ISSIMMEE, Fla.—Micro Key Solutions and the New DICE Corporation have partnered to provide central stations who are using Millennium Monitoring automation software with the ability to add interactive and advanced video services with AI analytics.

While the two companies both offer monitoring and video solutions currently, the partnership allows central stations powered by Millennium Monitoring to take advantage of interactive video services offered by Matrix Interactive.

“The change in focus from our video partners, including DICE’s Matrix Interactive, has positioned video monitoring into a more useful and sellable security offering. With analytics being right at the core, DICE’s solution embraces the changing needs in the market and delivers actionable information when dispatchers need it most, separating that data from the deluge of video information that floods a monitoring center,” said Chuck Speck, Executive Vice President of Micro Key Solutions.

With the overabundance of cameras and recorded video, the industry is seeing a greater rise in video monitoring. By integrating with Matrix Interactive, Millennium Monitoring meets that demand in a new way.

The Matrix Interactive engine uses several third party multi-billion-dollar technologies embedded into the platform, providing true AI analytics going beyond motion detection and basic video verification. These technologies include object detection, human behavior detection, and object filtration.

“We are proud to partner with Micro Key Solutions and are enjoying a great working relationship,” said New DICE Corporation Co-President Avi Lupo. “Thanks to an open and generic platform DICE developed for industry players, the solution is an opportunity to add value for Micro Key central stations and their customers by providing them with advanced interactive video monitoring. Plus, it is an excellent new RMR generator with initial minimal investment for Micro Key central stations. The platform is scalable, but they can start off with the entry level package that provides ROI in no time and then add more cameras, services, and modules when ready.”

Verified automated scheduled video tours are another service made possible through Matrix Interactive. The platform analyzes, understands, and prioritizes the video stream in real time. If nothing is detected during the tour, there is no need for operator intervention. The priority level determines if the video is sent to an end user, a central station operator, and/or recorded.

“Micro Key continues to partner with best-in-class solutions to provide real revenue and growth opportunities to our customers and help them separate themselves in their competitive markets. Solutions like this fit solidly in that mission and we’re excited to add them as a partner.”

The preview is available for its solutions Dataplex, Analytics Hub and Datastream.
Google Cloud, at its inaugural Data Cloud Summit, has announced three new solutions across its database and data analytics portfolio.

The company has announced the preview availability of its solutions Dataplex, Analytics Hub and Datastream.

Datastream is the tech giant’s new serverless Change Data Capture (CDC) and replication service.

It enables customers to replicate data streams in real-time, from Oracle and MySQL databases to Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage, and Cloud Spanner.

“This solution allows businesses to power real-time analytics, database replication, and event-driven architectures,” Google said.

Analytics Hub is a new capability that will enable companies to create, curate, and manage analytics exchanges securely and in real-time. The solution will allow customers to share data and insights, including dynamic dashboards and machine learning models inside and outside their organisation, securely. In addition, Analytics Hub enables organisations to combine enterprise datasets with unique Google, commercial, industry and public data, Google said. The preview for Analytics Hub will be launched soon.

Available in preview, “Dataplex is an intelligent data fabric which provides an integrated analytics experience.”

It will bring together Google Cloud capabilities and open-source to enable customers to rapidly curate, secure, integrate, and analyse their data at scale.

It has built-in data intelligence that leverages Google’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities.

“Data must be thought of as an ability that integrates all aspects of working with it. Every industry is accelerating their shift of being digital-first as they recognize data is the essential ingredient for value creation and the key to advancing their digital transformation,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, Vice President and General Manager, Databases, Data Analytics and Looker, Google Cloud.

“At Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping customers build the most powerful data cloud solution to unlock value and actionable, real-time insights, needed to future-proof their business,” added Kazmaier.

Google LLC today outlined a range of new compliance and security certifications for Google Cloud as part of a commitment to act as a “security transformation partner and to be the most trusted cloud.”

The new certifications include the addition of Cloud DNS to Google Cloud’s list of Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program compliant products along with additional government and security compliance certifications across Canada, Europe and Asia.

FedRAMP is a U.S. governmentwide program designed to standardize security assessment, authorization and monitoring for cloud products and services offered to federal government agencies. The goal of the program is to make sure that federal data is consistently protected at a high level in the cloud.

