Cloud Computing & Storage

Snowflake launches workload to respond to threats with the Data Cloud

Snowflake announced the launch of a new cyber security workload that enables cyber security teams to better protect their enterprises with the Data Cloud. Using Snowflake’s platform and an extensive ecosystem of partners delivering security capabilities with connected applications, cyber security teams can quickly gain visibility and automation at cloud-scale. Organisations today are faced with a continuously evolving threat landscape, with 55% of security pros reporting that their organisation experienced an incident or breach involving supply chains or third-party providers in the past 12 months, according to Forrester. Current security architectures built around legacy security and information management systems (SIEMs) are not designed to handle the volume and variety of data necessary to stay ahead of cyber threats. With legacy SIEMs imposing restrictive ingest costs, limited retention windows, and proprietary query languages, security teams struggle to gain the visibility they need to protect their organisations. With Snowflake’s cyber security workload, customers gain access to the power and elasticity of Snowflake’s platform to natively handle structured, semi-structured, and unstructured logs. Customers are able to efficiently store years of high volume data, search with scalable on-demand compute resources, and gain insights using universal languages like SQL and Python, currently in private preview. With Snowflake, organisations can also unify their security data with enterprise data in a single source of truth, enabling contextual data from HR systems or IT asset inventories to inform detections and investigations for higher fidelity alerts, and running fast queries on massive amounts of data. Teams gain unified visibility across their security posture, eliminating data silos without prohibitive data ingest or retention costs. Beyond threat detection and response, the cyber security workload supports a broad range of use cases including security compliance, cloud security, identity and access, vulnerability management, and more. “With Snowflake as our security data lake, we are able to simplify our security program architecture and remove data management overhead,” says Prabhath Karanth, Sr. Director of Security, Compliance & Trust, TripActions. “Snowflake has been vital in helping us gain a complete picture of our security posture, eliminating blind spots and reducing noise so we can continue to provide user trust where it matters most. Deploying a modern technology stack from Snowflake is a pivotal piece of our cyber security strategy.” Snowflake’s rich ecosystem of partners enables best-of-breed security Snowflake is heavily investing in its extensive ecosystem of partners to transform the security industry and enable customers to choose best-of-breed applications that fit their needs. Snowflake integrates with partners including Hunters, Panther Labs, and Securonix to deliver industry-leading cyber security capabilities to customers with the Data Cloud using connected applications. Snowflake’s modern security architecture allows customers to gain control of their data, leverage pre-built content and security capabilities on top of their existing Snowflake environments, and utilise a single copy of data across cyber security use cases. With Snowflake’s Data Cloud, tightly integrated connected applications, and data from providers on Snowflake Data Marketplace, Snowflake is pioneering a new standard architecture for security teams looking to achieve their security goals. Snowflake Ventures, which focuses on investing in companies that help accelerate and augment the growth and adoption of the Snowflake Data Cloud, has already invested in Hunters.ai, Lacework, Panther, and Securonix. These investments have helped drive product alignment to further eliminate security data silos and enable data-driven strategies for joint customers. “Snowflake is leading the security data lake movement, helping defenders bring their data and analytics together in a unified, secure, and scalable data platform,” says Omer Singer, Head of Cybersecurity Strategy, Snowflake. “With Snowflake’s cyber security workload, we further empower security teams in the Data Cloud so that they can collaborate with diverse stakeholders and succeed in their vital mission to protect the enterprise.”

