GigaSpaces Version 15.0 set to operationalize and optimize machine learning; gain actionable insights from data

GigaSpaces announced this week availability of GigaSpaces Version 15.0, including InsightEdge Platform and XAP, to operationalize and optimize machine learning with the required speed, scale, accuracy and management tools. GigaSpaces Version 15.0 powers machine learning operations (MLOps) initiatives, helping enterprises maximize the business value derived from big data. 

Deploying machine learning models in production remains a major challenge for many enterprises. The Gartner Accelerate Your Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Journey Using These DevOps Best Practices says that, “according to the 2019 Gartner CIO Survey, AI and ML continue to be viewed as the No. 1 game-changing technology by CIOs. However, most organizations underestimate how long it will take to move AI and ML projects into production.”

GigaSpaces delivers fast in-memory computing platforms for real-time insight to action and extreme transactional processing.  With GigaSpaces, enterprises can operationalize machine learning and transactional processing to gain real-time insights on their data and act upon them in the moment.  

The always-on platforms for mission-critical applications across cloud, on-premise or hybrid, are leveraged by organizations across various verticals, including financial services, retail, transportation, telecom and healthcare. GigaSpaces offices are located in the US, Europe and Asia.

GigaSpaces Version 15.0 simplifies integrating AI workloads with the organization’s core infrastructure, accelerating machine learning deployment and enabling enterprises to more readily experience the business benefits of machine learning models.

GigaSpaces Version 15.0 introduces a new enterprise-grade monitoring and administration tool, Ops Manager, that provides visibility into the components of systems running models including logs, inputs, outputs and exceptions, using different performance visualization techniques. 

The Ops Manager enables continuous monitoring of machine learning pipelines, starting at the cluster level and drilling through to individual services so users can maintain accurate data models and ensure that problems are resolved before they affect overall performance. 

The new AnalyticsXtreme Batch Indexing included in GigaSpaces InsightEdge Version 15.0 optimizes and automates data access and storage with the added ability to move data between the more frequent (cold data) access and infrequent (archive data) access tiers on data lakes and data warehouses.  

The performance of ML models is enhanced since frequently accessed cold data can be retrieved 80 times faster directly from data lakes and processing costs are reduced as data access patterns change. 

GigaSpaces Version 15.0 also provides a native smart space client in Kubernetes that supports remote CRUD operations, task execution, and event-driven analytics providing high throughput and fast serialization, as well as automatic load balancing. Writing and updating of data without a predefined schema allows easy changes to the data model, while ensuring compatibility with JDBC and BI tools so code can be integrated more reliably and faster with lower administrative overhead.

“Machine learning is becoming an essential component of mission critical applications to optimize operations and deliver superior real time customer experiences,” said Yoav Einav, VP product at GigaSpaces. “GigaSpaces Version 15.0 provides enterprises with the machine learning model management capabilities, speed and scale that they need to accelerate their machine learning and artificial intelligence journey.”

Diamanti joins AI/ML sector with its GPU platform that supports containerized workloads on Kubernetes

Diamanti announced availability of its enterprise platform with GPU support for running containerized workloads under Kubernetes, ideal for the demanding requirements of emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications. 

In conjunction with its recent announcement of Diamanti Spektra, customers can now provide to their end users GPU capacity in cloud clusters for scaling AI/ML workloads on premises out to public clouds to accelerate model development and training.

Diamanti recently announced the close of a $35 million Series C funding round that the company plans to use to ramp global go-to-market initiatives, along with increased investment in engineering resources to drive the roadmap for Diamanti Spektra, as well as new software, SaaS, and hardware solutions for emerging AI and ML workloads.

“AI is quickly proving to be the most disruptive set of new technologies in decades thanks to breathtaking advances in computing power, volume, velocity and variety of data,” said Tom Barton, CEO of Diamanti. “Our platform offers unmatched extensibility and flexibility for containerized workloads and now our customers can add GPU support for a heterogeneous environment under the same Kubernetes umbrella to help with even the most demanding AI/ML requirements.”

The Diamanti platform for AI/ML workloads fully supports Nvidia’s NVLink cross connect GPU card technology for higher performing workloads, as well as Kubeflow, a machine learning framework for Kubernetes that provides highly-available Jupyter notebooks and ML pipelines.

“Cloud-native methodology and software are crossing over with AI and machine learning, with Kubernetes an increasingly attractive option for data scientists to orchestrate the distributed architecture required to run multiple machine learning libraries and frameworks in production at scale,” said Matt Aslett, research vice president, 451 Research. “One key use case across several verticals involves infrastructure that can be quickly spun up or down to support massive simulations.”

Early access Diamanti customers are already benefiting from the new platform support for GPUs in industries as varied as financial services, energy and travel, among others.

For AI/ML applications requiring GPUs, the new Diamanti Spektra solution can also now manage the full lifecycle of containerized workloads across on-premises and public clouds, moving applications and data between Kubernetes clusters as necessary. 

Diamanti Spektra combines the power of Diamanti’s hardware-boosted x86 platform along with cloud-based infrastructure to provide Kubernetes-as-a-Service. Diamanti Spektra is in technology preview.

Synack report showcases rapid growth, almost four times, in crowdsourced security testing for compliance

Synack released a new report Wednesday detailing a major cultural shift taking part among some of the world’s largest organizations and institutions. The 2020 State of Compliance and Security Testing Report reveals that a large percentage of organizations and institutions are moving toward a rigorous, continuous testing model to ensure compliance. 

As part of this shift toward continuous testing, organizations are utilizing crowdsourced security testing to achieve regulatory compliance and real security, with adoption expected to increase four-fold in 2020.

With new compliance frameworks such as GDPR and CCPA increasing the cost of a breach, organizations are racing to protect their data. In an increasingly connected, highly regulated and digital world, business leaders and decision makers are turning to outside vendors that can ramp up quickly in a cost effective manner. 

As a result, the crowdsourced security testing space--which has already gained credibility for its significantly better ROI than more traditional, less frequent, and less secure methods--has surpassed all estimates and will continue to do so in 2020 and beyond.

For the report, Synack surveyed leaders from more than 300 organizations representing a number of industries and verticals, including technology, government, healthcare, information technology, and financial services. 

In addition to helping identify a set of security and compliance best practices for a diverse set of industries, the report found security testing is becoming part of an organization’s normal routine rather than a once-a-year check of the box focused only on compliance. 

44 percent of organizations and institutions surveyed are performing security tests on a monthly or weekly basis, which suggests they are moving toward the more effective continuous model that crowdsourced solutions enable.

Other findings include 63 percent of organizations agree that the most common use case for external vendors is to identify and reduce vulnerabilities, which is encouraged by different compliance frameworks and best practice standards; 52 percent of organizations experience unwanted cost and complexity due to overlap in functionality from using multiple security vendors, which is caused by poor budget allocation and overlap in vendor capabilities; and 32 percent of compliance testing processes are expensive and difficult to scale, yet crowdsourced security testing solutions provide 147 percent higher ROI than a typical pen test and may decrease the burden of testing on organizations by reducing signal-noise ratio.

DXC Technology improves IT acceleration for large enterprise clients with Virtual Clarity acquisition

DXC Technology announced it has acquired the outstanding shares of Virtual Clarity, provider of IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) transformation advisory services. This acquisition further positions DXC as a leading provider of IT modernization services for applications and infrastructure and strengthens DXC’s ability to assess, design and manage transformations to cloud.

The addition of Virtual Clarity also builds on DXC’s acquisition earlier this year of Luxoft as clients increasingly are seeking industry specific application development and innovation as part of their IT modernization approach.

Founded in 2008, Virtual Clarity is comprised of a blend of enterprise IT experts with knowledge of modern tools, techniques and industries – including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and telecommunications.

“I am excited to welcome Virtual Clarity’s talented team to the DXC family,” said Mike Salvino, DXC’s president and CEO. “Virtual Clarity is a solid fit with our growth strategy with proven expertise in IT transformation and cloud migration. The company complements and enhances DXC’s capabilities in cloud, platforms and IT modernization, enabling DXC to help our clients with their digital transformation journey and improve their business outcomes.”

