TEKsystems Global Services, a leader in full-stack technology services, announced today it will be speaking and exhibiting at AWS re:Invent 2018. AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the global cloud computing community. The event features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to more than 2,000 technical sessions, a partner expo, after-hours events, and so much more.

TEKsystems’ deep cloud experience offers a full-stack perspective that can help organizations maximize their cloud strategies and provide tailored solutions that fit the specific needs of their business. With over 100 cloud, application re-architecture, data warehouse migration and DevOps automation projects completed; over 1,000 on-premises workloads migrated to the cloud; and a 60 percent decrease in provisioning time for new builds delivered to a client, TEKsystems has a proven track record in accelerating their clients’ success to meet the demanding pace of digital transformation.

Protecting your business doesn’t always require you to spent six figures on security infrastructure or perform hundreds of penetration tests. As with many things in life, it’s the little things that really count. Here are a few things you can do right now to enhance your business’s security posture – and they won’t cost a thing.

There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the cybersecurity space. It seems like you can’t even read the news without hearing about some terrifying new black hat organization, or some highly-sophisticated malware that’s bringing businesses to their knees across the world. It’s hard not to adopt something of a fatalist outlook amidst all that chaos.

After all, if these large enterprises with their million and billion dollar security budgets can’t fend off hackers, what chance do the rest of us have?

A pretty good one, actually. See, while it’s certainly true that there are a ton of well-funded, extremely advanced hacking groups out there, the chances that one of them will directly target your business are extremely slim. Likely as not, anyone who goes after you is simply taking a shotgun approach to their hacking – throw a bunch of attempts at the wall and see which ones work.

Univa announced a significant advancement in the migration of HPC workloads to the cloud with the release of Navops Launch 1.0, the latest version of the most powerful hybrid HPC cloud management product. Navops Launch meshes public cloud services and on-premise clusters to cost-effectively meet increasing workload demand.

The Navops Launch platform helps HPC organizations manage cloud spending and audit usage. This latest product uses an automation engine that integrates cluster and cloud management systems with end-user defined metrics to fully inform intelligent cloud workload placement actions. With Navops Launch, organizations can take advantage of the virtually unlimited scalability, lightning-fast cluster creation and the pay-per-use economics of hybrid HPC cloud computing with fully automated control of spending and policies.

Navops Launch automation tightly integrates with Univa Grid Engine and its workload status and metrics collection to respond to changes in workload demand and cluster utilization by expanding or contracting the cloud footprint in a dynamic fashion. Once configured, administrators have full control over tying cloud resource usage to a corresponding budget without having to intervene manually. Built-in monitors report the efficiency, use, spend and status of workloads placed in the cloud.

Aviatrix, the pioneer in software-defined cloud routing, has teamed with the digital skills management platform, Cloud Academy, to teach technology professionals how to build and operate software-defined public cloud networks for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

The course, called "Managing Cloud Networks at Scale," is a series of informal "chalk talks" and demonstrations that teach software-defined cloud routing, and look at the architectures and issues teams face when managing multi-cloud implementations.

"While compute and storage are relatively easy to do in the cloud today, networking is not," said Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing at Aviatrix. "Our courses on Cloud Academy will help cloud operations teams learn how to simplify networking and secure connectivity between their data centers and public clouds, and between multi-cloud environments."

Among the specific topics covered in the course are:

To continue supporting enterprise IT infrastructure and connectivity needs, TierPoint and CenturyLink, Inc. announced that CenturyLink’s Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections will be offered out of TierPoint data centers across the United States.

Thirty-five of 43 TierPoint data centers are now connected with fiber to CenturyLink’s global network, with the majority already enabled with the SDN capability. This allows enterprise customers to quickly and easily establish highly scalable Ethernet connections directly to major cloud service providers and their enterprise locations.

Enterprises using TierPoint can turn up and down dedicated Ethernet connections to Amazon Web Services (AWS) locations across the globe, ranging in size from 10 Mb/s to 3 Gb/s in just a few minutes, and only pay for the time the network is used in hourly increments. If customers keep the connection up, it automatically reverts to a lower monthly billing rate. In addition, the connections can be scaled up and down dynamically as bandwidth needs fluctuate.

Elastifile, a pioneer of enterprise-grade, scalable file storage for the public cloud, announced the availability of an Elastifile Qwiklabs learning module along with new enhancements to its cutting-edge data management platform.

The Elastifile Qwiklab provides a commitment-free, hands-on introduction to the company’s storage solution and leads users through a guided tour of the Elastifile experience. Any user can easily create and test an Elastifile Cloud File System in minutes, with no prior experience required.

"A recent study found that 30% of IT fixed assets are missing or can’t be found¹," said Ian Aitchison, Senior Product Director, Ivanti. "For many enterprises, knowing what assets you have and where they are is simply the tip of the IT asset management iceberg. It’s also vital to track contracts, regulatory compliance, and cost of ownership. Ivanti Asset Manager Cloud monitors and reports on these areas as well as what hardware needs to be purchased, updated, and maintained so IT management can plan ahead, avoid hasty purchasing decisions, and optimize asset use operationally and fiscally. It’s the kind of support enterprises need to successfully manage their IT assets."

Built for complete asset optimization, Ivanti Asset Manager Cloud features:

With its latest capabilities for The Connected Enterprise -Boomi Connect Now, Boomi Data Services for Pivotal, Boomi API Gateway and Developer Portal, Bot SDK and new Professional Services offerings -Boomi provides the tools organizations need to support a breadth of use cases across all personas, ensuring both high productivity and IT control. Boomi democratizes integration, making it accessible to all users regardless of their level of technical expertise or role in the organization from citizen developers, business analysts and integration experts.

"Sky’s mission is to connect customers to more of what they love. Dell Boomi’s ability to connect data, processes and people has an extremely positive impact on the experience Sky provides its 12 million UK customers," said Olive Perrins, Service Strategy Manager at Sky. "Our people are critical to our success and being able to bring together our rich talent along with critical applications and data will be key to our continued success."

VMware, Inc. announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Heptio, a leader in the open Kubernetes ecosystem. Heptio’s products and expertise help organizations deploy and operationalize Kubernetes. Terms were not disclosed.

Founded in 2016 by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, two of the creators of Kubernetes, Heptio has applied its unique insight to a growing set of products, open source projects and contributions to upstream Kubernetes. This is complemented by Heptio’s work with organizations through training, support and professional services that speed integration of Kubernetes and related technologies into the fabric of enterprise IT. As a result, Heptio will be able to open new channels for VMware to further engage the open source community and harden upstream Kubernetes as well as support the cloud native needs of the largest enterprises in the world upon closing.

DH2i, the leading provider of multi-platform Software Defined Perimeter and Smart Availability software for Windows and Linux, today announced the launch of DxOdyssey, its new network security software that dynamically deploys perimeter security where needed in order to isolate services for fine-grained user access, creating a Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP). The new DH2i SDP offering gives medium and large organizations the perimeter security model needed for Zero Trust network connectivity between on-premises sites and/or multi-cloud environments. In addition, the new offering addresses customer desire for a highly scalable, self-healing networking solution that is easy to configure and manage, with a high ROI. DxOdyssey makes the application infrastructure "always-secure and always-on".

Today’s medium and large organization security and network admins are well-aware of the difficulties that surround using traditional approaches such as virtual private networks (VPNs) for perimeter security to connect on-premises sites and/or multi-cloud environments. The issues include: