Cloud

Infinidat has announced that it has received another series of prestigious industry awards from Storage Magazine, UK. Now in its 20th year, Storage Magazine’s awards –The Storries XX, recognise the industry’s finest solutions, companies, and people. The event is regarded as an important fixture in the global enterprise storage calendar. This year, Infinidat has been named a winner in the ‘Storage Optimisation Company of the Year’ category, and a runner up in three categories: Editor’s Choice – Product award, Performance Storage Vendor of the Year, and the Storage Innovators award. “Infinidat has been a strong enterprise storage solutions innovator for several years and the results of the 2023 Storries awards are a testament to our continued success in the storage market. The company’s systems and software deliver enterprises the cyber storage resilience, unmatched real-world application performance, and guaranteed 100% availability they need for today’s deployments. At a time when financial resources are strained, and businesses are focused on reducing their capital and operational expenses, while providing more environmentally friendly data centres, choosing Infinidat is the obvious choice,” says Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat. “Infinidat has an outstanding track record for providing the best-in-class enterprise grade storage solutions for our channel partners and their end users. As the company continues to excel with the advancement of innovative storage solutions, such as cyber storage resilience, we see the growth of its solutions across the enterprise storage marketplace. Its recognition is a testament to the company’s vision and hard work. Congratulations to the team! Very well deserved,” says Stewart Legge, Vendor Development Director at CMS Distribution.

evroc reveals plans to build Europe's first sovereign hyperscale cloud

evroc has presented its plans to build Europe’s first secure, sovereign, and sustainable hyperscale cloud. It recently closed a seed funding round to build its launch team. The company now plans to raise and invest three billion euros over the next couple of years to develop and operate two hyperscale data centres, one in Northern Europe and one in Southern Europe. By 2028, it aims to establish eight hyperscale data centres, as well as three software development hubs, across the continent, employing over 3,000 people in total. “The lack of home-grown hyperscale cloud providers poses a serious challenge for Europe. Not only because our citizens’ data is placed under foreign ownership by companies operating under laws that conflict with European privacy legislation. It is also a real threat to our long-term competitiveness in a digital world where others are advancing much faster. Europe’s digital economy must be built on a European foundation,” says Mattias Åström, Founder and CEO, evroc. Cloud services play a key role in critical digital infrastructure. Between 2017 and 2022, the European cloud market grew five-fold. During the same time, the market share of European cloud players fell from 27% to 13%. A competitive European hyperscale cloud is critical to enable the continent’s digital economy, keeping investments, job creation, technology development and intellectual property rights within its borders. It will also give Europe digital sovereignty that is compliant with European privacy legislation, settling a long-standing problem. “evroc has spotted an exciting opportunity to make Europe a leader in cloud technologies by bringing together the continent’s brightest minds, ambitious thinkers, and experienced entrepreneurs. We believe the next generation of European tech companies will be built on evroc’s cloud services,” says Ted Persson, Partner at EQT Ventures. Data centres until now have had a significant environmental footprint, consuming about 3% of the global electricity supply, and accounting for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. evroc will build a clean cloud by leveraging energy-efficient technologies to maximise its sustainability impact, including a proprietary eco load balancer solution. The eco load balancer enables data to flow seamlessly and securely between evroc’s data centres based on where renewable energy is most readily available and affordable. “The data centre industry is on par with the airline industry in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Data processing will continue to grow substantially over the coming decades, causing significant emissions and damage to our climate, unless we change direction. evroc’s holistic strategy for clean energy usage, combined with the implementation of state-of-the-art energy efficiency technology, could set the standard for the entire industry,” says Tove Larsson, Partner at Norrsken VC.

Lacework announces new CIEM functionality for simplified cloud security

Lacework has announced new CIEM functionality to address the complex and growing challenges in managing identity threats and unnecessary risk within public cloud environments by unifying entitlements management and threat detection for simplified cloud security. With over 35,000 granular permissions across hyperscale cloud providers, organisations can struggle to maintain an overview and to manage access and identities securely. Most cloud users and instances are granted far more permissions than they require, exposing unnecessary vulnerabilities to cloud breach, account takeover, and data exfiltration. This issue is then intensified by machine identities in the cloud, which typically outnumber humans by an order of magnitude. Lacework’s new CIEM capabilities extend the company’s broad identity security offerings with powerful new automation that calculates risks and prioritises action for security teams. It delivers real time monitoring of all cloud identities across complex multi-cloud environments. This has now been combined with its sophisticated system and behavioural analysis to identify exposed secrets, IAM misconfiguration and over-provisioning of permissions, and to prioritise any necessary action according to risk. These new capabilities augment Lacework’s existing anomaly detection technology that actively monitors human and non-human activity to detect behaviour that may be a sign of an attack in progress. Unifying these capabilities at scale bridges the gap between IAM and SecOps teams to simplify cloud identity security. “Our customers need to know what entities are actually doing in their cloud and whether it’s malicious or inappropriate, and it can’t get in the way of their ability to move fast,” says Adam Leftik, Vice President, Product, Lacework. “Now Lacework customers can address both sides of the identity security issue with a single platform that prevents identity risk exposure and detects identity threats at scale, with the context to quickly investigate, prioritise, and respond to identity alerts. It’s the latest step in our mission to give enterprises the confidence to rapidly innovate in the cloud and drive their business forward.” Preventing cloud identity risk with new entitlement management technology Lacework dynamically discovers all cloud user, resource, group and role identities and their net-effective permissions, and automatically correlates granted versus used permissions to determine identities with excessive privileges. The platform calculates a risk score for each identity, determines the riskiest identities based on attack path analysis, and auto-generates high-confidence recommendations for right-sizing permissions based on historical observations. Combined with it's ability to prioritise risks from an attack path context, as well as detect user and entity behaviour anomalies, customers are able to: Continuously comply with IAM security and regulatory compliance requirements. Identify all cloud user, application and service identities, know exactly what actions each can take, and prioritise the identities that pose the greatest risk. Limit the blast radius of compromised cloud accounts, achieve least privilege, and establish trust with engineering teams. Continuously discover risky behaviour, including lateral movement and privilege escalation, without writing rules or stitching together disparate alerts.  Rapidly detect insider threats associated with malicious or accidental abuse of permissions. “Enforcing least privilege and having visibility of identities and entitlements is a top cloud security challenge for IDC clients. With this innovation from Lacework, security teams can automatically see which identities are overly-permissive, and zero in on the ones that pose the greatest risk,” says Philip Bues, Research Manager for Cloud Security, at IDC. “Beyond prioritising risks, this will also allow teams to confidently suggest policy changes and reduce their overall attack surface risk.”

Infinidat expands support for hybrid cloud storage deployments

Infinidat has announced the launch of two new solutions that will catapult automated hybrid cloud storage and enterprise cyber storage resilience forward to modernise enterprise storage services: the expansion of Infinidat’s support of hybrid cloud storage deployments with the launch of InfuzeOS Cloud Edition, and the addition of new cyber resilience capabilities with InfiniSafe Cyber Detection for enterprise primary storage to better resist cyber attacks. “The launch of InfuzeOS Cloud Edition signifies a bold move to extend the unmatched Infinidat user experience, encompassing ease of use, autonomous automation, and powerful enterprise data services across a hybrid cloud storage environment. With Infinidat’s operating system now in the public cloud, we can provide a consistent core-to-cloud experience through our full support for hybrid cloud deployments,” says Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat. “Simultaneously, we’re addressing concerns about cyber attacks by adding cyber storage detection to our award-winning InfiniSafe cyber storage resilience technology with the introduction of InfiniSafe Cyber Detection. This adds an essential tool for enterprises to enable comprehensive cyber storage resilience and recovery for enterprise primary storage. Infinidat is now the ‘go-to’ enterprise storage solution provider for the automation of hybrid cloud storage and cyber storage detection.” “Infinidat’s extension of its operating system to hybrid cloud environments with InfuzeOS Cloud Edition enables use cases that are primed for hybrid cloud storage, ranging from disaster recovery and backup to dev ops to burst capacity to cloud storage. The expansion of InfiniSafe is giving enterprises advanced cyber storage detection and rapid recovery capabilities. Infinidat continues to extend its storage portfolio to provide the functionality that its customers expect and need with hybrid cloud, autonomous automation, cyber storage resilience, or cyber detection capabilities,” says Dave Pearson, Research VP at IDC. Infinidat expands support for hybrid cloud storage deployments Hybrid cloud storage solutions enable IT managers to modernise their storage services, on-prem, and in the public cloud to deliver mobility, cyber storage resiliency, and increased operational efficiency. Infinidat is putting its comprehensive, software-defined storage capabilities into the public cloud to enable and support the hybrid cloud storage deployments of enterprise customers. With intelligent autonomous automation that Infinidat developed, the InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA II that reside on-premises simply see the public cloud as if it is another InfiniBox platform. This seamless integration extends the ‘Best Storage Solution of the Year’ award-winning InfiniBox and InfiniBox SSA II platform experience to the cloud, delivering the same best-in-class automation, ease of use, enterprise-class data services and cyber storage resilience that differentiate Infinidat as a technology leader. By the year 2025, according to Gartner, 60% of infrastructure and operations leaders will implement at least one of the hybrid cloud storage use cases, representing a significant increase from 20% in 2022. Use cases for InfuzeOS Cloud Edition include: • Disaster recovery and business continuity • Backup • Test/dev ops and application integration, and proof of concept • Burst storage and storage tiering Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the first supported public cloud platform for InfuzeOS Cloud Edition in a single node InfiniBox configuration. Customers can deploy a full version of InfuzeOS that resides in their AWS environment. The InfuzeOS Cloud Edition solution expands Infinidat’s activities as an AWS Partner Network member, including its existing AWS Outposts Ready designation. Infinidat delivers cyber detection capabilities As cyber security continues to be one of the top concerns of CEOs and senior leadership teams, Infinidat made it a priority to enhance its InfiniSafe cyber storage resilience solution portfolio with cyber detection. Infinidat is now one of the very few storage vendors to offer cyber detection on primary storage. Infinidat equips enterprises with stronger cyber storage resilience capabilities to counter cyber attacks against their data infrastructure in the face of increasing cyber threats. InfiniSafe Cyber Detection is designed to help enterprises resist and quickly recover from cyber attacks. It provides highly intelligent deep scanning and indexing needed to identify potential issues. InfiniSafe Cyber Detection inspects the full breadth of files, applications, core storage infrastructure (such as volumes), and databases for signs of cyber threats for primary storage environments, helping ensure all data that needs to be recovered has integrity. InfiniSafe Cyber Detection uses advanced machine-learning models that provide 99.5% confidence in detecting cyber threats. This helps dealing with false positive/negatives and greatly reduces the effort in any additional forensics. Over 200 points of determination are included, using content-based analytics that inspect inside files for even subtle signs of attack. The post-attack dashboard (with forensic report) details the last known good copy of the data for rapid, intelligent recovery.

Aruba's MultiCloud Link: the solution to all public cloud platforms

95% of companies agree that multi-cloud architecture is now critical for the success of a business, and half of these companies believe that those who do not adopt this approach may be at risk of failure. This is according to VMware's Multi-Cloud Maturity Index, which shows that 'multi-strategies' are more instrumental in the rapid transformation of their business. In this context, Aruba presents its MultiCloud Link service, the private connectivity solution to all public cloud platforms. This proposal allows one or more connections from the infrastructure in colocation, private cloud or dedicated cloud to distributed environments on public cloud platforms (from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure, up to Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud or IBM Cloud). The MultiCloud Link works through an end-to-end architecture: a physical device (router/firewall) within a data centre is connected to a cloud router in a BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) session, through which network routes are exchanged. In the case of a double circuit, it is the BGP that ensures the routing and balancing of traffic, and also determines any fault in a route. The MultiCloud Link is available in various bandwidths, up to 1Gbps, with the possibility of creating a 10Gbps link dedicated to the customer; the service can be adapted according to many needs and can also be used in managed mode, thanks to the skills of Aruba’s enterprise division’s team of solution architects and technical experts. In addition to its speed and competitive price, the main advantages of the new solution include security, since the connection is direct and private to the public clouds, without passing through the internet - and performance, since latency is certain, fundamental for mission critical applications. In addition to the main use cases of the MultiCloud Link highlight, it is also important to mention both colocation interconnection, which allows the colocation infrastructures hosted within the Aruba Data Centres to connect with the hyperscalers, and VM management, through which it is possible to manage the virtual machines distributed on various public cloud environments. In addition, the workload management, thanks to which the infrastructures that rely on the Aruba cloud can distribute the workloads in various environments; the DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) solutions and the Cloud Backup, which allows data distributed on public cloud infrastructures to be replicated in view of data sovereignty; the MultiCloud application, which allows the integration of the applications distributed on various public clouds; the peering between the hyperscalers, which favours the activation of interconnections with the hyperscalers in total security.  "One of the cornerstones of Aruba's cloud strategy is interoperability, i.e. the ability to make infrastructures - cloud, in this case - talk through common communication protocols and underlying technological standards," comments Massimo Bandinelli, Marketing Manager of Aruba Cloud. "The data centre and in this specific case the MultiCloud Link, a fundamental element of the Aruba cloud roadmap, enable this principle, thus allowing companies to simultaneously manage, in a multi-cloud perspective, workloads distributed on different public clouds, on the Aruba platform, on-premises or in the edge, and therefore address any needs of compliance, territoriality, latency, scalability."

DigiCert announces partnership with Oracle

DigiCert has announced a partnership to provide DigiCert ONE on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Customers will benefit from DigiCert ONE’s fast time-to-value combined with OCI’s high-performance and security-first architecture for single and multi-cloud deployments. Moving forward, DigiCert and Oracle will collaborate on further integration into the OCI ecosystem to help joint customers manage their digital trust initiatives in a unified architecture. “Collaboration and deeply integrated security are a few of the key reasons why many of the world’s leading brands turn to OCI to help secure their clouds and data,” says Mike Cavanagh, Group Vice President, ISV Cloud for North America at Oracle. “Enabling access to DigiCert’s leading digital trust infrastructure on OCI provides customers a powerful combination of solutions to safeguard their data and secure their assets.” “DigiCert’s partnership with OCI makes deployment of DigiCert ONE on OCI easy to deploy and scalable within customers’ single or multi-cloud environments,” says DigiCert Chief Product Officer, Deepika Chauhan. “Together we can help our joint customers reduce the risk of business disruption, protect attack surfaces and deliver identity-based digital innovation with ease." With DigiCert ONE, customers can secure users, devices, servers, documents, software and more with a unified architecture that centralises management of digital trust initiatives. DigiCert ONE is a modern, multi-tenant, cloud-native SaaS platform, with the flexibility to be deployed in customers’ private cloud or on premises, if required. DigiCert ONE supports organisations across a wide variety of use cases, including securing connected medical devices for improved patient care, improving user trust in election data, protecting collection and analysis of device telemetry for improved retail operations, and automating user and device authentication to corporate IT services. OCI provides a cloud infrastructure with built-in, always-on security that helps deliver compliance with rigorous security protocols and operations. It also delivers performance and reliability with simplified, transparent pricing, and flexible options to help customers meet their unique business needs, whether on premises or in the public cloud, using multiple cloud vendors or a combination. OCI cloud regions, including OCI Dedicated Regions, offer all the benefits of public cloud services while allowing secure, high-performance, local environments that can help keep sensitive or regulated data and workloads separate to address data residency requirements based on location or sensitivity.

