Microsoft celebrates 62% Azure revenue growth


Thomas Dougherty

5 Feb, 2020

Revenue from Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering grew by 62% in the last three months of 2019, according to the company’s most recent earnings report. 

The company’s overarching intelligent cloud service – consisting of Azure and Enterprise Services – garnered $11.9 billion (£9.2 billion) in revenue last quarter, nearly a third of the its total figure of $36.9 billion (£28.3 billion).

Among its three operating groups, Microsoft’s cloud services experienced the most significant growth, with revenue increasing 27%. Revenue in its business and productivity division, which includes LinkedIn, rose 17% to a total of $11.8 billion (£9.1 billion). Personal computing earned $13.2 billion (£10.2 billion) – only a 2% increase from the prior quarter. 

Raymond James investment banking analyst Michael Turits credited Azure’s innovation and software updates for Microsoft’s quarterly success.

“Our Microsoft checks were strong this quarter, with the biggest improvement from resellers that were seeing an uptick in Office 365 E3 to E5 conversions, on increased interest in collaboration and integration of Microsoft Teams, and from security including EMS, Azure Active Directory and Azure Sentinel,” he said in a note to clients, as reported by Seeking Alpha. 

For years Azure has maintained consistent, upward revenue growth rates: its worst performing fiscal quarter in recent memory occurred between July and September 2019 (the company’s first fiscal quarter of 2020). Within this period however, the cloud service’s revenue still managed to jump 59%.

Although Azure is one of the fastest growing cloud computing services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates the field, controlling roughly a third of the cloud infrastructure market. Last quarter, AWS revenue alone grew 34%, according to Amazon’s most recent quarterly release.

Google Cloud trails far behind both Azure and AWS, although it is growing. In its first-ever public cloud revenue release, Alphabet reported Google Cloud’s revenue increased 53% last quarter, hitting $2.6 billion. 

Even though AWS prevails over both Azure and Google Cloud in terms of market share, it lags in profitability. Its revenue in calendar 2019 was $35 billion (£26.9 billion) in comparison to Microsoft’s $44.7 billion (£34.4 billion) – a 27.7% disparity in favor of Azure.

Samsung and Salesforce plough millions into blockchain company


Keumars Afifi-Sabet

5 Feb, 2020

The investment arms of tech heavyweights Samsung and Salesforce have invested millions of dollars into the blockchain company Digital Asset as part of a Series C funding round worth an initial $35 million. 

Digital Asset, which has created the open-source smart contract language DAML, will use the funds to accelerate its adoption across several industries, and raise the level of integrations. 

The Series C funding was revealed in December, but the particular investors were not disclosed at the time. The $35 million will also be used to fund new products that are designed to improve the developer experience with DAML. 

Meanwhile, the company has recruited Susan Hauser, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its worldwide enterprise and partner group, to its board of directors. Huaser had previously served as an advisor to Digital Asset while working with Microsoft, where she was in charge of partnerships across several industries in the public and private sector.

“Salesforce Ventures and Samsung joining our Series C financing round demonstrates the potential that technology giants see in DAML as the standard for smart contracts,” said Digital Asset co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz.

“Appointing Susan Hauser to the board will help us capitalise on this vision. She brings us her unparalleled understanding of customer needs and exceptional experience building an enterprise business at Microsoft.”

DAML was open-sourced by the company in 2019, and is used to create smart contracts and software that automates business processes, as well as digitally verify and enforce agreements between several parties.

The company offers integrations of DAML with partner platforms so other companies can develop their own versions of the blockchain-powered technology.

“We strongly believe that Digital Asset’s model to embed DAML in partner platforms fundamentally changes the entire blockchain market,” said a spokesperson from Samsung Venture Investment Corp.

“Digital Asset has positioned itself for success in the blockchain space and we are pleased to help it achieve its vision.”

Salesforce has previously shown a great deal of interest in pursuing blockchain-related ventures. The software company previously connected a low-code blockchain platform with its customer relationship management (CRM) suite in May 2019 to open up a host of new services for its customers. 

The firm, together with Microsoft, also hopped onto an open-source blockchain venture run by the Linux Foundation in June. The Hyperledger research initiative expanded its reach with a host of new members, and was working on 13 projects using the Hyperledger blockchain at the time that Salesforce and Microsoft had joined.

Amazon to help businesses develop custom voices for Alexa


Bobby Hellard

5 Feb, 2020

Businesses will be able to customise their own text-to-speech voice for Alexa, Amazon has announced.

KFC is one of the first to work with the company on the feature, developing a voice for Colonel Sanders that replies to customers instead of the default Alexa voice.

This is part of a new capability within Amazon Polly called ‘Brand Voice’. Polly is a department of AWS that comprises linguists and AI research scientists who build neural text-to-speech (NTTS) technology that can match the speaking styles of a person.

It uses deep learning models that can interpret intonation patterns from natural speech data and reproduce the acquired voice in a similar style or tone. The service has already been used by National Bank Australia, as well as KFC.

“The Colonel was passionate about his fried chicken and this new skill makes re-ordering your favourite KFC menu items easier than ever but in a fun and memorable way,” said Jason Cassidy, marketing director for KFC Canada.

AWS debuted a similar feature in September that allows users to set their Alexa device’s voice to that of Samual L Jackson. The American actor didn’t have to record hours of dialogue, though, as the NTTS models are able to translate audio recordings of his voice into natural-sounding responses.

For a more serious business perspective, Laurent De Segur, the general manager of digital at National Australia Bank, said that it would help improve the experience customers have when they contact its call centres.

“For that reason, it was also important that the voice we created using Amazon Polly Brand Voice felt both uniquely NAB and consistent with our position and what our customers expect when they call us,” he said.

Alexa has become a popular household feature via Amazon’s Echo smart speaker and the tech giant has also opened the service to businesses, with Alexa for Business‘ and a number of partnerships with large organisations, such as the NHS.

The top 10 cybersecurity companies to watch in 2020: How AI and ML is a key differentiator

AI, machine learning and the race to improve cybersecurity  

The majority of information security teams’ cybersecurity analysts are overwhelmed today analysing security logs, thwarting breach attempts, investigating potential fraud incidents and more. 69% of senior executives believe AI and machine learning are necessary to respond to cyberattacks according to the Capgemini study, Reinventing Cybersecurity with Artificial Intelligence.

The following graphic compares the percentage of organisations by industry who are relying on AI to improve their cybersecurity. 80% of telecommunications executives believe their organisation would not be able to respond to cyberattacks without AI, with the average being 69% of all enterprises across seven industries.

