ESG Validation

Cybersecurity Challenges

The ever-increasing volume and velocity of threats has made cybersecurity one of the top IT concerns. However, IT’s drive to improve the business’ security posture is complicated by the global cybersecurity skills shortage. As a result, organizations evaluating their options for strengthening cybersecurity are seeking more efficient and effective tools. Indeed, according to ESG research, 46% of surveyed IT and cybersecurity decision makers ranked effectiveness as the most important consideration when investing in cybersecurity products or services—by far the most often cited consideration.²

Co-Author(s): Tony Palmer

Introduction

ESG recently completed testing of IBM Watson Studio and Watson Machine Learning, which are designed to enable organizations to accelerate the value they can extract from AI more easily. Testing examined how IBM Watson Studio and Watson Machine Learning collect data, organize an analytics foundation, and analyze insights at scale—with a focus on the ease of operationalizing AI and data science to improve trust, simplify compliance, and speed monetization.

The Challenges

As organizations of all sizes embrace digital transformation and the shift to modern cloud architectures, their IT infrastructure is both growing and becoming more complex. Indeed, two-thirds (68%) of respondents to an ESG research survey said that their IT environment had become more complex in the last two years.¹

Complex infrastructures have large attack surface areas, necessitating a variety of cybersecurity tools and techniques to protect them against ever-increasing volumes and sophistication of attacks. However, cybersecurity teams report numerous challenges managing an assortment of security products from different vendors, such as the inefficiencies created by having separate management and operations for each tool, cited by 27% of ESG research respondents as a challenge, or different tools for various parts of the IT infrastructure (24%), or the number of security tools making operations complex and time consuming (22%)

Introduction

ESG Lab evaluated Western Digital NVMe flash solutions with Supermicro servers for VMware vSAN hyperconverged infrastructure for business-critical applications and databases, with a focus on assessing the performance and value of NVMe-based flash for infrastructure-wide storage virtualization and hyperconverged solutions in the data center.

Abstract

This ESG Lab Review documents hands-on testing of HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HPE Smart SAN for 3PAR Software solution to verify its ability to automate and simplify SAN and Federated SAN zoning configuration. We focused on how Smart SAN for 3PAR leverages industry standards based FCIA T11 (Peer Zoning) with target-driven peer zoning (TDPZ), transforming the complex, time-consuming, and error-prone manual zoning process into a 3PAR-orchestrated, simple, rapid, automated, and error free process.

Abstract

This ESG Lab Review documents hands-on testing of Acalvio ShadowPlex autonomous deception. We focused on how easy it is to deploy ShadowPlex at scale, and how Acalvio’s deception technology provides high-fidelity low-volume breach detection.

Introduction

ESG Lab evaluated the Forcepoint Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) to validate how it secures the use of any cloud applications across an organization’s users and endpoints. We tested how the Forcepoint CASB provides visibility into an organization’s cloud applications and its users, identifies and assesses the potential risks associated with the cloud applications, and automates threat prevention and policy enforcement.

Introduction

ESG Lab evaluated SanDisk flash solutions for VMware Virtual SAN 6 hyper-converged infrastructure for business-critical applications and databases, with a focus on assessing the performance and value of flash for infrastructure-wide storage virtualization and hyper-converged solutions in the data center.

According to ESG Research: [1]

VMware Validated Designs for the Software-defined Data Center

The acceleration of cloud computing initiatives, combined with the change in IT infrastructure consumption, is rapidly transitioning the IT conversation away from a technology focus to more of a business-oriented approach.