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer,” Amazon notes. “This shared model can help relieve customer’s operational burden as AWS operates, manages and controls the components from the host operating system and virtualisation layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which the service operates.
“The customer assumes responsibility and management of the guest operating system (including updates and security patches), other associated application software as well as the configuration of the AWS provided security group firewall.”
A post on Microsoft’s Azure security and compliance blog puts it this way. “Shared responsibility in public cloud is related to the fact that you have a partner when you host resources on a public cloud service provider’s infrastructure. Who is responsible for what (in terms of security) depends on the cloud service model you use.
“With IaaS, the cloud service provider is responsible for the core infrastructure security, which includes storage, networking and compute (at least at the fabric level – the physical level). As you move from IaaS, to PaaS and then to SaaS, you’ll find that you’re responsible for less and the cloud service provider is responsible for more.”
With GDPR on the horizon as well, businesses need to make sure they get this right. “Although cloud providers have a duty to ensure they help keep data secure and readily available, the ultimate responsibility of maintaining a compliance position with regulations such as GDPR lies with the organisation that owns the information,” said Jason Tooley, Veritas Northern Europe vice president.