ESG Blogs

Dreamforce 2019 just kicked off in San Francisco. What an event and a great boost to the local economy: lots of people, celebrity speakers, lots of vendors, and many locations around the Moscone Center to accommodate the many sessions and events. A forest theme was selected this year - a forest in the middle of the urban forest - with cute characters including a bear...the same bear I am going to poke in this blog entry.

Salesforce is a formidable player, a trailblazer (check the little guy's shirt!) that made SaaS what it is today. It's a great success by any stretch of the imagination.

SaaS is an interesting space that we study closely here at ESG, and we see a big disconnect when it comes to backup and recovery, and many challenges with Salesforce specifically. 33% of respondents to our cloud data strategies survey believe that SaaS-based applications don't need to be backed up, and 37% solely rely on the SaaS vendor because they are responsible for protecting the organization's SaaS-resident application data. 

At this year’s Dell Tech Summit, there were several high-impact announcements, each one important and each one valuable. But, with each, the real story will be whether these are just single isolated announcements or whether each one can become a first step in a larger journey that helps define Dell and its offerings moving forward.

When ESG began discussing the elastic cloud gateway (ECG) architecture in July, one of the key questions we were asked centered on SD-WAN and the importance of the convergence of networking and security. The short answer is that while strong integrations between networking and SD-WAN functionality and security capabilities are clearly necessary, partnerships will be the predominant route for the next few years. Sure, there are vendors that will provide both, be they someone like Cisco that has both networking and security capabilities, or smaller upstarts like Cato Networks. But our feeling was that those would be the exceptions, not the rule.

HYCU just announced a set of new capabilities for its Google Cloud Platform service. In this latest release, the company is placing the focus on delivering further enhancements to its native enterprise-class capabilities in/for GCP. This is something other vendors should look at closely with a competitive eye. Here's why: In combination, the enhancements to the service scream enterprise scalability. Remember that a service is a lot easier to quickly and constantly "upgrade" for a vendor versus a legacy approach, which makes HYCU very nimble.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend Fal.Con Unite 2019 in San Diego earlier this week where the CrowdStrike team brought together over 1200 customers for two and a half days of keynotes and learning sessions. It was apparent from the moment we arrived that there was a significant partner focus, with many visible conference sponsors and partner-led sessions (most of whom are recent CrowdStrike Store partners), plus six new Store partners who are all leveraging CrowdStrike APIs and threat graph data to enhance their solutions. And of course, there was much to say about product and services roadmaps, as well as plenty of learning sessions to help users get the most out of their investment with CrowdStrike.

Microsoft Ignite should be added as a must attend event for IT decision makers and executives that have any type of current investment in Microsoft, building cloud strategies and transforming the way people work. The wave of announcements, the insights into technology, and the validations of customer success are worth tuning into.

Worth watching... https://t.co/nxQxgfzWTK

— markbowker (@markbowker) November 7, 2019

NetApp’s Insight event last week felt very different to me from prior iterations. The degree of "credible spring in its corporate step" was noticeably improved. An outside -- and purely numbers-focused -- observer might find that somewhat counter-intuitive as NetApp's recent financial results have not been what the Sunnyvale outfit would have wanted. Meantime, I’ll also bet that some long-in-the-tooth customer attendees found the changes surprising and even a little jarring. After all, NetApp generally -- and Insight specifically -- has traditionally been a comfortable, technically astute organization. The Filer Cult. Even when it has been way more than that.

Good move by Secureworks partnering with Microsoft. I wrote a blog just a few days ago about how cloud providers are blurring the lines in cybersecurity services delivery, especially in managed security services.

A ZDNet article yesterday brought to my attention today just how far Microsoft has moved the needle to becoming a cybersecurity services provider. Increasingly, cloud providers are entering this market and Microsoft has started off by providing the most important services to cloud customers. Cloud has become a ubiquitous infrastructure and buyers are demanding cloud security monitoring and alerting. In fact, 40% of respondents to a recent ESG cybersecurity services study state that these services are must-haves from managed security services providers (MSSPs). In this instance, Microsoft can be considered an MSSP as it offers many of the services in this market.

Microsoft is making great strides in adding cybersecurity services to its arsenal. In April, it introduced the managed threat hunting service called Threat Experts on Demand as part of the Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service for customers with subscriptions such as Windows 10 Enterprise E5 and the Microsoft 365 bundle, giving enterprise customers access to top Microsoft security experts when they need help working through a tough threat. Last September, the company launched its Azure Sentinel cloud-SIEM, enabling data collection across the enterprise and detection of unknown and advanced threats utilizing Microsoft’s threat intelligence telemetry, which is significant in quantity and is made actionable by the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and threat hunting capabilities. These ingredients enable faster response to incidents, but not all enterprises have the resources to dig deep into these tools on their own. Now with Threat Experts on Demand, Microsoft assists the enterprise to make sense of the most challenging threats.