ESG Blogs

ESG attended Canonical’s Analyst Day 2019 last week in New York, which featured its management team, including CEO Mark Shuttleworth, as well as customer speakers from BT and partner Atos for an audience of ~60 industry analysts and bankers. Major messages were focused on its vision for both open architecture and open applications, its financial independence, competitive position and growth in enterprise from a license, maintenance, and managed services perspective.

This week Pure // Accelerate came to my hometown of Austin, Tx. And for three days, the city was orange; filled with a customer base that is both passionate and enthusiastic.

I first came up with the SOAPA concept in late 2016. Here’s the blog I wrote in November of that year describing the architecture and its rationale. 

VMware held its flagship customer event, VMworld 2019, in San Francisco last week.

It was a big week for VMware, especially since it was coming on the heels of announcing two significant acquisitions of Pivotal and Carbon Black. Much of the news this year centered on the desire to embrace containers and manage hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Along those lines, the big announcements included:

VMworld was big – but that’s not really news. It has been big for a while – both from an event perspective, but also from a market impact perspective; after all, VMware is the chosen basis for many applications and users. But this year, the “choir” grew; this was partly the obvious growth of those paying attention, including the newly intended-to-be-acquired Pivotal and Carbon Black…but it was also because of a more cohesive and inclusive message. To use terms that VMware would approve of, the company used its virtually eponymous mega-gathering to ‘make its mark’ in the ‘age of any’ by running even-more-keenly towards a multi-cloud world. Heterogeneity was everywhere…as long as that heterogeneity runs on VMware, of course! Conversations about - and proposals for - hybrid-, multi- and even edge- cloud, were both well-constructed and explained…but also at times served to prudently obfuscate the fact that VMware sees itself as the [benevolent?] spider at the center of this expanding IT web.   

The theme of this year’s VMworld is “Make you Mark.” The kickoff keynote delivered a familiar narrative placing the IT leader in the place of a hero, a cross between “Morpheus and Hermione,” gifted with powers to change the world.

If it’s not clear yet, elastic cloud gateways are a major focus of ESG’s network security research. I discussed the idea in a previous blog…and video…and second video. As a refresher, ECGs are multi-channel, multi-mode, cloud-delivered security gateways built on a globally distributed, cloud-native microservices platform. ECGs automatically scale to provide end-user access and threat prevention to a range of cloud services, with tightly integrated data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities utilizing a centralized control plane and scalable data plane to arbitrate access and inspect content.

When you think about VMware and cybersecurity, two products have always stood out. NSX has evolved into a common micro-segmentation tool for east/west traffic within ESXi, while AppDefense monitors applications, determines “normal” behavior, and detects anomalies.

With the recent announcement by VMware that it will be acquiring Carbon Black, VMware will be adding much needed security expertise and technology to its already strong portfolio.

Trustwave and Grupo Tecno, a large information technology integrator in Mexico, are teaming up to offer Trustwave Managed Security Services and cybersecurity technologies to enterprises and other institutions in Mexico and other Spanish speaking countries in Latin America. This is exciting news for both. Trustwave expands its footprint in Latin America; Grupo Tecno firmly implants itself in the managed security services (MSSs) and security operations center (SOC) arena with a strong global partner.