Moving to the cloud is the basis of a good business continuity plan

By Amir Hashmi, CEO and Founder of zsah A business continuity plan (BCP) is a thorough and complex plan to fight the ever-present and ever-costly risk of downtime, and moving operations to the cloud is the best shortcut to take. A Business Continuity Plan is, broadly speaking, a set of processes and principles to improve resilience and ensure a business can continue functioning. Due to the importance of IT to productivity for almost every organisation in the 21st Century – downtime, when IT systems are offline, is its antithesis. Thanks to the rapid adoption of digital tools spurred on by the pandemic and the general move to online we have seen throughout the world, there is a tremendous amount of risk out there for businesses with online assets, from cyber attacks and ransomware to natural disasters and power outages. However, using cloud-based IT assets such as remote desktops, SaaS applications and cloud storage of data can be a shortcut to protecting their continuity – and therefore the continuity of your business. According to Veeam’s 2021 Data Protection Report, the average cost of downtime is $84,650 per hour, that’s $1,410 per minute. Naturally, this figure is skewed by larger organisations reporting higher sums. Still, small, and medium businesses are increasingly impacted as they are seen as easier targets – and they have far less capital to absorb the blow. Although downtime has an infinite number of causes, from natural disasters to cyber attacks, two factors remain consistent: it is costly for modern businesses and often preventable. The key to this prevention is a good business continuity plan. Suppose we disregard the part of BCPs that consider the physical security of assets and focus on the digital continuity of IT systems. In that case, we can say that a good BCP focuses on three things, and according to IBM, these are: • High availability: the systems provided in a business that allows the enterprise to have access to applications that allow it to still operate even if it experiences local failures in areas such as IT, processes, and physical facilities. • Continuous operations: the system a business has in place that allows business to run smoothly during times when disruption or maintenance takes place either planned or otherwise. • Disaster recovery: the system a business has in place that allows it to recover its data centre at another location safely and securely if there is a significant event which means the current site either damaged beyond repair or inoperable. Of course, this is not a universally prescriptive solution. As businesses have varied sizes and needs, one size never fits all. However, many of these essential issues are automatically covered if enterprises move storage, desktops, and digital tools to the cloud rather than store and operate them from on-site servers or even on personal devices. Firstly, cloud providers automatically encrypt and protect your information through extensive cyber security measures and often duplicate it across multiple sites, areas, or even time zones to protect it against physical or cyber damage. Doing this yourself is a costly and time-consuming task with huge risks if not done correctly. Here, you benefit from the economy of scale, as huge deep pockets develop and invest in the most thorough, innovative, and automated protection measures. This means that your data, your applications, and therefore the continuity of your business is protected from all but the most apocalyptic and unforeseen of circumstances, including data loss, power outages, ransomware attacks, and many other causes of downtime. You are now (nearly) continuously operable and, just as importantly, are operable from anywhere. This, in turn, makes hybrid or working from home a far easier and safer experience for new and existing members of your team, with cybersecurity measures and encryption embedded in your teams’ operating systems and tools, no matter what device they use. As the ability to hybrid work is seen as an expectation of staff across the board, and most of the modern, industrialised world, making this process more accessible is a wise investment to attract and retain future employees. It’s not a magic cure, but it’s a start The cloud is the obvious answer for a company that requires always-accessible and always-operational data storage and applications. This is true whether you use public cloud resources or a dedicated, off-premises private cloud server operated by a dedicated IT team on your behalf. The cloud is nothing new, and it certainly is not a single-point cure to IT pain points. Still, it is undoubtedly one of the most transformational changes you can make to aid both security and operational efficiency. However, if you want to avoid unmonitored cloud usage causing a surge in costs, make sure you have the resources to dedicate to its use. Better yet, outsource to experts: an IT managed-service provider will ensure that your move onto the cloud, and its continued use, will be managed effectively.

NHS trusts to digitise pathology following cloud contract with Sectra

Sectra has signed a contract for digital pathology with the East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust and the West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust. The solution will enable pathologists to review and collaborate around cases in a way that is not possible with microscopes. This will reduce variation and increase efficiency in primary diagnostics, thereby improving cancer care. The two NHS trusts in the East of England will transform pathology services for a population of more than a million people, following a new agreement signed during the fourth quarter of Sectra's 2021/2022 fiscal year. The contract comprises the digital pathology module of the enterprise imaging subscription service Sectra One Cloud. The solution will be delivered as a fully managed service where Sectra takes responsibility for all hardware, software, and other IT components. Pathologists working at both the East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust and the West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust will be able to better collaborate as they move away from microscopes and glass slides to analysing high-resolution digital images that can be accessed from almost anywhere. The move to Sectra's digital pathology solution will support healthcare professionals in delivering timely diagnoses for patients. Rather than having to wait for glass slides to be transported from one site to another, pathology specialists will be able to easily and quickly access digital images of patient tissues to carry out their reports. Multidisciplinary teams will also be able to view images without delay, and the trusts will be able to pool their pathology resources more effectively to make best use of capacity, while improving working flexibility for professionals through home working. Sarah Rollo, Pathology Project Manager at West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, says: "The recent pandemic has highlighted the importance of being able to access slides remotely and the ability to provide flexibility and resilience in our service. Our consultants will have the ability to report routine and urgent work from home, shortly after it has been issued out of the laboratory. Consultants will be able to work collaboratively on cases from remote locations with simultaneous access to view and annotate patient slides. As a district general hospital, a proportion of our patients are referred to specialist hospitals. Improved data sharing with these specialist centres will improve the turnaround time in the patient's pathway. Digital pathology has also facilitated the introduction of digital processes within the laboratory, reducing the need for manual transcription and improving patient safety." Dr Yinka Fashedemi, Clinical Lead for Cellular Pathology with East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust, says: "This new technology will allow our staff to analyse and share samples remotely, in turn enabling us to further improve the service we provide by making sure our patients receive their test results as quickly as possible. It will also make it easier to work in collaboration with colleagues based at specialist hospitals to obtain second opinions so that patients can begin any treatment they may need promptly. We are pleased to be one of the first trusts in the country to introduce this digital pathology system which will further support our staff to deliver the best possible service." The digital program is expected to support specialist pathways, such as cancer pathways. It will support around 1.5 million examinations per year and will also pave the way for introducing emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, into the diagnostic process. The trusts will be the first in the UK to deploy the digital pathology solution on the Microsoft Azure Cloud, with a fully managed service provided by Sectra minimising IT and infrastructure burdens for the trust. Significantly, this will allow the trusts to make use of archive storage facilities now available in the cloud that will help to manage high volumes of data associated with digital pathology at a sustainable cost. Jane Rendall, Managing Director for Sectra in the UK and Ireland, says: "NHS diagnostic services are undergoing the biggest transformation seen in decades, if not centuries, as disciplines like pathology digitise. East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust and West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust are at the forefront of that journey and are particularly innovative in their use of cloud computing to ensure their program remains scalable and sustainable. We are extremely proud to have the opportunity to support this transformation that will deliver significant benefits to healthcare professionals and patients."