News – Digital IT News

Nutanix Essentials New Virtual Event Announced

Taylor Graham — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 18:12:15 +0000

Nutanix announced Nutanix Essentials, a new virtual event for IT and DevOps leaders that will be hosted on September 14th, 2022.

Many IT professionals are grappling with fast-growing data complexity in both the private and public clouds, and a lack of specialized tech talent to handle it. The leader in hybrid multicloud computing hosting Nutanix Essentials, will demystify common challenges involving hyperconvergence, hybrid and multicloud environments, and unifying public cloud agility with private cloud security. The event will feature expert-led sessions and speakers ranging from thought leaders and industry voices to technicians discussing how best to build a modern hybrid cloud.

Nutanix Essentials is designed to help IT leaders and practitioners discover new strategies to reduce complexity and costs for their IT infrastructures, freeing teams to focus on delivering business objectives. During the one-day event, attendees will have access to an insight-packed day of programming, including:

Keynote Featuring Thought Leaders and Customers

Nutanix Essentials will kick off with an opening keynote from Nutanix President and CEO, Rajiv Ramaswami, who will share his perspective on the Nutanix vision. Attendees will also gain additional insights on the company’s product strategy, which will be shared by a range of Nutanix executives, including:

Mano Bhattacharyya, Chief Technology Officer
Mandy Dhaliwal, Chief Marketing Officer
Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing
Thomas Cornely, Senior Vice President, Product Management
Induprakas Keri, Senior Vice President, HCI and Chief Product Security Officer
Laura McKinney, Vice President, US Commercial Sales

Attendees will hear from Nutanix customers and users, including Royal Bank of Canada, LabCorp, Albemarle Corporation, and others. These speakers will share expert insights, best practices, and their personal experiences using Nutanix products and solutions to achieve business goals and reduce complexity.

8 Essential Breakout Sessions for Building a Modern Hybrid Cloud

Following the keynote, attendees will have access to expert-led sessions on use cases and technical deep dives on hybrid multicloud infrastructure. These sessions will offer insights into the latest trends and best practices for optimal business outcomes. Session topics will include:

Running Business-Critical Applications
Reducing SecOps Complexity
Simplifying Database Management and Speed Development across Clouds
Establishing a Cloud Operating Model
Extending On-Premises Workloads to Cloud
Revving up Ransomware Defense
Maximizing End User Computing
Boosting Kubernetes and Modern Applications

Nutanix Essentials will take place on Wednesday, September 14th for the Americas and on Thursday, September 15th for ASEAN, ANZ, EMEA, Hong Kong, and India.

Learn more at www.nutanix.com. Free registration for “Nutanix Essentials” is available to all attendees – register now and view the full agenda, session descriptions, and speaker lineup.

Image licensed by pixabay.com

eBPF Added To Traceable AI for Efficient API Security

The post Nutanix Essentials New Virtual Event Announced appeared first on Digital IT News.

Jira and Confluence Simplified with Forty8Fifty Labs and Old Street Solutions

Taylor Graham — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 13:28:58 +0000

Forty8Fifty Labs and Old Street Solutions announced that they are partnering in the development and delivery of solutions that simplify the collaboration and use of Atlassian Jira and Confluence. Both companies are Atlassian Platinum Solution Partners and are focused on enhancing data-driven businesses with the powerful Atlassian-based solutions they need to improve user productivity and business performance. Forty8Fifty Labs are the experts in empowering teams to innovate at the velocity of business.

“Like Forty8Fifty Labs, Old Street Solutions is focused on enabling companies to create and collaborate more easily leveraging Atlassian’s powerful platforms,” said Steve Bishop, Executive Director of Forty8Fifty Labs and CTO for Veristor. “We are pleased to be partnering with them and to offer their innovative Atlassian Apps for Jira and Confluence. Together, we are simplifying and enhancing the use of Jira and Confluence across teams from programmers to project managers to support staff.”

“Forty8Fifty Labs are about delivering faster through making teams more proactive, and our software helps make that happen,” said Chris Cooke, CEO of Old Street Solutions. “We want to make Jira and Confluence easier to use for business users and beginners, so that everyone can get more involved, more easily. The fact that we were both rated Atlassian Partners of the Year in 2020 makes our alignment even more compelling.”

