ESG Validation

Abstract

This ESG Technical Review documents ESG’s evaluation of how VMware and Dell Technologies’ joint engineering and integration of VxRail HCI and VMware HCI software enables organizations to extend their existing investments in infrastructure, people, and skills. We focus on the solution’s efficiency, agility, and simplicity for day 0, day 1, and day 2 lifecycle management across hybrid cloud infrastructure, operations, and services.

Abstract

This ESG Technical Review documents ESG’s evaluation of how VMware and Dell Technologies’ co-engineering of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and Dell EMC VxRail HCI enables organizations to extend their existing investments in infrastructure, people, and skills. We focus on the solution’s efficiency, consistency, and simplicity of lifecycle management for day 0 deployment, day 1 day-to-day operations, and day 2 maintenance, updates, and expansions across hybrid cloud infrastructure, operations, and services.

Co-Author(s): Vinny Choinski

Introduction

This ESG Technical Validation documents evaluation of Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. We evaluated how the platform enables organizations to extend their existing investments in infrastructure, people, and skills with a solution that provides day 0, day 1, and day 2 lifecycle management spanning public cloud, on-premises private cloud, and edge infrastructures. We also focused on how the solution integrates VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure, VMware Cloud Foundation, and VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid-Integrated (TKGI), unifying management, eliminating silos, and providing consistency across infrastructure, operations, and services.

Abstract

This ESG Technical Review of Respond Analyst focuses on how the solution functions as a virtual cybersecurity analyst, analyzing cybersecurity telemetry, aggregating many events and alerts into security incidents, and efficiently and effectively presenting incidents to the security team for investigation and remediation.

Introduction

ESG recently completed testing of BlackBerry Intelligent Security, which is designed to continuously evaluate risk and dynamically apply risk-based security policies to protect endpoints. Testing focused on ease of deployment and management and the simplification of the user experience.

Introduction

This ESG Technical Validation documents evaluation of Morphisec’s moving target defense-powered Unified Threat Prevention Platform. We focused on understanding the operational simplicity of the platform and the efficacy of its threat prevention capabilities.

Introduction

This ESG Technical Validation documents evaluation of Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI: Deep Learning with Intel. We focused on understanding the performance, ease of use, and total cost of ownership (TCO) of the solution. To validate the full stack performance, we measured the number of tokens per second processed when training the Token2Token Big Transformer model and evaluated how Nauta, an open source initiative by Intel, accelerates deep learning model training. We also compared how Nauta simplifies the deep learning training process, and how the TCO of Deep Learning with Intel compares to running the same tasks on a leading public cloud AI service.

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%)