News in Cloud Computing & Data Storage

Infinidat appoints new regional director

Infinidat has announced the appointment of Richard Connolly as Regional Director for the UKI and the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) regions. Richard brings extensive experience selling enterprise storage, cyber security software, hybrid cloud storage, data centre solutions, and professional services to enterprise customers and service providers, including as a global sales director at Hitachi Vantara. He is responsible for driving sales growth in the UKI and DACH regions for Infinidat, reporting to Richard Bradbury, SVP, EMEA and APJ at Infinidat, effective immediately. “Richard Connolly is a strategic sales leader, who has a long, proven track record of exceeding sales growth targets. With his wealth of knowledge and his deep network of relationships with large enterprises across Europe, he will be an excellent leader to expand our market presence, continue to make our customers and partners more successful, and shift the balance of power in the storage industry to Infinidat’s award-winning enterprise storage solutions,” says Richard Bradbury, SVP, EMEA and APJ at Infinidat. "I am extremely excited to join Infinidat, recognised for the last 5 years as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage. Not only has the company substantially expanded and enhanced its enterprise solution portfolio in the last few years, but I strongly believe, with the business value, continuous innovation, and cyber storage capabilities that Infinidat offers to customers, we're well-positioned to solve some of the most complex problems and drive significant cost savings for enterprises," says Richard Connolly, Regional Director for the UKI and DACH regions at Infinidat. "Infinidat is one of the hottest companies in storage and I'm thrilled to contribute to the high-performance mindset that keeps customers at the centre of everything we do." Prior to joining Infinidat, Richard was the Director of Global & Strategic Accounts at Palo Alto Networks, where he drove large, cross-portfolio deals and transformed sales into a high-performance function. Before that, he worked at Hitachi Vantara as Global Sales Director, providing leadership to drive high sales growth. He also spent five years in sales roles at Avaya, leveraging professional services to improve outcomes for customers, particularly large financial service enterprises. Earlier in his career, he led infrastructure projects at JP Morgan and the Royal Bank of Scotland, among other major financial institutions. He earned an executive MBA from the London School of Economics. Click here for latest data centre news.

How a FinOps strategy maximises cloud cost efficiency

Adam Weldon Ming, Cloud Solution Architect and Team Lead, OryxAlign According to a report by Statista, 30% of cloud spend was wasted in 2020. As more organisations embrace the cloud, optimising cloud services, managing costs and choosing the right platforms to support business operations becomes crucial. Thus, it is important to have a discussion around the different methods businesses can use to optimise their cloud usage for cost efficiency. A 2022 report by Gartner states, “More than half of enterprise IT spending in key market segments will shift to the cloud by 2025.” Cloud optimisation falls under FinOps (Financial Operations) and focuses on managing and optimising the costs associated with using cloud computing resources. By analysing resources, companies can gain insight on the cloud costs for each department or cost centre. FinOps also explores strategies to reduce costs, such as identifying servers that can be turned off during non-operational hours or leveraging Microsoft Azure cost saving plans like reserved instances. Tagging and resource allocation Applying proper tagging and categorisation to cloud resources, such as compute instances, storage and databases, can help allocate costs accurately to different departments, projects or teams. This allows for better cost allocation, accountability and cost optimisation based on specific business needs. For example, compute instances can be split by department, with tags like ‘Development_VM’, ‘Marketing_VM’ and ‘Support_VM’, providing insights into department-specific costs. The company can then analyse the usage patterns and optimise its resources. If certain compute instances consistently experience low utilisation, they can be rightsized to match actual demand, eliminating unnecessary expenses. Demand based flexibility Cloud platforms like Azure include options such as auto-scaling and flexible scaling sets to ensure that servers are only used when needed. Auto-scaling in Azure refers to the automatic adjustment of compute resources based on the workload demand. It allows organisations to dynamically scale their applications and infrastructure up or down to match the system’s changing needs. Flexible Scaling Sets or Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) enable the deployment and management of a group of identical virtual machines (VMs) as a single entity. VMSS supports auto-scaling, allowing organisations to scale the number of VM instances within the set automatically. It ensures the required capacity is available during high demand periods and reduces costs during low demand periods. Similarly, AWS offers Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). This automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple instances or resources, ensuring that the load is evenly distributed. It helps improve the applications' availability and fault tolerance by automatically scaling the number of instances behind the load balancer based on traffic patterns. These options are particularly useful for companies that experience seasonal workloads, such as online retailers during holidays or tax filing services during tax season. They also benefit websites that experience varying levels of traffic throughout the day or for specific events. Another option that provides flexible scaling is Azure Functions, a serverless computing service. It enables developers to build and run event-driven functions that scale automatically, without requiring underlying infrastructure management. Platform as a Service (PaaS) Offered by all major cloud providers, PaaS is a cloud computing model that provides a ready to use platform for developing, deploying and managing applications, without the need to worry about underlying infrastructure. With PaaS, developers can focus on writing code and building applications, while the cloud provider takes care of the servers, storage, networking and operating systems. Pricing model analysis Although the names for pricing models might differ between them, cloud service providers offer different options, such as pay-as-you-go, reserved instances or spot instances. Reserved instances, for example, allow users to reserve cloud computing capacity in advance, typically for a one or three year term. Reserving a server for three years can cut the running cost by up to 40% compared to on-demand usage. OryxAlign successfully migrated a prominent organic baby and toddler food producer to Azure. It monitored the infrastructure and implemented scale sets, allowing it to automatically provision new servers when capacity reached 75%. Combining this with purchasing, it reserved instances for a three year term and resulted in significant cost savings, reducing the client’s annual cloud expenses from between £200,000 - £300,000 to around £100,000. By partnering with a trusted advisor that can help to navigate the cloud landscape, companies can avoid wasting money on their cloud costs, by analysing resource usage, implementing cost reduction strategies, and leveraging features like auto-scaling and load balancing. Click here for latest data centre news.