Old Street Solutions makes Atlassian add-ons that turn Jira and Confluence into a universal collaborative hub. The apps have been designed to empower Jira and Confluence users by giving them greater control and visibility while taking the pressure off programmers by making apps more intuitive to use by anyone on the team.

Old Street Solutions apps are offered as part of Forty8Fifty Labs’ solutions and services for Atlassian team collaboration. For more information visit Forty8Fifty Labs.

Image licensed by freepik.com

Veristor and Network Data Systems Partner to Deliver Services for Managed Secure Networking

The post Jira and Confluence Simplified with Forty8Fifty Labs and Old Street Solutions appeared first on Digital IT News.

Forty8Fifty Labs Partners with Exalate for Flexible Service Desk Synchronization

Leigh Porter — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 21:03:19 +0000

Forty8Fifty Labs, the Agile and DevOps consultancy and subsidiary of Veristor Systems, announced that it has partnered with Exalate for the delivery of the Exalate solution for flexible service desk synchronization. Together, the companies enable simplified syncing between service desk and ticketing solutions for more productive collaboration and issue tracking and management.

“With Exalate, we are able to simplify and automate even the most complex issue tracking environments,” said Armando Wirshing, Senior Business Development Manager, Forty8Fifty Labs. “Featuring an intuitive scripting engine, Exalate is optimized for cross-company issue tracking use cases and is not only high performing but extensible as well. It is a core component of our solutions and deployments for IT service management (ITSM).”

“Forty8Fifty Labs is an expert at architecting and implementing service management solutions that address even the most challenging requirements,” said Francis Martens, CTO, Exalate. “We are pleased to have their expertise and insight as part of our growing ecosystem of technology and delivery partners.”

Exalate is offered as part of Forty8Fifty Labs’ solutions and services for lean ITSM which leverage automation to deliver service request management, incident management, problem management and change management. For more information visit: https://www.forty8fiftylabs.com/lean-itsm.

Image licensed by: Jetpatch.com

Microsoft’s PowerApps New Vector of Data Exposure

The post Forty8Fifty Labs Partners with Exalate for Flexible Service Desk Synchronization appeared first on Digital IT News.

DevOps Institute Announces the ‘Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report’

Leigh Porter — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 18:43:24 +0000

DevOps Institute, a global professional association for advancing the human elements of DevOps, today announced the release of the “Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report.” In its third year, the report examines DevOps hiring trends around the globe within enterprise IT organizations of all sizes. In addition to DevOps roles, the report examines the top skill domains and associated must-have skills within these domains, which are essential for a successful DevOps journey. Data in the 2021 report is based on research gathered from an open survey of more than 2,000 respondents from organizations of all sizes around the world.

Infographic Source: DevOps Institute, ‘Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report’. Learn more at https://devopsinstitute.com/.

The report is available for download at https://info.devopsinstitute.com/2021-upskilling-report-download

“DevOps Humans remained in-demand, despite a global pandemic that upended our ways of life and business,” said Jayne Groll, CEO of DevOps Institute. “This is a testament to the importance and value of DevOps transformations at companies across industries and around the globe. The findings in the 2021 Upskilling Report give us clarity into the evolution of DevOps Humans and how IT organizations will shape their talent-based structures in 2021 and beyond.”

The research and data analysis was led by DevOps Institute’s Chief Research and Content Officer, Eveline Oehrlich, with support from Platinum Sponsor, GitLab; Gold Sponsors, CloudBees and The LLPA; Bronze Sponsors, Tricentis and HCL Software; and Media Sponsor, MediaOps.

Key Findings from the ‘Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report’ include:

Stop talking about being a learning organization and start acting. Seventy percent of survey respondents said that a learning organization was a predominant model–the DevOps way of working–while 45 percent leaned toward a safety culture. And, while 39 percent of IT teams are still struggling with a defined and systematic upskilling program, 52 percent of organizations already have a formally designed upskilling program or are currently developing one.
Hiring for DevOps initiatives is high. COVID-19 has not stopped the hiring of DevOps roles. Sixty percent of organizations are recruiting now or in the future.
Capabilities and skill development must go hand in hand. DevOps teams must assess which critical capabilities they can perform or not, across key areas. But capabilities must be supported with skilled DevOps Humans. Upon examining the priority domain skill categories, the survey data shows that the essential combination of skills for a successful DevOps human are across the automation, human, technical, functional, process and framework knowledge skill domain categories.
Pressure continues to force old IT operating models to change. As new forms of hybrid computing are on the rise, it gives application developers more freedom to choose tools and programming languages. As this increases, IT operations teams not yet practicing DevOps feel more pressure to embrace DevOps.
Value Stream Management (VSM) skills are seen by 39 percent of respondents as a must-have skill within the process and framework skill domain. DevOps and Agile practices have been adopted to innovate and create more iterative approaches for software development and delivery. However, the value must come through the customer lens. This is where VSM comes in. In simple terms, understanding and examining value streams of software being delivered end-to-end enables teams to make complex processes visible and provides the ability to pivot towards further value improvement.
The adoption of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) as an operating model is 22 percent in 2021 compared to 15 percent in the previous year. SRE is needed to continue automation and reduce toil. Forty-seven percent of the survey respondents voted SRE skills as a must-have skill in the process and framework skill domain this year compared to 28 percent in the previous year’s survey.
DevSecOps is a key trend. Security is integral to protect the business and enforce internal and external policies of the company. DevSecOps makes security an equal consideration alongside development and operations. According to survey participants, DevSecOps achieved a must-have percentage vote of 56 percent in the automation tool category.
New models such as DataOps and ModelOps are showing up. DataOps was voted by 27 percent as a must-have skill domain in the automation tool skill domain, whereas ModelOps received 22 percent. These new models are shaping the ongoing iterations of DevOps operating models.
DevOps Engineers are the most in-demand job title this year. It represents 53 percent of recently recruited DevOps positions. The DevOps engineer’s responsibility might differ from company to company, but all should be engaged in upskilling themselves and their teams.

“Our research shows that the future of DevOps at any organization is dependent upon the breadth and depth of capabilities and the supporting skills of the team members and within the team,” said Oehrlich. “A successful DevOps journey (actually any journey) has the DNA of a learning organization which means there is a commitment of continuous learning across all layers and players. Team members have changed their mental models to look at different views working in a collective and collaborative team. For example, problems and mistakes are opportunities to learn. This ability to continuously learn enables individuals and teams to work better together across boundaries regardless of process, team or technology boundaries. This mental continuous learning model will take time to develop, adapt and apply. Still, each individual can bring their skills and abilities to shape the bigger collective effort of DevOps. For everyone in IT, this is an exciting time to unlock your power, abilities and skills to accelerate your DevOps journey and that of your team and company. DevOps Human readiness and organizational learning must take on new importance now and in this next normal.”

Image licensed by: Pixabay.com

Survey: 60% of Educational Organizations Hit by Phishing Attacks Targeting Cloud Data, the Highest Result of All Verticals Analyzed

The post DevOps Institute Announces the ‘Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report’ appeared first on Digital IT News.

Anchore Announces New Partner Program to Meet Growing Demand for DevSecOps

Leigh Porter — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 20:37:30 +0000

Today Anchore, Inc., the leading experts in continuous security and compliance for containers, announced the launch of a new partner program to speed customers’ digital transformation and reduce risks by automating security and compliance checks earlier in the development lifecycle.

Anchore’s new partner program will meet a growing demand for DevSecOps. Launch partners include Red Hat, GitHub, Carahsoft,GitLab, Atlassian.

The program launches worldwide with existing partners such as GitHub, GitLab, Atlassian, CloudBees, Red Hat, Microsoft, Carahsoft, and many others. The program will bring together Anchore and partners to help companies and government agencies build DevSecOps toolchains and processes to meet their business and mission objectives.

“As software delivery increasingly moves to containers and cloud-native technologies, organizations must fundamentally change their approach to security and compliance. They can’t wait to fix security and compliance until the end of the software development lifecycle, but instead must shift left by continually checking the software applications and remediating issues earlier in the process,” remarked Saïd Ziouani, Anchore CEO and Cofounder. “With this new partner program, we’re formalizing our strategic relationships to create the flexible and integrated DevSecOps solutions that enterprises and government agencies have been requesting.”

Anchore’s new partner program has three categories:

Solution Providers, such as systems integrators, managed services providers, and security/compliance firms who provide clients with a complete end-to-end solution for continuous security and compliance across the software development lifecycle through to production environments.
Channel Partners, such as value added resellers (VARs), who interact with clients and Anchore to scope deployment and enable the procurement of technologies needed for a complete continuous security and compliance solution.
Technology Partners who integrate with Anchore to create compelling DevSecOps technologies to fuel innovative solutions for customers.

Supporting Partner Quotes:

“As GitHub continues to focus on building the best experience for developers, it’s critical to embed security into their workflow. With the Anchore GitHub Action, developers are able to surface container security findings directly through the GitHub code scanning UI. This empowers teams to ship more secure code, faster, and all within the native GitHub user experience,” said John Leon, VP of Business Development, GitHub.

“Red Hat’s joint work with Anchore at the US Department of Defense has driven technology and services innovation such as hardened Red Hat UBI images, Anchore’s Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification, and joint DevSecOps services expertise,” said Lars Herrmann, Senior Director of Technology Partnerships, Red Hat. “With Red Hat Marketplace, we are making it easier for customers to find and purchase tools like Anchore that are tested, certified and supported on Red Hat OpenShift, and we’ve removed operational barriers to deploying and managing these technologies on Kubernetes-native infrastructure.”

“We are excited to be included in Anchore’s new partner program,” said Natalie Gregory, Vice President of the team that manages Anchore at Carahsoft, which serves as Anchore’s Master Government Aggregator®. “Our Carahsoft team is committed to providing the public sector with the leading solutions to build out their DevSecOps pipelines, and we look forward to strengthening our partnership with Anchore under this program to better serve our government customers and reseller partners seeking to integrate security and compliance into their development processes.”

Image Licensed by Adobe Stock

Accenture Helps Rakuten Mobile Launch Fully Virtualized Cloud-Native Mobile Network

The post Anchore Announces New Partner Program to Meet Growing Demand for DevSecOps appeared first on Digital IT News.

AWS Announces Amazon DevOps Guru

Leigh Porter — Sat, 05 Dec 2020 17:44:41 +0000

AWS announced Amazon DevOps Guru, a fully-managed operations service that uses machine learning to make it easier for developers to improve application availability by automatically detecting operational issues and recommending specific actions for remediation. Amazon DevOps Guru applies machine learning informed by years of Amazon.com and AWS operational excellence to automatically collect and analyze data like application metrics, logs, events, and traces for identifying behaviors that deviate from normal operating patterns (e.g. under-provisioned compute capacity, database I/O over-utilization, memory leaks, etc.).

When Amazon DevOps Guru identifies anomalous application behavior (e.g. increased latency, error rates, resource constraints, etc.) that could cause potential outages or service disruptions, it alerts developers with issue details (e.g. resources involved, issue timeline, related events, etc.) via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and partner integrations like Atlassian Opsgenie and PagerDuty to help them quickly understand the potential impact and likely causes of the issue with specific recommendations for remediation. Developers can use remediation suggestions from Amazon DevOps Guru to reduce time to resolution when issues arise and improve application availability and reliability with no manual setup or machine learning expertise required. There are no upfront costs or commitments with Amazon DevOps Guru, and customers pay only for the data Amazon DevOps Guru analyzes. To get started with Amazon DevOps Guru, visit https://aws.amazon.com/devops-guru

As more organizations move to cloud-based application deployment and microservice architectures to globally scale their businesses and operations without the limitations of on-premises deployments, applications have become increasingly distributed to meet customer needs, and developers need more automated practices to maintain application availability and reduce the time and effort spent detecting, debugging, and resolving operational issues. Application downtime events caused by faulty code or config changes, unbalanced container clusters, or resource exhaustion (e.g. CPU, memory, disk, etc.) inevitably lead to bad customer experiences and lost revenue. Companies invest considerable money and developer time to deploy multiple monitoring tools, often managed separately, and then have to develop and maintain custom alerts for common issues like spikes in load balancer errors or drops in application request rates. Setting thresholds to identify and alert when application resources are behaving abnormally is difficult to get right, involves manual setup, and requires thresholds that must be continually updated as application usage changes (e.g. an unusually large numbers of requests during holiday shopping season).

If a threshold is set too high, developers don’t see alarms until operational performance is severely impacted. When a threshold is set too low, developers get too many false positives, which ultimately get ignored. Even if developers get alerted to a potential operational issue, the process of identifying the root cause can still prove difficult. Using existing tools, developers often have difficulty triangulating the root cause of an operational issue from graphs and alarms, and even when they are able to find the root cause, they are often left without a means to fix it. Each troubleshooting attempt is a cold start where teams must spend hours or days to identify problems, and this leads to time consuming, tedious work that slows down the time to resolve an operational failure and can prolong application disruptions.

