Broadcom debuts Automation.ai, its AI-driven platform that boosts digital business decision-making and execution

Broadcom has announced availability of Automation.ai, an AI-driven software intelligence platform purpose built to accelerate decision-making across multiple business and technology domains that support digital transformation initiatives. As enterprises increase digital investments, they must contend with increasing complexity and overwhelming volumes of data that slow even simple decision-making. 

Automation.ai correlates and analyzes this data and powers Digital BizOps from Broadcom, a new solution that uses these AI-driven insights to deliver intelligent recommendations—across business and development and operations to transform customer experience, increase employee productivity, improve operational efficiency and speed innovation.

“Digital transformation creates strain and pressure on businesses who need to move more quickly and confidently through the constant change rippling through their organizations,” said Ashok Reddy, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Software Division, Broadcom. “Silos of teams, tools and data impede decision-making. Automation.ai is central to Broadcom’s strategy to leverage AI and automation to create collective intelligence that speeds the informed decision-making critical to achieving digital business success.”

“At Sun Life, we put the client at the center of all we do,” said Barbara Mitchell, assistant vice president, IT Operations, Sun Life Financial, Inc. “As we continue on our digital transformation journey, we are always looking for new ways to harness the power of data. Our partnership with Broadcom will help us take that data and turn it into predictive insights to prevent outages that impact our client experience.”

Automation.ai harnesses the power of advanced machine learning (ML), intelligent automation and internet-scale open source frameworks to transform massive volumes of data from disparate toolsets, providing a unified approach to enterprise decision-making such as AI-driven to provide a predefined and out of box set of AI-driven analysis, correlation, recommendation and remediation services that are fully automated; open to ingest AIOps, DevOps, ValueOps, Automation COE domain data from a full-range of software, including Broadcom, third party and open source.

The offering is Always Learning so that users can continuously validates and improves decisions based on real-world outcomes; extensible so as to operate independently or within existing AI and machine learning ecosystems; and comes multi-cloud with fully containerized Kubernetes-based orchestration on public or private cloud.

AIOps from Broadcom leverages Automation.ai to correlate and analyze a broad range of IT monitoring data sources, and acts as a trusted proof point for the IT Operations analytics offered in Broadcom’s Digital BizOps solution. AIOps from Broadcom now includes new intelligent recommendations and auto-remediation capabilities that help IT teams predict and prevent problems before they impact user experience. 

Its capabilities include SRE DevOps dashboard that provides a new level of DevOps context to Site Reliability Engineers for historic and upcoming releases for production apps; ML-driven Recommendation Engine that provides prescriptions on how to resolve common problems, intelligent actions triggered by Automic Automation, and tribal knowledge recommendations based on customer data; new user journey analysis for flow and funnel visibility for faster triage of customer experience related issues; and enhanced Kubernetes monitoring and Prometheus integration, making it easier to monitor modern applications and infrastructures with smart instrumentation.

In related news, Broadcom recently completed the acquisition of privately-held Terma Software, whose solutions model workload dependencies, optimize workloads, enable intelligent SLAs and improve overall operational efficiency, in real-time. This acquisition will enrich the Automation.ai platform by providing new sources of workload intelligence and analytics to produce actionable insights from multiple vendors.

A10 Networks extends carrier-class firewall product lineup with a container offering, new 5G network ready features

A10 Networks announced Wednesday that it is extending the capabilities of the Thunder Convergent Firewall (CFW), part of the A10 Orion 5G Security Suite, to support the coming cloud-native 5G requirements. The container-based carrier-class firewall delivers up to 180 Gbps throughput, one of the fastest in the industry. 

A10 is also releasing a new version of its Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) 5.1, which includes multiple 5G-ready updates. Thunder CFW running ACOS 5.1 brings functionality, performance and scale of the existing physical and virtual appliances to the container firewall, helping to prepare service provider customers in their transition to cloud-native 5G infrastructures.

The Thunder containerized firewall was recently demonstrated as part of the Linux Foundation’s end-to-end cloud-native 5G network proof of concept at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. This first of its kind proof-of-concept (PoC) was a fully containerized, end-to-end 5G non-stand-alone (NSA) distributed cloud network, which paves the way for commercial deployments in mobile operator networks globally.

The Thunder CFW includes functionality that helps ensure the security, reliability and availability of 5G networks as they transition from physical network functions to be completely cloud native. It can be broadly deployed in mobile networks at the SGi, roaming and radio access network (RAN) interfaces. 

The A10 vThunder virtual network function (VNF) package has been integrated and validated with leading NFV-MANO solutions, including Ericsson Cloud Manager, NEC Netcracker HOM, Red Hat OpenStack, and tested in recent ETSI NFV Plugtests for end-to-end VNF lifecycle operation capabilities.

“The Thunder CFW release is an integral foundational element to our comprehensive A10 Orion 5G Security Suite. With the ACOS 5.1 release, A10 has integrated comprehensive feedback from multiple proven deployments in tier-one mobile operators over the last year. These production networks have required hyperscale, lower latency, automation, and advanced security,” said Yasir Liaqatullah, vice president, product management at A10 Networks. “As 5G adoption increasingly requires multi-terabit performance on the Gi-LAN, we continue to provide industry-leading scale in virtual network functions (VNFs), cloud-native network functions (CNFs) and physical network functions (PNFs), including scale-out agile deployments with containerized solutions for virtual mobile edge compute requirements.”

In addition to the release of the high-performance containerized firewall CNF, A10 Networks also released new PNFs with its 7600 series models, delivering up to 385 Gbps throughput in a compact RU physical appliance.

The A10 Orion 5G Security Suite is available now. Thunder CFW with ACOS 5.1 and the new CNF and PNF form factors will be available later this month.

Check Point brings to market its serverless security technology for cloud workload protection

Check Point announces on Monday a new serverless security technology for cloud workload protection (CWPP) and security posture management (CSPM), delivering continuous serverless security with improved run time protection and application hardening.

Protego, an Israeli startup, provides a serverless security technology that prevents malicious attacks on serverless functions in run time, and prevents vulnerable code from being deployed into production.

Check Point will be integrating serverless security technology into the Infinity architecture, its consolidated security solution to support networks, mobile, endpoint, IoT and cloud environments.

The rapid adoption of serverless computing technologies such as AWS Lambda, is challenging existing cloud and application security paradigms. The move to cloud native applications, bears many inherent vulnerabilities and potential misconfigurations that require extending security solution to protect functions and code.

The Check Point CloudGuard platform provides consistent and comprehensive cloud security for all assets in public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud environments. The solution is now extended with serverless security providing the CISO with full visibility, control and complete security coverage of all serverless estate with a click of a button. 

Protego’s technology integrates out-of-the-box with the broadest set of CI/CD frameworks so DevOps teams ensure that only compliant functions are deployed to production. In addition, customers rave the new technology for its innovative IAM hardening capabilities and minimal performance impact in protecting serverless run time environments.

 “On their journey to cloud transformation, organizations require a new security paradigm to protect against 5th and 6th generation of cyber attacks” said Dr. Dorit Dor, Check Point’s VP Products. “By incorporating serverless security into our market leading CloudGuard portfolio, and leveraging our comprehensive platform for cloud security and compliance, we deliver unprecedented protection across multi-cloud and hybrid environments”

The transaction is expected to close by this year, and the technology will be integrated into the Infinity architecture in the first quarter of next year.

Alibaba Cloud collaborates with Animal Logic to create better animation production experience

Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, and Animal Logic announced Tuesday a partnership to meet the growing and demanding requirements of media production. Animal Logic has started backing-up its on-premise production content onto Alibaba Cloud’s world-class computing platform. Through this partnership, the parties hope to drive efficiencies of media production by utilising more cloud computing technologies.

Alibaba Cloud and Animal Logic will continue working on future cross-regional storage and backup projects, large scale rendering farm requirements and migration of legacy applications to the cloud. These projects will support Animal Logic’s multi-cloud, whilst retiring a number of critical legacy applications, and ageing on-premise hardware.

“Alibaba Cloud is thrilled to announce our partnership with Animal Logic, in which we will bring increased efficiency and safety to the artists at Animal Logic and in turn, push the boundaries of animation and VFX to a new level,” said Raymond Ma, General Manager for Alibaba Cloud in Australia and New Zealand.

Alibaba Cloud’s cross border network covers 20 regions and 61 availability zones globally. It is also the first Cloud provider to fulfil the additional requirements of Germany’s Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) and has more than 70 security and compliance accreditations worldwide.

As one of digital production studios that created animation and visual effects for various films including Peter Rabbit, The LEGO Movie 2, Captain Marvel and Happy Feet, Animal Logic requires a high-performance cloud storage platform that can quickly scale up for backup requirements, especially during peak production periods, in which 150TB of data can be generated in a 24-hour period. 

Animal Logic required a partner that could not only provide them with secure data protection capabilities, but also secure backup solutions for the increasingly large amount of data generated within a short period of time.

“Our partnership with Alibaba Cloud will provide us with the best technology to secure our content more efficiently,” says Darin Grant, Animal Logic’s Chief Technology Officer. “With Alibaba Cloud, we have the capability to backup large amounts of data and in turn, operate seamlessly even during our busiest times.”