“From inception, we’ve been obsessed with customer outcomes,” said Virtual Clarity CEO Steve Peskin, who will report to Salvino. “Our approach to help clients transform their business quickly, seamlessly and safely complements the ability of DXC to execute globally at scale. Together with DXC, we create an immensely powerful and compelling opportunity for clients to unlock new value and competitive agility across the enterprise. We will make a real difference for clients, partners and our industry.”

DXC will combine its deep cloud and application engineering services and strategic partnerships with Virtual Clarity’s IT modernization capabilities to enable enterprise clients to accelerate their digital transformation, harness technology to improve efficiencies at scale, and drive business innovation, while accelerating customers’ digital transformation journeys with Virtual Clarity's Precision Guided Transformation services and unlocking the value of DXC’s application migration and modernization capabilities.

Aligning IT-as-a-Service to the needs of the business-lines quickly and safely.

It also helps turn IT innovation into business value for customers with Virtual Clarity’s “Air Traffic Control” offering – a combination of unique tools, highly experienced enterprise IT leaders, and provide deep understanding of what it takes to implement change in complex enterprises.

The DXC and Virtual Clarity alliance has assisted in the moving of several thousand applications for a large bank holding company to a hybrid cloud and clearing regulatory concerns by implementing a solution based on migration factory (cloud assessment, architecture, and air traffic  control) and automated IT platform. 

It also accelerated IT application modernization for a North American commercial bank by delivering a new, dynamic IT platform and migration factory which boosted implementation and safeguarded the outcome. The client realized an 80 percent-plus reduction in IT unit costs and a 50-fold increase in the speed of change

Migration of 7,000 applications to the public cloud for a Fortune 100 telecommunications leader. DXC and Virtual Clarity analyzed the IT applications platform, assessed options and charted the most effective course of action to rapidly migrate the 7,000 applications to the public cloud.

IBM releases financial services- ready public cloud platform to meet specific compliance and security requirements

IBM announced this week that it has designed a financial services-ready public cloud. IBM will welcome financial services institutions, and their suppliers, to join the financial services-ready public cloud. 

The financial services-ready public cloud is expected to run on IBM's public cloud, which uses Red Hat OpenShift as its primary Kubernetes environment to manage containerized software across the enterprise, and includes more than 190 API driven, cloud native PaaS services to create new and enhanced cloud-native apps. 

The project draws upon technology and financial services industry experience earned through IBM's relationships with 47 of the Fortune 50 companies and the 10 largest financial institutions globally.  Additionally, to help promote a regulatory compliant environment, IBM and Bank of America are working with Promontory, an IBM business unit and provider of financial services regulatory compliance consulting. 

Bank of America will be a committed collaborator to use the platform built on IBM's public cloud. The Bank will host key applications and workloads to support the requirements and privacy and safety expectations of its 66 million banking customers. 

The financial services-ready public cloud has been designed to help address the requirements of financial services institutions for regulatory compliance, security and resiliency. This will help financial institutions transact with technology vendors who have met the platform's requirements. 

It is the only industry-specific public cloud platform that can provide preventative and compensatory controls for financial services regulatory workloads, multi-architecture support and proactive and automated security, leveraging the industry's highest levels of encryption certification.

To help develop the control requirements for the platform, IBM has collaborated intensively with Bank of America. The financial services-ready public cloud can potentially enable Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers – from the smallest FinTechs to more established vendors – to focus on their core offerings to financial institutions with the controls for the platform put in place.

"This is one of the most important collaborations in the financial services industry cloud space," said Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer, Bank of America. "This industry-first platform will allow Bank of America to use the public cloud, putting data security, resiliency, privacy and customer information safety needs at the forefront of decision making. By setting a standard that addresses the concern of hosting highly-confidential information, we aim to drive the public cloud to a safety level that is unmatched."

The collaboration with IBM marks the next step in Bank of America's seven-year cloud journey and reflects the Bank's unwavering commitment to the security and privacy of banking customers while also creating an opportunity to address the unique regulatory and compliance requirements of the financial services industry.  

"The financial services-ready public cloud represents an ongoing focus from Bank of America, IBM and Promontory to help develop a technology ecosystem where regulations can be addressed," said Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President, Global Industries, Clients, Platforms & Blockchain, IBM. "Together we plan to help our customer address their ongoing compliance requirements, coupled with highly scalable, standardized capabilities that will be built to help serve today's modern financial services industry." 

"We recognize that we must help create an environment where financial services institutions can address their regulatory requirements and expectations," said Gene Ludwig, Promontory Founder and CEO. "Bank of America, IBM and Promontory are uniquely suited to help give the industry and vendors confidence in the quality of this cloud platform." 

The financial services-ready public cloud will help give financial institutions an opportunity to more efficiently assess the security, resiliency and compliance of their technology vendors. Participating financial services software providers may benefit from the platform's security validation. Only ISV or SaaS providers that demonstrate they comply with the platform's policies will be eligible to deliver offerings through the platform.

Rancher Labs industry survey shows rapid adoption of Kubernetes for production workloads

Rancher Labs released Wednesday highlights of a survey of 1,106 tech users at large and small enterprises across a broad range of more than 25 industries, including technology, financial services, telecom, education, government and healthcare. The respondents were almost evenly split among EMEA and North America.

The results of the survey illustrate rapid adoption of containers and Kubernetes. Key findings include 85 percent of respondents are running containers in production; with Kubernetes emerging as the standard for container management with 90 percent of respondents using it for orchestration.

Architects, developers, and DevOps are the primary drivers of adoption (69 percent) followed by IT operations (30 percent), while multiple cluster environments are becoming the norm with 91 percent of respondents running multiple clusters, and 45 percent planning multiple clusters within six months.

The most common use cases for containers are designing microservices (71 percent), building customer facing applications (70 percent), and modernizing legacy applications (53 percent). Hybrid cloud deployments are prevalent with 71 percent of respondents running on-premises workloads, while 67 percent are running cloud-based applications. Edge is emerging as an important use-case with 15 percent of respondents deploying containers for edge workloads

As with any rapidly emerging technology, the survey also indicates that challenges remain, including complexity remains a barrier to entry with more than 62 percent of respondents not currently running containers citing that as the primary reason slowing adoption, while Windows container adoption is limited, although this is not surprising given Windows container support was only introduced in Kubernetes earlier this year.

Users are still wary of persistent storage due to complexity and perceived risk, while service mesh is perceived as complex which is limiting more widespread adoption.

“It’s clear from the survey results that containers have become a key pillar of modern IT strategy with 85% of respondents running containers in production,” said Peter Smails, CMO, Rancher Labs. “Additionally, 91% of respondents running more than one cluster combined with a healthy mix of on-premises and cloud-based deployments indicates multi-cluster / multi-cloud is emerging as a deployment strategy of choice.”

Fortanix gets FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certification enabling businesses to update to a more modern encryption platform

Fortanix Inc. announced that the Fortanix Self-Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS) has earned the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Level 3 certification from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. 

This achievement enables businesses to replace legacy encryption technologies, including Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), with the Fortanix SDKMS encryption platform for protecting the most sensitive data in the U.S. Government, technology, financial services and healthcare industries.

SDKMS has been built on HSM-grade security, secures any KMS use case including TDE, storage multi-cloud and blockchain. SDKMS also delivers tokenization, secrets management and HSM; central management, audit and control. It also comes secured with Intel SGX, built for cloud scale/resiliency, SDKMS reduces threats and consolidates costs.​

As part of the certification, Fortanix passed strict government requirements for Level 3 certifications, validating the Fortanix SDKMS cryptographic protections and ability to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of protected information. Customers in the U.S. Government, financial services, healthcare and other regulated industries have specific private data such as passwords and PIN numbers that must be encrypted using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified cryptographic modules.

For decades, businesses in highly regulated industries have been locked into HSM appliances that are costly to operate, difficult to scale, and lack the modern RESTful programming interfaces required by application developers to bring new applications to market and migrate them to the public cloud. 

With Fortanix SDKMS, businesses can lower their operating costs up to 70 percent, scale across multi-site and multi-cloud environments, and accelerate application development through modern cryptographic services.