A10 Networks boosts cloud defence with new application delivery solution

The last decade of digital transformation has turned most organisations today into true digital businesses. But the effectiveness and economics of cloud operating models have become top concerns. How to best secure, optimise and automate hybrid cloud environments in the most effective manner is a significant challenge. To solve this problem, A10 Networks is announcing the combined solution of the Thunder Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and the new A10 next-generation Web Application Firewall (WAF), powered by Fastly, to enable automated, multi-layered security, and resilience. As organisations seek to establish an efficient and effective cloud operating model, the combined technology enables a highly performant security solution at a strategic application ingress point that reduces false positives and automates security, empowering agility and effectiveness. The end solution ultimately helps deliver better cloud economics and business outcomes. Improving the security and resiliency of hybrid cloud The company is adding the A10 Next-Gen WAF to its solution portfolio as an integrated add-on to its A10 Thunder ADC solution. Together, the A10 Thunder ADC and A10 Next-Gen WAF implementation provides a single solution to enhance web defences across software and hardware appliances installed in hybrid cloud environments. The solution can be deployed across multiple form factors, including virtual machines and hardware appliances. Thunder ADC, in addition to providing advanced availability options, can perform DDoS protection, authentication, and protocol checks at scale. The integrated A10 Next-Gen WAF provides deep web application security services. As the solution sits at the primary application ingress point, a single deployment can efficiently front-end one, hundreds, or thousands of applications without the need for individual server end-point deployments. This enables faster time to market with secure application deployments. “A10 Networks provides high-performance application delivery and security, and its solution is a natural fit for our next-gen WAF to help provide mutual customers with deep web application security for hybrid cloud environments. This is the first software and hardware application delivery controller implementation for Fastly, which expands our addressable market and provides A10 with the most advanced WAF technology for its customers,” says Emily Friedberg, Group Vice President, Global Partnerships at Fastly. Protect applications while keeping overhead and disruption low The A10 Thunder ADC and A10 Next-Gen WAF combine to provide a series of capabilities that outpace traditional stand-alone or existing web application firewalls. These include: ● Layered defence - counters modern web threats, and includes OWASP Top 10 mitigation, DDoS protection, authentication, and TLS/SSL decryption. ● Simplification via consolidation - converges under Thunder ADC as a fully integrated single appliance solution that is optimised with advanced load balancing, ADC caching, and the Fastly cloud service; customers have a single point of support with A10. ● Ease of use - no learning period for IT teams with near-zero false positives; almost 90% of Fastly users run in blocking mode, ensuring only bad traffic is stopped. ● Lower costs - provides superior protection with little or no tuning; uses a combination of thresholding, along with Fastly’s proprietary Network Learning Exchange (NLX) and SmartParse technology, to reduce false positives, for highly effective automated detection and blocking. ● Reduced risk - protects against modern attack vectors like account takeover (ATO), enumeration, and DDoS; integrates with popular DevOps and SIEM tools, making it a great fit for enterprise DevSecOps teams. “When selecting a partner to deliver superior web application firewall security for our hybrid cloud solutions, Fastly was an obvious choice. It has been a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ choice for Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) for the last five years. Our combined solution will help customers ensure security and resiliency while reducing the operational overhead for security teams,” says Mikko Disini, VP of Product Line Management at A10 Networks.