Worldwide spending on information security and risk management systems will reach $131B in 2020, increasing to $174B in 2022 approximately $50B will be dedicated to protecting the endpoint according to Gartner’s latest Information Security and Risk Management forecast. Cloud Security platform and application sales are predicted to grow from $636M in 2020 to $1.63B in 2023, attaining a 36.8% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) and leading all categories of Information & Security Risk Management systems. Application Security is forecast to grow from $3.4B in 2020 to $4.5B in 2023, attaining a 9.7% CAGR. Security Services is projected to be a $66.9B market this year, increasing from $62B in 2019. AI, Machine Learning And The Race To Improve Cybersecurity The majority of Information Security teams’ cybersecurity analysts are overwhelmed today analyzing security logs, thwarting breach attempts, investigating potential fraud incidents and more. 69% of senior executives believe AI and machine learning are necessary to respond to cyberattacks according to the Capgemini study, Reinventing Cybersecurity with Artificial Intelligence. The following graphic compares the percentage of organizations by industry who are relying on AI to improve their cybersecurity. 80% of telecommunications executives believe their organization would not be able to respond to cyberattacks without AI, with the average being 69% of all enterprises across seven industries. Top 10 Cybersecurity Companies To Watch In 2020 STATISTA The bottom line is all organizations have an urgent need to improve endpoint security and resilience, protect privileged access credentials, reduce fraudulent transactions, and secure every mobile device applying Zero Trust principles. Many are relying on AI and machine learning to determine if login and resource requests are legitimate or not based on past behavioral and system use patterns. Several of the top ten companies to watch take into account a diverse series of indicators to determine if a login attempt, transaction, or system resource request is legitimate or not. They’re able to assign a single score to a specific event and predict if it’s legitimate or not. Kount’s Omniscore is an example of how AI and ML are providing fraud analysts with insights needed to reduce false positives and improve customer buying experiences while thwarting fraud. The following are the top ten cybersecurity companies to watch in 2020: Absolute – Absolute serves as the industry benchmark for endpoint resilience, visibility and control. Embedded in over a half-billion devices, the company enables more than 12,000 customers with self-healing endpoint security, always-connected visibility into their devices, data, users, and applications – whether endpoints are on or off the corporate network – and the ultimate level of control and confidence required for the modern enterprise. To thwart attackers, organizations continue to layer on security controls — Gartner estimates that more than $174B will be spent on security by 2022, and of that approximately $50B will be dedicated protecting the endpoint. Absolute’s Endpoint Security Trends Report finds that in spite of the astronomical investments being made, 100 percent of endpoint controls eventually fail and more than one in three endpoints are unprotected at any given time. All of this has IT and security administrators grappling with increasing complexity and risk levels, while also facing mounting pressure to ensure endpoint controls maintain integrity, availability and functionality at all times, and deliver their intended value. Organizations need complete visibility and real-time insights in order to pinpoint the dark endpoints, identify what’s broken and where gaps exist, as well as respond and take action quickly. Absolute mitigates this universal law of security decay and empowers organizations to build an enterprise security approach that is intelligent, adaptive and self-healing. Rather than perpetuating a false sense of security, Absolute provides a single source of truth and the diamond image of resilience for endpoints. Centrify - Centrify is redefining the legacy approach to Privileged Access Management (PAM) with an Identity-Centric approach based on Zero Trust principles. Centrify’s 15-year history began in Active Directory (AD) bridging, and it was the first vendor to join UNIX and Linux systems with Active Directory, allowing for easy management of privileged identities across a heterogeneous environment. It then extended these capabilities to systems being hosted in IaaS environments like AWS and Microsoft Azure, and offered the industry’s first PAM-as-a-Service, which continues to be the only offering in the market with a true multi-tenant, cloud architecture. Applying its deep expertise in infrastructure allowed Centrify to redefine the legacy approach to PAM and introduce a server’s capability to self-defend against cyber threats across the ever-expanding modern enterprise infrastructure. Centrify Identity-Centric PAM establishes a root of trust for critical enterprise resources, and then grants least privilege access by verifying who is requesting access, the context of the request, and the risk of the access environment. By implementing least privilege access, Centrify minimizes the attack surface, improves audit and compliance visibility, and reduces risk, complexity, and costs for the modern, hybrid enterprise. Over half of the Fortune 100, the world’s largest financial institutions, intelligence agencies, and critical infrastructure companies, all trust Centrify to stop the leading cause of breaches – privileged credential abuse. Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2021, approximately 75% of large enterprises will utilize privileged access management products, up from approximately 50% in 2018 in their Forecast Analysis: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide, 4Q18 Update published March 29, 2019 (client access reqd). This is not surprising, considering that according to an estimate by Forrester Research, 80% of today’s breaches are caused by weak, default, stolen, or otherwise compromised privileged credentials. Deep Instinct – Deep Instinct applies artificial intelligence’s deep learning to cybersecurity. Leveraging deep learning’s predictive capabilities, Deep Instinct’s on-device solution protects against zero-day threats and APT attacks with unmatched accuracy. Deep Instinct safeguards the enterprise’s endpoints and/or any mobile devices against any threat, on any infrastructure, whether or not connected to the network or to the Internet. By applying deep learning technology to cybersecurity, enterprises can now gain unmatched protection against unknown and evasive cyber-attacks from any source. Deep Instinct brings a completely new approach to cybersecurity enabling cyber-attacks to be identified and blocked in real-time before any harm can occur. Deep Instinct USA is headquartered in San Francisco, CA and Deep Instinct Israel is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel. Infoblox - Infoblox empowers organizations to bring next-level simplicity, security, reliability and automation to traditional networks and digital transformations, such as SD-WAN, hybrid cloud and IoT. Combining next-level simplicity, security, reliability and automation, Infoblox is able to cut manual tasks by 70% and make organizations’ threat analysts 3x more productive. While their history is in DDI devices, they are succeeding in providing DDI and network security services on an as-a-service (-aaS) basis. Their BloxOne DDI application, built on their BloxOne cloud-native platform, helps enable IT, professionals, to manage their networks whether they're based on on-prem, cloud-based, or hybrid architectures. BloxOne Threat Defense application leverages the data provided by DDI to monitor network traffic, proactively identify threats, and quickly inform security systems and network managers of breaches, working with the existing security stack to identify and mitigate security threats quickly, automatically, and more efficiently. The BloxOne platform provides a secure, integrated platform for centralizing the management of identity data and services across the network. A recognized industry leader, Infoblox has a 52% market share in the DDI networking market comprised of 8,000 customers, including 59% of the Fortune 1000 and 58% of the Forbes 2000. Kount – Kount’s award-winning, AI-driven fraud prevention empowers digital businesses, online merchants, and payment service providers around the world to protect against payments fraud, new account creation fraud, and account takeover. With Kount, businesses approve more good orders, uncover new revenue streams, improve customer experience and dramatically improve their bottom line all while minimizing fraud management cost and losses. Through Kount’s global network and proprietary technologies in AI and machine learning, combined with flexible policy management, companies frustrate online criminals and bad actors driving them away from their site, their marketplace, and off their network. Kount’s continuously adaptive platform provides certainty for businesses at every digital interaction. Kount’s advances in both proprietary techniques and patented technology include mobile fraud detection, advanced artificial intelligence, multi-layer device fingerprinting, IP proxy detection and geo-location, transaction and custom scoring, global order linking, business intelligence reporting, comprehensive order management, as well as professional and managed services. Kount protects over 6,500 brands today. Mimecast – Mimecast improves the way companies manage confidential, mission-critical business communication and data. The company's mission is to reduce the risks users face from email, and support in reducing the cost and complexity of protecting users by moving the workload to the cloud. The company develops proprietary cloud architecture to deliver comprehensive email security, service continuity, and archiving in a single subscription service. Its goal is to make it easier for people to protect a business in today’s fast-changing security and risk environment. The company expanded its technology portfolio in 2019 through a pair of acquisitions, buying data migration technology provider Simply Migrate to help customers and prospects move to the cloud more quickly, reliably, and inexpensively. Mimecast also purchased email security startup DMARC Analyzer to reduce the time, effort, and cost associated with stopping domain spoofing attacks. Mimecast acquired Segasec earlier this month, a leading provider of digital threat protection. With the acquisition of Segasec, Mimecast can provide brand exploit protection, using machine learning to identify potential hackers at the earliest stages of an attack. The solution also is engineered to provide a way to actively monitor, manage, block, and take down phishing scams or impersonation attempts on the Web. MobileIron – A long-time leader in mobile management solutions, MobileIron is widely recognized by Chief Information Security Officers, CIOs and senior management teams as the de facto standard for unified endpoint management (UEM), mobile application management (MAM), BYOD security, and zero sign-on (ZSO). The company’s UEM platform is strengthened by MobileIron Threat Defense and MobileIron’s Access solution, which allows for zero sign-on authentication. Forrester observes in their latest Wave on Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers, Q4 2019 that “MobileIron’s recently released authenticator, which enables passwordless authentication to cloud services, is a must for future-state Zero Trust enterprises and speaks to its innovation in this space.” The Wave also illustrates that MobileIron is the most noteworthy vendor as their approach to Zero Trust begins with the device and scales across mobile infrastructures. MobileIron’s product suite also includes a federated policy engine that enables administrators to control and better command the myriad of devices and endpoints that enterprises rely on today. Forrester sees MobileIron as having excellent integration at the platform level, a key determinant of how effective they will be in providing support to enterprises pursuing Zero Trust Security strategies in the future. One Identity – One Identity is differentiating its Identity Manager identity analytics and risk scoring capabilities with greater integration via its connected system modules. The goal of these modules is to provide customers with more flexibility in defining reports that include application-specific content. Identity Manager also has over 30 direct provisioning connectors included in the base package, with good platform coverage, including strong Microsoft and Office 365 support. Additional premium connectors are charged separately. One Identity also has a separate cloud-architected SaaS solution called One Identity Starling. One of Starling’s greatest benefits is its design that allows for it to be used not only by Identity Manager clients, but also by clients of other IGA solutions as a simplified approach to obtain SaaS-based identity analytics, risk intelligence, and cloud provisioning. One Identity and its approach is trusted by customers worldwide, where more than 7,500 organizations worldwide depend on One Identity solutions to manage more than 125 million identities, enhancing their agility and efficiency while securing access to their systems and data – on-prem, cloud, or hybrid. SECURITI.ai - SECURITI.ai is the leader in AI-Powered PrivacyOps, that helps automate all major functions needed for privacy compliance in one place. It enables enterprises to give rights to people on their data, be responsible custodians of people’s data, comply with global privacy regulations like CCPA and bolster their brands. The AI-Powered PrivacyOps platform is a full-stack solution that operationalizes and simplifies privacy compliance using robotic automation and a natural language interface. These include a Personal Data Graph Builder, Robotic Automation for Data Subject Requests, Secure Data Request Portal, Consent Lifecycle Manager, Third-Party Privacy Assessment, Third-Party Privacy Ratings, Privacy Assessment Automation and Breach Management. SECURITI.ai is also featured in the Consent Management section of Bessemer’s Data Privacy Stack shown below and available in Bessemer Venture Partner’s recent publication How data privacy engineering will prevent future data oil spills (10 pp., PDF, no opt-in). Top 10 Cybersecurity Companies To Watch In 2020 SOURCE: BESSEMER VENTURE PARTNERS, HOW DATA PRIVACY ENGINEERING WILL PREVENT FUTURE DATA OIL SPILLS , SEPTEMBER, 2019. (10 PP., PDF, NO OPT-IN). Transmit Security - The Transmit Security Platform provides a solution for managing identity across applications while maintaining security and usability. As criminal threats evolve, online authentication has become reactive and less effective. Many organizations have taken on multiple point solutions to try to stay ahead, deploying new authenticators, risk engines, and fraud tools. In the process, the customer experience has suffered. And with an increasingly complex environment, many enterprises struggle with the ability to rapidly innovate to provide customers with an omnichannel experience that enables them to stay ahead of emerging threats.