Amazon DevOps Guru’s machine learning models leverage over 20 years of operational expertise in building, scaling, and maintaining highly available applications for Amazon.com. This gives Amazon DevOps Guru the ability to automatically detect operational issues (e.g. missing or misconfigured alarms, early warning of resource exhaustion, config changes that could lead to outages, etc.), provide context on resources involved and related events, and recommend remediation actions – with no machine learning experience required. With just a few clicks in the Amazon DevOps Guru console, historical application and infrastructure metrics like latency, error rates, and request rates for all resources are automatically ingested and analyzed to establish normal operating bounds, and Amazon DevOps Guru then uses a pre-trained machine learning model to identify deviations from the established baseline.

When Amazon DevOps Guru analyzes system and application data to automatically detect anomalies, it also groups this data into operational insights that include anomalous metrics, visualizations of application behavior over time, and recommendations on actions for remediation. Amazon DevOps Guru also correlates and groups related application and infrastructure metrics (e.g. web application latency spikes, running out of disk space, bad code deployments, memory leaks etc.) to reduce redundant alarms and help focus users on high-severity issues. Customers can see configuration change histories and deployment events, along with system and user activity, to generate a prioritized list of likely causes for an operational issue in the Amazon DevOps Guru console.

To help customers resolve issues quickly, Amazon DevOps Guru provides intelligent recommendations with remediation steps and integrates with AWS Systems Manager for runbook and collaboration tooling, giving customers the ability to more effectively maintain applications and manage infrastructure for their deployments. Together with Amazon CodeGuru – a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifying an application’s most expensive lines of code – Amazon DevOps Guru provides customers the automated benefits of machine learning for their operational data so that developers can more easily improve application availability and reliability.

“Customers have asked us to continue adding services around areas where we can apply our own expertise on how to improve application availability and learn from the years of operational experience that we have acquired running Amazon.com,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “With Amazon DevOps Guru, we have taken our experience and built specialized machine learning models that help customers detect, troubleshoot, and prevent operational issues while providing intelligent recommendations when issues do arise. This enables teams to immediately benefit from operational best practices Amazon has learned from running Amazon.com, saving customers the time and effort that would otherwise be spent configuring and managing multiple monitoring systems.”

With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can enable Amazon DevOps Guru to begin analyzing account and application activity within minutes to provide operational insights. Amazon DevOps Guru gives customers a single-console experience to visualize their operational data by summarizing relevant data across multiple sources (e.g. AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config, AWS CloudFormation, AWS X-Ray) and reduces the need to switch between multiple tools. Customers can also view correlated operational events and contextual data for operational insights within the Amazon DevOps Guru console and receive alerts via Amazon SNS. Additionally, Amazon DevOps Guru supports API endpoints through the AWS SDK, making it easy for partners and customers to integrate Amazon DevOps Guru into their existing solutions for ticketing, paging, and automatic notification of engineers for high-severity issues. PagerDuty and Atlassian are among the partners that have integrated Amazon DevOps Guru into their operations monitoring and incident management platforms, and customers who use their solutions can now benefit from operational insights provided by Amazon DevOps Guru. Amazon DevOps Guru is available in preview today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Europe (Ireland) with availability in additional regions in the coming months.

Teams at more than 170,000 companies rely on Atlassian products to make teamwork easier, and help them organize, discuss, and complete their work. “Atlassian is proud to partner with AWS on the launch of Amazon DevOps Guru and help empower teams to deploy code and operate services with confidence,” said Emel Dogrusoz, Head of Product, Opsgenie. “With our new Opsgenie and Jira Service Management integration, the right teams can be immediately notified the instant Amazon DevOps Guru predicts a potential issue, or determines an incident has occurred. Amazon DevOps Guru provides a new dimension of insight, and Atlassian ensures the fastest response.”

“PagerDuty was built to drive the move to a DevOps culture by automating the entire incident response lifecycle with resolution,” said Jonathan Rende, SVP of Product at PagerDuty. “We’re excited to continue this commitment to DevOps with our latest integration with Amazon DevOps Guru. Leveraging Amazon’s decades of operational excellence and Amazon DevOps Guru’s machine learning capabilities, PagerDuty provides even more real-time signal-to-action capabilities to our joint customers. Through PagerDuty’s ingestion of Amazon DevOps Guru’s Amazon SNS, AWS customers can take real-time action on operational issues before they become customer-impacting outages.”

