Atomic Data Selects Corero’s Real-Time DDoS Mitigation Solution

Corero Network Security has announced that Atomic Data has selected the Corero SmartWall® Network Threat Defense (TDS) solution to protect its own network and its tenant networks from DDoS attacks.

Atomic Data provides data centers, hosting services, Atomic Cloud® technology and 24×7 managed IT service and support. “We were driven to seek out a DDoS mitigation solution due to the increasing severity and frequency of DDoS attacks against our hosted client base. DDoS attacks can create service interruptions for customers and create unpredictable work efforts for the engineers tasked with resolving them.” said Larry Patterson, chief technology officer and co-founder, Atomic Data.

Previously, Atomic Data used manual techniques for dealing with DDoS attacks.  After an attack was identified using network flow monitoring technology, upstream null routing required network engineers and architects to intervene. This approach resulted in slow and ineffective problem resolution for mitigating the attacks. Thus, Atomic Data felt compelled to find a DDoS solution that was not only more effective, but also more scalable and affordable.

Atomic Data selected the Corero SmartWall TDS as its dedicated real-time DDoS mitigation solution because it delivers a granular level of protection, and the product is flexible, affordable and scalable, with an easy-to-understand user interface. The Corero solution features attack dashboards for Atomic Data and their tenants. Atomic Data can assign subscriber/tenant service levels, and distribute reporting and analytics to tenants so they can see the value of the protection they are receiving.

“The key benefit of the Corero solution is that it automatically mitigates DDoS attack traffic, and surgically removes it at the network edge, before it can be impactful to our customers. We not only keep our networks clean of attack traffic, but our network engineering team now has more time to dedicate to servicing other customer needs and scaling our network to accommodate business growth,” added Patterson.

“One emerging trend is that enterprise customers are increasingly calling on their service providers to assist them in defeating DDoS attacks, and they are eager to adopt service-based DDoS mitigation from their native providers,” said Stephanie Weagle, vice president at Corero. “Hence, Corero’s real-time mitigation capabilities set Atomic Data apart from their competition when it comes to protection against damaging DDoS attacks, adds Weagle.”

 “Because we can offer DDoS protection as a standard service with all Atomic Cloud® instances, we now have a competitive advantage in the cloud marketplace,” said Patterson.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Microsoft Leads In Burgeoning SaaS Market

New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that the enterprise SaaS market grew 32% year on year to reach almost $13 billion in quarterly revenues, with ERP and collaboration being the highest growth segments. For the third successive quarter Microsoft is the clear leader in overall enterprise SaaS, having overtaken long-time market leader Salesforce. Other leading SaaS providers include SAP, Oracle, Adobe, ADP, IBM, Workday, Intuit, Cisco and Google. Among the major SaaS vendors those with the highest growth rates were Oracle and Google, the latter thanks to a big push for its G Suite collaborative apps.

The enterprise SaaS market is somewhat mature compared to other cloud markets like IaaS and PaaS and consequently has a lower growth rate. Nonetheless, Synergy forecasts that it will more than double in size over the next three years, with strong growth across all segments and all geographic regions.

“There are a variety of factors driving the SaaS market which will guarantee substantial growth for many years to come,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group. “Traditional enterprise software vendors like SAP, Oracle and IBM are all pushing to convert their huge base on on-premise software customers to a SaaS subscription relationship. Meanwhile relatively new cloud-based vendors like Workday and Zendesk are aggressively targeting the enterprise market and industry giants Microsoft and Google are on a charge to grow their subscriber bases, especially in the collaboration market.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

CTP Achieves Google Cloud Partner Specialization In Application Development

Cloud Technology Partners (CTP) has announced that it has achieved Google’s Cloud Application Development Specialization. CTP is one of the first Google consulting partners to earn this specialization, highlighting the success of its Digital Innovation services, which help clients design, build and run cloud-native applications.

“Google is a leading public cloud platform for building and deploying cloud-native applications, and is often the platform of choice for our clients wanting to develop data-intensive workloads,” said Rob Lancaster, vice president of Global Alliances at Cloud Technology Partners. “Achieving the Google Cloud Application Development Specialization reaffirms to the marketplace that CTP has the vision, the skills, and a track record of customer success building and deploying solutions on Google.”

The Google Cloud Partner Specialization program is designed to provide Google Cloud Customers with qualified partners that have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven success in key service areas.

