Category: News

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.”

Minio today announced the general availability of its distributed object storage server built for cloud applications and DevOps. The solution enables applications to manage massive quantities of unstructured data, and enables cloud and SaaS application developers to adopt emerging cloud hosting providers such as Digital Ocean, Packet and Hyper.sh with Amazon S3 like capabilities. Minio’s object storage server is now production ready, with major features such as erasure code, bitrot detection and lambda notification, and has grown in popularity amongst the Docker, Mesos and Kubernetes communities due its cloud native architecture.

"Minio is a valued partner of Mesosphere and a leading voice on the topic of storage in the DC/OS community," said Florian Leibert, CEO of Mesosphere. "With its future-proof and developer-friendly distributed object storage offering, Minio solves a real problem for our joint customers, and this latest release continues their history of innovation."

Completing the Storage Stack

Cato Networks, provider of network and security as a service solutions, today announced the launch of its cloud-based, secure SD-WAN service. The Cato Cloud converges networking with security to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of existing networks. It extends the WAN with policy-based routing, an SLA-backed global backbone, enterprise-grade network security as well as cloud and mobile support. Enterprises can now reduce their reliance on expensive MPLS services and distributed network security appliances to securely connect branch offices, cloud and physical data centers, and the mobile workforce.

"The role of the wide area network (WAN) is now expanding to incorporate a new set of requirements including connectivity to a growing number of mobile workers and public cloud providers," said Jim Metzler, Ashton, Metzler and Associates. "These requirements expand the enterprise attack surface, which drives the need to better integrate the network security stack into the WAN infrastructure."

"Current enterprise networks are built upon 25 years old networking and security technologies. This aging architecture is incompatible with the cloud-centric and mobile-first modern enterprise," said Shlomo Kramer, Co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks. "Over the next 10 years organizations of all sizes will need to re-architect their WANs to provide secure networking capabilities across the business, anytime and anywhere. This challenge requires a new architecture, not merely point solutions like existing SD-WAN products. Cato Cloud is the blueprint for transforming the enterprise WAN for the business of the future."

The Cato Cloud provides multiple benefits to maximize the business impact of WAN transformation.

ThinPrint Cloud Services, the specialist for cloud-based printing and print management, today announces the release of its free ThinPrint Cloud Extension for Chrome OS. For the first time, IT administrators in businesses and organizations of all sizes have the ability to manage network printing activities both securely and easily for all devices. Chromebook users also benefit from printing smoothly and without needing any instruction.

Chromebooks are in high demand, especially among educational institutions as well as companies seeking thin client replacements. Two-million notebooks running on Google’s operating system were sold between January and March 2016, which is more than the 1.76 million Apple Macs sold during the same period. Despite its popularity, the economical laptop lacks important printing features. While Chromebook users can send documents unmanaged to compatible printer models, IT departments had no way of embedding these devices into their corporate print environment and managing the volume of printing.