Software & Applications

Schneider Electric launches IT monitoring & dispatch services in the UK.

Schneider Electric, today announced the launch of Monitoring & Dispatch Services in the UK. The services enable IT solution providers and end users to optimise resources, improve efficiency, and help prevent downtime by leveraging Schneider Electric to manage the operations of distributed IT infrastructure. Through simplifying the management of edge computing sites, the new services are designed to make life easier for IT staff, ensure coverage at any unmanned sites and can provide significant savings over the lifecycle of the infrastructure. Services include remote monitoring, troubleshooting, and on-site, next-business-day remediation, including replacement parts. "I am pleased that our Monitoring & Dispatch Services are now available in the UK. The services add to Schneider Electric’s continued drive to find new and innovative ways to simplify operating at the edge while increasing uptime, meeting the key challenges of multiple remote sites and limited IT staff," states David Pownall, Vice President of Services at Schneider Electric. "Using our vast experience in IT infrastructure, we are providing more options to enable our partners and end users to operate more productively, efficiently and sustainably. IT solution providers can add Monitoring & Dispatch Services to their service offering to quickly and cost-effectively expand their portfolio and value to customers. Digital transformation requires edge computing and comes with new challenges Digital transformation depends on edge computing, which places IT infrastructure across distributed networks. Industry analysts agree that as a result, shrinking IT staffs are challenged to manage the complexity. In a recent report* from IDC, analysts comment "edge IT presents organisations with new challenges related to areas such as deployment, integration, network management, security, and cost management." More than 60 percent of end user organisations want outside help in managing their edge deployments, according to IDC. In answer to those challenges, Monitoring & Dispatch Services are powered by analytics from the EcoStruxure IT data lake. This data, along with Schneider Electric's deep domain expertise, allows the Connected Services Hub and customers to glean insightful, data-driven recommendations to maintain system uptime and shift from being reactive to proactive in maintaining distributed IT infrastructure. This approach combines 24/7 expert remote monitoring and troubleshooting by Schneider Electric's engineers with next-business-day, on-site support, including replacement parts, when necessary. Moreover, by employing a proactive approach to service, end users can save up to 40 percent** over the lifecycle management of their distributed IT. Benefits of Monitoring & Dispatch Services include:  Optimise resources: By streamlining and standardising operations, the new services eliminate the burden of managing dispersed physical infrastructure deployments without having to hire additional IT staff.Improve efficiency and reduce risk: It helps reduce mean time to repair with access to enhanced reports, providing the ability to plan for required maintenance, future upgrades, and expansions.Help prevent costly downtime: 24/7 remote monitoring against system instability and unexpected failures. "Monitoring & Dispatch Services have enabled our IT teams to focus on mission-critical activities that support Ventura County Community College District's key priorities," says Dan Watkins, Associate Vice Chancellor, Information Technology, Ventura County Community College District. "By combining 24/7 monitoring, troubleshooting, on-site support, and any necessary parts; the service reduces our time spent on reactive maintenance, keeps us focused on achieving our commitments and timelines, and helps us gain OpEx efficiencies." New services fuel IT solution provider revenue growth As IT solution providers seek new ways to help their customers address the challenges of managing distributed infrastructure networks, they are extending their offer portfolios to include new services. Monitoring & Dispatch Services can quickly and cost-effectively be added to a partner's service portfolio to expand their offerings to include remote monitoring, troubleshooting, and on-site, next-business-day remediation, including replacement parts. "Thanks to Monitoring & Dispatch Services, we have been able to provide a full package service to our customers to relieve their staff from maintenance duties and give them the peace of mind to dedicate their time to their focused activities," comments Dan Coffman, CEO, UPS Protection. Monitoring & Dispatch Services are supported by the open, vendor-agnostic software platform EcoStruxure IT. Schneider Electric's portfolio of software and services provide the power and flexibility for customers to seamlessly manage critical infrastructure devices on their own, with a partner, or to leverage Schneider Electric's expert service engineers to manage it on their behalf. Monitoring & Dispatch Services are available in North America, Australia, Austria, Germany, New Zealand, and now in the United Kingdom.