CTP has worked with Google on a number of innovative client projects including developing an IoT and data analytics application for Land O’Lakes which was featured on stage at last year’s Google Cloud Next conference. By leveraging cloud, IoT and big data technologies, Land O’Lakes farmers are now producing 650% more corn today on 13 percent fewer acres than they were 50 years ago.

“CTP helped us build applications that streamline data capture and knowledge transfer, all in real time,” said Teddy Bekele, Vice President IT at Land O’Lakes.

“We welcome the recognition by Google in response to the tremendous results we’ve delivered for our clients that leverage Google Cloud Platform, and we look forward to continuing to expand our Google Cloud expertise and offerings,” said John Treadway, senior vice president of Cloud Technology Partner’s Digital Innovation practice.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Zoomdata Announces Expanded Support For Google Cloud Platform

Zoomdata has announced support for Google’s Cloud Spanner and PostgreSQL on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as well as enhancements to the existing Zoomdata Smart Connector for Google BigQuery. With these new capabilities, Zoomdata is one of the first visualization analytics partners to offer such deeply integrated and optimized support for Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud Spanner, PostgreSQL, Google BigQuery, and Cloud DataProc services.

Google Cloud Spanner is the first and only relational database service that is both strongly consistent and horizontally scalable. Zoomdata’s Smart Connector for Cloud Spanner is available today for testing on Google Cloud Launcher. It supports key data analytic capabilities, including streaming analytics (Live Mode), aggregate analytics (group by), time series handling, and federated data blending of data from Cloud Spanner and other data sources via Zoomdata Fusion.

Zoomdata has also added a Zoomdata Smart Connector for PostgreSQL to its Google Cloud Platform launcher. Optimized to take full advantage of the powerful, object-relational database system, users can now easily connect to and quickly visualize and explore data from PostgreSQL running on GCP. In addition, Zoomdata enhanced its Smart Connector for Google BigQuery to include support for visual drill-through to full record “details,” as well as enhancing the speed at which visualizations are generated.

“The Zoomdata team is committed to delivering a big data visualization experience that optimizes GCP’s core data management services, including support for Google BigQuery,” said Russ Cosentino, Zoomdata co-founder and VP, Channels. “As a launch partner for Google Cloud Dataproc, and now offering optimized support for Google Cloud Spanner and PostgreSQL on GCP, Zoomdata is an ideal choice for helping business users deliver value against their data workloads on Google.”

Zoomdata is an open platform that provides visual analytics solutions for big and fast data. Architected for both cloud and on-premise deployments, its modern architecture delivers visual analysis of huge datasets in seconds. Zoomdata’s patented Data Sharpening™ technology delivers the industry’s fastest visual analytics for real-time streaming and historical data. Zoomdata’s microservices architecture makes this possible by using Apache Spark as a complementary high performance engine. Zoomdata Fusion enables users to perform analytics across disparate data sources in a single view — without the need to move or transform data.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Dataguise DGSecure Is Now Integrated In Google Cloud Storage

Dataguise has announced that DgSecure Detect now supports sensitive data detection on Google Cloud Storage (GCS). Integration with GCS extends the range of platforms supported by DgSecure Detect, which helps data-driven enterprises move to the cloud with confidence by providing precise sensitive data detection across the enterprise, both on premises and in the cloud. With DgSecure Detect, organizations can leverage Google’s powerful, simple, and cost-effective object storage service with a complete understanding of where sensitive data is located — an important first step to ensuring data protection and privacy compliance.

DgSecure Detect discovers, counts, and reports on sensitive data assets in real time within the unified object-based storage of GCS. The highly scalable, resilient, and customizable solution precisely identifies and summarizes the location of this data, down to the element level. DgSecure allows organizations to comb through structured, semi-structured, or unstructured content to find any data deemed “sensitive” by the organization. The range of sensitive data that is discoverable by DgSecure Detect is nearly unlimited using the solution’s custom sensitive data type definition capabilities.

Sensitive Data Detection Capabilities for Google Cloud Storage:

• Detects high volumes of disparate, constantly moving, and changing data with time-stamping to support incremental change and life cycle management
• Supports a flexible information governance model that has a mix of highly invested (curated) data as well as raw, unexplored (gray) data, such as IoT (Internet of Things) data, clickstreams, feeds, and logs
• Processes structured, semi-structured, and unstructured or free-form data formats
• Provides automated detection and processing of a variety of file formats and file/directory structures, leveraging meta-data and schema-on-read where applicable
• Provides deep content inspection using patent-pending techniques, such as neural-like network (NLN) technology, and dictionary-based and weighted keyword matches to detect sensitive data more accurately.

