Oracle calls time on DNS specialist Dyn


Jane McCallion

26 Jun, 2019

Oracle has announced it’s shuttering Dyn, three years after it bought the DNS service, which will be integrated into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. 

In a post to its website last night, the company said: «Since the acquisition of Dyn in 2016 and the subsequent acquisition of Zenedge, the engineering teams have been working diligently to integrate Dyn’s products and services into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. Enterprises can now leverage the best-in-class DNS, web application security, and email delivery services within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and enhance their applications with a comprehensive platform to build, scale, and operate their cloud infrastructure.»

While the FAQ page gives no deadline for migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, customers have reposted emails which give 31 May 2020 as the End of Life (EOL) date.

Some customers have hit out at the decision, citing the consequent culling of a free tier and loss of some functionality, particularly dynamic DNS.

On Hacker News, someone under the username jpollock said: «As a lesson to anyone else hoping to do a shutdown with a migration to a different service with your company.

«If you are going to treat me the same as any new subscriber, where I have to re-signup, re-add my payment method, export my settings and then import them again, you’re asking me to buy all over again.

«If you ask me to buy, then I get will reevaluate the relationship, and if it’s just as easy to migrate to another supplier I will move.

«Migrating internally should have been «push this button to accept the new terms and pricing, you don’t even need to talk with your registrar.»

«I’ve been a Dyn customer for over a decade, and now I’m moving because it’s just as easy to move as it is to stay.»

Others took to Twitter to announce their displeasure.

Cloud Pro contacted Oracle for confirmation of the May 2020 deadline and further comment, but hadn’t received a response at the time of publication.

NHS Wales goes all in with Microsoft 365


Bobby Hellard

26 Jun, 2019

Every NHS Wales worker will be given access to Microsoft’s enterprise programs such as Outlook and Teams, aiding digital transformation in Britain’s healthcare system.

As part of a country-wide focus on digital transformation, more than 100,000 NHS employees, including GPs, consultants, nurses, therapists, paramedics and support staff, will have access to Microsoft 365.

This will include Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint and Yammer and will be available to staff on multiple devices, such as phones, tablets and laptops.

According to Microsoft, the move is expected to help NHS staff save money and time by not having to travel to face-to-face meetings, freeing them up to focus on patients who need the most help.

«This new national agreement is part of our commitment to refresh NHS Wales IT infrastructure and ensure it supports the transformational changes taking place across health and social care,» said Andrew Griffiths, director of NHS Wales Informatics Service. «It moves our digital estate away from locally managed services and into cloud-based services, delivering efficiencies and economies of scale.

«Frontline staff who work in our health and care services rely on technology, to help them deliver services in new, innovative ways that put the needs of patients first. I am very pleased that we are able to deliver the most up to date tools to our NHS Wales staff to help them with the fantastic work they do every day.»

This is not the first deal Microsoft has gone into with the Welsh public sector. In March, the country became one of the first in the world to give all local authority schools access to Microsoft 365.

The Welsh government paid for all 1,521 «maintained» schools to have access to Microsoft programs in a bid to boost the use of technology among pupils and reduce costs for families and headteachers, as part of the £1.2 million investment.

The agreement with NHS Wales will see Microsoft migrate all its digital estate from locally managed services to a cloud-based service, which has potential risks, particularly for an organisation as large as NHS Wales. As an example of what can go wrong, TSB bank spent the majority of 2018 fixing a botched IT upgrade than cost it almost £100 million.

Then there is the risk of outside threats, similar to the WannaCry attacks. According to Microsoft, the deal also includes an upgrade to Windows 10 E5, which comes with cutting-edge security features to prevent, detect, investigate and respond to potential risks.

«It’s essential that NHS Wales has secure systems that health staff and patients trust and this agreement will help achieve that,» Griffiths added. «It will increase resilience and mean our services are running on the most up-to-date operating system at all times.»

How cloud is transforming manufacturing and financial services in 2019

Two of the world’s most traditional industries have ascended to the cloud.

To meet new demands from an increasingly tech-centric world, manufacturing and financial services are harnessing digital to transform how they do business. These longstanding industries are often perceived as less flashy in comparison with some of their more technology-forward counterparts, like media and entertainment or life sciences, but the reality is that they’ve found creative, compelling ways to adopt cloud computing for business advantage.

