Targeted attacks on the network of a business can be big trouble. A business should know where to look and what to look for to stop the attacks.
Businesses are aware of the dangers of hackers. They know that a hacker can steal private information that hey store on their computer networks. They recognize that hackers can create problems for the business and the business’s computer systems through a variety of different ways.
Skyhigh Networks snapped up by McAfee to combine endpoint and cloud security expertise
McAfee is acquiring cloud security provider Skyhigh Networks with the aim of ‘establishing the leading company to provide the cybersecurity architecture of the future.’
Skyhigh, alongside other organisations such as Netskope, is in the ‘cloud access security broker’ (CASB) space, defined by Gartner as “on-premises, or cloud-based security policy enforcement points, placed between cloud service consumers and cloud service providers to combine and interject enterprise security policies as the cloud-based resources are accessed.”
In other words, CASBs are gatekeepers ensuring traffic between on-premises devices and cloud providers are compliant. Skyhigh secured a total of $106.5 million in funding across four rounds, with the most recent being a $40m series D. At the time, the company said it would use the money to ‘carry [itself] to productivity’.
Rajiv Gupta, Skyhigh CEO, will run McAfee’s new cloud business unit, with Skyhigh’s existing organisational structure remaining ‘generally intact’, McAfee said. The move can also be seen in the wake of McAfee’s structure; the company announced in April it was operating as a new standalone company, in the process closing the funding put in place by Intel, who purchased the security provider in 2011 and called it Intel Security for the past three years.
“Becoming part of McAfee is the ideal next step in realising Skyhigh Networks’ vision of not simply making the cloud secure, but making it the most secure environment for business,” said Gupta in a statement. “McAfee will provide global scale to further accelerate Skyhigh’s growth, with the combined company providing leading technologies and solutions across cloud and endpoint security – categories Skyhigh and McAfee respectively helped create, and the two architectural control points for enterprise security.”
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The multi-cloud imbroglio: What is it, what drives it, and how do you manage it?
A research report from BMC Software argues organisations are struggling to manage multi-cloud environments – with four in five respondents saying current multi-cloud management approaches need rethinking.
The study, which polled 1,000 IT decision makers across 11 countries, found that drivers of multi-cloud strategies were less than clear. The most popular reason was cost optimisation, cited by 45% of respondents, with agility (44%) and mitigating risk (40%) also highly cited.
It may however not be as much of a surprise that the drivers were unclear if the definition of multi-cloud is unclear. Just over half (52%) of those polled agreed that the term multi-cloud ‘includes a combination of public and/or private clouds as well as on-premises solutions’. 23% of respondents said it must encompass all three.
Wait, you may be asking: isn’t that hybrid? More on that shortly. Yet the most worrying finding from the study is around costs; even though 45% of respondents said cost optimisation was the biggest driver in multi-cloud, 40% admitted they did not know how much their businesses were spending on cloud services.
“IT leaders must consider new ways to manage multi-cloud environments to ensure they are getting the expected benefits from public cloud in terms of cost savings, automated performance optimisation, and increased security and governance,” said Bill Berutti, BMC president of enterprise solutions.
The report goes on to note the different approaches organisations can take, with automation high on the list. Yet it may be worth taking a step back here.
Analysis
Let’s take an extremely basic definition of multi-cloud – in this instance “the use of two or more cloud computing services”. This often refers to a mix of public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments. For instance, organisations could use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for compute, and Microsoft Azure for storage. A looser definition could be utilising different cloud providers for different product sets. Security provider Symantec appears to have done this, using Azure to power its Norton anti-virus product suite, and AWS for many other workloads.
The other definition of multi-cloud is around avoiding vendor lock-in; something which, as TechTarget notes, drove many early strategies but is being slowly subsided, as previously mentioned, for organisations’ broader business or technical goals. Writing for this publication in August, Jay Chapel, CEO of ParkMyCloud, argued risk mitigation was not the most significant driver, while vendor lock-in could be mitigated in other instances. Chapel argued he sees customers using a multi-cloud strategy ‘to design and build applications in the clouds best suited for optimising their applications’. “You can then use this leverage to help prevent vendor lock-in,” he added.
In April, analyst firm 451 Research said that around half of AWS houses in Europe were also using Azure, and vice versa. More recent figures released by the company show more than two thirds (69%) of survey respondents were planning to have some type of multi-cloud environment by 2019.
The cloud providers themselves are of course more than aware of this – and in certain instances trying to get organisations to bridge the divide. Earlier this year Microsoft, whose aggressive strategy in cloud is unmistakeable, published a lengthy guide comparing AWS and Azure services. As Melanie Posey, 451 research vice president, told this publication at the time, while the guide notes the importance of multi-cloud for organisations in terms of greater choice and flexibility, the real aim is most likely to ‘translate’ AWS services into Azure, and showing organisations how to migrate from one to the other.