These new capabilities enable enterprises from a range of industries—including finance, insurance, healthcare, government, technology and retail — to gain accurate insight on where sensitive data resides in GCS so it can be protected properly. DgSecure helps organizations comply with regulatory mandates for PII, PHI, and PCI data, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and other data privacy and data residency laws.

“With support for GCS, Dataguise provides broad cross-platform support of sensitive data detection within the industry’s most popular data repositories and platforms, both on premises and in the cloud,” said JT Sison, VP, marketing and business development, Dataguise. “Demonstration of DgSecure Detect at Google Cloud Next will be the first public display of the technology, and we invite attendees to meet with Dataguise and Google regarding this innovative solution.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

SBS Group Selected As An Indirect Cloud Solution Provider By Microsoft

Microsoft has named SBS Group an Indirect Cloud Solution Provider (ICSP). Formerly called a Tier-2 Distribution Partner, the ICSP provides the connection between Microsoft and resellers of Microsoft’s cloud solutions including Azure, Office 365, PowerBI, and the recently launched Dynamics 365 service.

The ICSP program is built to help ease the complexity of selling Microsoft solutions. Technology resellers can partner with an ICSP for support in with sales, service, administration and billing. The Stratos Cloud Alliance, SBS Group’s new ICSP program, is the only ICSP specializing in Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s business solution focused service. SBS Group has vast experience in the Dynamics landscape having operated in the Microsoft ERP and CRM spaces for over 30 years. The Stratos Cloud Alliance will leverage that knowledge and experience to provide superior Dynamics 365 implementation, training and support services for technology partners to resell. Additionally, the Stratos Cloud Alliance will offer unique partner enablement services, giving partners the option to develop, market, and deliver their own Dynamics 365 solutions and services.

“We serve several communities including customers, partners, independent software vendors, and Microsoft,” said James Bowman, president and CEO of SBS Group. “It is our mission to deliver innovative solutions that serve the evolving needs of these communities.  Seven years ago, we pioneered the Master VAR program, enabling other Dynamics partners to grow their businesses. Last year, we led the Microsoft Dynamics community into the ‘cloud’ when we launched the first online Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Marketplace focused on Dynamics solutions. We are leveraging these experiences in launching the Stratos Cloud Alliance. This program will help ERP and CRM-focused partners in their digital transformation process and enable Managed Service Providers (MSP’s) and IT-focused solution providers to expand their solution portfolios for their customers.”

The Stratos Cloud Alliance (SCA) features a comprehensive portfolio of Microsoft Cloud Business and Productivity Solutions, ISV Products and Tools, and Partner and Customer Services.  The SCA offers three flexible partner models (including a white-label option) with value-added features and benefits for ERP and CRM resellers, Managed Service Providers, Accounting and Consulting firms. All partner tiers are powered by best-in-class e-commerce capabilities and include dedicated partner teams and support services designed to simplify onboarding and streamline the partner experience.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Report: 90% Of Telcos Believe Cloud-Based Platforms Speed Time To Market

According to a survey conducted by Frost & Sullivan in collaboration with BroadSoft, Inc., 90% of telecom providers believe that integrated, cloud-based platforms speed time to market for the delivery of unified communications offerings to business customers. The survey results indicate that an integrated SaaS cloud-based unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) platform can enable telecom providers to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market through enhanced offerings, reduced sales cycles, and new revenue opportunities.

The findings of the SaaS revolution report conducted by Frost and Sullivan were based upon in-depth interviews with 20 senior executives at major global telecom providers during the fourth quarter of 2016. From the research, it is clear that the business priorities of telecom providers need to change with the rapidly evolving UCaaS market, as 90% of respondents indicate an integrated, cloud-based platform speeds time to market; 63% believe it reduces reliance on scarce resources; and more than half (52%) believe it enables them to transition from a CAPEX to a more profitable SaaS OPEX model.  

Key Report Findings:

• Ninety percent of telecom providers said that turn-key cloud-based platforms would speed their time to market
• Forty-five percent plan to deploy a turnkey solution hosted and operated by a third-party to improve their own ability to offer innovative solutions, with the majority expecting to make the switch in the next 12 months
• Eighty percent say theirs is a culture that encourages rapid innovation but only 40% agree that their internal processes make that a reality
• Seventy-five percent want to grow awareness of their solutions, but only 55% currently support online ordering
• Fifty-five percent view the integration of multiple vendor technologies to develop their cloud solution as a significant challenge

“The UCaaS market is witnessing accelerated adoption and intensified competition, and service providers are uniquely positioned to capitalize on and lead this transformation,” said Elka Popova, North American program director, Connected Work, Frost & Sullivan. “This survey afforded us an in-depth view of service provider priorities, challenges and strategies, with the conclusion that a managed platform simplifies and reduces the cost of service delivery while ensuring a comprehensive and continuously updated offering is always available to service provider customers.”

“Telecom providers recognize that rapid and cost effective product innovation is a key business driver in the dynamic and highly competitive UCaaS market, and are increasingly looking to vendors to offer flexible and innovative delivery options,” said Taher Behbehani, chief digital and marketing officer, BroadSoft. “To help telecom providers meet this market challenge, BroadSoft remains focused on developing and offering a complete range of delivery models, including BroadCloud, a PaaS offering and our Powered by BroadSoft go-to-market program.”

The report, “Service Providers: Are You Prepared for the SaaS Revolution?” is available for download here.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

MainFrameIT Partners With CloudJumper

CloudJumper has announced a partnership with MainFrameIT. Through a new partnership with CloudJumper, the company will deliver a suite of services based on nWorkSpace, CloudJumper’s Workspace as a Service (WaaS) platform. MainFrameIT will focus its delivery of the solution on small and medium size businesses (SMBs) throughout North America.

MainFrameIT, LLC launched in 2008 and began helping SMB customers benefit from a modern-day “mainframe” computing paradigm – Microsoft Windows PCs/servers/networks all running centrally from the cloud. MainFrameIT’s model liberated customers from having to purchase and maintain heavy infrastructure such as servers and related technologies, as well as the expense and headaches of maintaining it all. With CloudJumper nWorkSpace assuming a primary role in its technology stack, MainFrameIT will continue to empower SMBs with the security and data protection postures today’s world demands. As for the enduser experience, staff are no longer shackled to a single PC as each employee’s workspace (Windows/Apps/Data) follows them from PC to PC to Mac to device resulting in a workforce that is more agile, more mobile, and more productive.

With the advanced CloudJumper-enabled WaaS solution, MainFrameIT customers are provided with policy-based access to their workspace from any location at any time, as defined by the organization. Customers with multiple locations and/or remote staff are now able to work as if all are in one virtual office (in the cloud). CloudJumper nWorkSpace powered WaaS allows MainFrameIT to quickly and easily provision cloud services, providing customers with the flexibility of one or more public or private cloud environments to operate their business from.

“With nWorkSpace, we are accelerating our success in the cloud arena, providing both ourselves and our customers with greater operational agility along the way,” said James White, managing partner at MainFrameIT. “While in our case CloudJumper fit perfectly into our existing business model, it’s really a turnkey solution built for all IT service providers. At the end of a rigorous evaluation process we selected nWorkSpace versus others, not only because of CloudJumper’s platform, but because of their proven experience in the WaaS space. Since the platform is turnkey it provides the lowest overhead solution in the industry which translates to cost savings that we are able to pass on to clients. We fully expect MainFrameIT’s WaaS services to lead the company’s revenue generation efforts in 2017.”

CloudJumper’s nWorkSpace is a preferred platform for MSPs, CSPs, software vendors, and other IT providers as it integrates all elements necessary to deliver highly scalable WaaS, including software, services, multi-cloud infrastructure, and expert engineering support. The platform provides layers of defense against data loss and cyber-attack with powerful data protection capabilities that include spam filtering, malware/virus protection, ransomware protection, data theft protection, data backup, disaster recovery, and disaster recovery planning and support. The CloudJumper partner portal provides an industry-first engagement platform for web-based quoting and ordering, partner and customer analytics and monitoring, support integration, financial reporting with on-demand access to detailed billing, service discounting based on account size, pricing estimates for new accounts, onboarding support, and white label billing.

