Masimo secures FDA clearance for neonatal RD SET Pulse Oximetry sensors with improved accuracy specifications

Masimo announced that RD SET sensors with Masimo Measure-through Motion and Low Perfusion SET pulse oximetry have received FDA clearance for improved oxygen saturation (SpO2) accuracy specifications for neonatal patients (< 3 kg). 

The updated RD SET sensors’ SpO2 accuracy specifications have improved significantly, from 3 percent to 1.5 percent ARMS (at 1 standard deviation), in conditions of motion and no motion, providing clinicians with even greater confidence when monitoring the oxygenation status of neonates. With this clearance, the improved performance specifications, which were incorporated into RD SET sensors for patients > 3 kg in 2018, are now available to all patient populations in the United States.

Masimo’s SET pulse oximetry has been shown in more than 100 independent and objective studies to outperform other pulse oximetry technologies – even before the revisions that achieved the improved accuracy specifications – providing clinicians with increased sensitivity and specificity to help them make critical patient care decisions. 

Crucially for newborn health, SET has been shown to help clinicians reduce severe retinopathy of prematurity in neonates3 and in multiple studies, including the largest critical congenital heart disease (CCHD) study to date, to improve CCHD screening in newborns.

In addition to offering improved accuracy, RD SET sensors are designed to enhance patient comfort, optimize clinician workflows, and help hospitals meet green initiatives. 

The sensors are lightweight and have a flat, soft cable with smooth edges, so that they lie comfortably on a patient’s hand or foot. In particular, RD SET NeoPt sensors with Velaid SofTouch use little to no adhesive, facilitating quick but gentle application and repositioning on the fragile skin of newborns and pre-term babies. 

RD SET sensors also feature an intuitive sensor-to-cable connection, while their lightweight design results in up to 84 percent less waste and their sleek, recyclable packaging reduces storage and shipping space.

“We’re delighted to announce the latest result of our continued innovation in our foundational SET pulse oximetry. We have long been dedicated to helping improve the lives of neonatal, infant, and pediatric patients, and this clearance significantly furthers that mission,” said Joe Kiani, founder and CEO of Masimo. “Thanks to the brilliance and dedication of our engineers and the continuing support of our customers, we’ve been able to once again raise the standard for pulse oximetry performance. Even though no one has been able to create pulse oximetry that outperforms SET, we have not allowed that to stop us from continuing our pursuit of perfecting pulse oximetry.”

Kaspersky Web Traffic Security now available in two deployment options to meet customer demands

Kaspersky released next version of Kaspersky Web Traffic Security, which now offers enhanced protection capabilities though integration with Kaspersky Anti Targeted Attack to improve early detection of sophisticated web threats. The product is now available in two deployment options, as a standalone application and a software appliance, to meet broader customer needs.

According to Kaspersky researchers, 717 million web attacks were revealed in the second quarter of this year. The attacks contain various kinds of malware including generic adware to ransomware and advanced threats that reach corporate networks through phishing, social engineering or unreliable web resource surfing.

Web gateway protection allows companies to block massive amounts of web threats before they reach endpoints. This decreases the number of alerts on endpoints that interrupt users and administrators, as well as ensures protection of devices which don’t have endpoint security product installed or updated.

To make the deployment and use of the product effective for companies with different needs, Kaspersky now offers two options: as a software appliance or a standalone application.

The software appliance is a ready-to-use solution for companies that need to quickly deploy and start using secure web gateway with a proxy server pre-configured. The appliance interface allows users to manage the incorporated proxy server, avoiding configuration hassle.

The Kaspersky Web Traffic Security standalone application allows resource economy and a more agile configuration for companies that need a more customized solution and careful integration of different cybersecurity products. The application does not necessarily demand a separate server, as the system requirements necessary to protect a particular bandwidth are met. It can be installed alongside other applications but configured separately from other gateway components.

The protection capabilities of Kaspersky Web Traffic Security are now empowered by two-way API-based integration with Kaspersky Anti Targeted Attack, which allows customers of both solutions to achieve earlier attack detection and automated responses to advanced web threats. 

Suspicious files are automatically sent to Kaspersky Anti Targeted Attack for analysis. The system reveals the nature and malicious activity that the advanced threat generates, including files, transmission of commands, payloads and stolen data, and blocks them at the early attack stage.

“Different deployment scenarios allow companies to choose the best way to secure corporate web traffic, depending on available resources or IT network architecture,” said Sergey Martsynkyan, head of B2B product marketing at Kaspersky. “It also brings new usage scenarios to our partners. For example, the new format of the all-in-one appliance can be used by managed service providers to add web traffic security to their portfolio. Thanks to the application’s ease of deployment, scalability and multi-tenancy, they can provide web traffic security as a service for additional protection to ever growing number of customers, without the hassle.”

Kaspersky Web Traffic Security is available in both deployment options as part of Kaspersky Security for Internet Gateway and Kaspersky Total Security for Business.

VMware completes acquisition of Pivotal, connects infrastructure and application owners to boost software delivery, business outcomes

VMware announced Monday that it has completed the acquisition of Pivotal Software. With the completion of the acquisition, Pivotal’s Class A common stock was removed from listing on the New York Stock Exchange with trading suspended prior to the open of the market today, and Pivotal will now operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of VMware. The transaction represented an enterprise value for Pivotal of approximately $2.7 billion.

Under the terms of the transaction, Pivotal’s Class A common stockholders are entitled to receive $15.00 per share cash for each share held (without interest and less applicable tax withholdings), and Pivotal’s Class B common stockholder, Dell Technologies, received approximately 7.2 million shares of VMware Class B common stock, at an exchange ratio of 0.0550 shares of VMware Class B common stock for each share of Pivotal Class B common stock.

Pivotal’s offerings will be core to the VMware Tanzu portfolio of products and services designed to help customers transform the way they build, run and manage their most important applications, with Kubernetes as the common infrastructure substrate. 

The combination of Pivotal’s developer-centric offerings with VMware’s upstream Kubernetes run-time infrastructure and management tools will deliver a comprehensive enterprise solution that enables dramatic improvements in developer productivity in the creation of modern applications. VMware is able to offer product building blocks and integrated solutions that are tested and proven with technical expertise that customers need to accelerate software delivery across data center, cloud and edge environments.

“It's my pleasure to announce Ray O'Farrell as the leader of VMware’s new Modern Applications Platform business unit—uniting the Pivotal and VMware Cloud Native Applications teams,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware. “And as Pivotal is now part of VMware, I want to thank the Pivotal leadership team for building a great company. Together, we’re poised to be the leading enabler of Kubernetes with a deep understanding of both operators and developers.”

“Digital transformation and the applications that drive it should not be restricted only to cloud and software giants,” said Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and general manager, Modern Applications Platform Business Unit, VMware. “We believe that modern application development solutions and practices need to be easily accessible to everyday enterprises across the globe. With Pivotal’s developer capabilities as the foundation, we’ll focus on delivering consumable, enterprise-ready cloud native offerings to customers to help them achieve better business outcomes.”  

“Pivotal has fundamentally changed how the world’s biggest brands build and manage software with a focus on developer productivity through platform abstractions and development techniques as well as connecting the business with the developer,” said Edward Hieatt, senior vice president, customer success, Pivotal. “The combination of Pivotal and VMware offers the most comprehensive application platform in the industry and is a win for our customers, a win for Pivotal, and a win for VMware. We’re excited to team up with VMware to help more enterprises become like modern software companies by adopting DevOps and Lean techniques developed by internet giants and the startup community.”

Numerous mutual customers including Raytheon have reacted positively to the news of the acquisition. “By working with both Pivotal and VMware, we’ve been able to completely transform how we write software for our military and government customers,” said Todd Probert, vice president for C2, Space and Intelligence at Raytheon. “Combining these companies under a single umbrella is going to make it possible for my team to get code to our customers even faster and easier.”

NetApp predicts data management and IT trends will lead in the New Year

2019 was a year of rapid innovation—and disruption—for both the IT industry and the broader business community. With the widespread adoption of hybrid multicloud as the de facto architecture for enterprise customers, organizations everywhere are under tremendous pressure to modernize their infrastructure and to deliver tangible business value around data-intensive applications and workloads.

As a result, organizations are shifting from on-premises environments to using public cloud services, building private clouds, and moving from disk to flash in data centers—sometimes concurrently. These transformations open the door to enormous potential, but they also introduce the unintended consequence of increased IT complexity.

NetApp predicts that a demand for simplicity and customizability will be the number one factor that drives IT purchasing decisions in 2020. Vendors will need to offer modern, flexible technologies with the choice of how to use and to consume those technologies so that customers can keep pace with their evolving business models. As IT departments strive to deemphasize maintenance and hardware, to reduce overhead, and to adopt pay-as-you-go models, simplicity and choice will be crucial.

Achieving this simplicity will serve as the foundation for companies as they navigate the exciting technological trends that we identify in the following sections.

1. As the advent of 5G makes AI-driven Internet of Things (IoT) a reality, edge computing environments are primed to become even more disruptive than cloud was.

In preparation for the widespread emergence of 5G, lower-cost sensors and maturing AI applications will be used to build compute-intensive edge environments. This effort will lay the groundwork for high-bandwidth, low-latency AI-driven IoT environments with the potential for huge innovation—and disruption.

The advent of 5G is what AI-driven IoT has been waiting for. It will take a few more years for 5G data technology to spread across the entire United States. However, 2020 will see many players in the technology industry and business community invest in building edge computing environments to support the reality of AI-driven IoT. These environments will make possible new use cases that rely on intelligent, instantaneous, and autonomous decision-making, with low-latency, high-bandwidth capabilities. This evolution will bring us to a world where the internet will work on our behalf—without even having to ask.

This AI-driven IoT innovation, however, will depend on a massive prioritization of edge computing, further disrupting IT infrastructures and data management priorities. As edge devices move beyond home devices (such as connected thermostats and speakers) and become more far-reaching (such as connected solar farms), more data centers will be placed at the edge. Also, platforms such as artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) will be necessary to help monitor complex environments across the edge, the core, and the cloud.

2. The impact of blockchain will be undeniable as indelible ledgers rapidly enable game-changing use cases outside of cryptocurrency.

The world is quickly moving beyond Bitcoin to adopt enterprise-distributed indelible ledgers, setting the stage for a transformation that’s exponentially bigger than the impact that cryptocurrency has had on blockchain in finance. 

While the crypto frenzy continues to steal the limelight when it comes to blockchain, most players in the industry understand the bigger picture of the technology and its potential. Going into 2020, we will see a tipping point for larger implementations as enterprises go a step further to adopt indelible ledgers based on Hyperledger, which represents the maturation of blockchain for wider use cases. Indeed, we will start to see blockchain go “mainstream” as it enables industries such as healthcare to create universal patient records, to improve chain-of-custody pharmaceutical processes, and more.

With such use cases validating blockchain and indelible ledgers, additional widespread adoption of the technology will drive transformation across society on a larger scale. This widespread adoption will build on the disruption that cryptocurrency has brought to finance to touch nearly every industry. As a result, new data management and compute capabilities will encourage companies to invest in indelible ledgers to build differentiated applications and to collaborate on critical, sensitive datasets.

3. Hardware-based composable architecture will have less short-term potential against commodity hardware and software-based infrastructure virtualization.

Continued improvements in commodity hardware performance, software-based virtualization, and microservice software architectures will eliminate much of the performance advantage of proprietary hardware-based composable architectures, relegating them to niche data center roles soon. 

Hardware-based composable architecture is being hyped as the next evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This architecture enables CPUs, networking cards, workload accelerators, and storage resources to be distributed across a rack-scale architecture and to be connected with low-latency PCIe-based switching. 

Although composable architecture does have potential, standardization has been slow, and adoption has been even slower. Meanwhile, software-based virtualization of storage, combined with software-based (but hardware-accelerated) compute and networking virtualization solutions, offers much of the flexibility of hardware-based composable architectures today with lower cost and consistently increasing performance.

Next year, attempts to build a true hardware-based rack-scale computing model will no doubt continue, and the space will continue to evolve quickly. However, most organizations that must transform within 2020 will be best served by a combination of modern HCI architectures (including disaggregated HCI) and software-based virtualization and containerization.

Portshift syncs Kubernetes policies to container vulnerabilities in CI/CD pipelines for remediation

Portshift announces its new capability that delivers runtime policies for vulnerability remediation, allowing more secure workload communications. Portshift’s risk mitigation engine  connects Kubernetes network policies with discovered vulnerabilities in production workloads, allowing to mitigate the risk potential of vulnerable containers till its replacement with new version that remove the vulnerable component.

With Portshift, the company has taken DevSecOps to the next level with a platform that connects identified vulnerabilities with the identity of the workload, providing a measured balance that prevents workload communications based on the risk level and the potential threat to certain applications.

The technology has the ability to block traffic based on the vulnerability level discovered, providing a single picture for complete visualization of these processes during runtime. This provides protection that is matched to the DevOps applications in production.

According to a 2019 Gartner report, “Security can’t be an afterthought. It needs to be embedded in the DevOps process, which Gartner refers to as “DevSecOps…Integrate an image-scanning process to prevent vulnerabilities as part of an enterprise’s continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) process, where applications are scanned during the build and run phases of the software development life cycle.”

Portshift mitigates vulnerabilities with greater sophistication. Available as part of the company’s identity-based cloud native workload security and risk management platform, the technology ensures that Kubernetes environments are protected from development to runtime. With Portshift, app security is simplified and speeded-up by replacing multiple fragmented firewalls, security groups, and ACLs with automated identity-based workload security that is decoupled from the network infrastructure.

When unknown, and possibly malicious workloads are detected, they are quickly identified and rapidly removed using Portshift’s innovative DevOps security platform. The company’s workload management processes offer an alternative to the use of IP addresses, ports and firewalls to secure the network perimeter as it addresses the unique security requirements of cloud-native microservices running in containers both inside and outside of the network perimeter.

“With the availability of this identity-based approach, we are actively collaborating with industry leading vulnerability scanning providers including Twistlock, Aqua and Clair to move the industry forward,“ said Zohar Kaufman, co-founder and VP, R&D for Portshift. “Having Portshift’s information-rich view of containers in real time will be exceedingly important in 2020 as more determined hackers continue their efforts to attack earlier in the development process in order to exploit vulnerabilities before they are addressed by DevSecOps.“

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).

Optiv Security expects election hacking, ‘hybrid threat actors’ to top the list of 2020 cyber threats

Optiv Security announced its cybersecurity industry predictions for 2020 and beyond. A focus on privacy, evolving threat actors, pervasive deepfake videos, and increased election interference are among the issues Optiv sees taking on greater importance in the New Year.

Optiv expects the most common issues that the industry may face in 2020 include hybrid threat actors may become more commonplace. Optiv’s 2019 Cyber Threat Intelligence Estimate (CTIE) found a growing number of “hybrid threat actors.” These are attackers who impersonate one type of adversary to disguise their true intentions (for example, a nation state imitating a generic hacker targeting a customer database, when its true aim is to steal intellectual property). 

Optiv believes a possible increase in the number of adversaries to adopt this technique and launch “imposter” attacks to obfuscate their true intentions, adding yet another layer of complexity to threat hunting and incident response.

Apple’s “privacy as a human right” campaign should cause others to follow. As the world’s foremost technology organization going all-in on privacy will shift the competitive landscape, security and privacy could become a competitive differentiator for companies that follow Apple’s lead and grab “first mover” status in their markets. Laggards may risk meeting the unseemly fate of past organizations that failed to embrace important technology paradigms such as internet, cloud, and mobile computing.

Election misinformation campaigns could proliferate. The effectiveness of the Russian misinformation campaign of 2016 increases the possibility of increased copycat attacks for the 2020 election. These attacks could come from nation states as well as domestic groups supporting rival U.S. politicians. This activity threatens to trigger a major public/private response to the online misinformation problem.

Optive expects to see the first cases of deepfakes used to manipulate stock prices. There has been much publicity around the potential to impact elections using deepfakes (AI-doctored videos that enable individuals to make it appear people said things they never said). However, not enough attention has been paid to how cybercriminals can make money using deepfakes against businesses. 

This might change in 2020, as it’s possible we will see the first deepfake attacks designed to impact stock prices, by having CEOs, financial analysts, Federal Reserve leaders or other powerful economic figures make phony statements that will cause stock market movements. Cybercriminals would use these videos to make quick fortunes in the market.

There should be widespread realignment of IT and security organizations. As boards view cybersecurity as a peer-level risk to traditional enterprise risks, such as lawsuits and product recalls, more CISOs should become peers of CIOs and other executives, rather than direct or indirect reports. This would cause a realignment of the IT and security organizations to eliminate conflicts and encourage collaboration. 

The most critical of these will be the continued expansion of DevSecOps, in which security is fully integrated into the application development process; and patch management, which will move from being divided between security and IT (security finds vulnerabilities, IT patches them), to becoming a unified process with a single point of accountability.

Cybersecurity basics may continue to vex consumers and enterprise organizations.Whether insufficient passwords, lack of education and training around phising attacks, or simple upkeep and compliance, the tiny details of cybersecurity will continue to be the cause of a vast portion of compromises if left unaccounted for. Simple passwords (those without special characters or are extremely obvious, such as “password123”) only take minutes to crack by professional hackers and can be done inexpensively.

“As we look beyond 2019 and into 2020, we have a solid idea of what threats the industry is facing, and not just ransomware and phishing attacks, but new, hard-to-combat threats,” said Anthony Diaz, Division Vice President, Emerging Services at Optiv. “As is always the case, us ‘good guys’ are forced to play catch up with bad actors, who constantly remain a step ahead. There is much IT and business leaders must be aware of when it comes to cybersecurity, as the pace of change is quite high. That is why we recommend cybersecurity programs focus on proactive risk mitigation and build out from there. This ensures your organization is actively looking for, combating, and identifying threats before they can cause damage.”