Thomson Reuters is one of the world’s most trusted providers of answers, helping professionals make confident decisions and run better businesses. “Customer experience is vital to us. Dealing with multiple sources of alerts for availability, performance, and change requests can be a challenge when trying to prevent and mitigate incidents impacting our customers,” said Steve Thoennes, Director of Infrastructure Hosting Portfolio at Thomson Reuters. “We are excited to use Amazon DevOps Guru and leverage its machine learning insights to provide clear paths for action, allowing us to mitigate issues quickly and avoid customer impacting events. The integration with PagerDuty is a bonus, as we can have recommendations delivered to the right people timely and efficiently.”

SmugMug facilitates the sale of digital and print media for amateur and professional photographers. “My team follows an ops-for-life motto, and we are always on the lookout for ways to automate our manual activities,” said Andrew Shieh, Operations Director at SmugMug. “With Amazon DevOps Guru, we hope to realize that goal and let AIOps take over many of our day-to-day tasks and make our workday composed of a single George-Jetson-style Easy Button, so my team can focus on IT innovation. We are now not only meeting the needs of the business but able to exceed them since we have more time to focus on what matters most – delivering value for our organization and our customers.”

NextRoll helps marketplaces and marketing platforms grow revenue by empowering them to build and enhance their marketing solutions. “We run thousands of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, and we are looking for ways to reduce my team’s time spent on resolving operational issues,” said Valentino Volonghi, CTO at NextRoll. “We are excited to use Amazon DevOps Guru and leverage its machine learning-powered insights to help us identify, correlate, and remediate operational issues with recommendations. This will help my team save hours and reduce our mean time to recovery.”

Imaged licensed by Pixabay.com

Siemens Smart Infrastructure Chooses AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Provider for SAP Environments

The post AWS Announces Amazon DevOps Guru appeared first on Digital IT News.

Actifio’s Cloud Data Management Accelerates Customers’ DevOps, Analytics Initiatives

Leigh Porter — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 18:35:45 +0000

Turning data into a competitive advantage was already a top priority for CEOs everywhere, but the global pandemic has raised the stakes by making instant access to large volumes of data a critical path to business success. Actifio, the pioneer of multi-cloud copy data management software, designed and honed its platform for precisely this kind of urgency.

Ash Ashutosh, Actifio CEO and Co-Founder, said, “We used to worry about the digital divide — those who have access to the internet and those who don’t. Today, it’s the data divide — the divide between organizations that know how to leverage and exploit their data and accelerate the business, and those that don’t. This year, that divide has had a major effect. Data is the new infrastructure, and more and more of our customers are on the right side of the digital divide.”

This is reinforced by IDC analyst Archana Venkatraman’s newly published guest blog, sponsored by Actifio and titled, “Innovate with Data in the Next Normal: Leveraging cloud data management platforms for data protection, availability, and re-use. With IDC estimating the amount of data created over the next three years to exceed the amount created over the last 30 years, “Maximizing the value of data is a foundational aspect of achieving a data-driven organization,” the analyst asserts. “Today, there is a laser-sharp focus on value and cost optimization. As a result, enterprises need to pivot from traditional backup environments that are seen as necessary, single-use, static business procedures to a new paradigm of backup as a dynamic data hub that can provide any data, any number of times, for any business purpose – DevOps, analytics, testing, simulation, machine learning, or app development.”

Ashutosh continued, “I think this is a phenomenal time for companies to absolutely go change, make this transformation about data acceleration, data leverage, data exploitation. And this idea of making data the new infrastructure, it’s finally come to fruition. Most of our customer base relies on Actifio for secure backup and then re-uses the backup data for things that accelerate the business, make the business move faster and more productively.”

“Backup cannot be an insurance or a destination,” Ashutosh said. “It has to be something that you can use as an asset. For us, being the world’s fastest backup and most scalable DR solution is a starting point. It really pays off when customers can use that to develop applications 8-10 times faster, to run analytics 100 times faster. The more data you have, the more people who use the data you have, the better this return becomes.”

In her report, Venkatraman describes IT organizations’ urgency: “In conversations with IDC, IT teams insist that live data availability, data reuse, and data cost optimization are moving from nice-to-have to must-have capabilities for their businesses. But many businesses were caught by the pandemic with legacy data management architectures that were neither cloud connected or automated. These architectures hindered quick access to data, becoming bottlenecks that slowed business decisions. At some organizations, refreshing a large database environment could take as many as three days. This needs to change.”