Veeam partners with Microsoft

Veeam Software has announced that it is integrating Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 with Microsoft 365 Backup via its backup APIs to bring customers and partners new capabilities for backup, recovery, ransomware protection and business continuity. Veeam plans to utilise this integration to deliver new innovations and experiences to Microsoft customers that need the very best data protection and ransomware recovery to keep their businesses running. “Today, every business is a digital business,” says Danny Allan, CTO at Veeam. “That means fast, reliable access and availability of data is critical to keep businesses running. Veeam is the leading provider of backup and recovery for Microsoft 365, with over 15 million users protected. We’re delighted to extend our advanced capabilities to customers and partners using Microsoft 365 Backup. We plan to deliver innovative new features and capabilities, taking advantage of the power and reliability of the Veeam data platform which keeps businesses running.” “We’re excited to work with Veeam, and look forward to the unprecedented speed and scale of backup and restore experiences they can bring to customers with our new Microsoft 365 Backup solution,” says Jeff Teper, President, Collaboration Apps and Platforms, Microsoft. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is being used to protect more than 15 million users. This adoption reflects customers’ shared responsibility to own and protect their critical Microsoft 365 data, eliminating the risk of losing Microsoft 365 data. It provides the lowest recovery point objectives (RPO), the broadest set of recovery options, and the flexibility to back up Microsoft 365 data to any location. Availability Work on the integration between Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft 365 Backup via its backup APIs is underway, with general availability of the updated offering expected within 90 days of the Microsoft 365 Backup service being available. Click here for latest data centre news.

GovAssure, cyber security and NDR

By Ashley Nurcombe, Senior Systems Engineer UK&I, Corelight We live in a world of escalating digital threats to government IT systems. The public sector has recorded more global incidents and data breaches than any other over the past year, according to a recent Verizon study. That’s why it is heartening to see the launch of the new GovAssure scheme, which mandates stringent annual cyber security audits of all government departments, based on a National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) framework. Now the hard work starts. As government IT and security leads begin to work through the strict requirements of the Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF), they will find network detection and response (NDR) increasingly critical to these compliance efforts. Why we need GovAssure GovAssure is the government's response to surging threat levels in the public sector. It is not hard to see why it is such an attractive target. Government entities hold a vast range of lucrative citizen data which could be used to carry out follow-on identity fraud. Government services are also a big target for extortionists looking to hold departments hostage with disruptive ransomware. And there's plenty of classified information in there for foreign powers to go after to gain a geopolitical advantage. Contrary to popular belief, most attacks are financially motivated (68%), rather than nation-state attempts at espionage (30%). That means external, organised crime gangs are the biggest threat to government security. However, internal actors account for nearly a third (30%) of breaches, and collaboration between external parties and government employees or partners accounts for 16% of data breaches. When the cause of insider risk is malicious intent rather than negligence, it can be challenging to spot because staff may be using legitimate access rights and going to great lengths to achieve their goals without being noticed. Phishing and social engineering are still among threat actors' most popular attack techniques. They target distracted and/or poorly trained employees to harvest government logins and/or personal information. Credentials are gathered in an estimated third of government breaches, while personal information is taken in nearly two-fifths (38%). Arguably the shift to hybrid working has created more risk here as staff admit being more distracted when working from home (WFH), and personal devices and home networks may be less well protected than their corporate counterparts. The growing cyber attack surface Several other threat vectors are frequently probed by malicious actors, including software vulnerabilities. The new Freedom of Information data reveals a worrying number of government assets are now using outdated software that vendors no longer support. Connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices are an increasingly popular target, especially those with unpatched firmware or factory default/easy to guess passwords. Such devices can be targeted to gain a foothold in government networks and/or to sabotage smart city services. Finally, the government has a significant supply chain risk management challenge. Third-party suppliers and partners are critical to efficiently delivering government services. But they also expand the attack surface and introduce additional risk, especially if third parties aren't properly and continuously vetted for security risks. Take the recent ransomware breach at Capita, an outsourcing giant with billions of pounds of government contracts. Although investigations are still ongoing, as many as 90 of the firm's clients have already reported data breaches due to the attack. What the CAF demands In this context, GovAssure is a long overdue attempt to enhance government resilience to cyber risk. In fact, Government Chief Security Officer, Vincent Devine, describes it as a "transformative change" in its approach to cyber that will deliver better visibility of the challenges, set clear expectations for departments and empower security pros to strengthen the investment case. Yet delivering assurance will not be easy. The CAF lists 14 cyber security and resilience principles, plus guidance on using and applying the principles. These range from risk and asset management to data, supply chain and system security, network resilience, security monitoring and much more. One thing becomes clear, visibility into network activity is a critical foundational capability on which to build CAF compliance programmes. How NDR can help NDR (Network Detection and Response) tools provide visibility. This kind of visibility will enable teams to map assets better, ensure the integrity of data exchanges with third parties, monitor compliance and detect threats before they have a chance to impact the organisation. Although the CAF primarily focuses on finding known threats, government IT leaders should consider going further, with NDR tooling designed to go beyond signature-based detection to spot unknown but potentially malicious behaviour.  Such tools might use machine learning algorithms to learn what regular activity looks like to better spot the signs of compromise. If they do, IT leaders should avoid purchasing black box tools that don't allow for flexible querying or provide results without showing their rationale. These tools can add opacity and assurance/compliance headaches. Open-source tools based on Zeek may offer a better and more reasonably priced alternative. Ultimately, there are plenty of challenges for departments looking to drive GovAssure programmes. Limited budgets, in-house skills, complex cyber threats, and a growing compliance burden will all take its toll. But by reaching out to private sector security experts, there is a way forward. For many, that journey will begin with NDR to safeguard sensitive information and critical infrastructure. Click here for more thought leadership.

VeUP achieves AWS certification to fuel global growth

VeUP has been formally accredited with AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status after just eight months of trading. The company works with AWS startup, SaaS and ISV customers in the AWS partner network, providing a suite of tailored services. VeUp also oversees a $100m growth fund to provide investment to high growth businesses, most recently injecting a multimillion investment into an anti-fraud platform, Pasabi. As part of the company’s global expansion, it has hired AWS startup and ISV specialist, Josh Boer, as Head of Sales, EMEA, and industry veteran, Sean Burke, as AWS Cloud Alliance Manager. The company brings deep industry expertise in AWS operations, investment and go-to-market and helps its partners navigate the AWS landscape. The formal accreditation recognises VeUP’s expertise in AWS consultancy, awarded only to companies with a strong team of trained and certified technical individuals who have proven customer experience. Sean Burke, AWS Cloud Alliance Manager, VeUP, says, “As we continue our rapid growth journey, this accreditation underlines VeUP’s commitment to delivering the very highest standards of AWS consultancy and technical expertise to our partners and customers. Backed by our $100m growth fund, our mission is to turbocharge a new generation of ambitious ISVs, enabling them to scale and grow through AWS.” Click here for more news on data centres.

Infinidat named finalist for Tech Innovator Awards

Infinidat has announced that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Infinidat as a finalist for the 2023 CRN Tech Innovator Awards. It is being recognised for its InfiniBox solution in the ‘Storage−Enterprise’ category. The InfiniBox solutions portfolio offers two major choices: the InfiniBox SSA II solid-state storage array and the InfiniBox hybrid storage array. For enterprises that require consistent sub-millisecond latency for every I/O, it provides the InfiniBox SSA II, which is the industry’s fastest all-flash storage array with latency as low as 35 microseconds, driving unsurpassed real world application performance. The InfiniBox hybrid system combines DRAM, flash caching layers, and high capacity, cost effective HDDs, optimised by its patented Neural Cache technology. The use of HDDs dramatically lowers the cost of storage, while delivering 100% guaranteed availability, powerful cyber storage resilience and ease of use with its autonomous automation. “With its cyber storage capabilities, InfiniBox is one of the most exciting enterprise storage solutions on the market today, addressing one of the critical concerns of Fortune 500 CEOs − cyber security. Congratulations to Infinidat for repeatedly receiving industry awards for their technological innovation and the business value they bring to our enterprise customers. As a trusted partner, Infinidat continues to provide a powerful storage solution for enterprises who need to get the most out of their storage investment,” says Bob Elliott, Vice President, Storage at Mainline Information Systems. This annual award program showcases innovative vendors in the IT channel across 37 different technology categories, in key areas ranging from cloud to storage to networking to security. To determine the 2023 winners, a panel of CRN editors reviewed hundreds of vendor entries − including solution provider testimonials − using multiple criteria, including key capabilities, uniqueness, technological ingenuity and ability to address customer and partner needs. The Tech Innovator Awards will be featured in the August issue of CRN and can be viewed online at crn.com/techinnovators.

Lunar partners with Zayo to revolutionise digital landscape

Lunar Digital has announced its strategic partnership with Zayo Group. Through this partnership, Lunar will leverage Zayo's extensive network infrastructure and high performance connectivity solutions in all three of Lunar’s Manchester data centres to enhance the delivery of its services to customers. Zayo's robust network will provide Lunar Digital with reliable, secure and scalable connectivity, ensuring optimal performance and seamless integration across various platforms. The partnership marks a significant milestone as the two companies join forces to revolutionise the digital landscape and accelerate the deployment of cutting-edge technologies to customers around the globe. Together, the companies will explore innovative initiatives and collaborate on joint offerings to address the evolving needs of their customers.  "We are thrilled to partner with Zayo," says Rob Garbutt, CEO of Lunar Digital. "Zayo’s expertise in network infrastructure and connectivity solutions will enable us to deliver even greater value to our customers. By leveraging Zayo's powerful network, we can expand the reach and capabilities of our digital solutions, empowering businesses to thrive in the digital era." "The synergy between Lunar Digital’s expertise in digital solutions and Zayo’s network infrastructure provides an exciting opportunity to drive our shared values of powering the future of digital business,” says Yannick Leboyer, Chief Revenue Officer at Zayo. “Zayo's global footprint and comprehensive suite of solutions will enable Lunar Digital to extend its reach to new markets and industries, strengthening its position as a trusted provider of end-to-end digital solutions. We look forward to working together to deliver unparalleled value to customers and to support their digital business initiatives.”  The partnership between Lunar Digital and Zayo represents a significant step forward in their shared mission to enable businesses to thrive in an increasingly digital world. Click here for other latest news.

Aruba launches unlimited storage services

As the digital world grows at an increasing pace, more and more space is needed to store one’s data. For this reason, the web is teeming with articles offering useful tips for saving space, emptying one's inbox of excessively heavy content and tricks on how to free up precious GBs of memory. As of today, one less thought will be required. Aruba has announced the availability of the new unlimited email storage service which will ensure that owners of Aruba email account will no longer have to worry about freeing up space or increasing the capacity of their account, as they will be able to store all their emails with unlimited storage. The company provides its users with a definitive solution to a need that is destined to grow over time. As well as enabling unlimited email storage, it has also made the Aruba Drive application available, which offers an unlimited cloud space where users can store their files, protect them and ensure easy access and sharing capabilities. With the drive, it is possible to store and share numerous types of files, relying not only on unlimited space, but also on a proprietary space relating to one’s own domain name. Once an account has been created and files have been uploaded to the online space, users can view them, share them with whoever they wish and edit them using various tools. It is integrated for working on text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, or for retouching photos and organising photos and videos in albums. SpazioMail Unlimited and Aruba Drive add to the offer of unlimited web space and traffic already present in the Aruba hosting offer, effectively creating an ecosystem of services that revolves around a wide range of quality hosting solutions. Details about unlimited email storage  The service costs €14.99 + VAT/year. Until 2 August 2023, users can register or transfer a domain with email by purchasing unlimited email storage for only €1.99 + VAT for the first year, upon renewal from €30.48 + VAT. Aruba Drive is available in three different plans: Aruba Drive Easy- for storing and digitising files with no space limits and easy access. Includes a user account, unlimited space, domain registration and five email accounts. Costs from €50.00 + VAT/year. Aruba Drive Advanced- provides a storage space that is synchronised with desktop and mobile applications and integrated with working tools to optimise efficiency in daily activities. Includes a user account, unlimited space, domain registration and five email accounts, integrated tools and synchronisation with apps. Costs from €100.00 + VAT/year. Aruba Drive Professional- the most comprehensive solution, ideal for team and company work. Includes ten usernames, unlimited space, domain registration and five email accounts, integrated tools and synchronisation with apps. Costs from €300.00 + VAT/year. In addition, a promotion is available until 20 December 2023 with a 50% discount for the first year on all plans. Click here for more on Aruba.

Cubbit has announced the appointment of two data storage world veterans to its executive team: Richard Czech as Chief Revenue Officer and Enrico Signoretti as VP, Product & Partnerships.   The expansion of the leadership team reinforces the company’s goals around international growth and the realisation of strategic market opportunities in cloud and edge computing. This news follows the launch of Cubbit’s international advisory board, consisting of initial members, Nicolas Ott, Alec Ross and Mikko Suonenlahti.  Richard Czech, the new CRO, has more than 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur and key executive in the storage industry. For the past six years, he was VP EMEA of Sales at Wasabi Technologies, where he led the European go-to-market strategy from startup to unicorn, growing the partner network from zero to thousands and selling hundreds of PB of storage, when it was valued at over $1bn. Prior to Wasabi, he held key positions such as the European Sales Executive for DataXion, CEO of Lightsand Communications, VP of Technology, EMEA at ADIC, and Founder and President of InterBackup.  In his role as Chief Revenue Officer for Cubbit, Richard’s unique experience will lend itself to driving business growth by taking a holistic approach in overseeing the entire revenue cycle, with the alignment of teams, operations and systems, around the customer experience in the go-to market process.  Enrico Signoretti has over 30 years of experience in the IT industry, having held various roles including IT manager, consultant, head of product strategy, IT analyst, and advisor. He is an internationally renowned visionary author, blogger and speaker on next-generation technologies. Over the past four years, Enrico has kept his finger on the pulse of the evolving storage industry as the Head of Research Product Strategy at GigaOm. He has worked closely and built relationships with top visionaries, CTOs, and IT decision makers worldwide. Enrico has also contributed to leading global online sites, with over 40 million readers for enterprise technology news.  Enrico will be drawing upon his vast experience to contribute towards the technical vision, initiatives and strategy of Cubbit’s DS3 solution and the overall business goals, as well as expanding the company’s network of strategic partners, fostering relationships with leading industry players. 

Forestry & Land Scotland embrace cloud technology

Nutanix has announced that Forestry & Land Scotland (FLS) has upgraded its data centre infrastructure to a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), selecting the Nutanix Cloud Platform to support a workload of 300 virtual machines. FLS opted for Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Microsoft Azure. With Nutanix NC2, it has been able to migrate the whole data centre to Azure without the time, effort and expense of re-engineering applications for native deployment. Founded in 2018 as part of the Scottish devolution process, FLS manages over 1.5 million acres of national forests and land. To meet the short term IT needs of a newly devolved Scottish government agency, at the same time, supporting its move to the public cloud in line with a cloud-first government policy, it was required to rapidly revamp its legacy on-premises data centre. FLS was already using Microsoft Azure to provide for disaster recovery of its on-premise data centre, so naturally, the organisation first looked at re-engineering for native operation of its applications on that platform. It soon realised that NC2 for Azure would be a better, quicker and more cost-effective approach, enabling it to stretch its existing environment seamlessly into the cloud and migrate workflows at its own pace, without having to transform or re-engineer the code in any way. The migration also offered immediate benefits in terms of both performance and on-demand scalability. It resulted in a significantly smaller data centre footprint, in terms of both physical space and power and cooling requirements. As with the original data centre project, Mahlitz, Nutanix was able to help by arranging a proof of concept trial of Nutanix NC2 on Microsoft Azure involving actual FLS production workloads.