ESG Blogs

Cybersecurity professionals are paid to be paranoid and tend to want to control everything they can to minimize surprises or third-party dependencies This has always been the case with regards to security technology.  Historically, CISOs mistrusted managed services, preferring instead to “own” the deployment and operations associated with their security technologies. 

Hadoop and NoSQL workloads are pervasive in production environments and require enterprise-class data protection, yet few data protection solutions offer such capabilities. That’s the problem Imanis Data is zooming in on. Imanis Data is demonstrating that it is squarely focused on product execution and is putting its B-round of $13.5 million from earlier this year to good use. The recent announcement of v 4.0 introduces many new data protection features, including some innovative machine learning-based capabilities. More information in this ESG Brief, Imanis Data Launches Version 4.0 and Delivers Machine Learning-based RPO.

It’s easy to talk about automation within IT as an inherently ‘good thing’; but, as Steve Duplessie explains in this conversation, things in IT are invariably done for far more pragmatic reasons than just some vague intrinsic nice-ness! As we move from functional automation (where the real value usually emphasizes cost saving) to more holistic or system-wide automation - both across and between systems – the motivation is more about getting better ROI from better and faster business decisions; moreover those improvements can often be based upon inputs from disparate data sources and applications.

Integrating, and thus automating, security via the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) processes of DevOps, an approach referred to as “DevSecOps,” is a topic that had, until somewhat recently, been discussed largely only at DevOps and cloud-specific forums and events. But DevSecOps is coming of age. The ongoing adoption of DevOps by enterprise organizations, and the growing interest in bringing security along for the ride, is getting the topic a bigger stage, with DevSecOps being presented in sessions at more mainstream events such as RSA Conference, the CISO Summit at Black Hat, and VMworld. The adoption of application containers and the Kubernetes environment that orchestrates their lifecycle across the build-ship-run continuum has also been a catalyst for CI/CD integrated security. Because DevSecOps starts with a cultural shift, leverages CI/CD methods, and requires purposeful controls, it is an amorphous concept not only hard to define, but challenging to make actionable.

This conversation with Doug Cahill examines the crucial - but all-too-often overlooked - necessity for cooperation between DevOps and Security teams. While there’s pretty much universal agreement that built-in security is better than bolted-on security, nonetheless the apparently (or at least potentially) competing objectives of DevOps (faster, faster, leaner) and Security (careful, careful, preclude risk) can appear to run counter to everyone’s desires. 

Hello dedicated readers! My blog is back from a restful week’s vacation on Cape Cod and ready to tackle the falling leaves, changing temperatures, and cybersecurity issues of Autumn.

Back in August, I wrote a few blogs about cybersecurity trends in small and mid-sized organizations (i.e. between 50 and 499 employees). The first blog looked at the state of cybersecurity at SMB firms and the second blog examined what they are doing to address these issues. 

Before I peel into Microsoft’s Managed Desktop (MMD), I think it’s important to understand the potential value of intelligent data and the power of what can be done with the data in the form of AI and ML. So, while applications and devices typically provide the appeal on the surface (pun intended), the charge that Microsoft can inject into a service pivots completely around taking action on intelligent data. Steve Duplessie explains this concept well in his blog, “The True Value of SaaS and Managed Service Offerings.” He writes, “It’s not what they ‘do,’ it’s what they ‘could do’ that makes them so valuable.”

In this conversation, Bob Laliberte talks about the increasing relevance of [optimized] networking in the contemporary IT world; of course, networking has always mattered, but it has often been the most likely component of IT infrastructure to be viewed as "plumbing."

These days, however, with the emphases on mobility, clouds, the edge, and distributed-everything (data and applications just as much as endpoint-access), the integral impact of networking on connectivity and experience is becoming ever clearer. When everything-IT is interlinked, the linkages matter intently! Bob outlines the main points and then talks about how this new focus on optimized networking is being - and can be - made manifest.  

SaaS companies carry huge valuations when compared with traditional licensed software companies. It took me forever to figure out why, but I did.

Today, Lenovo and NetApp announced a new partnership collaborating to deliver IT data center solutions, which at least for now, is focused on enterprise storage. This new partnership has tremendous potential for both companies. Lenovo gets a partner to co-develop solutions for the robust and growing hybrid/all-flash array storage market; a partner that won’t be going away (or getting bought) any time soon. NetApp gets a possible path into emerging markets in Asia and a partner with a robust X86 server portfolio. It is a win-win.