Actifio’s patented Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology turns data silos into data pipelines, with automation from on-premises to any cloud for secure, instant access for business use.

Image licensed by Pixabay.com

Verizon and Newlab Unveil Results of 5G Studio

The post Actifio’s Cloud Data Management Accelerates Customers’ DevOps, Analytics Initiatives appeared first on Digital IT News.

Security Champions Programs Can Improve Relationship Between Security and DevOps Teams, Says Survey

S.J. Fisher — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 23:11:46 +0000

A survey from ZeroNorth says 84 percent of security and development professionals believe that Security Champions efforts can both bolster application security (AppSec) and improve relationships between Security and DevOps teams.

As organizations embrace DevOps and accelerate software delivery, the notion of centralized control is fading away as DevOps teams are gaining increasing AppSec responsibilities. A recent Ponemon Institute Research report revealed the challenges these shifts are creating, indicating that 71% of AppSec professionals believe security is undermined by developers who don’t include proper security functionality early in the software development life cycle (SDLC).

In an effort to better prepare DevOps teams for their AppSec remit, Security Champions programs are being implemented by organizations looking to create a culture of security across the development process. The report, conducted by ZeroNorth, surveyed security and development professionals to learn about the state of Security Champions programs at their individual organizations.

The survey found that while the notion of a Security Champions program is not a new one, 67% of these programs have existed for less than two years, with almost 40% being in place less than one year. For organizations that have implemented a Security Champions Program, 78% of respondents said the program has strengthened security skills and knowledge of developers, and 77% said it improved the company’s overall AppSec posture.

“The challenge of securing applications against increasingly sophisticated attacks is larger than any single organization,” said ZeroNorth CEO, John Worrall. “The most successful approaches to creating a culture focused on security begin at the top, with CISOs and security leaders working to bridge internal divides and demonstrate that the security of applications is everyone’s responsibility.”

Among the key findings of the survey:

Security champions have the power to improve AppSec, with 84% of respondents agreeing or strongly agreeing.
Passion for security gives strength to a Security Champion, with 50% of respondents naming it the characteristic for a successful Security Champion.
Security Champions are a unifying force with 56% of respondents saying Corporate Security leadership was a top requirement for the success of Security Champion and 47% saying Engineering leadership support.
Corporate Security teams are vital to the success of security champions programs, with 57% of respondents saying they should play a role in defining security priorities and 47% saying they should be involved in training best practices.

Download a copy of the Security Champions: Empowering Heroes to Unite Security & DevOps report here.

The post Security Champions Programs Can Improve Relationship Between Security and DevOps Teams, Says Survey appeared first on Digital IT News.

Veeam’s Acquisition of Kasten Aims to Accelerate Protection of Kubernetes-Native Workloads

Taylor Graham — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 21:32:44 +0000

Veeam Software has announced the acquisition of Kasten, the market leader for Kubernetes Backup and Disaster Recovery, in a cash and stock transaction valued at $150M.

Researchers at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, report that nearly three-quarters of organizations are currently using or planning to use Kubernetes within the next two years. Veeam believes this shift creates a massive opportunity for the future of data protection and the acquisition reinforces its commitment to support customers’ business transformation to future-ready architectures. With this new acquisition, Veeam will integrate Kasten into its market-leading Cloud Data Management platform for modern data protection and radically simplify data management for enterprises.

As applications using microservice-based architectures have quickly gained traction in the enterprise, this shift has established a new segment of application development methodology known as DevOps. Containers are a critical component of this DevOps-led infrastructure and application modernization, and Kubernetes has emerged as the dominant container orchestration platform – creating a significant opportunity for a single data protection platform that includes virtual, physical, cloud and Kubernetes environments. Veeam recognizes the strategic importance of this environment, the increasing importance of providing modern data management that is deeply integrated into Kubernetes, and the growth of DevOps to improve quality, increase scalability, and accelerate application delivery while reducing daily management. With the Kasten K10 Data Management Platform, Veeam will now be able to offer enterprise operations teams an easy-to-use, scalable, and secure system for Kubernetes Backup and application mobility with unparalleled operational simplicity.