The bottom line is all organisations have an urgent need to improve endpoint security and resilience, protect privileged access credentials, reduce fraudulent transactions, and secure every mobile device applying Zero Trust principles. Many are relying on AI and machine learning to determine if login and resource requests are legitimate or not based on past behavioral and system use patterns.

Several of the top 10 companies to watch take into account a diverse series of indicators to determine if a login attempt, transaction, or system resource request is legitimate or not. They’re able to assign a single score to a specific event and predict if it’s legitimate or not. Kount’s Omniscore is an example of how AI and ML are providing fraud analysts with insights needed to reduce false positives and improve customer buying experiences while thwarting fraud.

The following are the top ten cybersecurity companies to watch in 2020:

Absolute

Absolute serves as the industry benchmark for endpoint resilience, visibility and control. Embedded in over a half-billion devices, the company enables more than 12,000 customers with self-healing endpoint security, always-connected visibility into their devices, data, users, and applications – whether endpoints are on or off the corporate network – and the ultimate level of control and confidence required for the modern enterprise.

To thwart attackers, organisations continue to layer on security controls — Gartner estimates that more than $174B will be spent on security by 2022, and of that approximately $50B will be dedicated protecting the endpoint. Absolute’s Endpoint Security Trends Report finds that in spite of the astronomical investments being made, 100 percent of endpoint controls eventually fail and more than one in three endpoints are unprotected at any given time.

All of this has IT and security administrators grappling with increasing complexity and risk levels, while also facing mounting pressure to ensure endpoint controls maintain integrity, availability and functionality at all times, and deliver their intended value.

Organisations need complete visibility and real-time insights in order to pinpoint the dark endpoints, identify what’s broken and where gaps exist, as well as respond and take action quickly. Absolute mitigates this universal law of security decay and empowers organisations to build an enterprise security approach that is intelligent, adaptive and self-healing. Rather than perpetuating a false sense of security, Absolute provides a single source of truth and the diamond image of resilience for endpoints.

Centrify

Centrify is redefining the legacy approach to Privileged Access Management (PAM) with an Identity-Centric approach based on Zero Trust principles.

Centrify’s 15-year history began in Active Directory (AD) bridging, and it was the first vendor to join UNIX and Linux systems with Active Directory, allowing for easy management of privileged identities across a heterogeneous environment. It then extended these capabilities to systems being hosted in IaaS environments like AWS and Microsoft Azure, and offered the industry’s first PAM-as-a-Service, which continues to be the only offering in the market with a true multi-tenant, cloud architecture.

Applying its deep expertise in infrastructure allowed Centrify to redefine the legacy approach to PAM and introduce a server’s capability to self-defend against cyber threats across the ever-expanding modern enterprise infrastructure.

Centrify Identity-Centric PAM establishes a root of trust for critical enterprise resources, and then grants least privilege access by verifying who is requesting access, the context of the request, and the risk of the access environment. By implementing least privilege access, Centrify minimises the attack surface, improves audit and compliance visibility, and reduces risk, complexity, and costs for the modern, hybrid enterprise. Over half of the Fortune 100, the world’s largest financial institutions, intelligence agencies, and critical infrastructure companies, all trust Centrify to stop the leading cause of breaches – privileged credential abuse.

Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2021, approximately 75% of large enterprises will utilise privileged access management products, up from approximately 50% in 2018 in their Forecast Analysis: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide, 4Q18 Update published March 29, 2019 (client access reqd). This is not surprising, considering that according to an estimate by Forrester Research, 80% of today’s breaches are caused by weak, default, stolen, or otherwise compromised privileged credentials.

Deep Instinct

Deep Instinct applies artificial intelligence’s deep learning to cybersecurity. Leveraging deep learning’s predictive capabilities, Deep Instinct’s on-device solution protects against zero-day threats and APT attacks with unmatched accuracy. Deep Instinct safeguards the enterprise’s endpoints and/or any mobile devices against any threat, on any infrastructure, whether or not connected to the network or to the Internet.

By applying deep learning technology to cybersecurity, enterprises can now gain unmatched protection against unknown and evasive cyber-attacks from any source. Deep Instinct brings a completely new approach to cybersecurity enabling cyber-attacks to be identified and blocked in real-time before any harm can occur. Deep Instinct USA is headquartered in San Francisco, CA and Deep Instinct Israel is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Infoblox

Infoblox empowers organisations to bring next-level simplicity, security, reliability and automation to traditional networks and digital transformations, such as SD-WAN, hybrid cloud and IoT. Combining next-level simplicity, security, reliability, and automation, Infoblox can cut manual tasks by 70% and make organisations’ threat analysts 3x more productive.

While their history is in DDI devices, they are succeeding in providing DDI and network security services on an as-a-service (-aaS) basis. Their BloxOne DDI  application, built on their BloxOne cloud-native platform, helps enable IT professionals to manage their networks, whether they’re based on on-prem, cloud-based, or hybrid architectures.  BloxOne Threat Defense  application leverages the data provided by DDI to monitor network traffic, proactively identify threats, and quickly inform security systems and network managers of breaches, working with the existing security stack to identify and mitigate security threats quickly, automatically, and more efficiently. The BloxOne platform provides a secure, integrated platform for centralising the management of identity data and services across the network. A recognised industry leader, Infoblox has a 52% market share in the DDI networking market comprised of 8,000 customers, including 59% of the Fortune 1000 and 58% of the Forbes 2000.

Kount

Kount’s award-winning, AI-driven fraud prevention empowers digital businesses, online merchants, and payment service providers around the world to protect against payments fraud, new account creation fraud, and account takeover. With Kount, businesses approve more good orders, uncover new revenue streams, improve customer experience, and dramatically improve their bottom line all while minimising fraud management cost and losses. Through Kount’s global network and proprietary technologies in AI and machine learning, combined with flexible policy management, companies frustrate online criminals and bad actors driving them away from their site, their marketplace, and off their network. Kount’s continuously adaptive platform provides certainty for businesses at every digital interaction. Kount’s advances in both proprietary techniques and patented technology include mobile fraud detection, advanced artificial intelligence, multi-layer device fingerprinting, IP proxy detection and geo-location, transaction and custom scoring, global order linking, business intelligence reporting, comprehensive order management, as well as professional and managed services. Kount protects over 6,500 brands today.

Mimecast

Mimecast improves the way companies manage confidential, mission-critical business communication and data. The company’s mission is to reduce the risks users face from email, and support in reducing the cost and complexity of protecting users by moving the workload to the cloud.

The company develops proprietary cloud architecture to deliver comprehensive email security, service continuity, and archiving in a single subscription service. Its goal is to make it easier for people to protect a business in today’s fast-changing security and risk environment. The company expanded its technology portfolio in 2019 through a pair of acquisitions, buying data migration technology provider Simply Migrate to help customers and prospects move to the cloud more quickly, reliably, and inexpensively. Mimecast also purchased email security startup DMARC Analyser to reduce the time, effort, and cost associated with stopping domain spoofing attacks.

Mimecast acquired Segasec earlier this month, a leading provider of digital threat protection. With the acquisition of Segasec, Mimecast can provide brand exploit protection, using machine learning to identify potential hackers at the earliest stages of an attack. The solution also is engineered to provide a way to actively monitor, manage, block, and take down phishing scams or impersonation attempts on the Web.

MobileIron

A long-time leader in mobile management solutions, MobileIron is widely recognised by Chief Information Security Officers, CIOs and senior management teams as the de facto standard for unified endpoint management (UEM), mobile application management (MAM), BYOD security, and zero sign-on (ZSO).

The company’s UEM platform is strengthened by MobileIron Threat Defense and MobileIron’s Access solution, which allows for zero sign-on authentication. Forrester observes in their latest Wave on Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers, Q4 2019 that “MobileIron’s recently released authenticator, which enables passwordless authentication to cloud services, is a must for future-state Zero Trust enterprises and speaks to its innovation in this space.” 

The Wave also illustrates that MobileIron is the most noteworthy vendor as their approach to Zero Trust begins with the device and scales across mobile infrastructures. MobileIron’s product suite also includes a federated policy engine that enables administrators to control and better command the myriad of devices and endpoints that enterprises rely on today. Forrester sees MobileIron as having excellent integration at the platform level, a key determinant of how effective they will be in providing support to enterprises pursuing Zero Trust Security strategies in the future.

One Identity

One Identity is differentiating its Identity Manager identity analytics and risk scoring capabilities with greater integration via its connected system modules. The goal of these modules is to provide customers with more flexibility in defining reports that include application-specific content. Identity Manager also has over 30 direct provisioning connectors included in the base package, with good platform coverage, including strong Microsoft and Office 365 support.

Additional premium connectors are charged separately. One Identity also has a separate cloud-architected SaaS solution called One Identity Starling. One of Starling’s greatest benefits is its design that allows for it to be used not only by Identity Manager clients, but also by clients of other IGA solutions as a simplified approach to obtain SaaS-based identity analytics, risk intelligence, and cloud provisioning.

One Identity and its approach is trusted by customers worldwide, where more than 7,500 organisations worldwide depend on One Identity solutions to manage more than 125 million identities, enhancing their agility and efficiency while securing access to their systems and data – on-prem, cloud, or hybrid.

SECURITI.ai

SECURITI.ai is the leader in AI-Powered PrivacyOps, that helps automate all major functions needed for privacy compliance in one place. It enables enterprises to give rights to people on their data, be responsible custodians of people’s data, comply with global privacy regulations like CCPA, and bolster their brands.

The AI-Powered PrivacyOps platform is a full-stack solution that operationalises and simplifies privacy compliance using robotic automation and a natural language interface. These include a Personal Data Graph Builder, Robotic Automation for Data Subject Requests, Secure Data Request Portal, Consent Lifecycle Manager, Third-Party Privacy Assessment, Third-Party Privacy Ratings, Privacy Assessment Automation and Breach Management. SECURITI.ai is also featured in the Consent Management section of Bessemer’s Data Privacy Stack shown below and available in Bessemer Venture Partner’s recent publication How data privacy engineering will prevent future data oil spills (10 pp., PDF, no opt-in).

Worldwide spending on information security and risk management systems will reach $131B in 2020, increasing to $174B in 2022 approximately $50B will be dedicated to protecting the endpoint according to Gartner’s latest Information Security and Risk Management forecast. Cloud Security platform and application sales are predicted to grow from $636M in 2020 to $1.63B in 2023, attaining a 36.8% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) and leading all categories of Information & Security Risk Management systems. Application Security is forecast to grow from $3.4B in 2020 to $4.5B in 2023, attaining a 9.7% CAGR. Security Services is projected to be a $66.9B market this year, increasing from $62B in 2019. AI, Machine Learning And The Race To Improve Cybersecurity The majority of Information Security teams’ cybersecurity analysts are overwhelmed today analyzing security logs, thwarting breach attempts, investigating potential fraud incidents and more. 69% of senior executives believe AI and machine learning are necessary to respond to cyberattacks according to the Capgemini study, Reinventing Cybersecurity with Artificial Intelligence. The following graphic compares the percentage of organizations by industry who are relying on AI to improve their cybersecurity. 80% of telecommunications executives believe their organization would not be able to respond to cyberattacks without AI, with the average being 69% of all enterprises across seven industries. Top 10 Cybersecurity Companies To Watch In 2020 STATISTA The bottom line is all organizations have an urgent need to improve endpoint security and resilience, protect privileged access credentials, reduce fraudulent transactions, and secure every mobile device applying Zero Trust principles. Many are relying on AI and machine learning to determine if login and resource requests are legitimate or not based on past behavioral and system use patterns. Several of the top ten companies to watch take into account a diverse series of indicators to determine if a login attempt, transaction, or system resource request is legitimate or not. They’re able to assign a single score to a specific event and predict if it’s legitimate or not. Kount’s Omniscore is an example of how AI and ML are providing fraud analysts with insights needed to reduce false positives and improve customer buying experiences while thwarting fraud. The following are the top ten cybersecurity companies to watch in 2020: Absolute – Absolute serves as the industry benchmark for endpoint resilience, visibility and control. Embedded in over a half-billion devices, the company enables more than 12,000 customers with self-healing endpoint security, always-connected visibility into their devices, data, users, and applications – whether endpoints are on or off the corporate network – and the ultimate level of control and confidence required for the modern enterprise. To thwart attackers, organizations continue to layer on security controls — Gartner estimates that more than $174B will be spent on security by 2022, and of that approximately $50B will be dedicated protecting the endpoint. Absolute’s Endpoint Security Trends Report finds that in spite of the astronomical investments being made, 100 percent of endpoint controls eventually fail and more than one in three endpoints are unprotected at any given time. All of this has IT and security administrators grappling with increasing complexity and risk levels, while also facing mounting pressure to ensure endpoint controls maintain integrity, availability and functionality at all times, and deliver their intended value. Organizations need complete visibility and real-time insights in order to pinpoint the dark endpoints, identify what’s broken and where gaps exist, as well as respond and take action quickly. Absolute mitigates this universal law of security decay and empowers organizations to build an enterprise security approach that is intelligent, adaptive and self-healing. Rather than perpetuating a false sense of security, Absolute provides a single source of truth and the diamond image of resilience for endpoints. Centrify - Centrify is redefining the legacy approach to Privileged Access Management (PAM) with an Identity-Centric approach based on Zero Trust principles. Centrify’s 15-year history began in Active Directory (AD) bridging, and it was the first vendor to join UNIX and Linux systems with Active Directory, allowing for easy management of privileged identities across a heterogeneous environment. It then extended these capabilities to systems being hosted in IaaS environments like AWS and Microsoft Azure, and offered the industry’s first PAM-as-a-Service, which continues to be the only offering in the market with a true multi-tenant, cloud architecture. Applying its deep expertise in infrastructure allowed Centrify to redefine the legacy approach to PAM and introduce a server’s capability to self-defend against cyber threats across the ever-expanding modern enterprise infrastructure. Centrify Identity-Centric PAM establishes a root of trust for critical enterprise resources, and then grants least privilege access by verifying who is requesting access, the context of the request, and the risk of the access environment. By implementing least privilege access, Centrify minimizes the attack surface, improves audit and compliance visibility, and reduces risk, complexity, and costs for the modern, hybrid enterprise. Over half of the Fortune 100, the world’s largest financial institutions, intelligence agencies, and critical infrastructure companies, all trust Centrify to stop the leading cause of breaches – privileged credential abuse. Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2021, approximately 75% of large enterprises will utilize privileged access management products, up from approximately 50% in 2018 in their Forecast Analysis: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide, 4Q18 Update published March 29, 2019 (client access reqd). This is not surprising, considering that according to an estimate by Forrester Research, 80% of today’s breaches are caused by weak, default, stolen, or otherwise compromised privileged credentials. Deep Instinct – Deep Instinct applies artificial intelligence’s deep learning to cybersecurity. Leveraging deep learning’s predictive capabilities, Deep Instinct’s on-device solution protects against zero-day threats and APT attacks with unmatched accuracy. Deep Instinct safeguards the enterprise’s endpoints and/or any mobile devices against any threat, on any infrastructure, whether or not connected to the network or to the Internet. By applying deep learning technology to cybersecurity, enterprises can now gain unmatched protection against unknown and evasive cyber-attacks from any source. Deep Instinct brings a completely new approach to cybersecurity enabling cyber-attacks to be identified and blocked in real-time before any harm can occur. Deep Instinct USA is headquartered in San Francisco, CA and Deep Instinct Israel is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel. Infoblox - Infoblox empowers organizations to bring next-level simplicity, security, reliability and automation to traditional networks and digital transformations, such as SD-WAN, hybrid cloud and IoT. Combining next-level simplicity, security, reliability and automation, Infoblox is able to cut manual tasks by 70% and make organizations’ threat analysts 3x more productive. While their history is in DDI devices, they are succeeding in providing DDI and network security services on an as-a-service (-aaS) basis. Their BloxOne DDI application, built on their BloxOne cloud-native platform, helps enable IT, professionals, to manage their networks whether they're based on on-prem, cloud-based, or hybrid architectures. BloxOne Threat Defense application leverages the data provided by DDI to monitor network traffic, proactively identify threats, and quickly inform security systems and network managers of breaches, working with the existing security stack to identify and mitigate security threats quickly, automatically, and more efficiently. The BloxOne platform provides a secure, integrated platform for centralizing the management of identity data and services across the network. A recognized industry leader, Infoblox has a 52% market share in the DDI networking market comprised of 8,000 customers, including 59% of the Fortune 1000 and 58% of the Forbes 2000. Kount – Kount’s award-winning, AI-driven fraud prevention empowers digital businesses, online merchants, and payment service providers around the world to protect against payments fraud, new account creation fraud, and account takeover. With Kount, businesses approve more good orders, uncover new revenue streams, improve customer experience and dramatically improve their bottom line all while minimizing fraud management cost and losses. Through Kount’s global network and proprietary technologies in AI and machine learning, combined with flexible policy management, companies frustrate online criminals and bad actors driving them away from their site, their marketplace, and off their network. Kount’s continuously adaptive platform provides certainty for businesses at every digital interaction. Kount’s advances in both proprietary techniques and patented technology include mobile fraud detection, advanced artificial intelligence, multi-layer device fingerprinting, IP proxy detection and geo-location, transaction and custom scoring, global order linking, business intelligence reporting, comprehensive order management, as well as professional and managed services. Kount protects over 6,500 brands today. Mimecast – Mimecast improves the way companies manage confidential, mission-critical business communication and data. The company's mission is to reduce the risks users face from email, and support in reducing the cost and complexity of protecting users by moving the workload to the cloud. The company develops proprietary cloud architecture to deliver comprehensive email security, service continuity, and archiving in a single subscription service. Its goal is to make it easier for people to protect a business in today’s fast-changing security and risk environment. The company expanded its technology portfolio in 2019 through a pair of acquisitions, buying data migration technology provider Simply Migrate to help customers and prospects move to the cloud more quickly, reliably, and inexpensively. Mimecast also purchased email security startup DMARC Analyzer to reduce the time, effort, and cost associated with stopping domain spoofing attacks. Mimecast acquired Segasec earlier this month, a leading provider of digital threat protection. With the acquisition of Segasec, Mimecast can provide brand exploit protection, using machine learning to identify potential hackers at the earliest stages of an attack. The solution also is engineered to provide a way to actively monitor, manage, block, and take down phishing scams or impersonation attempts on the Web. MobileIron – A long-time leader in mobile management solutions, MobileIron is widely recognized by Chief Information Security Officers, CIOs and senior management teams as the de facto standard for unified endpoint management (UEM), mobile application management (MAM), BYOD security, and zero sign-on (ZSO). The company’s UEM platform is strengthened by MobileIron Threat Defense and MobileIron’s Access solution, which allows for zero sign-on authentication. Forrester observes in their latest Wave on Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers, Q4 2019 that “MobileIron’s recently released authenticator, which enables passwordless authentication to cloud services, is a must for future-state Zero Trust enterprises and speaks to its innovation in this space.” The Wave also illustrates that MobileIron is the most noteworthy vendor as their approach to Zero Trust begins with the device and scales across mobile infrastructures. MobileIron’s product suite also includes a federated policy engine that enables administrators to control and better command the myriad of devices and endpoints that enterprises rely on today. Forrester sees MobileIron as having excellent integration at the platform level, a key determinant of how effective they will be in providing support to enterprises pursuing Zero Trust Security strategies in the future. One Identity – One Identity is differentiating its Identity Manager identity analytics and risk scoring capabilities with greater integration via its connected system modules. The goal of these modules is to provide customers with more flexibility in defining reports that include application-specific content. Identity Manager also has over 30 direct provisioning connectors included in the base package, with good platform coverage, including strong Microsoft and Office 365 support. Additional premium connectors are charged separately. One Identity also has a separate cloud-architected SaaS solution called One Identity Starling. One of Starling’s greatest benefits is its design that allows for it to be used not only by Identity Manager clients, but also by clients of other IGA solutions as a simplified approach to obtain SaaS-based identity analytics, risk intelligence, and cloud provisioning. One Identity and its approach is trusted by customers worldwide, where more than 7,500 organizations worldwide depend on One Identity solutions to manage more than 125 million identities, enhancing their agility and efficiency while securing access to their systems and data – on-prem, cloud, or hybrid. SECURITI.ai - SECURITI.ai is the leader in AI-Powered PrivacyOps, that helps automate all major functions needed for privacy compliance in one place. It enables enterprises to give rights to people on their data, be responsible custodians of people’s data, comply with global privacy regulations like CCPA and bolster their brands. The AI-Powered PrivacyOps platform is a full-stack solution that operationalizes and simplifies privacy compliance using robotic automation and a natural language interface. These include a Personal Data Graph Builder, Robotic Automation for Data Subject Requests, Secure Data Request Portal, Consent Lifecycle Manager, Third-Party Privacy Assessment, Third-Party Privacy Ratings, Privacy Assessment Automation and Breach Management. SECURITI.ai is also featured in the Consent Management section of Bessemer’s Data Privacy Stack shown below and available in Bessemer Venture Partner’s recent publication How data privacy engineering will prevent future data oil spills (10 pp., PDF, no opt-in). Top 10 Cybersecurity Companies To Watch In 2020 SOURCE: BESSEMER VENTURE PARTNERS, HOW DATA PRIVACY ENGINEERING WILL PREVENT FUTURE DATA OIL SPILLS , SEPTEMBER, 2019. (10 PP., PDF, NO OPT-IN). Transmit Security - The Transmit Security Platform provides a solution for managing identity across applications while maintaining security and usability. As criminal threats evolve, online authentication has become reactive and less effective. Many organizations have taken on multiple point solutions to try to stay ahead, deploying new authenticators, risk engines, and fraud tools. In the process, the customer experience has suffered. And with an increasingly complex environment, many enterprises struggle with the ability to rapidly innovate to provide customers with an omnichannel experience that enables them to stay ahead of emerging threats.

