Features

Nasuni and Presidio expand partnership and sign multi-year agreement

Presidio has announced an extensive partnership with Nasuni. Nasuni is optimising AWS Cloud use and reducing OpEX with Presidio’s proactive recapture into savings management (PRISM) program. In addition, Nasuni has signed a multi-year business agreement to simplify how companies store, protect and manage file data in hybrid cloud environments. A top concern of CIOs is cost optimisation according to industry analysts. To better monitor cloud spending, reduce financial risk and operational burden for its cloud and finance teams, Nasuni is leveraging Presidio’s fully managed PRISM program. Presidio manages cost optimisation and uses proprietary data science models to automatically scale cloud commitments up or down on behalf of customers at no risk to them. With its managed services taking care of operational management of Nasuni’s file data cloud environment, its team is saving time and able to focus on enhancing the Nasuni product and new innovative features. Organisations are looking to move their legacy file storage infrastructure to the cloud to centralise control of and make files easily accessible on premises or in the cloud globally to strategically use data and optimise productivity. With the Nasuni File Data Platform’s intelligent edge caching, customers can leverage the power of cloud object storage while maintaining local performance, which can translate into reduced storage costs by 60% over legacy storage as well as the ability to recover from ransomware attacks in minutes. Presidio’s team of technical experts can help customers better manage their file data environment with Nasuni in a hybrid cloud environment through any or multiple cloud providers. Click here for more latest news.

Building resilience for hybrid cloud environments

Anthony Webb, Vice President, A10 International, A10 Networks In today’s modern business landscape, outside of any macro issues or economic uncertainty, there are two significant technology challenges that enterprises are grappling with. The first challenge is around the constantly evolving threat landscape, and the growing sophistication of cyber criminals and their techniques. This means the risk of an application attack and a data breach is an ever-present threat that enterprises must contend with.  The other key challenge is around the effectiveness and economics of cloud operating models. Without a doubt, over the last decade digital transformation has catapulted many businesses forward, many of whom can now claim to be ‘true’ digital businesses servicing their customers in new and exciting ways. However, in this new digital and hybrid cloud environment, enterprises are highly concerned about how they can best secure, optimise, and automate their infrastructure in the most effective and cost-efficient way. Applications must be consistently available  Today, organisations must guarantee their applications are consistently and securely accessible, no matter the location, to ensure the best end-user experience and productivity. This includes ensuring workloads are efficiently distributed across all servers, monitoring application health, and maintaining operational integrity around the clock. However, when you add in the need to protect against a rise in application attacks and an ever-increasing number of bad actors targeting the organisation, the scale of these challenges starts to become clearer. Likewise, complex deployments coupled with regular maintenance and often limited resources dedicated to cyber security are exacerbating the risk to organisations further. In this environment, with cyber criminals constantly evolving their tactics to exploit vulnerabilities in systems, a layered defence strategy that provides comprehensive protection against a wide range of threats is essential. At the same time, a solution that also helps to deliver better business outcomes, enabling organisations to optimise the customer experience, and ensure business continuity, is highly desirable.  Combining ADC with next-gen web application firewall Combining an application delivery controller (ADC) and a next-gen web application firewall (WAF) creates a robust security solution that supports the principles of a zero trust security framework. As organisations seek to establish a more efficient, effective, and secure cloud operating model, these two combined technologies enable a highly performant security solution at a strategic application ingress point that reduces false positives and automates security, empowering agility and effectiveness. The ADC efficiently sifts through the myriad of threats, while the next-gen WAF efficiently provides defence against more sophisticated web attacks. How does this layered defence approach work It is important to start with ADCs to understand how layered defence works. ADCs can provide load balancing and transport layer security (TLS) offloading, which can help reduce the attack surface by minimising the number of entry points into the system. This mitigates the impact of volume-based attacks, such as DDoS or brute-force attacks. On the other hand, next-gen WAFs can provide deep packet inspection and advanced threat detection capabilities, enabling them to identify and block attacks such as account takeover (ATO), known CVEs, injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other OWASP Top 10 attacks. Earlier in the year, A10 partnered with Fastly to offer its next-gen WAF with its Thunder ADCs to provide its customers with a premier next-generation web application firewall solution running on high-performance hardware and virtual platforms for businesses operating in a competitive market. This enables organisations to protect their apps against advanced threats with greater accuracy while gaining superior application availability and accelerating content delivery. Digital transformation initiatives will continue to evolve Unfortunately, digital transformation is not a one and done initiative. Moving forward, enterprises will continue to evolve their environments as new technologies inevitably emerge. Likewise, the cyber threat landscape will undoubtedly continue to expand. Organisations must, therefore, stay vigilant, never compromise and make sure that they have a layered defence approach to protect their business. Click here for more latest news.

InterCloud simplifies challenges with network complexity

While the growth of cloud has been instrumental to the evolution of modern business, its increased sophistication also brings complexity. There is no hard-and-fast method to deal with every cloud management challenge, but figuring out how to simplify network complexity is key to ensuring organisations reap the full benefits of multicloud, according to InterCloud. There are many factors contributing to this complexity. The very fact that organisations are holding increasing amounts of data, coupled with the need to store this in a safe, easily accessible location, means more companies are migrating to cloud to improve IT performance and innovation. According to the Cloud Industry Forum, 95% of organisations have at least one cloud-based service in place, while data commissioned by Oracle shows that 98% of cloud users have embraced a multicloud strategy.   Luc Imbert, CPO at InterCloud, adds, “Ensuring adequate connectivity across an ever-expanding cloud ecosystem is complex. The prevalence of multicloud shows that leaders are seeking the best possible combination of cloud environments to enhance efficiency and enable them to focus more heavily on innovation. While the motivations for embracing multicloud are clear, the complexity of managing network connectivity across many different clouds makes it a double-edged sword, if it is not handled well. “In addition, tightening regulatory requirements means businesses need much greater clarity on where their data and applications are held and how they are connecting to different clouds across different regions. Combined with ever-present security threats, there are a lot of things for organisations to think about. This is especially pertinent in large enterprises, where the company might be managing data and workloads in up to 100 cloud regions.”  According to Luc Imbert, solving the problem of network complexity requires a considerable degree of expertise, which may not be available to businesses in-house. Luc says, “The key goal for any business operating in a multicloud environment should be to transform their networks from being a burden into a critical business asset. “The first step is to assess what the organisation wants to achieve with the cloud, and from there, work out how to manage migrations, choose the right cloud partners, and gain full visibility of their critical data traffic. Partnering with end-to-end managed network connectivity specialists can help enterprises meet these challenges by delivering a comprehensive, holistic approach that isn’t wedded to one particular vendor, ensuring the organisation has complete control to choose what is right for the business.”   He concludes, “Specialists can also deliver in-depth knowledge of the differing data sovereignty requirements across different countries and regions, helping organisations get to grips with the vast and varied web of international regulation and ensuring their cloud activities are fully compliant. All of this can be done while keeping security very much front of mind with techniques such as traffic segmentation and isolation minimising the chances of compromise.”

Servecentric to reach €5 million turnover and double its cloud capacity

Servecentric has announced that it is on track to reach €5 million in turnover by the end of 2023 after doubling its cloud capacity. Making a significant contribution to this increase in turnover is its cloud business which looks set to grow 300% since 2021. The cloud, data centre and connectivity services provider has invested over €100,000 in the last year on increased compute capacity and HPE enterprise class hardware to meet the increasing demand for its cloud and colocation services, with further investment planned in 2023. As well as this investment and allocating its own additional resources, Servecentric’s cloud partner, Cloudsigma are also increasing operations staff by 50% to meet cloud requirements across the global network. The company’s expanded cloud capacity and capability means it can strengthen its portfolio for customers, including scalable data compute resources and storage options. It has also enabled the company to develop and deliver a new PaaS offering, which offers developers ready to go platforms and compliments the existing IaaS solution. Moreover, it will soon be able to provide single sign on for over 16 geographic locations for customers, which will also benefit from increased redundancy and resilience across the cloud platform as a result of the investment and expansion. The company expects its increasing cloud capacity to further grow its customer base over the coming months, with a particular focus on managed service providers, mid-sized software companies, startups and growing technology companies. In terms of existing clients in the area of cloud, it currently works with a wide range of organisations such as Dmac Media, Procuro, Profitsflow, CupPrint and Infinite Technology. To further meet the growing demand for cloud and colocation services among its increasing customer base, Servecentric has applied for planning for a new data centre facility which will significantly increase the company’s workforce, including its engineering team. The organisation is also developing a number of strategic partnerships to provide full cloud infrastructure services, including managed IT and security providers. Click here for latest data centre news.

G42 Cloud and VAST Data to build a data cloud for AI

G42 Cloud and VAST Data have joined forces in an ambitious strategic partnership to reimagine the future of data-intensive AI computing. G42 Cloud has selected the VAST Data Platform to build a central data foundation for a global network of AI supercomputers and to store and learn from hundreds of petabytes of data.  With a strong focus on harnessing the potential of high-performance computing, G42 Cloud is at the forefront of driving transformative advancements in the UAE and beyond. Leveraging the power of AI to deliver superior performance, it is furthering the development of a powerful AI-optimised cloud infrastructure, designed to make organisations more intuitive, agile and effective in addressing real world challenges.  The strategic partnership demonstrates the scale and power of VAST Data's new approach to building distributed data systems for enterprises and AI service providers. As part of this partnership, the VAST Data Platform will serve as a central multi-tenant and secure data platform that scales capacity and performance to power a multi-architecture high performance computing system as well as the recently announced world’s largest AI supercomputer, Condor Galaxy. In total, a single VAST Data cluster will support multiple ExaFLOPs of AI supercomputing capability. G42 Cloud chose to partner with VAST Data due to its simplicity, scalability, resilience, and overall cost of ownership benefits. The platform, built on VAST’s Disaggregated Shared-Everything Architecture (DASE), offers G42 Cloud the scalability in both performance and size needed for exascale AI and high performance computing (HPC). Additionally, it provides a global namespace and the multi-tenancy features essential for zero-trust cloud environments.  Click here for latest data centre news

DigiCert expands its certificate management platform

DigiCert has announced the expansion of its certificate management platform, DigiCert Trust Lifecycle Manager, to provide full lifecycle support for multiple CAs, including Microsoft CA and AWS Private CA, as well as integration with ServiceNow, to support existing IT service workflows. The platform additionally supports enrolment to a broad range of Microsoft and AWS technologies, providing organisations a unified approach to managing public and private trust for use cases such as biometric authentication, device authentication, WiFi/VPN provisioning, cloud workloads and infrastructure management. “DigiCert customers place high priority on ensuring continuity of security across diverse IT infrastructure, as data and processes cut across clouds and environments,” says DigiCert’s Chief Product Officer, Deepika Chauhan. “Trust Lifecycle Manager provides organisations a centralised way to secure users, servers and devices across all these environments.” With support for Microsoft CA and AWS Private CA, it enables discovery, issuance, automation and revocation, including the ability to tag, filter and apply policy to imported and discovered third-party digital certificates. Certificates can be enrolled to a broad set of technologies through ACME, SCEP, EST and other enrolment methods. Its native integration reduces the effort and expertise needed to extend the value of internal CAs, with embedded, pre-built capability that accelerates time to value and eliminates human error.   Additional Microsoft technologies supported with native integration include: Active Directory, for autoenrollment of certificates and zero-touch provisioning using DigiCert Autoenrollment Server Windows Hello for Business, for support for certificate-mediated biometric authentication Microsoft Intune, for management of certificates provisioned to end-entity devices Azure Cloud Services, for deployment of DigiCert ONE solutions on Azure cloud infrastructure Additional AWS technologies supported with native integration include: Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, for governing certificate-mediated authentication to multiple targets Amazon Cloudfront, for securing CDN-networked domains Click here for latest data centre news.

Epsilon and ExodusClouds to boost global enterprise connectivity

ExodusClouds has partnered with Epsilon Telecommunications to boost its global connectivity offering for enterprises across multiple industry verticals. ExodusClouds will serve enterprise customers across the telecommunications, finance, healthcare, education and manufacturing sectors with a white-labelled version of Epsilon’s NaaS platform, Infiny. Infiny will help connect enterprise customers to Epsilon’s ecosystem of 300+ data centres and 600+ leading cloud, IX, network and technology partners. The company is utilising Epsilon’s global last mile capabilities to level up its solutions including SD-WAN. It is also helping its enterprise customers to grow beyond its existing markets of Turkey, the Middle East and Africa, with a global reach. ExodusClouds aims to simplify the increasingly complex cloud networking ecosystem with software-driven solutions based on automation, orchestration and on-demand scalability. It provides high-performance infrastructure and connectivity to 150+ cloud service providers. Epsilon is helping ExodusClouds to extend its global reach via its MEF-certified network and suite of connectivity solutions, all within a single platform. By partnering with Epsilon, ExodusClouds can access a suite of solutions on Infiny in addition to cloud connect, including high performance data centre interconnection, access to internet exchanges and global inbound numbers. Infiny makes it simple for ExodusClouds to quickly pivot and scale its offerings in response to changing enterprise demands across multiple industries. Click here for latest data centre news.

Pulsant delivers cost savings for LinkPool crypto ecosystem

LinkPool has reduced memory, CPU and disk costs by 85%, while delivering higher network performance, following its move to platformEDGE, which is Pulsant’s multiregional UK edge infrastructure. Having previously operated on hyperscale cloud infrastructure, the combination of cost inflation and performance limitations led LinkPool to seek a solution that offered lower latency and expense without sacrificing scalability. platformEDGE was chosen to compose the infrastructure it needs to support its business-critical global workload. In moving to a regional data centre network offering edge colocation, hyperscale cloud access, and distributed compute – all available in a high-performance package – LinkPool has been able to make huge cost savings while improving performance. It has done so in an infrastructure capable of scaling to match the company’s success and growth over time. Pulsant's regional network also meant that Sheffield's data centre was ideally placed to personally oversee the build, onboarding its infrastructure in a matter of days rather than weeks. Continued investment has also seen a recent upgrade to 380kW from 176kW processing power (+114%), ensuring all businesses in the region can benefit scalable, high-performance, low latency edge application delivery. As part of the edge platform, Pulsant's Milton Keynes data centre delivers resiliency via dedicated links over its high-performance, secure, national network. “As the first third-party team creating products and services specifically for the Chainlink network, we’re in a unique position to further its use cases and adoption, and Pulsant is enabling us to do that at scale,” says Jonathan Huxtable, Founder, LinkPool. “LinkPool is committed to lowering the barrier of entry to meaningfully contribute to the Chainlink Network. Pulsant is doing the same for edge computing, making sure regional businesses like us can drastically reduce costs and improve performance,” Jonathan adds. Click here for latest data centre news.

LiveAction partners with Multipoint Group

LiveAction has announced its partnership with Multipoint Group, a provider of network and communications solutions. With a primary focus on Israel, Turkey, Greece and Cyprus, it will deliver LiveAction’s full product portfolio in addition to technical and sales support. The offering will include LiveAction’s network performance management (NPM) solutions. Its network intelligence platform transforms complex data into actionable insights, providing organisations with a comprehensive view of their network. NetOps professionals can rapidly take action to resolve network issues at scale, increase employee productivity, and reduce business risk. Its LiveNX NPM platform enables comprehensive network observability that spans the entire network – on-premises, WAN, SD-WAN, cloud, or hybrid. The LiveWire packet capture solution solves complex network events faster with forensic-level analytics that help eliminate blind spots in any network. “There’s a massive opportunity for LiveAction and our partners in these regions. Our partnership with Multipoint not only plays an important role in our growth into new verticals and geographies, but it upholds our commitment to providing our partners and customers with end-to-end performance visibility,” says Luke Millar, EMEA Channel Director, LiveAction. “Partnering with LiveAction delivers on our commitment to pursue the Mediterranean markets with the aim of helping a broad range of partners and customers take advantage of LiveAction’s network performance monitoring and security solutions to gain visibility into their networks and remediate problems quickly,” says Ricardo Resnik, CEO, Multipoint. Click here for latest data centre news.

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.