“Veeam was built on offering the best data protection for virtual and modern data infrastructures, and we have continued to expand our offerings to include industry-leading protection for physical and cloud environments. With the acquisition of our partner Kasten, we are taking a very important next step to accommodate our customers’ shift to container adoption in order to protect Kubernetes-native workloads on-premises and across multi-cloud environments. This significant milestone strengthens Veeam’s commitment to continue to deliver the industry’s leading Cloud Data Management platform that will support data protection for container-based applications built in Kubernetes environments.” – Danny Allan, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam

While the Kasten K10 platform will continue to be available independently, it will also be integrated into Veeam Backup & Replication to offer a comprehensive data management solution. With Kasten’s protection of container workloads and Veeam support for virtual machines, physical servers, SaaS applications and cloud workloads, this best of breed technology will provide all organizations a single platform for modern data protection.

“The enterprise landscape is shifting as applications rapidly transition from monoliths to containers and microservices. With Kubernetes at the core of this infrastructural shift, Kasten’s innovation in Kubernetes-native data management combined with Veeam’s expertise in Backup, both on-premises and in multi-cloud environments, will significantly advance the state of modern data management. Veeam’s success has been a beacon of inspiration for the Kasten team and we are very excited to join forces with a company where there is so much philosophical alignment.” – Niraj Tolia, Chief Executive Officer at Kasten

Kasten will operate as a separate Kubernetes Business Unit (BU) within Veeam. Kasten’s founders, Niraj Tolia and Vaibhav Kamra, will lead the business unit – Tolia as its President and General Manager, and Kamra as Chief Technology Officer, Kubernetes BU. All teams including sales, marketing, R&D, and customer service will stay intact to continue growing the business with increased investment in people and resources.

Veeam’s commitment to the Kubernetes community will also continue through the contribution to Open Source and other community projects that Kasten has supported, including the Kubernetes Storage Special Interest Group and the Data Protection Working Group in Kubernetes, which aim to improve storage operations and promote data protection support for the Kubernetes user base. Additionally, Veeam will continue to support Kanister, Kasten’s open source project that extends support for and execution of data management tasks in Kubernetes, and the development of kopia, a fast and secure open-source tool to manage Backups.

The post Veeam’s Acquisition of Kasten Aims to Accelerate Protection of Kubernetes-Native Workloads appeared first on Digital IT News.

Datadog and Microsoft Strike Partnership

Digital IT News Editors — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 15:46:51 +0000

Datadog has announced a new strategic partnership with Microsoft Azure. As a result Datadog will now be available in the Azure console as a first class service. This means that Azure customers will be able to implement Datadog as a monitoring solution for their cloud workloads through new streamlined workflows that cover everything from procurement to configuration.

Datadog reports that the improved onboarding experience makes Datadog setup automatic, so new users can start monitoring the health and performance of their applications with Datadog quickly, whether they are based entirely in Azure or spread across hybrid or multi-cloud environments. With the deepest integration and the easiest configuration, Datadog is now clearly positioned as the premier monitoring solution for Azure.

In addition to the integration enhancements, the new channel through the Azure Marketplace allows customers to draw down on their committed Azure spend to purchase Datadog. This makes it significantly easier for customers to find budget, and also aligns incentives for Azure and Datadog sales teams for better collaboration and engagement in co-sell motions with enterprise clients. As a result, this partnership will enable more Azure customers to leverage Datadog’s observability platform to drive successful cloud modernization and migration initiatives.

Datadog’s native presence represents a first-of-its-kind integration of a third-party service into Azure.

“Azure is the first cloud to enable a seamless configuration and management experience for customers to use partner solutions like Datadog. Together with Datadog, we are enabling customers to use this experience to monitor their Azure workloads and enable an accelerated transition to the cloud,” – Corey Sanders, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Azure

“Observability is a key capability for any successful cloud migration. Through our new partnership with Microsoft Azure, customers will now have access to the Datadog platform directly in the Azure console, enabling them to migrate, optimize and secure new and migrated workloads.” – Amit Agarwal, Chief Product Officer, Datadog

Through the new experience in the Azure Portal, customers can:

Purchase a Datadog plan and consolidate billing through the Azure Marketplace
Start sending Azure logs and metrics to Datadog with a few clicks
View and manage which Azure resources are monitored by Datadog
Easily deploy the Datadog agent to Azure hosts and web applications

Image licensed from Adobe Stock.

The post Datadog and Microsoft Strike Partnership appeared first on Digital IT News.