Transmit Security

The Transmit Security Platform provides a solution for managing identity across applications while maintaining security and usability. As criminal threats evolve, online authentication has become reactive and less effective. Many organisations have taken on multiple point solutions to try to stay ahead, deploying new authenticators, risk engines, and fraud tools. In the process, the customer experience has suffered.

With an increasingly complex environment, many enterprises struggle with the ability to rapidly innovate to provide customers with an omnichannel experience that enables them to stay ahead of emerging threats.

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HPE snaps up edge-to-cloud security startup Scytale


Bobby Hellard

4 Feb, 2020

HPE is building on its edge to cloud security strategy by snapping up Scytale, an open-source security platform that runs across on-premise, cloud and container-based infrastructure.

Scytale is a San Francisco-based startup that looks at application-to-application identity and access management.

The company was founded in 2017 by Sunil James, Emiliano Berenbaum, and Andrew Jessup. The three co-founders have built up a workforce hailing from cloud-native enterprises like AWS, Duo Security, Google, Okta, PagerDuty and Splunk.

Scytale is also recognised as the founding contributor of the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and SPIFFE Runtime Environment, along with other open-source projects under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Announcing the purchase on Monday, David Husak, GM of HPE’s Cloudless Initiative, said that security will continue to play a fundamental role as the company progresses into its edge to cloud platform as a service strategy. Financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

“We recognise that every organisation that operates in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment requires 100% secure, zero trust systems, that can dynamically identify and authenticate data and applications in real-time,” Husak said in a blog post.

“We also recognise that the open-source community, which every day advances an endless array of projects designed for an open, multi-cloud, micro-services driven world, are at the forefront of writing code that delivers true zero trusts, highly secure systems.”

Scytale founder Sunil James said that he met with Antonio Neri before he became HPE’s CEO and that a discussion between the two left him with a stronger understanding of the company’s deep roots in helping customers bridge complex enterprise IT infrastructure.

“This understanding was reinforced last year when I met Dave Husak and Dave Larson (I call them ‘the Daves’), two leaders within Hewlett Packard Labs,” James wrote.

“Scytale’s DNA is security, distributed systems, and open-source. Under HPE, Scytale will continue to help steward SPIFFE. Our ever-growing and vocal community will lead us. We’ll toil to maintain this transparent and vendor-neutral project, which will be fundamental in HPE’s plans to deliver a dynamic, open, and secure edge-to-cloud platform.”

Oracle broadens geographic reach with five new cloud data centres


Sabina Weston

4 Feb, 2020

Oracle is expanding its cloud data centre footprint in a bid to draw in customers by providing them with data sovereignty.

The corporation announced on Monday that it has successfully added cloud data centres in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and has expanded on existing centres in Japan, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands.

This falls into Oracle’s plan to open 36 locations by the end of 2020, which it hopes will broaden its target audience. In the UK, it is scheduled to open a cloud data centre in Newport, Wales, as well as a public sector facility in London.

In comparison, AWS plans to add five more regions and 16 availability zones. It currently holds 22 regions and 69 zones.

Oracle aims to have data centres in at least two physically separate locations (or “availability zones”) in each country where it operates – one primary location and one as a backup. This means that the newly added cloud data centre in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, will be joined by a second location this year, while new regions in Osaka, Melbourne, Montreal, and Amsterdam, are all functioning as a second sites.

“Customers have told us that to run critical systems of record in the cloud, they need to run workloads across fully independent cloud regions for disaster recovery purposes,” Oracle’s director of product management Andrew Reichman explained in a blog post.

“They also told us that those multiple sites must be in the same country to meet data residency requirements,” he wrote, referring to the data privacy regulations, such as those recently introduced by the European Union, which obligate many businesses to retain data in the country where it was generated.

The data centres are part of the second generation of Oracle’s cloud systems, allowing customers to rent their capacity. The company’s focus to expand its range of cloud data centre locations comes after its CEO pledged that Oracle’s cloud system is uniquely positioned to help businesses overcome challenges.

Google Cloud secures $2.6bn quarterly revenues at 53% growth as Alphabet reveals all for first time

Google Cloud hit $2.6 billion (£2bn) in revenues for the fourth quarter of 2019 with a more than $10bn run rate, as parent company Alphabet divulged various individual business figures for the first time.

The cloud business grew 53% year on year, according to CEO Sundar Pichai, with strong uptake noted in multi-cloud offering Anthos and growth in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) moving faster than the wider cloud business.

“We are very confident that there is an enormous opportunity here that plays to our core strengths,” Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat said in prepared remarks. “We’re pleased with the growth trajectory of GCP, which we see in customer momentum, the growing size of the average contract, and of course, revenues.”

Previously, cloud revenues were tucked in under the ‘other’ revenues bucket. For Q3, this totalled $6.42bn at an increase of 38.5% year over year. This time around, other revenues – not including cloud but including YouTube non-advertising revenues – were at $5.26bn. Combined with Google Cloud, this totals at $7.88bn, with cloud revenues comprising precisely one third of other revenues.

It was this time last year that Pichai noted the number of cloud deals exceeding $1 million had ‘more than doubled’ in the preceding 12 months. 2019 saw calls for Google to divulge specific numbers, with the company insisting the time needed to be right.

So why is the time right now? Responding to analyst questions, Pichai noted the roadmap under CEO Thomas Kurian, focusing on specific industry verticals and strong sales expertise, enabled change. As this publication mused last month, Google is playing a long game in cloud and, much like Microsoft, is trying to attract deeper integrations across infrastructure and, crucially, software.

“I think the progress I’ve seen in our customer focus, with our customer success organisation and the contracting framework, have all been great progress for us,” said Pichai. “Especially in one of these larger deals, [customers] are effectively looking for a technology partner. So differentiation is not just what we bring to the table in terms of cloud, where we have differentiated capabilities, but in many cases, it’s what we bring as Google.”

Google Cloud sees its key industries targeted as retail, healthcare, and financial services, while it sees five areas of differentiation. As Kurian put it this time last year in his first major speaking engagement, these were security and reliability for mission critical applications; hybrid and multi-cloud; AI solutions; ‘vastly different’ capabilities for managing data at scale, and ‘integrating a number of Google’s technology advances with Cloud to deliver industry solutions.’

On the retail side, in what was a very busy quarter for Google, partnerships with Lowe’s and Wayfair were announced at the NRF event. Travel is another industry which Google is targeting; last month the company secured airline Lufthansa, as well as a 10-year contract with Sabre, a provider of software for travel firms. Alongside this, Google Cloud announced a partnership with Indian telco Bharti Airtel in an echo of a deal Microsoft Azure announced with Reliance Jio in 2019, as well as launching a new enterprise support offering, and acquiring VMware specialist CloudSimple.

According to figures published overnight by Synergy Research, the needle has barely moved from the most recent quarterly results. Amazon Web Services (AWS), which recorded $9.95bn revenues in its last quarter, maintains 33% of the overall market, ahead of Microsoft (18%), Google (8%), and IBM (6%). Synergy added that, predominantly due to the growth of AWS and Microsoft, the cloud infrastructure services market had doubled in 2019 compared with 2017.

You can read Alphabet’s full financial report here (pdf).

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Telepresence for small businesses on a budget


Nik Rawlinson

4 Feb, 2020

The old ways of working don’t work any more. Now that fast broadband is the norm, city-centre offices are an expensive luxury. New starters fully understand the benefits of remote working and are often put off by traditional cultures of “presenteeism”, where bosses demand that staff be physically on site just to keep an eye on them.

That sort of attitude isn’t merely unhelpful – it’s counterproductive. A study by Stanford University’s Nicholas Bloom split 500 staff into two groups: a control group who continued to work from the offices of a Chinese travel agency, and an equal number who worked from home. Bloom observed that those based at home routinely worked longer hours than those in the office, while taking fewer sick days – and they were 50% more likely to stay with the company. At the same time, smaller offices enabled the agency to save $2,000 per head every year.

The challenge that remains is communication. When staff aren’t in the same building, they need ways of communicating as easily as possible. That’s led to a growth of telepresence services and hardware, but until recently the cost has put these out of reach of smaller businesses.

Today, small firms that haven’t been able to invest in telepresence facilities find themselves in an enviable position. There’s a boom in free or low-cost solutions that are resource-light and feature-rich. Open standards are driving increased competition and direct integration, with software and services already in use in businesses around the world. And with no existing investment in proprietary on-site equipment, there is no imperative for small companies to continue with their current solution until it’s been fully depreciated – or until the board can be convinced to sign off on its replacement.

It’s possible to set up telepresence facilities within a small business at no cost, and without a dedicated team to oversee its roll-out and maintenance. For those that decide that a paid-for solution is the best option, meanwhile, the savings made in rent, travel, staff turnover and sickness could well see those costs recouped in short order.

Here are some of the best free and low-cost solutions for bringing a diverse, remote workforce together.

3CX

The most flexible of these solutions are provided by companies for whom messaging and presence are just part of a wider offering. Office and Windows are Microsoft’s cash cows; social networking is how Facebook makes its money. However, 3CX is different. Its core focus is a unified communications system built largely on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which underpins most VoIP applications. Its service can live in the cloud or on-premise, running under Windows or Linux. It can even be hosted on a Raspberry Pi.

3CX’s offering delivers voicemails to inboxes, faxes as PDFs, and lets users see at a glance which colleagues are available. This is more intelligent than it sounds, allowing staff to tag their status with messages like “back at five”, so team members can avoid chasing them when they’re not free.

“Click to Call” extensions for Firefox and Chrome transform phone numbers on web pages into clickable links, which dial out automatically. But perhaps the smartest integration, works in the opposite direction, integrating the company’s website with its back-end systems so staff can chat with web visitors directly, not just by text but also voice or video call.

Pricing is determined not by how many users you want to connect, but the number that needs to connect simultaneously. Keep that number below eight and the standard service is free, after which Pro and Enterprise plans charge on a per-seat, per-month scale, which gets cheaper per user as your company grows. These plans also include features such as call recording, Office 365 integration and up to 250 web conferencing participants.

Jabber 

Cisco’s Jabber communications platform is perfect for a BYOD organisation. It can be installed on all types of consumer hardware, and includes phone integration, videoconferencing and visual voicemail. Participants can even control far-end cameras to show specific parts of the room to which they’re talking, as well as the room in which they’re sitting.

Jabber clients are available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, and in 2019 it underwent a redesign to bring it into line with Cisco Webex Teams. The two are fully integrated, allowing different parts of the firm – and members within a team – to use whichever they prefer, seamlessly.

If the name sounds familiar, the original Jabber protocol – now renamed as the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) – has been a significant player in presence and messaging since the early 2000s, and the technology on which Cisco’s implementation is based is open-source, with all transactions encrypted using industry standard SSL/TLS connections.

Cisco isn’t the only player in this market. Polycom is also building powerful telepresence conferencing products specifically aimed at smaller players. Its RealPresence Desktop Video Conferencing Software provides on-the-fly conferencing tools on a regular PC, saving businesses the capital outlay of equipping meeting rooms with screens and cameras. It incorporates acoustic fencing to isolate participants’ voices, backlight compensation, and simple provisioning for up to 50,000 users at a time. It will also connect to room-based video hardware for teams in which some work remotely and others are office-based.

Slack

Perhaps the best-known business collaboration tool, Slack began life as an internal project for game developer Tiny Speck, which needed an online space where its team could virtually meet to work on a game called Glitch. The game wasn’t a huge hit, but the collaboration tool was so successful that it was spun off as a separate product, and the company renamed itself Slack Technologies. 