Another much more recent example, albeit not both in the public cloud, can be seen with Microsoft and VMware. Today saw the launch of Azure Migrate to all Azure customers, aimed at helping organisations migrate VMware-based applications to Azure, integrate them with Azure, and deploy VMware virtualisation on Azure hardware. VMware responded by saying it could not support customers who went down that route as the Microsoft service had neither been certified nor supported by the company. Indeed, VMware has an official partnership with AWS in place with the marketing touted at combining the ‘world’s leading’ private and public cloud providers respectively.
Whichever definition of multi-cloud you take and the reasons for taking it on, there are tangible benefits. But as ever, plenty of due diligence needs to take place to make sure your organisation gets a solution which both offers technological advantage as well as saves costs.
In its report, BMC offers five recommendations for organisations in successfully managing multi-cloud environments: gain increased visibility into cloud assets to get the complete picture; get a clear picture of cloud costs as not everything may need to be in the cloud; take a proactive stance to harden a broader attack surface and ensure compliance; rethink management approaches and simplify and automate as much as possible; and explore AI and machine learning, which has the potential to remove repetition out of the multi-cloud management process.
You can find out more about the report here (pdf).
The Data Storage Explosion | @CloudExpo #Cloud #BigData #Storage
Cloud computing innovation will power enterprise transformation in 2018. Cloud growth is also driving a rapid rise in the storage market, exacerbating the enterprise challenge around storage cost and complexity. The business reason behind this marketplace reality is the proliferation of real-time data from the web, mobile devices, social media, sensors, log files, and transactional applications. Big Data has also found a home on the operational side of many market verticals in applications ranging from fraud detection to the processing of video evidence.
[video] Data Privacy with @CalligoCloud | @CloudExpo #IaaS #Cloud #Security
“Calligo is a cloud service provider with data privacy at the heart of what we do. We are a typical Infrastructure as a Service cloud provider but it’s been designed around data privacy,” explained Julian Box, CEO and co-founder of Calligo, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
[slides] Leveraging AI for Mobile Enterprise Apps | @CloudExpo #DX #Chatbots #ArtificialIntelligence
Mobile device usage has increased exponentially during the past several years, as consumers rely on handhelds for everything from news and weather to banking and purchases. What can we expect in the next few years? The way in which we interact with our devices will fundamentally change, as businesses leverage Artificial Intelligence. We already see this taking shape as businesses leverage AI for cost savings and customer responsiveness. This trend will continue, as AI is used for more sophisticated patterns, and chatbots replace the traditional mobile apps.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Michael Meiner, an Engineering Director at Oracle, looked at this evolution of mobile computing, along with the underlying enterprise technologies that enable this shift. Demos using Amazon Alexa and Oracle Mobile Suite were shown.
[video] Cloud Evolution | @CloudExpo @IBMcloud #DX #AI #ML #Cloud
In his Opening Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, John Considine, General Manager of IBM Cloud Infrastructure, led attendees through the exciting evolution of the cloud. He looked at this major disruption from the perspective of technology, business models, and what this means for enterprises of all sizes. John Considine is General Manager of Cloud Infrastructure Services at IBM. In that role he is responsible for leading IBM’s public cloud infrastructure including strategy, development, and offering management. To date, IBM has launched more than 50 cloud data centers that span the globe. He has been building advanced technology, delivering “as a service” solutions, and managing infrastructure services for the past 20 years.
[slides] What Is GDPR in Reality and Why Should We Care? | @CloudExpo @CalligoCloud #IoT #M2M #Cloud #BigData
With tough new regulations coming to Europe on data privacy in May 2018, Calligo will explain why in reality the effect is global and transforms how you consider critical data. EU GDPR fundamentally rewrites the rules for cloud, Big Data and IoT. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Adam Ryan, Vice President and General Manager EMEA at Calligo, examined the regulations and provided insight on how it affects technology, challenges the established rules and will usher in new levels of diligence around personal data.
[slides] What Is GDPR in Reality and Why Should We Care? | @CloudExpo @CalligoCloud #IoT #M2M #Cloud #BigData
With tough new regulations coming to Europe on data privacy in May 2018, Calligo will explain why in reality the effect is global and transforms how you consider critical data. EU GDPR fundamentally rewrites the rules for cloud, Big Data and IoT. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Adam Ryan, Vice President and General Manager EMEA at Calligo, examined the regulations and provided insight on how it affects technology, challenges the established rules and will usher in new levels of diligence around personal data.
[video] Are You Ready for GDPR? | @CloudExpo @CalligoCloud #DX #Cloud #Compliance
In his general session at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Dumas, Calligo’s Vice President and G.M. of US operations, discussed the new Global Data Protection Regulation and how Calligo can help business stay compliant in digitally globalized world.
Greg Dumas is Calligo’s Vice President and G.M. of US operations. Calligo is an established service provider that provides an innovative platform for trusted cloud solutions. Calligo’s customers are typically most concerned about GDPR compliance, application performance guarantees & data privacy.