Category: News

Grazed from CIO.com.  Author: Mary Branscombe

When Microsoft first showed off its disaster recovery service on Azure in 2014, it was called Hyper-V Recovery Manager and was an extension of a System Center tool for failing over Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) to another location, using the public cloud to coordinate testing and managing recovery between your data centers.

Today, Azure Site Recovery (ASR) lets you fail over into the cloud as well to another location, from physical and virtual servers, and it handles far more workloads than just Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (or even VMware and vSphere, which it also supports).

Bitglass, the total data protection company, today announced support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and custom apps — two major additions that extend the capabilities of Bitglass’ market-leading Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solution.

Bitglass for AWS offers deep visibility, real-time DLP, and granular access controls across all S3 and EC2 instances. According to Neil MacDonald and Greg Young of Gartner*, "Through 2020, 80% of cloud breaches will be due to customer misconfiguration, mismanaged credentials or insider theft, not cloud provider vulnerabilities."

TierPoint LLC, a leading national provider of hybrid IT solutions, today announced that it has been designated a Microsoft Azure Authorized Indirect Cloud Solution Provider – making it one of less than a dozen US-based managed hosting and cloud providers that have achieved this designation and building on TierPoint’s prior designation as a Direct Partner within the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program.

"This expanded licensing program opens the door to compelling new opportunities for our channel partners and their clients," said Bob Buchanan, TierPoint Vice President, Channel. "TierPoint partners that are enrolled in the Microsoft Partner Network with Indirect Reseller status can now provide one-stop shopping for Microsoft Azure solutions, increase revenue, and leverage TierPoint’s unique and comprehensive mix of hybrid IT services, including cloud design, deployment, and management – all backed by our superior, high-touch service and 39 world-class data centers in 20 geographically diversified markets."

Regardless of the project you’re working on, good project management is a must. In a web design project, for instance, good project management will not only help you organize every part of the project properly, but also allow you to overcome challenges and get the best results without wasting too much time revising and debugging. According to studies complied by Brandeis University and its masters in project and program management program, good project management involves five important steps.

The most important part of the project management cycle is actually planning. You can’t plan for everything, but good planning will help give you that extra set of guidelines that will get you to your goals faster. You can also organize resources and time better with careful planning at the beginning of the project.

Technology is the backbone of your business, but what happens when it fails? Make no mistake – this isn’t an "if" scenario, but a matter of time: From power outages to weather events or network issues, technology doesn’t always work as intended. How do you make sure you’re prepared?

Anatomy of a Disaster

What’s behind an IT disaster? The hard truth is that anything can cause network problems, device failures or total blackouts – some issues are simply more likely than others. For example, power outages caused by large-scale events such as storms or fires often top the list of IT disaster causes. Other common origins include issues with existing networks, such as the migration from local stacks to cloud-based networks or attacks by malicious actors. These could include DDoS attacks that are designed to quickly bring down tech services by overwhelming them with network requests or could be the result of employees accidentally or maliciously allowing attackers access to corporate networks.

ServiceNow, the enterprise cloud company, today announced integrations from leading cybersecurity companies into ServiceNow Security Operations solution. With ServiceNow customers can prioritize threats and use a structured response engine to resolve real security threats fast. Now security analysts can easily enrich threat information, map those threats to the underlying business service at risk, and easily collaborate with IT to automatically resolve them. This replaces the manual, slow and ineffective back-and-forth resolution process of the past.

While enterprises have invested heavily in protection and detection tools, security response is often left unaddressed. Determining whether an alert constitutes an actual threat can take hours. Security analysts use email, phone calls and spreadsheets to coordinate remediation with IT teams. These manual processes are error-prone and unwieldy, leading to lengthy breach containment times of 70 days on average, according to the Ponemon Institute.

ServiceNow Security Operations replaces the manual work patterns of the past with intelligent workflows of the future and just added several new automation integrations from leading security vendors. In as little as 20 seconds, Security Operations automatically enriches each security incident with threat intelligence, including information from potentially affected endpoints. This allows security analysts to spend less time on researching problems and to get to resolution faster. In addition, ServiceNow Security Operations eliminates the need for manual data collection by automatically generating a post-incident report for later analysis, reporting or audit.

Threat Stack, the leader in cloud-native security and compliance management, today announced the launch of its new packaging model for the Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform (CSP), strengthening the company’s commitment to customers of all sizes throughout their cloud maturity. Each package is custom built to align with three Cloud Security Maturity phases: Auditing the environment; Continuously monitoring and alerting; Investigating events and remediation. This new model enables the security of a customer’s journey from just getting started in the cloud to an approach focused on analysis, investigation and remediation.

"Traditionally companies amass several tools as security maturity evolves over time, becoming costly and resource intensive," said Brian M. Ahern, Chairman and CEO, Threat Stack. "The new Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform® packaging is designed to enhance security visibility, reduce operating costs and maximize company resources through flexible package selection aligning with company security maturity and infrastructure security requirements."

Threat Stack CSP is now available in three package options:

Green Cloud provides custom wholesale and white label cloud solutions to a network of 400 reseller partners, and the acquisition expands Green Cloud’s capacity and data center presence, particularly on the west coast, while adding core expertise around security and compliance services.

HotLink Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for hybrid IT, today announced an agreement with Avnet, a leading global technology distributor. The alliance makes HotLink solutions easily accessible to Avnet channel partners in the United States and Canada, as more enterprise customers seek ways to easily, quickly and cost-effectively extend, integrate and unify on-premise computing environments with public cloud resources like Amazon Web Services (AWS). As the only Avnet partner providing native public cloud integration with VMware vCenter management infrastructure, HotLink will enable resellers to deliver holistic management of hybrid cloud production environments as easily as homogenous, on-premise VMware deployments.

Avnet helps partners deliver consumption or subscription model public cloud solutions for their customers with reduced complexity and risk through its Avnet Cloud Marketplace.  Avnet curates the most cutting-edge technologies for its community of value-added resellers (VARs). Avnet partners can now take advantage of the HotLink Cloud-Attach Platform, patented technology that offers seamless interoperability between VMware management infrastructure and public and private cloud resources – without adding operational or integration complexity, or an array of new tools. Avnet will make available HotLink Managed DRaaSä, which extends VMware vCenter to provide disaster recovery and business continuity leveraging AWS and HotLink Cloud Management Expressä for out-of-the-box VMware vCenter integration with AWS and Azure resources.

The Ignite software powers and controls the Cloudistics on-premises cloud platform, delivering mid-market and enterprise customers the same experience and functionality of the public cloud in a simple, plug-and-play and high performance on-premises appliance.

“We love the flexibility, scalability, and the ease-of-use of the public cloud but we can’t store sensitive data outside our datacenter,” said Jon Halseth, manager, Information Technology for the Atlanta Hawks. “Cloudistics provided us with a simple-to-use and secure platform that gave us the best of public cloud with control over our data.”