Any company in manufacturing or financial services must fight to stay relevant. They occupy huge global markets and face steep competition from both legacy players as well as up-and-comers. It was therefore incumbent on both industries to rethink their business models – or risk being left behind. Cloud-based solutions help alleviate the challenges that come with large-scale digital transformation – the cloud helps avoid redundancy in a demanding world full of digitally-savvy consumers who expect far more efficient, customer-centric services, together with an influx of new, more technologically advanced competitors.

No wonder, then, that both industries have put more money behind the cloud. Our analysis of more than a billion dollars of cloud spend between 2018 – 2019, showed that financial services and manufacturing overall cloud spend grew significantly faster than the majority of their peers.

Since making the shift, manufacturing and financial services companies have found that the cloud offers a world of benefits and strategies to meet the demands of a global, technology-driven market. The challenge, however, is keeping the cloud tightly managed without stifling innovation: unchecked spend, security risks, and lack of visibility can derail an otherwise successful cloud program. Here are two prime examples:

  • Cox Automotive relies on the public cloud to take advantage of economies of scale. It enables them to be agile and test new ideas with limited investment. By consolidating data centres and leveraging AWS they are able to focus on products, services, and clients
  • Intuit, a financial software powerhouse, doesn’t let cloud complexity get in the way of its mission to power prosperity throughout the world. The company automates and optimises its cloud spend, avoiding manual processes that can be labor intensive and error prone

Both companies have found creative ways to drive accountability and avoid cost spikes through careful management of their cloud environment. As a result, they are achieving the objectives that bring so many people to the cloud in the first place – namely, agility, innovation and competitive advantage.

The adoption of cloud technology has enabled manufacturing and financial services to keep up with the ‘anywhere, anytime’ need to access and provide differentiation at a usage and consumption level. Specifically, there are three key areas in the public cloud that these industries are adopting at a faster rate – containers, machine learning, and serverless. Each of these provide a unique ability to improve the top or bottom line. For instance, containers can reduce overhead costs (they enable developers to move more quickly and require less system resources than traditional environments) while offering increased flexibility.

Containers run virtually anywhere; from the branch, to the data centre to the public cloud, across virtual machines or bare metal; they allow companies to move fast, deploy software efficiently, and operate at an unprecedented scale. This application’s agility and ability to improve application delivery, helps reduce costs, making it a strategic, long-term investment. Indeed, when we analysed the data collected for the last financial year, we found that both industries increased their spend in containers by a sizable 37%.

Cloud technology also unlocks access to advanced analysis and deeper insight into data (e.g. consumer and supplier engagement), which has enabled both industries to establish more cost-effective solutions and innovative strategies moving forward. Financial services companies increased their spend on analytics by nearly 2x – with top use cases like faster reporting and deeper analytics and insights.

The most popular cloud services are data warehousing, search, and big data analytics. Big data analytics is widely deployed by manufacturing companies who are looking to gain new insights from the vast amounts of information their machines collect. Consuming these offerings as managed services from a cloud provider means less overhead and maintenance for the organisation, as they are no longer responsible for the application operations.

The agile nature of the cloud also allows for quick responses to changing markets and developments, in a way that can accelerate a company’s business strategy. This helps to ease operations so that they function more efficiently. Manufacturing companies are able to remain fast and responsive to customer demands, which has resulted in shorter product cycles and less time to market, without sacrificing quality. Interestingly, the shift by financial services to the cloud was also spurred by the desire for greater sustainability, largely driven by stockholders and employees, so adopting cloud technology was a natural progression.

Perhaps the most fundamental way the cloud has transformed these industries is through serverless technology. According to our study, there’s been more than a 3x increase in serverless spend by both manufacturing and financial services over the past year. The latter in particular has seen immense value. Why? Scale. One the largest benefits serverless technology can offer companies is the ability to map high scalability– it is highly responsive and provides strong differentiation. For financial services like insurance and banking, it’s useful for predicting consumption and usership outcomes with a high level of accuracy.

Serverless technology is also extremely nimble: it has the ability to create applications for quick dissemination to the public, supporting radical change and real-time innovation. For financial services, where the level of differentiation between products is often small, this delivers a competitive advantage to born-in-the-cloud fintech companies, digital challenger banks and non-bank payment providers and pay services from technology giants such as Google, Apple and Amazon.

For manufacturing organisations, serverless is an ideal technology to power edge computing and IoT. Now, even when remote sites don’t have consistent network connections or robust infrastructure, serverless functions can trigger basic actions like record information, turn on a code, or message a user.

Cloud computing is transforming virtually every facet of every industry. It is clear that cloud adoption is no longer simply a technology decision for companies – it’s a business strategy that can give them agility, speed, and insight. It’s the way to do business in the modern age.

https://www.cybersecuritycloudexpo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cyber-security-world-series-1.pngInterested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Box: We’re in ‘wait-and-see mode’ with blockchain


Adam Shepherd

25 Jun, 2019

Box CEO Aaron Levie has confirmed that the company has no plans to integrate blockchain technology into its product portfolio, citing the fact that it’s still too early to have a meaningful impact for its customers.

The cloud collaboration company’s co-founder began his keynote at Box’s annual CIO Summit today by joking that he was teaching his new son – who was born late last month – ‘blockchain for babies’ so he is prepared for the future. Joking aside, however, Levie admitted that the company is not actively exploring blockchain technology.

«We have no specific products that we are working on at the moment, however, we do have people within the organisation that are either researching or always evaluating what might make sense,» he said.

«I think, frankly, we’re a little bit in wait and see mode to see where the trends are going. And we would certainly be there from a product standpoint, when we think it’s very meaningful for our customers… In general, it’s still probably early from a market standpoint, and relative to our technology.»

One branch of technology that Box is actively integrating into its portfolio, though, is artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The company has already begun deploying this technology on a limited basis via its Box Skills Kit feature, which allows customers to build their own integrations with other services, but Levie said that the company is planning to weave AI into its products more widely.

In particular, he says, data classification and security are areas in which the company could implement machine learning in order to benefit customers.

«You take something that used to be an unstructured blob of data, that we didn’t really know what was inside of it,» he said. «Now we can structure it, we can better help our customers manage it, and security and governance.»

In future years, the company is also looking into the possibility of adding complex AI to Box Relay to predict things like which action a person should take next as part of a workflow based on contextual information.

«It’s one thing to streamline a business process and describe that business process and software – it’s a whole other thing if you can actually go and automate that business process predictively or intelligently using AI or machine learning. And that’s the holy grail, frankly, for the entire industry,» Levie added. 

«But it’s something that we’re going to be investing quite a bit in, over the three to five year period.»

AWS hopes to entice more cloud customers with streamlined security tools


Dale Walker

25 Jun, 2019

AWS has made its Control Tower and Security Hub services generally available to all customers, designed to make it easier for organisations to manage security policies across their cloud environments.

Both platforms aim to ease the process for organisations looking to shift over to the cloud by removing a great deal of the heavy lifting involved, something that is being echoed by rivals in the industry.

In the case of Control Tower, automated and preconfigured services allow organisations to deploy a set of guardrails for their cloud environment, safe in the knowledge that these are built to AWS best practices. Importantly, AWS isn’t charging extra for this tool, and users can apply it to any AWS service that they currently pay for.

Once set up, organisations are able to build a secure AWS environment using these preconfigured best practices, defining policies around areas such as compliance and permissions. Control Tower should be especially useful for those organisations who need more prescriptive guidance on how to set up secure environments across multiple accounts, as the guardrails will prevent users from deploying tools that don’t conform to security policies.

The second release this week, AWS Security Hub, aims to solve the problem having too many disparate security packages running across an organisation and being unable to manage them centrally. Now, AWS customers can access all security tools within a single dashboard view, including those provided by third-parties.

The platform is similar to those offered by rivals Microsoft and Google, in the form of Azure Security Center and Google Cloud Security Command Center respectively, however even smaller companies such as Box are pushing for all-in-one windows for security management.

The cloud giant says it already has companies such as GoDaddy, Rackspace, Splunk and PagerDuty, T-Mobile, Uber and Sony Interactive signed up to either Security Hub or Control Tower.

AWS Control Tower is available to all customers using US East (N Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) data centres, with additional regions coming in the near future.

While Control Tower is free, Security Hub is generally available to all customers on a per-usage pricing scheme, although there is a 30-day trial for new users.

Overcoming the skills gap for cloud and digital: Where does security and automation fit in?

Digital transformation initiatives require a distinct technological and cultural change – and the element which binds both together is skills.

Yet getting the right skills remain a near-impossibility. The skills gap shows no sign of lessening, with two recent studies proving this point. In December OpsRamp found the vast majority of businesses continued to struggle finding the right talent for cloud environments. Nine out of 10 hiring managers polled agreed the digital skills gap was anywhere between ‘somewhat big’ and ‘huge.’ In the same month, Cloudera found similarly with machine learning (ML); more than half of 200 European IT managers polled said they were reticent at adopting ML technologies because they did not have enough knowledge of the area.

