McAfee MVISION Cloud is now a certified Data Loss Prevention provider for Microsoft Teams

McAfee announced that its cloud access security broker (CASB) technology is now Certified for Microsoft Teams. McAfee MVISION Cloud is now Certified for Microsoft Teams to serve the needs of partners and customers with a unified, cloud-native security platform that consistently protects their data and defends against threats in the cloud.

Teams is a chat-based workspace in Office 365 that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. It’s integrated with the familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on Office 365. Since its debut on the market just a little over two years ago, Teams has quickly took a hold on the market with over 13 million active daily users. 

With McAfee MVISION Cloud for Microsoft Teams, companies can answer employees’ requests for a collaboration platform, while enforcing the security capabilities they need to keep data safe.

With McAfee MVISION Cloud, organizations can enforce sensitive data policies: prevent sensitive data that cannot be stored in the cloud from being uploaded to Teams; build sharing and collaboration guardrails: prevent sharing of sensitive or regulated data with unauthorized parties in Teams; and limit activities for users on unmanaged devices and untrusted networks: gain control over user access to Teams by enforcing context-specific policies limiting end-user actions.

The platform can also perform forensic investigations with full context: capture a complete audit trail of all user activity enriched with threat intelligence to facilitate post- incident forensic investigations. It can detect and correct user threats and malware: detect threats from compromised accounts, insider threats, privileged access misuse, and malware infection.

Teams is the hub for teamwork in Microsoft 365 that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. It’s integrated with the familiar Microsoft Office 365 applications and is built from the ground up on the Office 365, secure cloud. 

With McAfee MVISION Cloud for Microsoft Teams, companies can answer employees’ requests for a collaboration platform, while enforcing the security capabilities they need to keep data safe.

The offering will leverage McAfee’s content analytics engine to discover sensitive data uploaded to Microsoft Teams based on keywords and phrases indicative of sensitive or regulated information; pre-defined alpha-numeric patterns with validation such as credit card numbers; regular expressions to detect custom alpha-numeric patterns like part numbers; file metadata such as file name, size, and file type; fingerprints of unstructured files with exact and partial or derivative match; fingerprints of structured databases or other structured data files; and keyword dictionaries of industry-specific terms such as stock symbols.

“We worked to develop a solution that our customers can use to get visibility and control over their data and user activity in Microsoft Teams,” said Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president of Cloud Security, McAfee. “McAfee MVISION Cloud complements Microsoft Teams’ capabilities by using a frictionless, API-based, cloud-native approach that allows security professionals to provide data loss prevention, collaboration control, and contextual access control policies, address threats from insiders and compromised accounts, audit all user activity and secure corporate data as users collaborate in the cloud.”

“We’re pleased to see McAfee’s commitment to supporting and securing this ever-increasing demand,” said Levon Esibov, Partner PM Director, Information Protection, Microsoft Teams at Microsoft said. “McAfee MVISION Cloud integrates with Microsoft Teams APIs—ensuring our joint customers can successfully meet key security and compliance requirements.”

SwiftStack 7 provides ultra-scale performance and capacity for data storage and management from edge to core to cloud

SwiftStack announced Tuesday SwiftStack 7 with extensive enhancements to its data platform for performance, data utilization, and services at ultra-scale. The update enables demanding workloads such as advanced machine learning, media analytics, and scientific research, in environments like autonomous vehicle development, ingest and processing of 4K/8K video, and other compute-intensive processes.

SwiftStack 7 drives previously unseen throughput performance at massive multi-petabyte scale and can handle thousands of simultaneous workers accessing data. Independent third-party testing on similar hardware and workloads validates SwiftStack 7 is multiple times faster than competitors, realizing extremely high production throughput speeds at over 100GB per second. The simple, open architecture allows linear scaling of both performance and capacity.

ProxyFS Edge extends SwiftStack’s file services to be distributed at the edge, close to the application, for high-throughput, data-intensive use cases. The containerized ProxyFS agent at the edge provides caching capabilities to minimize latency, while providing massive throughput to large datasets stored at the core. ProxyFS Edge is an extension of the existing ProxyFS clustered file system that allows for file and object API access to the same data sets.

The newest component of SwiftStack 1space, the 1space File Connector, brings existing enterprise file data into the cloud namespace so cloud-native applications can access data via S3 or Swift object APIs without complex migration. 

The containerized 1space File Connector interacts with network-attached storage (NAS) and can scale out to provided high-performance access of files to modern applications. This allows businesses and organizations to modernize their workflows incrementally and apply 1space data placement and protection policies (copy, move, tier) to file data when needed.

SwiftStack PRO (Professional Remote Operations) is an optional service developed from best practices employed by hundreds of large-scale customers, includes advanced professional service- and software-based capabilities to allow 24x7 remote management and monitoring of SwiftStack production clusters. SwiftStack PRO ensures teams of any size can keep a highly utilized data storage and management platform optimized for demanding uses.

SwiftStack 7’s capabilities are essential for deep learning at ultra-scale. This customer-proven architecture stack satisfies the storage performance needed by GPU compute complexes and modern AI frameworks accessing and processing hundreds of petabytes of data. SwiftStack’s architecture delivers elasticity from edge to core to cloud, data immutability for long-term referenceability, and viable TCO. 

“Data scientists are constrained by inherited infrastructure, particularly in performance, scalability, cost, metadata enrichment, workflow integration, and portability to accommodate data at the edge, core, and cloud,” said George Crump, Chief Steward at Storage Switzerland. “Large enterprise customers need to architect a data pipeline and framework to deliver business outcomes and intelligence, and SwiftStack’s software is a strategic component supporting these modern applications.”

“Right now, data is changing the world, applications can exist anywhere from the edge to the core data center to the cloud, and data management and control has been decoupled from core infrastructure,” said Joe Arnold, SwiftStack founder and chief product officer. “Our customers are pushing the boundaries in demanding environments, such as deep learning, and SwiftStack 7 is the foundation for delivering performance, capacity, and services at scale.”

SwiftStack 7 will be released next month, containing the ultra-scale performance enhancements and the 1space File Connector. ProxyFS Edge is currently in beta and will be generally available in early 2020. SwiftStack PRO and the SwiftStack AI Architecture are available immediately.

Cloudinary releases AI-enabled video management platform to deliver engaging, dynamic video at scale in minutes

Cloudinary announced Tuesday key enhancements to its video management solution, including new AI capabilities to accelerate the entire video workflow process and help companies improve customer experience and engagement. 

Cloudinary’s modern approach to video management eliminates traditional limitations and pain-points, enabling brands to enhance and deliver dynamic video experiences quickly and cost effectively at scale, no matter where their content is viewed.

Nearly 90 percent of consumers rely on videos to help make their purchasing decisions, and landing pages with video see higher conversion rates of 80 percent or more. Video has long been a favorite of marketers for its storytelling power and effectiveness, but traditional video platforms weren’t built to support the volume and scale of today’s digital experience needs.

Cloudinary’s new video capabilities allow users to automate for format and quality at scale. It also eliminates the time-consuming work traditionally required to select the right codecs, formats and quality. This allows any user – marketer or developer – to deliver each video optimally for any browser, device and location. 

Deep learning capabilities dynamically re-frame landscape mode videos to any aspect ratio requested on-the-fly with intelligent content-aware cropping to automatically focus on the most engaging story in the frame.

By utilizing a single media platform, Cloudinary users can seamlessly create engaging product pages that include both video and images without the hassle that come from working across two or more disparate systems. 

The platform also simplifies search, improves team workflows and optimizes storage. AI-based auto-tagging, structured metadata, and advanced search capabilities let users more easily manage, store and search video libraries. Streamlined media workflows help ensure that all asset stakeholders are in sync. 

By creating a single source of truth, Cloudinary helps users manage a single video asset, no matter how many derived assets they create, which greatly streamlines storage management and discoverability.

Cloudinary further simplifies the process of moderating, optimizing and delivering many thousands of user-generated videos at scale by automating functions like cropping, resizing, branding, overlays, quality and more.

Data Dynamics set to buy Infintus Innovations to provide analytics for data visibility, compliance, governance

Data Dynamics announced this week its intent to acquire Infintus Innovations, with the acquisition to close before the end of the year. 

Infintus is a data analytics company that automates and analyzes unstructured data using AI. The addition of Infintus enables Data Dynamics to provide content level analytics, thus offering more granularity into the visibility of data and complementing its metadata-driven analytics, policy-based movement, and management capabilities. 

Together, Data Dynamics' and Infintus' capabilities enable dynamic data for the digital enterprise. The combination of solutions provides intelligent data management solutions where data-driven strategy accelerates revenue, compliance, agility, and intelligence.

Data Dynamics prioritizes data visibility, compliance, and governance with the acquisition of Infintus innovations. The M&A strengthens Data Dynamics' value offerings by adding depth and granularity to its data analytics capabilities, and drives innovation and growth within the customer's data environment, Data Dynamics manages data life cycle from understanding data to data location optimization 

With revenue, compliance, and optimization being the top 3 initiatives in the CEO's agenda, this acquisition is ideal to receive explosive growth within the market and across all industries. This growth opportunity is further aided by enterprises that are looking to adopt hybrid cloud solutions and require complete data visibility for business-driven placement of data workloads.