Deloitte and Google Cloud unveil plans to collaborate on next-generation security offerings

Building on their existing global alliance, Deloitte and Google Cloud announces that they will jointly leverage the strength of their portfolios in cyber and cloud solutions to provide customers with end-to-end secure cloud transformation services and solutions in support of their digital transformation journeys and to better combat cyber threats.

As organizations move more of their businesses to the cloud, better control over data and activities in the cloud, as well as preventing privilege misuse, becomes critically important. Migrating a single application to cloud can seem straightforward, but more often, that application's function is tied to multiple business processes. Deloitte employs complex logic, data-driven analysis, and automated tools to rapidly map your applications and infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), helping to increase speed, quality and savings.

Deloitte has received Google Cloud’s Cloud Migration and Infrastructure specializations, demonstrating success in architecting and building GCP infrastructure and workflows, and migrating customer workloads to GCP.

Google Cloud’s infrastructure is designed, built and operated with rigorous attention to security. Deloitte has spent decades helping clients protect their businesses from security threats, and can help move securely to the cloud.

As clients increasingly leverage cloud native services to modernize their existing application portfolios and build new and innovative products and services for their customers, they turn to us to help drive increased value through Google Cloud. Its functional knowledge of client businesses and products, combined with the capability of Google Cloud services, helps clients reduce technology operating costs, accelerate innovation, and increase business agility and security.

Through its alliance with SAP, Deloitte and Google have the people, knowledge and experience to help capture the transformative potential of SAP running on Google’s fast, reliable, and global platform. Its integrated SAP offering can help leverage the power of SAP S/4 HANA and Deloitte’s preconfigured solutions to devise a comprehensive cloud strategy.

As a recognized global leader in business analytics and business strategy, Deloitte and Google are able to help harness the power of Google Cloud’s array of big data processing and analytics tools to enable data-driven insights at speeds and volumes that were previously unimaginable. Combined with its cognitive computing practices, Deloitte uses Google Cloud’s machine learning engine to provide next-generation machine learning offerings that help solve tough business challenges.

Deloitte provides dedicated, active, scalable cloud management as a service to help you set the pace of change in your industry. We leverage our secure platform and worldwide network of specialists to understand every dimension of your challenges and how they impact your requirements. Deloitte’s business insight, coupled with turnkey, on-demand cloud management offerings on Google Cloud, make it possible to accelerate the path to cloud.

"The increasing integration, interconnectedness, and data exchange of our businesses and lives create shared vulnerabilities where a problem in one area can quickly cascade into another. By building security into these environments, organizations can better protect their data, privacy, and operations," said Deborah Golden, U.S. cyber leader, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory, and principal in Deloitte & Touche LLP. "Together with Google, we are supporting secure transformative change for our clients, something that all organizations should prioritize, and can enable them to be better secured in their critical cyber and cloud needs."

"For enterprise customers moving to the cloud, security isn't an afterthought, it's at the top of every CIO's list, and in general is a board level topic," said Sunil Potti, vice president engineering at Google Cloud Security. "Building in the right security processes and controls from the beginning of the cloud journey can significantly reduce risks and costs for customers, and so we are delighted to be collaborating with Deloitte to help deliver end-to-end security services and solutions to our joint-customers."

As a Google Cloud Security Premier Partner, Deloitte offers cloud security services to its clients globally and helps assist Google Cloud Platform customers address security, privacy and compliance related risks as they migrate and transform their business in the cloud. 

As part of growing the alliance, Deloitte will offer Google Cloud customers cloud security solutions in the areas of security monitoring and threat response, zero trust, identity and access management (IAM) and data security. 

The alliance will also provide next-generation capabilities that can help organizations proactively detect, continuously monitor and respond to unauthorized activity before it can adversely affect networks, and establish and operationalize a zero trust architecture and program to continuously monitor and authenticate users — constantly determining their level of risk based on who they are, what they access, and when and where they do it from. 

The companies will also enhance a digital transformation strategy and lay the foundation to leverage new data-driven identity models as they evolve, and provide a suite of services designed to help organizations address data risk management challenges and help them understand the value of their data and privacy considerations, as well as to operationalize their data risk governance program. 

Microsoft and Oracle expand interoperability partnership to Canada to help joint customers run their mission-critical workloads

Oracle announced this week continued expansion of its cloud interoperability partnership with Microsoft to help joint customers worldwide run their mission-critical workloads across Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Its new interconnect location means enterprises can now build workloads that seamlessly interoperate between Microsoft and Oracle cloud regions in Canada. This interconnect builds on an existing partnership announced in June of 2019.

The partnership has received a huge amount of interest, as 80 percent of enterprises use a combination of Microsoft and Oracle software to run their businesses. 

As cloud computing becomes ubiquitous, and businesses rely on multiple cloud providers, the partnership makes managing companies’ most important cloud workloads significantly easier. These workloads include financial planning, inventory, sales applications – and their underlying databases.

The expansion will give more customers direct, fast and highly reliable network connectivity between Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, while providing first-class customer service and support that enterprises have come to expect from the two companies. This multi-cloud solution delivers the performance, easy integration, rigorous service level agreements, and collaborative enterprise support that they need to simplify their operations. 

Simply put, the Oracle-Microsoft partnership means cloud services run by the two providers will interoperate as if they were part of a single cloud, making it easier for customers to run their mission-critical workloads across the two clouds.

“The global demand for running applications and databases in multi-cloud environments continues to accelerate,” said Clay Magouyrk, senior vice president of engineering, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  “With the new interconnect, our Canadian customers can now take advantage of a nearly seamless cloud integration between the world's largest enterprise cloud providers, Microsoft and Oracle.”

The two companies are putting customers first by enabling them to run full-stack applications side-by-side across clouds, or one part of a workload within Azure and another part of the same workload within Oracle Cloud. 

For example, using the interconnect makes it possible to connect Azure services like analytics and AI to Oracle Cloud services like Autonomous Database. Together, Azure and Oracle Cloud offer customers a one-stop shop for all the cloud services and applications they need to run their entire business.

From a technical perspective, the interconnect means less latency or delay, which enables better data transfer and application interaction between clouds. It also supports a broader spectrum of workloads, using resources available on both sides. Accenture recently performed testing on the performance of the interconnect and confirmed that the solution offers customers low latency and high ease of use.

Microsoft and Oracle plan to make the direct interconnect available in additional regions, including on the US West Coast, in a US Government specific region, in Asia, and in the European Union. Earlier this year, Oracle and Microsoft created an interconnect in Ashburn (North America), Azure US East, and in London (United Kingdom).

Pivot3 improves resilience for large-scale HCI deployments with AI and automation capabilities

Pivot3 announced addition of  artificial intelligence (AI) and automation features to its Acuity software to address the data protection challenges often faced in large-scale hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) deployments. These capabilities provide resilience for large multi-petabyte environments, allowing customers who experience catastrophic hardware failures to recover, while ensuring high-availability with auto-healing, quick node rebuild and intelligent monitoring and analytics.

At the core of Pivot3's Acuity software platform is the Pivot3 Intelligence Engine. The Intelligence Engine comprises many advanced data- and performance-management capabilities, including its market leading Business Policy Management feature. This enables customers to map business objectives to resource management through simple policies. 

Pivot3 uses AI and machine learning to understand application performance, protection and security requirements and to make real-time system changes so SLAs are met. The Intelligence Engine also monitors system health and performs predictive maintenance to ensure maximum system availability. This automates time consuming systems administration and maintenance tasks to reduce operating expenses and to allow organizations to scale without adding additional IT resources.

Pivot3’s Intelligence Engine now includes a suite of new auto-healing capabilities. Designed to automate human decisions and tasks, the new features replace manual recovery processes by automatically adding a node back to a cluster once it has recovered from a failure. Pivot3 has also introduced a quick node rebuild feature to reduce repair times up to 90 percent and to eliminate the need for a time-consuming full node rebuild, lowering the risk of a second failure.

Other enhancements to the Intelligence Engine include intelligent automation, AI and analytics for proactive system health, configuration optimization and support. These additional system analytics and diagnostics provide customers with improved system health and performance and the ability to automatically share information to Pivot3’s Support Cloud. 

Proactive system monitoring flags events in real-time with on-alarm dispatch to Pivot3 Support and provides daily status reports. New AI and machine learning techniques analyze phone-home data and alert the customer to options if a system is not in compliance with best practices.

“Customers are increasingly required to manage massive amounts of data generated by video surveillance, both for long term retention and for analysis with video analytics,” said Ben Bolles, vice president of product management, Pivot3. “The sheer scale of the infrastructure needed to support these use cases presents new resilience challenges, and organizations are increasingly concerned about capturing, protecting and capitalizing on this mission-critical data. Pivot3 is meeting this growing challenge with new automation and intelligence capabilities to provide customers with peace of mind, knowing their system is resilient, secure and always available.”

“With the real-time system monitoring, Pivot3 Support now alerts my team to unforeseen failures and provides remediation,” said Jeremiah Francis, director of information technology at Financial Advocates. “Additionally, receiving daily system health and configuration status reports allows us to ensure our system is running at peak performance; we can now more easily resolve potential points of failure and optimize for success.”

A10 Networks Orion 5G security lineup delivers business transformation for service providers

A10 Networks announced its Orion 5G Security Suite that enables mobile carriers and service providers to be ready for the business transformation 5G and NFV brings. The suite allows customers to meet the requirements needed today and helps them future proof their networks for tomorrow by delivering security, scalability, agility and analytics, while integrating with a partner ecosystem. A10 brings unique expertise from working with many of the production 5G networks that are now operational around the world.

A10 Networks has been at the forefront of initial 5G rollouts with tier-one carriers worldwide and is working with many others to plan for their future 5G initiatives. 

With the announcement of the 5G Orion Security Suite, service providers have a proven comprehensive suite of secure applications services that have been engineered for cloud-native architecture to aid in making their 5G and NFV strategies successful. 

The Orion 5G Security Suite enables advanced security and reliability functions as individual services by modularizing and offering them as a service layer with a set of connected technologies that employ automated intelligence, machine learning and centralized visibility and control.

Partnering with tier-one operators, A10 has honed its solutions to meet the critical 5G requirements for improved security, reliability and performance learned from 5G network rollouts over the last year. A10 provides an interconnected suite – virtual or physical – resulting in lower latency, larger scale, higher reliability and lower TCO—all of which have been required for the emerging 5G use cases customers are enabling.

In the last year to 18 months, first movers have deployed the first wave of 5G networks and demonstrated improved customer satisfaction and increased average revenue per user (ARPU), despite an increase in network demands, including higher data usage and download rates.

The Orion 5G Security Suite addresses existing and emerging mobile network architecture requirements for agility, consolidated services, greater scale, and lower latency communications across the Gi-LAN, virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC), and multi-access edge computing (MEC) environments. 

The Orion 5G Security Suite’s disaggregated, cloud-native security services provide agility while maintaining scale and performance by leveraging cutting-edge technologies. It also goes beyond just protecting the data plane through a GiFW by adding protection for the control plane and signaling plane with full visibility.

The Orion 5G Security Suite represents a major evolution of the company’s 5G strategy outlined in late 2018 by providing a comprehensive solution for mobile operators and other service providers to successfully deploy 5G non-standalone (NSA) and standalone (SA) solutions at hyperscale for 5G devices and new NFVi requirements.

A10 supports existing 4G and 3G network architectures and use cases for the Gi-LAN and EPC, while catering to demanding requirements for 5G architectures, including the cloud-native agility needed for MEC. These solutions can be deployed in infrastructure but are future proofed for 5G deployments. This includes functional consolidation for application visibility and control, subscriber-aware intelligent traffic steering, Gi/SGi firewall with carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), GTP/SCTP firewall, integrated DDoS for frequently attacked services, intelligent traffic steering and more.

5G demands are inherently different than 4G, with smaller packet sizes, more throughput, and higher concurrent session counts. A10 solutions can scale concurrent sessions to multi-billion levels and throughput to multi-terabit levels in a scale-out cluster. 5G deployments can benefit from compact and efficient options, for example, 385 Gbps in compact physical network functions (PNFs), or high-performance 180 Gbps virtual network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs). 

Support for Kubernetes and Docker containers are available now. The compact PNF form factors and very high-performance software offerings (including containerized) are especially beneficial in emerging MEC use cases where space and power are at a premium.

With new user-plane and control-plane security requirements coupled with the increased attack surface and scale brought by 5G and IoT device proliferation, more advanced, scalable and automated approaches are needed. To guarantee uptime and ensure control- and user-plane security, components include edge firewall, GTP firewall, Gi/SGi firewall, control- and user-plane policy enforcement, DNS protection, RAN security gateways (SeGW), and more. 

Additionally, A10’s advanced DDoS protection solution includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities with its Zero-day Attack Protection (ZAP), continuous base lining, and One-DDoS for distributed intelligence. This provides full visibility into all packets versus traditional sample-based-only solutions. Network-wide ML-powered DDoS detection and mitigation for in-house protection can also be offered as a customer scrubbing service.

A10’s solutions can be delivered in a variety of form factors to meet the demands of the emerging NFVi architecture including, VNFs, CNFs, bare metal and PNFs. These solutions are integrated with leading NFVi architectures and interoperate with multiple MANO environments for faster network roll-out and optimized performance and agility. A10 also provides flexible software licensing and consumption with FlexPool subscription-based capacity pooling licensing.

A10 Harmony Controller provides actionable intelligence to manage subscriber services, meet law enforcement agency mandates and compliance, and deliver per-subscriber analytics. Harmony Controller provides visibility, management, orchestration and automation. Coordination of distributed One-DDoS data from all the Orion 5G Security Suite solutions is seamlessly orchestrated from the integrated aGalaxy TPS system.

A10’s products integrate with multiple third-party solutions and vendors, ranging from DevOps tools, such as Ansible, to providers of 5G solutions such as Ericsson, Red Hat, NEC, Tech Mahindra and Lenovo.

Cohesity and HPE assist TEC Eurolab to maximize data security and resiliency, improve customer service

Cohesity announced Tuesday that TEC Eurolab has doubled its productivity and increased its revenues, after deploying a disruptive data management solution provided by Cohesity and HPE.

TEC Eurolab has seen major cost and efficiency benefits by using the joint Cohesity-HPE solution to enable intelligent file share services and enhance data security and resiliency. The solution, delivered by local systems integrator NETMIND, is now helping the company effectively serve customers across a multitude of sectors including aerospace and defense, automotive and motor racing, manufacturing, and biomedical industries.

The Cohesity-HPE joint solution for TEC Eurolab offers zero data loss and improved security, compliance and data integrity; 50 percent reduction in data retrieval time compared to previous solution; 100 percent improved production output across the Tomographic Center; 30 percent operating expense savings in reduced personnel time spent on data management; 20 percent capital expenses savings due to reduced burden on workstations; and offers quick and easy file search and recovery across multiple workstations with a single UI.

Founded in 1990, TEC Eurolab is a private corporation based in the province of Modena, Italy. TEC Eurolab is a prominent center of technical expertise and laboratory testing with the mission of improving the reliability of chemical, mechanical, and structural properties of products for its global customers, and providing specialised support and knowledge of materials, processes, and industry standards.

“The center can now double the number of analyses it performs each week and is able to deliver results to our customers faster with no performance bottlenecks,” said Marco Moscatti, board member and production director, TEC Eurolab.

Industrial tomography scanners deal with large, high-resolution 3D images, resulting in the center’s data growth of 50 percent per year. However, it has been challenged by legacy technology that couldn’t keep up with the increasing data volumes. The existing environment failed to efficiently and reliably process massive volumes of data.

The Tomographic Center used numerous workstations for file acquisition, 3D reconstruction and analysis. These workstations were processing many copies of the same data separately, slowing down operations and causing data loss, legal risks, and missed service level agreements. 

TEC Eurolab had a number of requirements, including a secure, central data store to ensure data integrity and predictable recovery, efficient file sharing, secure and reliable target storage for backup, non-disruptive scalability, and a seamless integration with its existing HPE environment.

Outstanding performance results from a pilot test driven by the software-defined data center specialist NETMIND led TEC Eurolab to choose Cohesity DataPlatform software on certified HPE Apollo r2200 Gen 10 servers as their preferred file share and scale-out target storage for backups.

With the new solution in place, data from all three types of workstations is written to the Cohesity cluster that acts as a central repository for acquisition, 3D reconstruction, and analysis data. All data resides on a Cohesity file share, powered by Cohesity SmartFiles —  intelligent file services built into the Cohesity DataPlatform — resulting in more efficient file sharing and faster recovery, all from a central management user interface (UI).

Additionally, with robust security and data resiliency provided by Cohesity DataPlatform, TEC Eurolab greatly reduced the risk of data being lost or compromised, and enhanced its ability to meet regulatory compliance.

“We have reduced staff operational time by 30 percent and significantly improved data resiliency with Cohesity. Best of all, we have doubled our production capacity and are able to meet customer SLAs without compromising security and compliance, which contributed in part to an increase in Tomographic Center revenues. We are now looking to further maximize these benefits across the organization by expanding Cohesity to other use cases such as integrated backup, recovery, and analytics,” said Moscatti.

“With the Cohesity-HPE joint solution, TEC Eurolab is getting the best of both worlds,” said Giovanni Golinelli, pre-sales manager and systems and storage architect, NETMIND. “They are now able to adhere to their customers’ strict security needs and industry regulatory requirements. They have an enterprise-grade solution that combines the security-first approach of Cohesity software with built-in silicon-level firmware protection, encryption, and breach detection of HPE Apollo Gen 10 servers.”

TEC Eurolab is already considering Cohesity for additional use cases across the organization. In the next phase of deployment, TEC Eurolab is considering Cohesity for integrated backup and recovery of all data across the organization as well as using Cohesity MarketPlace apps for anti-virus, in-place analytics, and vulnerability assessment. 

The combination of self-monitoring infrastructure with HPE InfoSight for servers and unified visibility from Cohesity Helios, global SaaS-based management for data and applications, will allow the company to gain predictive insights from their data and further optimize operations.

“We see a lot of potential at TEC Eurolab for further expansion of the joint solution from Cohesity and HPE. TEC Eurolab has already realized tremendous efficiency in their operations by using Cohesity for file shares and as a scale-out backup target and will elevate it to the next level by using Cohesity for integrated backup and recovery,” adds Giovanni Golinelli, Pre-Sales Manager, Systems and Storage Architect at NETMIND. “Future native integration of Cohesity with HPE primary storage portfolio including HPE Nimble Storage and HPE SimpliVity will help accelerate this and make Cohesity their data management platform of choice.”