Centreon moves to cloud-first with new version 23.04

Centreon has announced the immediate availability of its new version 23.04 for on-premises and cloud deployments, with a new AIOps extension, and Centreon Cloud available in all its commercial editions. This new version is also resolutely user-centric, thanks to the active contribution of the Centreon user community, The Watch. Centreon keeps evolving its IT monitoring platform guided by a vision to provide deployment flexibility, extended visibility, and an optimised TCO for monitoring software. Centreon 23.04 features more cloud capabilities, extensions, and a range of community-inspired enhancements. Centreon 23.04: a cloud-first platform Version 23.04 marks the availability of the Centreon platform in the cloud environment. Thus, the IT and Business editions of Centreon are now available for SaaS and on-premises deployment. New features and corrective maintenance are now offered in CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous delivery) mode and automatically updated by Centreon for users of Centreon Cloud, Centreon’s SaaS platform. With Centreon Cloud, IT teams now enjoy complete visibility over cloud and non-cloud infrastructure and can truly align IT and business performance with even more ease, a faster time-to-market, an improved TCO, and an always up-to-date platform. Thus, IT teams can focus on their business and on creating value, rather than on managing an on-premises monitoring platform. The Centreon Cloud platform is available for deployment on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure in Europe and North America. Centreon 23.04: an open and extensible platform Given Centreon’s open source core, openness and extensibility were always key product characteristics. Version 23.04 reinforces these qualities, with more monitoring connectors, integrations and extensions available. A large number of monitoring connectors is one of the key features expected from an advanced monitoring platform. With more than 700 no-code connectors available for the monitoring of cloud and non-cloud infrastructure, networks, servers, applications, and user experience, Centreon 23.04 further extends the monitoring scope. Such extended coverage makes it possible to let go of obsolete, too specific or too expensive tools, in favour of a more effective and unified IT monitoring platform. A wealth of integrations is another key Centreon platform strength. To ensure seamless integration within the rest of the IT stack, and to provide the best possible TCO, Centreon 23.04 directly interfaces with a range of ITOps solutions such as Splunk, Elastic, Graylog, PagerDuty, and many others. In addition to offering flexibility in choosing data format and exchange methods, Centreon 23.04 now comes with ready to use no-code integrations. Last but not least, Centreon 23.04 introduces an AIOps Extension, complementing its monitoring platform’s AIOps capabilities based on Centreon's Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies. AI is a crucial component as today’s monitoring platforms must manage and correlate ever-increasing volumes of data and alerts. Following the launch of the Centreon DEM extension, now the Centreon AIOps Extension is introduced, delivering additional predictive monitoring capabilities based on AI and ML technologies. This extension includes: Anomaly Detection, now in General Availability (GA), allows users to eliminate fixed alert thresholds and leverage more accurate detection tailored to IT departments' needs. Predictive Capacity, available in Beta, enables much more precise and accurate capacity forecasts. Monitoring teams can now set a threshold and choose when they will be alerted, freeing up their time for more productivity. With Centreon 23.04, incidents are detected and resolved more quickly while reducing false positives. Automation keeps maintenance and operating costs down, and allows monitoring teams to focus on higher value-adding tasks. Predictive Capacity also enables IT departments to engage in rightsising initiatives, optimise spending and improve IT monitoring sustainability. Centreon 23.04 : a community platform Centreon's success has always been based on involving the user community, whether open source or commercial edition users, in the continuous improvement of its solutions. The Watch, Centreon’s community platform launched in 2021, provides a space for the community to submit improvement suggestions through the 'IDEAS' module, and thus directly contribute to the Centreon platform’s evolution roadmap. In addition to online discussions, Centreon regularly hosts on-site participative workshops named 'Centreon Product Connect,' during which The Watch community members are invited to discuss functionalities and future product orientations with the Centreon product team. This version 23.04 delivers a dozen new features based on ideas submitted by the user community, among which: Auto-Discovery: more configuration productivity (jobs duplication, automated plugins installation). Packaged Connector Streams: even more seamless integration with solutions such as Splunk, Elastic, Graylog, PagerDuty and many other ITOps platforms. Enhanced Custom Views: users can now customise their homepage and see the meta-service performance graph directly from their custom dashboards. Centreon in German, now available thanks to the contribution of partners and users who translated the user interface. "I am very proud of the work achieved by the Centreon teams with the release of this new version 23.04. We are making progress in important directions, such as the cloud and artificial intelligence, as well as in innovating and meeting customer and partner needs. We are also making great strides in the continuous delivery of our new features, which is helping our customers improve service quality and reduce the monitoring TCO. Finally, contributions from our community The Watch have never been so important, which is a real satisfaction and a pledge of confidence towards our entire ecosystem," says Julien Mathis, Centreon’s CEO.

Immutable storage is the one solution that will keep your data safe

By Florian Malecki, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Arcserve As businesses increasingly rely on the cloud to manage their data, they face more pressing concerns regarding data security and integrity. These concerns become even more complex in multi cloud and hybrid-cloud environments, where companies distribute data across multiple platforms. But there is a solution: immutable data storage. Immutable storage preserves data in its original state, thus preventing tampering. Immutable data storage ensures data security and integrity in multi cloud and hybrid-cloud environments in several ways. First, immutable storage guarantees that the data remains tamper-proof and unaltered. Second, immutable storage provides a transparent record of all data transactions. Each change to stored data is recorded and stored as a separate immutable object. It means that, in the event of an attack, it is much easier to trace the origins of the breach and identify which data has been affected. Finally, immutable storage provides an added layer of protection against accidental data loss or data corruption. Because data creators cannot alter the data once they have created it, it becomes much harder to overwrite important data. Implement immutable storage across platforms Some challenges come with implementing immutable data storage in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. One of the biggest is the complexity of managing the solution across multiple platforms. Each cloud platform may have its storage protocols, which makes it challenging to maintain a consistent immutable data storage strategy spanning all platforms. Your strategy might work well for one cloud, but another might not accommodate immutability. As your data travels to multiple destinations, the question is: are you getting the benefits of immutable storage everywhere your data ends up? Shadow IT within your company compounds this challenge. Your organisation might have multiple groups, from marketing to engineering to product management, all using different SaaS applications without the IT department even knowing. In that case, you don’t know if the data is being backed up or, ultimately, where it’s going. Is it going to a place with an immutable storage solution? You don’t know. That’s why shadow IT is an area of serious concern. It’s crucial to ensure that data stored in all shadow IT applications is on an immutable storage solution to maintain data integrity. To address these challenges, you should implement a unified data storage strategy that spans all cloud platforms. This strategy should involve standardising on a single immutable data storage protocol or investing in tools and technologies that can help manage data across multiple platforms. Solve compliance concerns with immutable storage Immutable data storage can also address challenges posed by data privacy and compliance requirements. Many industries, such as healthcare and finance, now mandate data preservation by law. Any business subject to such requirements must have mechanisms to prove that it maintains healthy copies of its data that cannot be altered or modified. Here, immutable data storage is often the answer because it helps ensure compliance with strict data retention and audit requirements. Immutable storage enables organisations to store data in a tamper-proof manner, which makes it easier for them to demonstrate compliance during audits. Immutable storage prevents alteration and provides an audit trail that lists the history of all data changes, demonstrating transparency and accountability. It is essential because regulators and auditors must verify that organisations follow specific rules and compliance requirements. Organisations with immutable storage as a resource for audit trails can show the outside world, including customers, partners, and investors, that they are compliant. It increases trust and confidence in the organisation and its capacity to handle sensitive data. Enforce strict access controls While a multi cloud approach to immutability is beneficial in many ways, it still can be vulnerable regarding privileges and administrator rights to data. Even though an immutable solution is very secure, a bad actor who gains access - whether a malicious employee or a third party with privileged account-management access - can delete data. It presents a real risk since data alteration or deletion can cause irreparable damage to an organisation’s operations. In other words, the danger of unauthorised access remains even if your data is stored on an immutable solution. If someone has privileged access to the data, they can delete it, regardless of the security measures in place. For this reason, it’s essential to couple immutable storage with strict access controls and monitoring mechanisms to prevent unauthorised access and ensure data integrity. Think about the keys to your home. If the bad guys get hold of them and gain access, they can take anything they want. Similarly, if someone gains privileged access to your data, they can delete it, causing significant harm to your organisation. Therefore, it’s critical to implement strict access controls and monitoring mechanisms. Recognise that immutability is now a necessity Immutable storage is no longer a fantasy; it’s reality. It’s no longer a luxury; it’s a 100% must-have. With the rise of multi-cloud providers - and the explosion of cyber threats - it’s now crucial to ensure that all providers have immutability. When it is, organisations can limit the risk of a breach and ensure their long-term survival. Cyber thieves are roaming the avenues of the digital world, rattling doors and looking for a way in. Immutable storage is the lock that will keep your data safe.