With no real sign of change, IT solutions provider Kainos fears the worst. The company warned last week that skills gaps would continue to widen unless positive action was taken to ensure ‘joined up’ digital skills training initiatives. The company argued current initiatives, particularly in the UK, had scratched the surface but done little more. Earlier this year 12 technology institutes were launched to ‘offer top-quality, higher level technical education [and] help close skills gaps in key STEM areas.’

For Kainos, enterprises, educational establishments and governments need to work more closely to achieve real change, rather than just paying lip service. This is by no means an idle statement either; the company has its own academy, with more than 5,000 users benefiting from it. The process goes from business to education and government, as well as educating parents on potential careers for their children in IT.

Accenture released a report earlier this month focused on expectation versus reality in cloud initiatives. Organisations see the benefits overall, with above 90% satisfaction on average, but only a third of companies polled said they were fully satisfied on cost, speed, and business enablement metrics.

This suggests a gap in itself. “If you listen to what is happening at the CEO table and also what we have seen in our global survey, is that you see there is a clear understanding of the benefits of cloud, the adoption,” Marco Franzen, Accenture Netherlands managing director for technology consulting, tells CloudTech. “If you then look at the results and analyse them, two out of three [companies] think we’re not there yet. They have implemented cloud to some extent but there’s still a new leap, a new platform to reach, above the normal TCO.”

What are the drivers of this gap? Skillsets are certainly one; Franzen notes that smaller-scale companies in particular may be lacking a key skill to ‘make the next move and go all-in on cloud.’ Complexity of change internally was also cited. But the biggest boon, as often tends to be in any cloud study, is security. Two third polled in the Accenture survey said security compliance – particularly handling security in a new cloud-based environment – was of concern.

Is security therefore the biggest stumbling block when it comes to achieving digital skills and digital transformation? It could be argued that it is one area where all the investment in the world won’t bridge the gap. Last month, Oracle released a report which argued better enterprise cybersecurity would need to be remedied through automation rather than a surge in employee training or great security talent being hired. The report, ‘Security in the Age of AI’ (pdf), found the default response for almost half (47%) of respondents was to invest in more people rather than in more technology regarding security.

Tom Gray, CTO at Kainos, notes the importance of automation bridging the gap to some degree with security, but warns against it being the bulwark of any long-term strategy.

“There are an increasing number of areas where the volume of data or the complexity and velocity of the environment makes it impossible for humans, however skilled, to be as effective as an automated solution,” Gray tells CloudTech. “The management of compute and storage infrastructure has become increasingly automated as this infrastructure has evolved from large numbers of modest sized on-premise installations to a small number of large-scale environments whose scale and complexity makes human operation unviable.”

Gray argues organisations need to invest ‘strategically’ in their training to focus on which areas will need further investment and where employees will progress. “It remains to be seen whether automation will create more new jobs than will be lost through automation but, as with today, skills in creating digital technology – as opposed to simply using it – remain in short supply,” he says.

“There is a growing need for skills in identifying opportunities for automation, making best use of the current automation techniques, and understanding and managing the human aspect of automation on both the organisation and broader society,” Gray adds. “Conversely, some of the more repetitive tasks in solution delivery – including some programming, testing, deployment and operations tasks – will inevitably by type for automation.

“It behoves organisations to consider accelerating automation in these areas, rather than trying to build skills that may become unnecessary or, at the very least, prioritise building foundational knowledge and transferable skills to ensure that the individuals and organisation is responsive and resilient to the automation opportunity.”

https://www.cybersecuritycloudexpo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cyber-security-world-series-1.pngInterested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

View from the airport: HPE Discover 2019


Jane McCallion

25 Jun, 2019

Just over two years into Antonio Neri’s tenure as CEO at HPE and the company is rather a different beast to how Meg Whitman left it in November 2017.

Not much has changed structurally, but this year’s Discover conference in Las Vegas to me pointed to a change in culture. Of course, we had the usual product announcements – some of which were quite exciting – but there was a lot of time spent talking about more «businessy» elements.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri at HPE Discover 2019

GreenLake is a standout example of this. The consumption-based service was launched back in November 2017 (just as Neri took the reins, in fact) but was absolutely the star of the show this year.

It’s clear the company is now aggressively pursuing an ‘as a service’ model, rather than sell once and hope for repeat custom down the line, as has been the case in the past, with a pledge to make the full HPE portfolio available through GreenLake by 2022. While there is a bit of a fudge (you can still buy on a one-off basis rather than consumption if you really want), this to me is a big step away from the years of talking about «hybrid IT» under Whitman, which I saw largely as an attempt to give a veneer of cloudiness to HPE’s products while really maintaining a traditional, legacy vendor profile.

Speaking of the cloud, the company has really started to embrace this technology in partnership with cloud vendors – and not just old friends like Microsoft, but also AWS and Google. In particular, it’s using containerisation technology to its advantage, as well as public cloud companies’ realisation that they need to play nice with traditional vendors in order to maximise their customer pool (not everything can be hosted on a public cloud, after all).

Aruba chief Keerti Melkote on stage with HPE CEO Antonio Neri during HPE Discover 2019

HPE has also brought its networking business, Aruba, front and centre in the cloud conversation with a major update to Aruba Central. Indeed, it was given one of the handfuls of product slots during the keynote, with Aruba co-founder Keerti Melkote taking to the stage alongside Neri to talk about this cloud management service.

We also saw the company’s in-memory computing efforts start to bear some commercial fruit. While The Machine, as it was called, was quietly downgraded over the past few years from in-memory computing moonshot product to in-memory computing project, to really just another part of HPE Labs, its technology lives on in the shape of Primera.

This appliance – which its beaming creators were clearly delighted with at the press launch – comes with a 100% uptime guarantee (I’m not rounding up there, either) and was described to me by an independent analyst as the company’s most important storage launch in years.

HPE Primera storage appliance reveal at HPE Discover 2019

There was also a lot of emphasis on the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, including its continued partnership with Purdue University aimed at using data and analytics to solve world hunger (no, really). As we were repeatedly told, the company’s commitment to social good goes all the way back to «Bill and David» (Hewlett and Packard respectively, in case you’re not on first name terms with the company’s founders), although not an awful lot of evidence was brought along to support this claim.

Overall, particularly as someone who missed 2018’s Discover and Discover Europe, I feel there’s been a palpable change in the company over the last 18 months and I’m not the only one, which can be credited almost entirely to Neri.

As a couple of people I spoke to at the event pointed out, he’s an unusual breed of CEO nowadays; he joined HPE’s predecessor, HP as a call centre operative in 1995 and over the intervening 24 years worked his way up to the top job, rather than being a direct transplant like the four CEOs who preceded him. I understand he’s quite hands-on and will have been closely involved with the development of Aruba Central (he was HP’s networking head for a while after all), staking Primera’s 100% uptime claim and the pivot to a consumption-based business.

Without wishing to sound like I’m completely toeing the party line, HPE really does feel like a more services-oriented and collaborative business than it was just a short two years ago. I’ll be intrigued to see next year how much business is actually being done through GreenLake (of the 600 customers currently counted as doing business through the scheme, two-thirds are actually «in the pipeline»), and whether we’ll see how that 100% uptime claim has held up. If it’s done well we could be at a very exciting point in the development of storage technology and I would expect to see some more products using the same technology to be very literally unveiled.

All images: Jane McCallion/Dennis Publishing. All rights reserved.

The top 10 cybersecurity companies to watch in 2019 – and the key trends to explore

Today’s threatscape has made “trust but verify” obsolete 

The threatscape every business operates in today is proving the old model of “trust but verify” obsolete and in need of a complete overhaul. To compete and grow in the increasingly complex and lethal threatscape of today, businesses need more adaptive, contextually intelligent security solutions based on the Zero Trust Security framework.

Zero Trust takes a “never trust, always verify, enforce least privilege” approach to privileged access, from inside or outside the network. John Kindervag was the first to see how urgent the need was for enterprises to change their approach to cybersecurity, so he created the Zero Trust Security framework in 2010 while at Forrester. Chase Cunningham, Principal Analyst at Forrester, is a mentor to many worldwide wanting to expand their knowledge of Zero Trust and frequently speaks and writes on the topic. If you are interested in cybersecurity in general and Zero Trust specifically, be sure to follow his blog.

AI and machine learning applied to cybersecurity’s most significant challenges is creating a proliferation of commercially successful, innovative platforms. The size and scale of deals in cybersecurity continue to accelerate with BlackBerry’s acquisition of Cylance for $1.4B in cash closing in February of this year being the largest. TD Ameritrade’s annual survey of registered investment advisors (RIA) showed nearly a 6X jump in cybersecurity investments this year compared to 2018.

The top ten cybersecurity companies reflect the speed and scale of innovation happening today that are driving the highest levels of investment this industry has ever seen. The following are the top ten cybersecurity companies to watch in 2019:

Absolute (ABT.TO) 

One of the world’s leading commercial enterprise security solutions, serving as the industry benchmark for endpoint resilience, visibility, and control. 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 network, and the ultimate level of control and confidence required for the modern enterprise. Embedded in over one billion endpoint devices, Absolute delivers intelligence and real-time remediation capabilities that equip enterprises to stop data breaches at the source.

To thwart attackers, organisations continue to layer on security controls — Gartner estimates that more than $124B will be spent on security in 2019 aloneAbsolute’s 2019 Endpoint Security Trends Report finds that much of that spend is in vain, however, revealing that 70% of all breaches still originate on the endpoint. The problem is complexity at the endpoint – it causes security agents to fail invariably, reliably, and predictably.

Absolute’s research found that 42% of all endpoints are unprotected at any given time, and 100% of endpoint security tools eventually fail. As a result, IT leaders see a negative ROI on their security spend. What makes Absolute one of the top 10 security companies to watch in 2019 is their purpose-driven design to mitigate this universal law of security decay.

Enterprises rely on Absolute to cut through the complexity to identify failures, model control options, and refocus security intent. Rather than perpetuating organisations’ false sense of security, Absolute enables uncompromised endpoint persistence, builds resilience and delivers the intelligence needed to ensure security agents, applications, and controls continue functioning and deliver value as intended. Absolute has proven very effective in validating safeguards, fortifying endpoints, and stopping data security compliance failures. The following is an example of the Absolute platform at work:

BlackBerry Artifical Intelligence and Predictive Security

BlackBerry is noteworthy for how quickly it is reinventing itself into an enterprise-ready cybersecurity company independent of the Cylance acquisition. Paying $1.4 billion in cash for Cylance brings much-needed AI and machine learning expertise to their platform portfolio, an acquisition that BlackBerry is moving quickly to integrate into their product and service strategies.

BlackBerry Cylance uses AI and machine learning to protect the entire attack surface of an enterprise with automated threat prevention, detection, and response capabilities. Cylance is also the first company to apply artificial intelligence, algorithmic science, and machine learning to cyber security and improve the way companies, governments, and end users proactively solve the world’s most challenging security problems.

Using a breakthrough mathematical process, BlackBerry Cylance quickly and accurately identifies what is safe and what is a threat, not just what is in a blacklist or whitelist. By coupling sophisticated math and machine learning with a unique understanding of a hacker’s mentality, BlackBerry Cylance provides the technology and services to be truly predictive and preventive against advanced threats.

The following screen from CylancePROTECT provides an executive summary of CylancePROTECT usage, from the number of zones and devices to the percentage of devices covered by auto-quarantine and memory protection, threat events, memory violations, agent versions, and offline days for devices.

Centrify

Centrify is redefining the legacy approach to Privileged Access Management by delivering cloud-ready Zero Trust Privilege to secure modern enterprise attack surfaces. Centrify Zero Trust Privilege helps customers grant least privilege access based on verifying who is requesting access, the context of the request, and the risk of the access environment.

Industry research firm Gartner predicted Privileged Access Management (PAM) to be the second-fastest growing segment for information security and risk management spending worldwide in 2019 in their recent Forecast Analysis: Information Security and Risk Management, Worldwide, 3Q18 Update (client access required). 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. PAM was also named a Top 10 security project for 2019 in Gartner’s Top 10 Security Projects for 2019 (client access required).

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a web performance and security company that provides online services to protect and accelerate websites online. Its online platforms include Cloudflare CDN that distributes content around the world to speed up websites, Cloudflare Optimizer that enables web pages with ad servers and third-party widgets to download Snappy software on mobiles and computers, Cloudflare Security that protects websites from a range of online threats including spam, SQL injection, and DDOS, Cloudflare Analytics that gives insight into website’s traffic including threats and search engine crawlers, Keyless SSL that allows organisations to keep secure sockets layer (SSL) keys private, and Cloudflare applications that help its users install web applications on their websites.

CrowdStrike

Applying machine learning to endpoint detection of IT network threats is how CrowdStrike is differentiating itself in the rapidly growing cybersecurity market today. It’s also one of the top 25 machine learning startups to watch in 2019.

CrowdStrike is credited with uncovering Russian hackers inside the servers of the US Democratic National Committee. The company’s IPO was last Tuesday night, with an initial $34/per share price. Their IPO generated $610M at a valuation at one point reaching nearly $7B. Their Falcon platform stops breaches by detecting all attacks types, even malware-free intrusions, providing five-second visibility across all current and past endpoint activity while reducing cost and complexity for customers.

CrowdStrike’s Threat Graph provides real-time analysis of data from endpoint events across the global crowdsourcing community, allowing detection and prevention of attacks based on patented behavioral pattern recognition technology.

Hunters.AI

Hunters.AI excels at autonomous threat hunting by capitalising on its autonomous system that connects to multiple channels within an organisation and detects the signs of potential cyber-attacks. They are one of the top 25 machine learning startups to watch in 2019.

What makes this startup one of the top ten cybersecurity companies to watch in 2019 is its innovative approach to creating AI- and machine learning-based algorithms that continually learn from an enterprise’s existing security data. Hunters.AI generates and delivers visualised attack stories allowing organisations to more quickly and effectively identify, understand, and respond to attacks.

Early customers include Snowflake Computing, whose VP of security recently said, “Hunters.AI identified the attack in minutes. In my 20 years in security, I have not seen anything as effective, fast, and with high fidelity as what Hunters can do.”  The following is a graphic overview of how the system works:

Idaptive

Idaptive is noteworthy for the Zero Trust approach it is taking to protecting organisations across every threat surface they rely on to operate their businesses dally. Idaptive secures access to applications and endpoints by verifying every user, validating their devices, and intelligently limiting their access. Their product and services strategy reflects a “never trust, always verify, enforce least privilege” approach to privileged access, from inside or outside the network.

The Idaptive Next-Gen Access platform combines single single-on (SSO), adaptive multifactor authentication (MFA), enterprise mobility management (EMM) and user behaviour analytics (UBA). They have over 2,000 organisations using their platform today. Idaptive was spun out from Centrify on January 1 this year.

Kount

Kount has successfully differentiated itself in an increasingly crowded cybersecurity marketplace by providing fraud management, identity verification and online authentication technologies that enable digital businesses, online merchants and payment service providers to identify and thwart a wide spectrum of threats in real-time. Kount has been able to show through customer references that their customers can approve more orders, uncover new revenue streams, 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 policy and rules management, its customers thwart online criminals and bad actors driving them away from their site, their marketplace and off their network. Kount’s continuously adaptive platform learns of new threats and continuously updates risk scores to further thwart breach and fraud attempts.

Kount’s advances in both proprietary techniques and patented technology include: Superior 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, Professional and managed services. Kount protects over 6,500 brands today.

MobileIron

The acknowledged leader in mobile device management (MDM) software, MobileIron’s latest series of developments makes it noteworthy and one of the top 10 cybersecurity companies to watch in 2019.

MobileIron was the first to deliver key innovations such as multi-OS mobile device management, mobile application management (MAM), and BYOD privacy controls. Last month MobileIron introduced zero sign-on (ZSO), built on the company’s unified endpoint management (UEM) platform and powered by the MobileIron Access solution. “By making mobile devices your identity, we create a world free from the constant pains of password recovery and the threat of data breaches due to easily compromised credentials,” wrote Simon Biddiscombe, MobileIron’s president and chief executive officer in his recent blog post, Single sign-on is still one sign-on too many.

Biddiscombe’s latest post, MobileIron: We’re making history by making passwords history, provides the company’s vision going forward with ZSO. Zero sign-on eliminates passwords as the primary method for user authentication, unlike single sign-on, which still requires at least one username and password. MobileIron paved the way for a zero sign-on enterprise with its Access product in 2017, which enabled zero sign-on to cloud services on managed devices. Enterprise security teams no longer have to trade off security for better user experience, thanks to the MobileIron Zero Sign-On.

Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is a fascinating cybersecurity company to track because it shows the ability to take on large-scale enterprise security challenges and turn them into a competitive advantage. An example of this is how quickly the company achieved FedRAMP Ready Designation, getting listed in the FedRAMP Marketplace.

Sumo Logic is a secure, cloud-native, machine data analytics service, delivering real-time, continuous intelligence from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across the entire application lifecycle and stack. More than 2,000 customers around the globe rely on Sumo Logic for the analytics and insights to build, run, and secure their modern applications and cloud infrastructures. With Sumo Logic, customers gain a multi-tenant, service-model advantage to accelerate their shift to continuous innovation, increasing competitive advantage, business value, and growth.

Founded in 2010, Sumo Logic is a privately held company based in Redwood City, Calif. and is backed by Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, DFJ, Franklin Templeton, Greylock Partners, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Tiger Global Management.

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Cloud IaaS revenue will top $150 billion in 2023, says Frost & Sullivan

Demand for cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is expected to drive the current $45.6 billion market toward $150.7 billion by 2023 – that's a compound annual growth rate of 27 percent, according to the latest worldwide market study by Frost & Sullivan.

Enterprises are using cloud services for strategic benefits such as supporting digital transformation efforts rather than for tactical ones, like reducing IT infrastructure costs and the hardware or software maintenance burden.

This market shift has changed the way enterprises choose and manage their IT infrastructure, and led them to deploy applications across multiple infrastructures, from on-premises private cloud to public cloud (multi- and single-tenant), resulting in higher demand for IaaS offerings.

Hybrid multi-cloud market development

"As the mix of deployment models and best-of-breed cloud IaaS vendors becomes increasingly diverse, single-tenant IaaS will gain revenue share over multi-tenant services," said Maiara Munhoz, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

Meanwhile, the emergence of cloud brokerage and cloud management platforms is boosting the trend of hybrid and multi-cloud deployment strategies, making managed cloud services providers key in supporting enterprises and their CIO or CTO requirements.

Frost & Sullivan analysts believe that managed service providers (MSPs) will support their customers with workload assessment and placement, workload migration, and hybrid cloud integration.

The North America region continues to be the most mature cloud IaaS market globally, followed by EMEA, but they are expected to gradually make room for the APAC and LATAM regions.

Some countries in APAC, such as Japan and Australia, are more mature, while India, China, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong are fast-growing markets.

Outlook for cloud IaaS applications growth

Going forward, it will be essential for vendors of cloud computing IaaS to invest in integrated services, on-premises and in the public cloud. For further growth opportunities, vendors should:

  • Offer more advanced services in the cloud — such as containers and serverless architecture — and tools for enterprises to manage, analyze, and act on their data
  • Support hybrid deployment models, as enterprises realize that a single cloud or deployment model will not address all their application requirements
  • Partner with MSPs to deliver training, programs and features to support them
  • Invest in educating clients on cloud computing technology, as enterprises still need guidance on how to use cloud services to meet goals for business innovation and digital transformation

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McAfee notes gap between cloud competence and transformation – with CASBs key to success

It is another case of mind the gap, according to McAfee: while the vast majority of companies are seeing some level of business acceleration through their cloud initiatives, only a fraction are exploiting its full potential.

The security provider has released a special edition of its Cloud and Risk Adoption Report, which polled 1,000 enterprise organisations worldwide alongside collating data from anonymised cloud events across its cloud access security broker (CASB) product.

87% of organisations polled said they do experience some business acceleration from their use of cloud services. More than half (52%) of respondents said they found better security in the cloud than in on-premise IT environments.

Looking at where data resided, almost two thirds (65%) of enterprise data analysed lives in software as a service (SaaS) environments, such as business collaboration tools, with a quarter (25%) in infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The remaining 10% is the big unknown, as shadow IT. Only a third (36%) of those polled said they could enforce data loss prevention in the cloud, with a similar number (33%) saying they could control collaboration settings which determined how data was shared.

The report – as may be expected given how the figures were acquired – explored the impact CASBs made on operations. Not altogether surprisingly, the findings were positive. McAfee argued that organisations were over 35% more likely to launch new products, gain quicker time to market, as well as expanding to new markets, when using a CASB. Despite this, only one in three companies polled were currently using a cloud access security broker.

“This research shines a light on organisations who are leading the charge in cloud adoption, prioritising the security of their data as they roll out new cloud services and winning in the market because of the actions they are taking,” said Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president for cloud security at McAfee. “Organisations often tell us how much faster their business moves when security is addressed in the cloud, and it is exciting for us now to quantify this experience and share our data and recommendations with the rest of the market.”

Read more: Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant shows the need for cloud access security brokers going forward

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