Acronis partners with World Economic Forum Centre for Cybersecurity

Acronis has announced it is partnering with the World Economic Forum Centre for Cybersecurity to join the efforts of this private-public network to respond to the world’s growing cybersecurity threats. As the digital economy becomes an ever-increasing driver around the globe, cybersecurity becomes a primary concern. Engaging leaders from business, government, civil society, academia, and a multitude of sectors, the World Economic Forum Centre for Cybersecurity champions cybersecurity as a competitive advantage that creates value and opportunities for public and private organisations.  Through this partnership, Acronis will contribute its unique approach to cyber protection, which provides a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity, to develop innovations that will solve the security and protection challenges of the future. Specifically, Acronis will engage in the Cyber Risk and Corporate Governance project to help establish a baseline understanding of key issues, while providing guidance on strategies for security and cyber resiliency.   “The Forum’s most recent global risk report noted that the top five global threats were cybersecurity-related, with cyberattacks and data theft among the most immediate dangers,” according to Acronis Founder and CEO Serguei “SB” Beloussov. “Having been at the forefront of the new IT discipline of cyber protection, Acronis brings a unique, comprehensive perspective to the protection challenges facing today’s institutions. By collaborating with our peers, we can ensure business and government leaders have the tools and frameworks needed to meet their cybersecurity obligations of the modern world.” As part of the company’s new involvement in the platform, Acronis Founder and CEO Serguei “SB” Beloussovbrought his expertise to the Centre for Cybersecurity’s annual meeting, which occurred 16-17 November 2020.  “Cybersecurity is critically important in the digital world, yet every day we witness successful breaches. Acronis uniquely offers a cyber protection platform that natively integrates the five layers of protection into a single offering: prevention, detection, response, recovery, and forensics,” says René Bonvanie, chairman of the board of Acronis. "In doing so, Acronis is offering a highly effective and efficient approach to modern cybersecurity challenges.” The partnership also means institutional leaders from both the private and public sectors will benefit from strategy and governance standards that have been developed, in part, using the holistic approach of cyber protection.

AWS announces general availability of Amazon managed workflows

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA), a new managed service that makes it easy for data engineers to execute data processing workflows in the cloud. Apache Airflow is a popular open-source tool that helps customers author, schedule, and monitor workflows. With Amazon MWAA, customers can use the same familiar Airflow platform as they do today to manage their workflows, and enjoy improved scalability, availability, and security without the burden of having to build, scale, and manage the underlying infrastructure. Amazon MWAA scales workflow execution capacity based on customer needs, and integrates with AWS security services to provide secure access to customers’ data. There are no up-front investments required to use Amazon MWAA and customers only pay for what they use. Today, customers are using analytics and machine learning to derive insights from massive amounts of data. To effectively use this data, customers often need to first build a workflow that defines a series of sequential tasks to prepare and process the data. Tens of thousands of customers use AWS Step Functions to visually build and run cost-effective and scalable event-driven workflows that execute tasks across multiple AWS services. There are also customers who want the Apache Airflow orchestration workflow, which has an active open source community, a large library of pre-built integrations to third-party data processing tools like Apache Spark and Hadoop, and the ability to use Python scripts to create workflows. However, using Apache Airflow requires data engineers to install, maintain, scale, and secure the Apache Airflow environments, which adds cost and operational complexity. Furthermore, to support role-based authentication for secure access, Apache Airflow often requires a manual, iterative, and error-prone combination of configuration changes, command-line interface (CLI) commands, and, in some cases, edits to the Apache Airflow code. Customers also must integrate and configure additional tools for alerting for issues like system downtime, workflow errors, and task execution delays. While customers really enjoy the pre-built integrations and familiar Python programming language of Apache Airflow, they want it without the added operational cost and complexity. Amazon MWAA makes it easy for customers to build and execute Apache Airflow workflows in AWS. Amazon MWAA manages the provisioning and ongoing maintenance of Apache Airflow so customers no longer need to worry about patching, scaling, or securing self-managed Apache Airflow implementations. With Amazon MWAA, compute resources that execute tasks are scaled on demand, providing consistent performance for users. Customer data is secure by default as workloads run in customers’ own isolated and secure cloud environments using Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), with stored data encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Amazon MWAA makes it easy for customers to combine data using any of Apache Airflow’s integrations, including AWS services and popular third-party tools like Apache Hadoop, Presto, Hive, and Spark, to automate data processing, machine learning pipelines, and software development and operations. Customers can provide role-based access to Apache Airflow’s user interface easily and securely via AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), providing users Single Sign-On (SSO) access for scheduling and viewing their workflow executions. Amazon MWAA automatically sends Apache Airflow system metrics and logs to AWS’s monitoring service, Amazon CloudWatch, making it easy for customers to view task execution delays and workflow errors across one or more environments without third party tools. With Amazon MWAA, data engineers get the extensibility of Apache Airflow with the scalability, availability, and security of AWS. “Customers have told us they really like Apache Airflow because it speeds the development of their data processing and machine learning workflows, but they want it without the burden of scaling, operating, and securing servers,” says Jesse Dougherty, Vice President, Application Integration, AWS. “With Amazon MWAA, customers can use the same Apache Airflow platform as they do today with the scalability, availability, and security of AWS.” Customers can launch a new Amazon MWAA environment from the AWS Management Console, CLI, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS SDK, and start running in minutes. Amazon MWAA is available today in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Stockholm), with more regions to come. The Pokémon Company International, a subsidiary of The Pokémon Company in Japan, manages the property outside of Asia and is responsible for brand management, licensing, marketing, the Pokémon Trading Card Game, the animated TV series, home entertainment, and the official Pokémon website. “Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow meshes with our security policy by providing single sign-on controlled access through IAM roles and the ability to restrict access to our Amazon Virtual Private Cloud,” comments Eric Smith, Data Platform Engineer at The Pokémon Company International. “With Amazon MWAA, we can focus on building reliable data pipelines that achieve business goals rather than patching and securing instances.” Detroit-based Rocket Mortgage, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, enables the American Dream of homeownership and financial freedom through an industry-leading, digital-driven client experience. “Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow has helped us grow and scale our data science and machine learning workflows with significantly less infrastructure overhead," states Dan Jones, Senior Vice President of Data Intelligence for Rocket Mortgage. "With this new service, our technology teams are able to deliver best-in-class, data-driven solutions faster than ever before." GoDaddy is the company that empowers everyday entrepreneurs. With more than 20 million customers worldwide, GoDaddy is the place people come to name their ideas, build a professional website, attract customers, and manage their work. “Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow solves one of the biggest operational overheads with orchestration,” concludes Jeremy Zogg, Senior Director of Engineering at GoDaddy. “We have spent a lot of hours setting up, configuring, scaling, and monitoring our on-premises Apache Airflow instances. This was our top challenge for our workflow deployments and we’re excited to migrate and concentrate on what we do best: harnessing the power of data to drive great outcomes for our customers and business.”

Pure storage expands pure-as-service offerings, delivers transparency

Today Pure Storage, the IT pioneer that delivers storage as-a-service in a multi-cloud world, announced expanded Pure as-a-Service offerings, eclipsing current flexible consumption models available from major storage vendors in the market today. Pure’s new Service Catalog is aimed at revolutionizing the industry by publishing transparent pricing for on-premises and hybrid cloud storage delivered as-a-Service - providing customers with true storage investment transparency so they can easily choose the right storage service level for each workload. In addition, Pure is making as-a-Service more accessible by offering lower cost service tiers and converged storage/compute solutions providing a seamless purchasing model for customers. “IDC predicts that by 2021, 75% of enterprises will recognize the benefits of as-a-service consumption, driving a 3x increase in demand for on-premises infrastructure delivered via flexible/as-a-service solutions. IDC data underscores that the global pandemic has accelerated this shift and enterprises are moving towards as-a-Service models faster than ever, with a desire for more capacity and performance to improve business agility,” said Susan Middleton, Research Director of Flexible Consumption and Financing Strategies for IT Infrastructure at IDC. “In a time of changing business needs, customers want cost transparency, simplicity and operational efficiency, as well as a straightforward on-ramp to the cloud that enables them to preserve capital.” Pure as-a-Service enables customers to optimize every dollar spent and eliminate technical debt, which has never been more important than in the current environment. With Pure as-a-Service, customers only pay for what they use, ensuring organizations don’t over-provision. Unlike other flexible consumption models, only Pure as-a-Service provides the economic benefits of cloud, along with the additional benefits of Evergreen architecture including non-disruptive expansions and maintenance. This provides a subscription to innovation that can last a decade or more, true cloud elasticity, and with the addition of the Service Catalog provides granularity of services along with the transparency that enterprises expect on-premises and in the cloud, raising the standard for future customer requirements. Staying true to Pure's partner centric approach, Pure as-a-Service is delivered 100% via partners. “Pure as-a-Service has achieved market maturity, having been available for more than two years as the first Storage as-a-Service offering from a major vendor,” says Rob Walters, General Manager, Pure as-a-Service, Pure Storage. “With the new service catalog and expanded offerings, we are once again leading the market in delivering the flexibility and transparency that customers are looking for in subscription services to accelerate their initiatives.” “Pure as-a-Service enables us to simplify the complex operations behind delivering the seamless reliability, performance and scalability our customers depend upon us for,” comments Blake Wetzel, Chief Operations Officer and Chief Revenue Officer, TeraGo. “Furthermore, the flexible consumption model eliminates big capital expenditures and gives us the agility to invest in other strategic initiatives. We’re delighted by the latest, innovative evolution of Pure-as-a-Service and how it aligns with and supports our efforts to make the move to the cloud a more frictionless experience for our customers.” New service offerings and enhancements include: New Service Catalog: Offers improved transparency and granularity of service selections for performance and capacity, allowing customers to easily identify the service and tier of storage needed based on the workload. Pure delivers clear and transparent pricing per GB. Pure is also providing customers with options and flexibility unmatched by the legacy storage providers and similar to the top cloud providers in the market. Services include: Block Service that enable customers to choose the right storage for their applications delivering simplicity and cost savings: Capacity Tier provides lower commitments, decreasing the barrier to entry and enabling customers to easily scale over time. Customers can now utilize block capacity with a minimum of 200 TiB, decreasing the minimum entry point by one third. Other tiers retain their minimum commitment of 50 TiB. Performance Tier to accelerate hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Premium Tier to support specialized tier 1 workloads, such as containers and test/dev applications. UItra Tier designed for in-memory databases. Unified Fast File and Object Service allows customers to select from Premium and Ultra Performance tiers to support not only traditional file and cloud object workloads, but also a wide variety of AI and Machine Learning, high performance compute, and software development needs.Full Stack as-a-Service: Enables flexible consumption-based payments for storage, compute, and networking through select Pure and Cisco partners. Built on Pure and Cisco’s FlashStack, partners can deliver multiple versions of flexible consumption for the Full Stack while benefiting from Cisco Validated Designs.

Schneider launches tool to evaluate the cost of servicing power systems

Schneider Electric has launched a new TradeOff Tool, the Edge UPS Fleet Management Comparison Calculator. Using the TradeOff Tool, IT solutions providers, managed service providers, VARs and end users can model the cost implications of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) monitoring and maintenance across distributed sites and make data driven decisions regarding cost, site criticality and servicing resources. The latest addition to Schneider Electric’s library of free digital TradeOff Tools, the Edge UPS Fleet Management Comparison Calculator helps users simplify and clarify the costs associated with monitoring and maintaining a UPS fleet. The model considers the size (VA rating), quantity, age and distribution of the fleet, as well as cost factors such as the expense of service technicians travelling to remote sites. Furthermore, it provides a financial analysis of the potential operational expenses (OpEx) incurred by using internal staff to service distributed sites, or whether engaging with an external partner or vendor can be more cost effective. “With greater dependency on digital infrastructure and IT at the edge, ensuring critical power across distributed sites has become a key challenge for today’s IT professionals,” says Marc Garner, VP, Secure Power Division, Schneider Electric UK&I. “UPS systems must be properly maintained, repaired or replaced when nearing end of life, and deploying sufficient technical staff to perform these tasks reliably and at minimum cost often requires the support of Schneider Electric or external service partners. This tool provides customers the capabilities to know when they should leverage additional resources, while optimising budgets to safeguard against outages.” Calculating the cost of downtime Schneider Electric TradeOff Tools are web-based, mobile-friendly applications that allow channel partners and end users to experiment with different scenarios, using data and science to estimate outcomes during data centre concept and design work. To facilitate cost comparisons, the Edge UPS Fleet Management Comparison Calculator allows the user to input a number of variables to gain an estimate for the amount of downtime that would be avoided by using a partner, or managed service, for monitoring and maintenance. It assigns a cost per hour which will vary according to the size of the UPSs. The larger the UPS, for example, the more expensive the outage. The user can also adjust the cost per hour variable if they have a record of the costs specific to their business. Having calculated the total cost of downtime, whether by self-servicing or through utilising proactive monitoring, preventative maintenance or a service level agreement (SLA), the comparison is automatically displayed. Research detailed in Schneider Electric white paper, ‘A Quantitative Comparison of UPS Monitoring and Servicing Approaches Across Edge Environments’, found that although internal personnel can manage a fleet of new equipment cost effectively, the savings gained by using partner or service provider resources increase substantially as equipment ages. With a fleet of 100 distributed UPS working with an external service partner can offer savings of up to 59 percent under a typical managed SLA. Digital services for the edge According to the Uptime Institute global annual data centre survey, 75% of respondents cited that downtime could have been preventable with better management, processes or configuration. For an organisation with the responsibility of operating multiple IT environments, the cost of having trained technical personnel on-site can be significant and often unrealistic. Using the tool, partners and end-users can calculate the cost of ensuring power continuity and resiliency for distributed, mission-critical IT applications, whether through partners or internal teams. By utilising software systems such as Schneider Electric’s open, vendor-agnostic remote management platform, EcoStruxure IT, customers can gain greater insights into the health and status of their UPS and dispatch service teams to minimise downtime. With its recent Public API and Monitoring and Dispatch Services, EcoStruxure also delivers proactive alerts into the status of edge computing environments, enabling IT Solutions Providers, MSPs and VARs to mitigate the fallout from power outages, and transition to digital servicing models.

ABB information systems selects Google cloud to expand its cloud footprint

Google Cloud announced it has been selected by ABB to further expand the cloud footprint of its Information System (IS) services. The Swiss-headquartered global technology leader has chosen Google as part of the organization’s ‘Rationalizing IT Operations’ (code named: Program RIO) initiative, which seeks to further increase the scalability and resilience of its infrastructure services to all ABB businesses. Google Cloud will collaborate with ABB’s hosting services team to layout an optimized cloud migration that is tailored to meet the IS needs of ABB businesses. This will be rolled out in a structured way and in-line with ABB’s new operating model. The migration signals ABB’s increased focus on cloud adoption, and optimizing its data centers’ capacity. Google Cloud’s data science, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities will be leveraged to simplify and improve the IS quality assurance via automation and consolidation of identified services housed in ABB’s strategic data centers and remote sites, with a cloud-first approach. “ABB is a global technology leader that has been a Fortune 500 company for many years,“ comments Dominik Wee, Managing Director Global Manufacturing and Industrial at Google Cloud. "We’re thrilled about the opportunity to help ABB in its journey toward powering its information systems services in the cloud, as the company heads towards a more digitized future.” ‘’We are excited to be working together with to improve the competitiveness of ABB’s Information Systems services, and the flexibility we offer our internal business customers,’’ says Daniele Lisetto, Head of IS Strategy Office and Sponsor of RIO Program at ABB. “Our choice further strengthens our strategic vision and stimulates innovation as we expand the Information Systems’ footprint,’’ concludes Prabhu Chakravarthy, Group IS Program Leader at ABB.

Aruba formalises its GAIA-X status as a Day-1 member

Aruba, formalizes its status as a Day-1 member of the GAIA-X project. With the aim of making a strong contribution to the development of a secure, reliable and certified network infrastructure for sharing and accessing data across Europe, the GAIA-X project is a step forward towards enabling a Cloud offering based on European values. Officially presented at the Digital Summit 2019, GAIA-X was formed with the intention of creating an interoperable and secure cloud infrastructure, based on compliance with European standards and regulations. It helps to create a free and transparent data environment, in which the potential for vendor lock-in is eliminated, and encourage competition between cloud solution providers, providing the highest level of certification, with the guarantee of the full protection of the European law. GAIA-X, due to be launched as early as 2021, acts as a legal entity supported by the European Commission according to the standards set out by its members. It is a project open to all countries that decide to contribute to its growth and join in as members, with the goal to provide European companies with a secure cloud network, using standards guaranteed by the European institutional system. Judging by the number of companies participating in the project and the country they are based in, Italy ranks third, behind only German and French firms. In total, 22 companies and founding associations are behind the project and there are also further providers that have been recently officialised, one of them being Aruba, which is named as a Day-1 Member of the project. “We’re aware how valuable and how much of a strategic resource data represents to every European company and beyond. GAIA-X aims to dictate a new European standard for the creation and provision of cloud services ideal for managing, storing, and processing data for everyday citizens and their businesses. This will most certainly strengthen the innovation and adoption of cloud computing while promoting European digital sovereignty” says Stefano Cecconi, CEO of Aruba S.p.A. He continues, “we joined the project as a Day-1 member because we believe that any service provided to citizens and businesses - either Italian or European - must comply with the same laws and regulations, the same principles and technical standards, in order to guarantee total interoperability between operators that adhere to the project by giving advantages to the users. " The newly formed GAIA-X company is a non-profit company that will oversee the creation, implementation, and promotion of this digital ecosystem, based in Belgium, Europe’s institutional heart.

BittWare Launches IA-840F and Support for oneAPI Unified Software Programming Environment

BittWare, a Molex company, has unveiled the IA-840F, the company’s first Intel Agilex-based FPGA card designed to deliver significant performance-per-watt improvements for next-generation data centre, networking and edge compute workloads. Agilex FPGAs deliver up to 40% higher performance or up to 40% lower power, depending on application requirements. BittWare maximized I/O features using the Agilex chip’s unique tiling architecture with dual QSFP-DDs (4× 100G), PCIe Gen4 x16, and three MCIO expansion ports for diverse applications. BittWare also announced support for Intel oneAPI, which enables an abstracted development flow for dramatically simplified code re-use across multiple architectures. “Modern data center workloads are incredibly diverse requiring customers to implement a mix of scalar, vector, matrix and spatial architectures,” said Craig Petrie, vice president of marketing for BittWare. “The IA-840F ensures that customers can quickly and easily exploit the advanced features of the Intel Agilex FPGA. For those customers who prefer to develop FPGA applications at an abstracted level, we are including support for oneAPI. This new unified software programming environment allows customers to program the Agilex FPGA from a single code base with native high-level language performance across architectures.” The new IA-84F offers enterprise-class features and capabilities, including: Support for Intel oneAPI unified software programming environmentHDL developer toolkit: API, PCIe drivers, application example designs and diagnostic self-testSophisticated Board Management Controller (BMC)Choice of thermal cooling options: passive, active or liquidMultiple expansion port for additional PCIe, storage or network I/O To streamline cross-architecture development, oneAPI includes a direct programming language, Data Parallel C++, and a set of libraries for API-based programming. Data Parallel C++ is based on C++ and incorporates SYCL from the Khronos Group. This dramatically simplifies code re-use across multiple architectures while facilitating custom tuning for accelerators. “Intel Agilex FPGAs and cross platform tools including the oneAPI toolkit are leading the way to enable easier access to these newest FPGAs and their tremendous capabilities - including eASIC integration, HBM integration, BFLOAT16, optimized tensor compute blocks, Compute Express Link (CXL), and 112 Gbps transceiver data rates for high speed 1Ghz compute and 400Gbps+ connectivity solutions”, comments Patrick Dorsey – VP Product, Programmable Solutions Group at Intel.  “The highly customizable and heterogenous Agilex platform and oneAPI tools enable products like the new IA-840F accelerator card from BittWare to drive innovation from the edge to the cloud.” First IA-840F card shipments are scheduled to begin Q2 2021. Customers can purchase the new card as a pre-integrated DELL or HPE server from the BittWare TeraBox range with a comprehensive three-year warranty.

Acronis expands its reach in cyber protection, joining the MPC Alliance

Acronis, a global leader in cyber protection, announces today that it has joined the MPC Alliance, a global association with the mission of improving data security through the implementation of the secure cryptographic technology of multi-party computation.  MPC is a mathematical approach to digital security, reducing the dependency on third parties to maintain the privacy of our digital footprints, which have grown in value and are vulnerable to misuse. MPC is a subfield of cryptography, allowing multiple parties to compute an output using their private data without disclosing their data to any third party, and is capable of doing so while guaranteeing the correctness of the output even if some data becomes corrupt.  Acronis has adopted MPC technology as it develops cyber protection solutions that address safety, accessibility, authenticity, and security challenges. Acronis services are trusted by 5.5 million individuals and companies worldwide.  Amongst a range of MPC research initiatives, Acronis is working with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University to create encryption and secure data management technologies to enable a secure MPC platform for business-to-business transactions, ensuring data can be shared between multiple untrusted parties while keeping shared data private.  Acronis Technology President and co-founder Stanislav Protassov concludes: "Multi-party computation is of interest to Acronis into which we have devoted research resources. Implementing MPC technology in our cyber protection solutions is essential to apply a trusted third party that receives the input and confidentially computes the result, not revealling any data."  

Increased responsibilities are pushing IT to breaking point

IT is an innovator as well as a caretaker in mid-market organisations, but increased pressure is driving teams towards burnout Increasing pressure on IT teams is pushing many IT decision-makers to the brink, according to new research from Pulsant, a leading UK provider of regional data centre and cloud infrastructure services. Nearly two-thirds of UK IT decision-makers (65%) have felt under increasing pressure to keep the organisation running effectively over the past year, with 80% of these admitting this has harmed their health and wellbeing. The research, which was conducted on 201 UK IT decision-makers in mid-market organisations, finds increased pressure on IT has manifested in various ways: 40% of IT decision-makers impacted say they are experiencing anxiety as a result of increased pressure; over a third (35%) are suffering from increased stress which is unsustainable and will result in burn out if not addressed, and nearly a quarter (24%) have experienced this which has resulted with absence from the business. Worryingly for businesses, 20% have either resigned or started looking for a new job. The rise in pressure could be due to an increase in expectations with 77% of IT decision-makers saying expectations of IT have risen within their organisation in the past 12 months. The biggest reasons for this increase were noted as a greater focus on security and compliance (45%), the expectation for IT to work with more areas of the business (39%), the expectation for IT to support and have knowledge of a broader range of technologies (38%), increased pressure to update ageing infrastructure (36%) and being expected to deliver projects quicker (35%). This, in turn, means that IT teams are left stretched across a wide range of responsibilities, with over a third (34%) of IT decision-makers saying a big workload/not enough time is one of the top challenges within their teams.  “An accelerating pace of change means that IT teams are under more pressure than ever to support more critical business initiatives and deliver results faster, while at the same time ensuring business systems remain available, secure and compliant,” says Pulsant CTO, Simon Michie. “This can place IT teams under immense strain which is detrimental to both the success of the business, and more importantly employee wellbeing, with staff left stressed, anxious and having to take time out from the business. “ The research also revealed a divide in opinions on the purpose of IT, with IT seen as both a caretaker of information and technology and also the driver of innovation across the business. Over half of IT decision-makers (58%) and business leaders (55%) believe the primary role of IT is either a help desk or technical support function or to be responsible for maintaining and running business-critical systems, while 40% of IT decision-makers and 45% of business leaders see the main role of the IT department as an enabler of innovation. IT has also become influential in board-level business decision making with the majority (87%) of IT decision-makers saying IT is involved in setting the business strategy for the year ahead. An overwhelming majority (93%) say their organisation has a representative from the IT team on the board/leadership team, highlighting that IT is now widely regarded as a critical function. However, while there is clear recognition for the role of IT in driving the business strategy and innovation, IT teams face challenges in delivering on expectations. Nearly two-thirds of IT decision-makers (65%) say their team is under pressure to be more innovative but there is not enough investment for this to be possible. IT decision-makers are also put off from driving new ideas forward by challenges including conflicting priorities (38%), lack of resource (36%) and time (35%). “It’s hugely positive that both business leaders and IT decision-makers recognise the role of IT in driving innovation, but it’s clear that more attention needs to be paid to providing the IT team with the right support and resources it needs to perform both functions effectively and maintain the wellbeing of IT professionals,” concludes Michie.