Alongside persistent messaging, Slack allows users to share files and participate in video calls, and boasts useful integrations with Google Drive, Trello and more than 150 other services, including Outlook Calendar and OneDrive. A big part of the appeal is that anyone can use it for free – there’s officially no limit to the number of users a business can register without paying a penny. This has helped the platform grow to more than ten million daily active users.

There are a few catches: the free plan only keeps the most recent 10,000 messages, only allows for one-to-one video calls and up to 5GB of storage, and doesn’t have screen-sharing capabilities. Those are enabled in the Standard (£5.25 per user per month) or Plus (£9.75 per user per month) plans, and you can include up to 15 participants on any video call.

A key strength of Slack is the way it minimises digital noise by dividing conversations into separate channels. These can be organised by subject, project, client and so on, and new channels can be opened up for specific issues. As Slack points out, members “can join and leave channels as needed – unlike lengthy email chains”. Integrated direct messaging also helps to keep exchanges focused. 

While most communication will be internal, Slack can also facilitate external collaboration, with team members sharing access to channels with participants outside of the host organisation. Perhaps the most attractive thing about Slack is that it’s a solely software-based solution, with clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. This makes it effectively free to deploy.

Microsoft Teams

Teams is self-evidently positioned as a competitor to Slack; it emerged after Bill Gates and Satya Nadella reportedly nixed a plan to acquire the latter for $8 billion. This was likely a smart move, as Microsoft already owned Skype, which contains much of the technology needed for business communications. Indeed, Microsoft plans to retire Skype for Business in 2021 and replace it with Teams.

The tool brings together multiple core business tools in one interface. VoIP is a given and it’s supplemented by regular telephony, allowing users to dial landline and mobile numbers from within the client. Both public and direct messaging are supported, and hosted meetings can be set up on the fly, with plugins for Outlook allowing meeting administrators to invite other members to participate. Other plugins, known as Connectors, draw in data from third-party services such as Twitter and Mailchimp.

A big attraction of Teams is its close integration with Office and the Office 365 subscription platform. That doesn’t mean you need to be an Office subscriber to use it: the free version is available to anyone. But sign up for free and you’ll get not only the Teams app, with full support for online audio and video calls for up to 300 users, but also access to web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. 

Upgrade to the Office 365 Business Essentials package (£3.80 per user per month) to get web-based Outlook access and scheduled meetings, as well as OneDrive storage. For £9.40 per month, the Business tier includes web and desktop versions of Office applications. Teams is available as a web app, or a locally hosted app on Windows, macOS, Android and iOS.

Workplace from Facebook

Workplace from Facebook started out in a similar way to Slack: originally an in-house product used by staff to discuss projects, it was shared with the public in beta form in 2015, and became an “official” product just over 18 months later. The Royal Bank of Scotland was one of the first big companies to sign up, and it’s now been joined by Starbucks, Spotify and 30,000 other organisations.

For Facebook, Workplace is a logical brand extension. The company already has plenty of experience of bringing users together, helping them share status updates and running a newsfeed. That newsfeed, which sits at the heart of the system, uses AI to make sure users see what it believes are the most important updates, while the people directory is analogous to Facebook’s profiles and Workplace Chat offers a business-focused alternative to Facebook Messenger. There is also automatic content translation and live video (as found in Facebook), along with multi-company collaboration, letting users liaise with suppliers and other contacts outside their corporate workspace.

When you’re using a free account, each member gets 5GB of storage and there’s no limit to the number of staff who can sign up. What’s more, like Slack, Workplace features built-in integration with OneDrive and Google Drive. Microsoft Office isn’t included by default, but these integrations and dozens more are available to paying users. Paid accounts start at $4 per user per month, but the Advanced tier is available to nonprofits and education establishments for free. The Advanced ($4 per user per month) and Enterprise ($8 per user per month) plans also increase video chat participants from 20 to 50, and lift the per-user storage limit to 1TB and unlimited respectively.

And if you’re worried about privacy, Facebook emphasises that Workplace has achieved certification against ISO27001, ISO27018, SCO2, SCO3 and is fully GDPR-compliant. The platform also undergoes an annual security verification audit, and the company pledges that customer data will never be used to serve ads.

How cloud software companies can cut costs – without impacting on quality

When evaluating the value of any business, one of the most important factors is the cost of goods sold (COGS). To put that another way, for every pound that a business makes, how much does it cost to deliver?

For a traditional business, there are many ways to minimise costs. A company could optimise its supply chain, find cheaper raw materials, or negotiate better rates with its suppliers.

But in the age of the cloud, a digital company’s costs might grow 10 times overnight as a result of a sudden increase in traffic volume, or a one-line configuration change. For every surprise event, a cloud company’s profit margin can be significantly eroded. 

As a result, keeping on top of COGS is a key focus area for any digital company. Here are some tips for reducing your costs and improving your bottom line:

Measure first

To cut costs, you first need to understand where inefficiencies are creeping in – after all, you can’t change what you can’t measure. 

Start by agreeing how you are going to model your company’s costs, and whether that’s something you intend to break down across each of your products. Generally, it can be useful to go product-by-product, as this can give you a more granular view of your company’s cost drivers and help to identify the ‘low-hanging fruit’ that can be cut without impacting overall performance.

Getting a clear view of the inefficiencies in your cloud set-up will help you figure out what will really move the needle, rather than making vague guesses at performance improvements. Once set in motion, this will also enable you to see whether the changes you’re making are having the desired effect.

To help monitor the raw cloud infrastructure that powers each of your products and understand the cost of your cloud configuration in real time, there are plenty of monitoring tools you can use such as CloudHealth, AWS’s billing CSV, and Tableau. 

Make a plan and rally your teams

Once you’ve identified the efficiencies you want to make, it will be key to put a plan in place to make sure the cost-cutting process is done efficiently. A plan helps unite your engineering team around shared goals and processes, with clear deadlines.

When laying out your plan, consider starting small and then building up. The best approach is to begin by tackling the lowest-hanging fruit you identified in the monitoring stage, and then steadily work towards more complex and time-consuming changes.

For each project, assign an ‘owner’ to drive it to completion – this can be done with a simple spreadsheet laying out who owns what, and when it’s due.

Once owners have been assigned, ask them to bring their team together once a week to ensure their cost-cutting effort is on track, and targets and deadlines are being met.

You will likely see the biggest cost savings by getting rid of unneeded processes, redundant effort and “dead” code. Every little counts, and having dedicated owners for each individual area – no matter how big or small – will combine into a huge collective effort that could save your company millions.

Other key areas to evaluate include your company’s CPU, disk and network costs, along with the cost of data transfer to and from the cloud. All of these can be brought under control with a little thought, and in some cases, new third-party solutions. 

Build a repeatable monitoring process

Once you’ve invested in reducing costs, you want to make sure inefficiencies don’t start creeping back in. It wouldn’t do your company any good to have to repeat the whole cost-cutting process six months down the line.

To get ongoing visibility, it’s a good idea to automate a daily report into your key cost drivers. If you visualise this through a graph or table, you can easily see spikes and catch them early. With some monitoring services, you can even set up automatic alerts whenever a cost driver jumps over a certain threshold, so your team is able to dive straight in and fix the problem. 

A worthwhile long-term investment

Though reducing your COGS is a serious undertaking, it’s well worth the effort. 

For every redundant piece of code you remove, and every efficiency you build into your cloud infrastructure, you’ll be driving up your company’s profit margin. 

And the better your gross margin, the better your company’s valuation – the ultimate reward for strong unit economics, and a great reflection on your business.

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