“Like many forward thinking MSPs, MainFrameIT is paving a frictionless a path to the cloud for its customers with nWorkSpace WaaS,” said Max Pruger, chief sales officer for CloudJumper. “CloudJumper reduces the cost and complexity of this reality with a well-planned approach designed with the channel in mind. With industry experts predicting rapid growth in the WaaS sector over the next several years, now is the time to develop a game plan for this space.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Kinetica And Nimbix Partner To Offer GPU Computing In The Cloud

Kinetica has announced its real-time analytics and visualization solution is immediately available on the Nimbix Cloud. Providing instant results and visualized insights across massive streaming datasets, Kinetica on the Nimbix Cloud can be launched in seconds and is the ideal solution for GPU-accelerated analytics.

“Kinetica on the Nimbix Cloud harnesses the power of parallel GPUs to deliver real-time analytics and data written to Kinetica is automatically routed to parallel connections across the cluster,” said Amit Vij, cofounder and CEO, Kinetica.  “The full Kinetica stack can be provisioned with a couple of mouse clicks from the Nimbix console or launched and automated with JARVICE’s powerful task API.”

“Kinetica’s GPU accelerated database platform paired with Nimbix’s Cloud is a natural fit for customers looking for industry-leading performance and ease-of-use from a cloud deployment,” said Steve Hebert, CEO, Nimbix. “With a few mouse clicks, customers can have unprecedented computing capabilities to help them solve some of their biggest data analytics challenges.”

The Nimbix Cloud offers customer selectable systems with either Intel x86 based processors or IBM POWER8 Processors both coupled with NVIDIA GPUs to deliver the best performance and economics available for Kinetica customers. Nimbix is the only public cloud provider featuring NVIDIA’s latest generation Tesla P100 GPUs with NVLink, a high-bandwidth, energy-efficient interconnect that allows data sharing at rates 5 to 12 times faster than the traditional PCIe interconnects.  Nimbix Cloud machines are interconnected with industry leading 56Gbps FDR infiniband for optimal GPU Cluster performance.

“The IBM POWER8 NVLink server is ideally suited for databases and advanced analytic applications because the NVLink super-highway between the POWER8 CPU and the NVIDIA Tesla P100 Pascal GPU accelerator enables data to up to move 2.5x higher throughput from the system memory to the accelerator,” said Sumit Gupta, IBM vice president of High Performance Computing, AI and Analytics.  “The availability of Kinetica running on these POWER8 NVLink servers in the Nimbix cloud enables enterprises to quickly try the real-time analytics of the Kinetica accelerated database.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

FloQast Unveils New Cloud Storage And Security Integrations

FloQast, Inc. has announced new integrations with leading cloud storage providers Microsoft OneDrive and Egnyte as well as cloud Single Sign-On(SSO) solutions from Google and Okta.

The out-of-the-box integrations help simplify the setup and adoption of FloQast’s close management software while bolstering security by providing secure access via SSO. These new integrations address enhanced security and governance requirements for security-conscious industries such as, among others, financial services, healthcare and aerospace.

With the new integrations of Microsoft OneDrive and Egnyte, FloQast close management software can directly and securely access financial data residing in Excel workbooks housed within these cloud storage applications.  This innovative approach ensures that accountants can leverage the familiarity and flexibility of Excel while maintaining security and retaining ownership and control of their sensitive financial data. FloQast accomplishes this by securely accessing customer financial data from Excel-based account reconciliations to make certain all accounts are automatically tied-out against the General Ledger system.  This approach reduces the risk of error and eliminates hours of manual work each month.

The integrations with Okta and Google SSO further strengthen security by supporting password complexity and Multi-Factor Authentication.  Integration with the identity management solutions helps ensure FloQast close management software can only be accessed by authorized users which bolsters governance and security.

These new integrations complement FloQast’s existing partnerships with Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. 

“The financial services industry — specifically accounting — is extremely security conscious as it constantly deals with high volumes of highly sensitive information,” said Ronen Vengosh, vice president of business development at Egnyte. “Egnyte’s integration with FloQast provides an easy-to-use interface for accounting professionals to collaborate on financial records and efficiently close their books, without losing custody of sensitive documents or risking violation of compliance regulations.”

“FloQast provides accounting teams a single place to manage the close and gives everyone visibility.  These new integrations expand our current product footprint and extend our capabilities while also demonstrating FloQast’s flexibility to address the myriad increasingly important concerns accountants face today ,” said Mike Whitmire, CPA, co-founder and chief executive officer of FloQast. “The new integrations with Egnyte, OneDrive, Google SSO, and Okta, along with our existing integration partners, ensure that enforce the highest levels of governance and security.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag