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.“

New Matillion Data Loader release delivers speed and simplicity of data integration

Matillion announced Matillion Data Loader, a free Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data integration solution that empowers data analytics professionals and business users to load and migrate data with a powerful and scalable product.

Matillion products reduce time to value for cloud data analytics projects with data integration and data transformation solutions for Amazon Redshift, Snowflake and Google BigQuery.

With Matillion Data Loader, data professionals can use a low-friction solution to replicate data from data sources into a CDW using a code-free, wizard-based pipeline builder; monitor jobs with a dashboard view of pipeline runs and data volumes; save on infrastructure, resources, and DevOps costs, using technology built to leverage the speed and scale of the cloud; and upgrade to handle advanced data transformation, integration, and orchestration needs with Matillion's top-rated ETL solution

"Exploding data volumes and the rapid shift toward data democratization mean enterprises have increasingly diverse data analytics needs across teams. A flexible data analytics platform should ensure companies can address simple use cases, sophisticated analytics projects, or both at the same time, without the inherent complexity of other tools," said Matthew Scullion, CEO of Matillion. "Matillion Data Loader works by itself to deliver low-friction data loading but also works with Matillion ETL as a platform to join and transform data sources for analytics. This is a far better option than having to choose between solutions that are either quick and simple or functional and complex."

Denodo Platform now available on Google Cloud Platform marketplace offering data delivery through data virtualization

Denodo announces availability of the Denodo Platform through Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace, making it easier for organizations to transition data to Google Cloud to accelerate cloud data analytics and data lake initiatives. 

As a subscription-based offering, the Denodo Platform on GCP Marketplace provides a true enterprise-scale data management solution for real-time data integration without the cost and complexity associated with traditional data replication. 

As organizations increasingly move data and processing to the cloud, and as data residing across multiple cloud repositories becomes a reality, there is a growing need for faster, more agile data integration methods like data virtualization. 

The Denodo Platform integrates on-premise data sources such as relational databases, data warehouses and CSVs; cloud data sources (Big Query, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Bigtable, Apigee and more), SaaS applications, such as Salesforce, to deliver a standards-based data gateway making it quick and easy for users of all skill levels to access and use data.

Denodo's easy-to-use tools allow data engineers and integrators to quickly prepare integrated data sets for analysts to use in their GCP-based analytical sandbox, while Denodo's dynamic data catalog allows data stewards tag and categorize data assets for easy discovery.

The Denodo Platform delivers accelerated performance by leveraging MPP processing with Spark, Impala, and Presto, in Big Data scenarios, together with a dynamic data catalog so that users can easily find the data that they need. 

Google Cloud customers who deploy the Denodo data virtualization product can realize easy access to a wide breadth of data by connecting, combining and consuming data from a variety of data sources, including Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, and other Google Cloud data sources, to provide a more data-driven approach to advanced real-time analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to help make better business decisions.

The offering also enhances BigQuery support that provides native connectivity and pushdown optimization to enable customers to process massive workloads with better query efficiency. The Denodo Platform’s ability to deliver real-time data access with BigQuery cloud-native APIs enables easy data movement between existing on-premises and cloud data sources and cloud storage.

BigQuery can be leveraged as a high-performance caching database for the Denodo Platform in the cloud. This supports advanced optimization techniques like data movement (data shipping), which enables multi-pass executions based on intermediate temporary tables. Users can leverage utility-based pricing through a number of offerings on the GCP Marketplace. They can start small and scale as needed.

Syncsort completes acquisition of the Pitney Bowes software and data business to maximize the value of their data

Syncsort closed on Monday the acquisition of the Pitney Bowes software and data business, creating a powerhouse data management software company with more than 11,000 enterprise customers, $600 million in revenue and 2,000 employees worldwide. The company brings together scale, agility and breadth of portfolio to empower enterprises to gain a competitive advantage from their data.

The transaction is backed by affiliates of Centerbridge Partners and Clearlake Capital. Debt commitments were provided by Jefferies Finance, Credit Suisse, Golub Capital, Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, SunTrust Bank and UBS AG Antares Capital LP. 

Credit Suisse and Jefferies LLC served as financial advisors to Syncsort. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP served as legal counsel to Syncsort.

The combined portfolio brings together capabilities in location Intelligence, data enrichment, customer information management and engagement solutions with powerful data integration and optimization software. These end-to-end capabilities will empower enterprises to overcome ever-increasing challenges around the integrity of their data so that their IT and business operations can integrate, enrich and improve data assets to maximize insights.

“The ability to derive actionable human intelligence from data requires ensuring that it has been integrated from all relevant sources, is representative and high quality, and has been enriched with additional context and information,” said Paige Bartley of 451 Research. “Syncsort, as a longtime player in the data management space, is further addressing these issues with the acquisition of Pitney Bowes' Software Solutions assets – technology that complements existing data-quality capabilities to provide additional context and enrichment for data, as well as leverage customer data and preferences to drive business outcomes.”

Gartner expects 80 percent of marketers to drop their personalization efforts by 2025

Gartner expects that, by 2025, 80 percent of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both. In fact, 27 percent of marketers believe data is the key obstacle to personalization — revealing their weaknesses in data collection, integration and protection.

Marketers face other impediments to personalization success including the continuing decline in consumer trust, increased scrutiny by regulators and tracking barriers erected by tech companies. While personalization comprises 14 percent of the marketing budget, more than one in four marketing leaders cite technology as a major hurdle to personalization.

Gartner has a number of recommendations for marketing leaders evaluating their personalization efforts, including leveraging a pilot or proof of concept (POC) with a vendor before investing in a personalization tool, while returning to the basics and test tailored recommendations at the segment level to avoid unnecessary or premature investment in a personalization engine. It also helps grow personalization efforts from a set of tactics or tools to a capability by focusing on strategic planning, use case development and consent management as part of a personalization roadmap.

The effort also helps collaborate with cross-functional teams to align personalization efforts and increase momentum. Sharing control of personalization efforts can lead to shared insight and expand collective impact and ROI.

Other Gartner predictions to help marketers adjust to rapidly evolving customer behaviors and plan accordingly include expectations that by 2023, chief marketing officer (CMO) budget allocation on influencer marketing will decrease by a third as consumers continue to lose trust in brands and entities they don’t personally know; by 2024, artificial intelligence identification of emotions will influence more than half of the online advertisements viewed; by 2022, 25 percent of marketing departments will have a dedicated behavioral scientist or ethnographer as part of their full-time staff; and in 2023, one-third of all brand public relations disasters will result from data ethics failures.

“Personal data has long been the fuel that fires marketing at every stage of the customer journey, and the drive to find new forms of fuel and devise new ways to leverage them seems to be boundless,” said Charles Golvin, senior director analyst in the Gartner for Marketers practice. “However, this quest has failed to meet marketers’ ambitions and, in some cases, has backfired, as consumers both directly and indirectly reject brands’ overtures.”

Atos announces new Workplace as a Service offering for optimal employee experience with Google Cloud

Atos announces its new Workplace as a Service | Google Edition, part of its Atos Digital Workplace solutions, to provide enterprise customers with a way of enhancing the employee workplace experience, through greater choice for users and a boost to productivity. 

With Atos Digital Workspace, users combine skills, from advisory to consulting and design thinking through to business and vertical solutions, including applications to the digital workplace platform. It offers complete solution to customers, with its end-to-end workspace transformation, helping customers’ address their employees’ needs with no compromise on security.

As part of its partnership with Google Cloud, Atos is offering a unique integrated and secure package including the supply and support of Chromebooks with Atos’ Circuit software, as well as Google’s G Suite, supported with setup, migration and management services.

G Suite and Chromebooks, used together, provide an enhanced user experience, which is consistent across all devices and apps, enabling workforces to be more productive and engaged, while security and compliance are built-in and reinforced with a ‘zero trust’ security framework, which requires strict ID verification for every person and device trying to access resources, in order to prevent data breaches.

The offering is available in a subscription-based model, delivered by Atos, with self-service, automation and virtual agents embedded, so businesses can both optimize costs and at the same time transform the way people collaborate thereby increasing productivity.

G Suite is a set of apps such as Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, and Hangouts, which are designed with real-time collaboration and machine intelligence to bring people together and help them work smarter and safer.

Circuit, the Atos unified communications and collaboration cloud solution, provides easy-to-use, powerful team collaboration capabilities and can be used in combination with existing communication platforms and business apps, such as G Suite.

“At Atos, we’re proud to support our customers in providing a secure and innovative workplace environment in which people and businesses are engaged and effective,” said Eric Grall, senior executive vice president and head of global operations and infrastructure & data management at Atos. “Our new Workplace as a Service offering provides enterprise customers with greater choice and a complete package to deliver an optimal employee experience and enhanced productivity.” 

“The cloud can transform the way people collaborate and get work done,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president, global ecosystem at Google Cloud. “This new service from Atos provides customers with a streamlined path to adopt a cloud-native approach to collaboration and productivity with G Suite and Chromebooks. We are delighted to partner with Atos to bring these capabilities to customers.”

stackArmor debuts stackArmor OpsAlert offering to reduce cloud costs by detecting and eliminating idle capacity

stackArmor has unveiled stackArmor OpsAlert cloud operations management solution for busy product managers, product owners and business managers with a stake in financially optimized cloud hosting. 

stackArmor OpsAlert provides actionable intelligence on cloud utilization and cost using simple business oriented metrics. These metrics allow business managers and product managers to detect idle capacity and improve utilization thereby increasing margins for cloud-based products.

Continuous monitoring of cloud operations and costs is a critical need for government program managers, who must stay compliant with Antideficiency Act requirements. It also comes with the capability to monitor cloud costs, detect cloud resource idling, and track cloud contract data in a single dashboard provides situational awareness and transparency.

stackArmor OpsAlert has been designed from the ground up to meet the needs of government agencies in monitoring cloud costs in compliance with FedRAMP, FISMA and DFARS requirements through its unique "ibn-boundary" deployment model. The "in-boundary" deployment model ensures that all operational and cost data remains within the system boundary, unlike SaaS solutions that install agents and are not FedRAMP-accredited.

stackArmor OpsAlert is geared for management oversight using easy to understand business metrics drive accountability. The stackArmor Cloud Idle Score provides an instant and easy to understand metric for detecting idle capacity that is being paid for but not utilized. 

It also aids in  accountability using simple categorization of cloud instances into highly idle, moderately idle or low idle allow managers to ask the right questions and drill-down to eliminate wastage, and increase margins. SaaS product hosted on AWS can improve their margins by improving operational efficiency of cloud assets by eliminating idle capacity.

The ability to interpret complex cost, operations and utilization data is essential for effective management. Using advanced data aggregation, integration and data science methods, stackArmor OpsAlert shows utilization, idle and cost data side by side to enable decision making.

stackArmor OpsAlert include actionable insights with proven algorithms to detect idle and waste to help product managers, SaaS CFO’s and business managers track cloud spend and bring it under control. It offers accountability across distributed teams with dashboards and emails to help agile product teams quickly see cloud spending and eliminate wastage using the Cloud Idle Score across Regions and AWS Accounts.

stackArmor OpsAlert is tailored for fast growing organizations that are unable to dedicate full-time resources for cloud cost and utilization management. Its fully managed billing and cloud operations support services are cost-effective tools for busy cloud product owners, product managers and program managers looking for force-multipliers.

Pavilion secures VMware Ready status for its Hyperparallel flash array offering; boosts data management features

Pavilion Data Systems announced Monday release 2.3 of its Hyperparallel Flash Array with VMware Ready status. The no-compromise enterprise storage platform now supports a complete suite of data management features for consolidation of VM sprawl and native Container Storage Interface (CSI) for simplified migration to PKS, Docker and Kubernetes containers. 

Release 2.3 includes native VMware support for vCenter, VMware Ready support for NFS along with backward compatibility for block-based iSCSI connectivity. Release 2.3 has been beta tested with numerous customers worldwide and is currently available.

The system is capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of Virtual Machines across 72 standard NVMe SSDs with capacities reaching 1+ PB using 16 TB NVMe drives. All of the Pavilion data management functions, including snapshots, thin provisioning, encryption and RAID-6 volume provisioning are now enabled under VMware vCenter for simplicity of scaling and consolidating enterprise VM sprawl.

One of the customers for Pavilion’s VMware consolidation is the Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). CBS selected Pavilion over several traditional all-flash arrays based on performance and footprint manageability. 

Last month, Pavilion Data Systems announced record-breaking results of STAC-M3 benchmarks in a new Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) Report.

The STAC-M3 benchmark specifications are maintained by the STAC Benchmark Council, which consists of more than 300 financial institutions and more than 50 vendor organizations. User firms include the largest global banks, brokerage houses, exchanges, hedge funds, proprietary trading shops, and other market participants. 

Such firms designed the STAC-M3 benchmark suite to represent a common set of performance-related challenges in financial time-series analytics. The STAC-M3 results were audited by the STAC, which facilitates the Council.

A solution using the Pavilion Data Hyperparallel Flash Array populated with standard SSDs for the test produced world-record performance in four analytical benchmarks against all other publicly disclosed systems, including systems with direct-attached storage and Intel Optane drives. The Pavilion array came ahead of all other publicly disclosed solutions involving kdb+ and flash arrays in eight tick analytics benchmarks.

“Release 2.3 extends Pavilion’s leadership from webscale and HPC customers directly into the heart of the Fortune 100 where VMware is the predominant operating environment,” said Gurpreet Singh, Pavilion CEO. “By natively supporting VMware NFS, demonstrating the upcoming VMware-native NVMe-oF functionality and enabling all of our data management functions inside vCenter, we enable orders of magnitude more consolidation than the nearest competitor and simplify operations in a familiar way for VMware administrators.”

Pavilion Data announced in August that its Series C funding of US$25 million, bringing the total funding to $58 million. New investors are Taiwania Capital and RPS Ventures.

All existing investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Korea Investment Partners, DAG Ventures, Artiman Ventures, SK Telecom, and Tyche Partners participated in this round. The investment will accelerate the delivery of the company's NVMe-oF products, expanding to new markets, and growing the team to support customer demand.