Why cloud solutions are the future for dealing with load shedding

By Julian Liebenberg, Chief of Cloud Platform Solutions at BCX It seems like yesterday, and, yet a lifetime ago that we as a technology industry had to deal with one of the greatest crises of recent times - the COVID-19 pandemic. Overnight, we were tasked with implementing digital systems and infrastructures that would take the core operations of South African enterprises and allow them to function online and remotely. Our clients wanted it to be 'business as usual' in the most unusual of times, a seamless transition to the digital transformation both they, and our country needed to have happen. We made it happen. We found solutions. We had the technology to do so. But now South Africa is faced with a challenge that dwarfs the pandemic. There is no greater threat to South African businesses than load-shedding. It is that simple and that stark. It is the most disruptive challenge of a generation. Just ask the CEOs of large enterprises who have been speaking about how hard they have been hit by the blackouts. Just ask the business leaders who fear for what the greater knock-on impact is across all sectors. Just ask the Reserve Bank governor who says almost a billion rand is lost every day in South Africa because of load shedding. Just ask economists who estimate almost a percentage point has been shaved off the country’s GDP because of Eskom’s struggles. As with the pandemic, the technology industry needs to find solutions to the challenges load-shedding creates for large enterprises in particular. The silver lining is in the cloud. The cloud has been the defining trend in technology for some years. Back in 2015, one of the worst years of load-shedding with 2,003 hours of blackouts, there was already talk about how load-shedding was forcing more companies to not only migrate to the cloud, but to take more of their operations there. Eight years later, with load-shedding hitting South Africa every day this year, the conversation needs to be less about possibly moving to the cloud but of the absolute necessity to do so to future-proof enterprises. The basics are that storing and transmitting data is reliant on power. It is estimated that data storage and transmission use 1-2% of global electricity, which is predicted to rise to a fifth of the world’s power output by 2040. If you are an enterprise that hosts your data centre on-site, this puts your productivity, continuity, and security at the whims of a power supply that is under massive strain. The choice is either to opt for significant capex in renewable energy or generators, or to use the infrastructure and back-up that is already on offer from cloud service providers. That way businesses can effectively pass the problem of load-shedding on to the provider, who has already invested in the infrastructure. The big players in the cloud space have their redundant power and back-up systems, and in many cases have invested in renewable energy both to keep their costs down and limit the impact on the climate. With the big players, such as Alibaba, for instance, the data is backed-up to multiple locations around the world, ensuring accessibility despite challenges in particular geographies. With a constant, safe back-up of data, there are no continuity issues or lost data. Work can carry on as per normal during a power outage because the workloads and data are readily accessible. Employees are also able to continue working offline if needed and have their work backed up automatically to the cloud when the power comes back in their location. The cloud’s benefits are enormous and ever-evolving: agility, resiliency, flexibility, better security, increase in performance and savings in technology spend gives the potential to integrate innovation and expand the enterprise’s capabilities. The cloud is also becoming increasingly cost-effective. The benefits we saw from forced digital transformation will grow exponentially as companies move more of their workloads and structures to the cloud. Just as the pandemic accelerated the move to the cloud, so, too, should load-shedding provide the necessary impetus for wholesale migration. The question companies should be asking themselves is not whether they need the cloud to help them remain competitive, but how they will be able to function in a digital era without the cloud. It is the silver lining to take us beyond the blackout.