With the addition of Cloud DNS as a FedRAMP certified offering, Google is aiming to allow U.S. public sector customers to leverage a broader set of Google Cloud technologies with the assurance they’re meeting the highest level of civilian classification. Customers that wish to take advantage of the support can leverage Assured Workloads for Government, a service that allows Google Cloud Platform customers to quickly and easily create controlled environments where U.S. data location and personnel access controls are enforced.

The service also supports compliance with the U.S. Department of Defense, the Federal Bureau of Investigations Criminal Justice Information Services Division and FedRAMP High requirements. The supported compliance regimes are currently in beta testing and will be generally available later this month.

APAC protection
Google’s commitment to compliance and requirements extends beyond the U.S. to Asia-Pacific countries with Google Cloud working with various public sector agencies in the region to help them understand their compliance requirements and shared responsibilities.

In India, Google Cloud, in conjunction with India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has been audited on its conformance with the requirements of MeitY empanelment (registration) and successfully passed. In Japan, a similar process has taken place with registration for the country’s Information System Security Management and Assessment Program, a Japanese government system for assessing the security of cloud service providers to participate in public sector projects.

South to Australia, Google Cloud has obtained certification through the Australian Signals Directorate’s Information Security Registered Assessor’s Program framework, which assesses the implementation and effectiveness of an organization’s security controls against the Australian government’s security requirements.

In southeast Asia, Google has published Google Cloud GR 71 mapping to help public sector customers in Indonesia evaluate their GR 71 compliance as it relates to their use of Google Cloud services. GR 71 is a local law that regulates the activities of electronic system operators, generally defined as any person, government administrator, business entity, or member of society that provides, administers, and/or operates an electronic system individually or collectively for users. In Thailand, Google has gained compliance with the Information Security Standard for Meeting Control Systems.

In Europe, Google has also received attestations of compliance with the German Federal Office for Information Security’s Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue for GCP and Google Workspace.

“In addition to public sector compliance, we continue to maintain our industry-leading audits and certifications for customers, including recertification of our compliance against ISO/IEC 27001/27017/27018 and SOC 1/2/3,” Mike Daniels, vice president Google’s Global Public Sector, wrote in a blog post. “We also recently added Apigee certificates for BSI C5, PCI-DSS, and SOC 1/2/3, as well as the AppSheet SOC 2 report, to our self-serve portal.”

IRVINE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Ingram Micro Cloud, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Consulting Partner and AWS Distributor, today announced a new global Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with AWS. This multi-year, joint investment is geared towards accelerating the growth of AWS Partners worldwide through Ingram Micro Cloud.

During this multi-year, global agreement, Ingram Micro Cloud and AWS will accelerate initiatives to increase reach and footprint in existing geographic markets and expand into new geographic markets across EMEA, LATAM, and ASEAN countries. Ingram Micro Cloud plans to scale AWS adoption with emerging ISVs, while driving greater adoption of AWS solutions with SMB customers through the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace.

Ingram Micro Cloud expects to continue broadening relationships with Emerging and Growth System Integrator (SI) and Value-added Reseller (VAR) partners for AWS through its partner enablement and support initiatives to help AWS Partners build a healthy AWS practice leveraging Ingram Micro Cloud’s 9-step IaaS Practice Building methodology. These initiatives cover a wide range of sales enablement, practice development, technical enablement, and business and financial support services.

“In addition to further strengthening our strategic relationship with AWS, this global agreement underscores the critical imperative of the IaaS business for Ingram Micro Cloud,” said Nimesh Dave, president of Ingram Micro Cloud. “We are thrilled to collaborate with AWS in bringing our skills, services, products, and overall channel knowledge to help our partners find success with AWS at an accelerated pace.”

“We are delighted to deepen our collaboration with Ingram Micro Cloud,” said Doug Yeum, Head of Global Partner Organization at AWS. “Through this agreement and with Ingram Micro Cloud’s expanding AWS Practice and global network of channel partners, more small and medium businesses and ISVs will be able to leverage AWS services to help solve business problems and accelerate growth through digital transformation.”

Additionally, the collaboration will see both organizations work together to bolster Ingram Micro Cloud’s current skills and offerings, as well as develop new resources to support channel partners in managing end customers. Ingram Micro Cloud currently provides an AWS Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) team with over 100+ AWS certifications, AWS Professional and Managed Services, AWS Well-Architected services, Ingram’s Cloud Marketplace with access to automated go to market tools, partner programs like AWS Illuminate, AWS Operations and Billing Services, and more.

“Ingram Micro Cloud has played a key role in building and scaling our AWS business,” said Matt Huff, Principal and President at Redapt. “We don’t normally work with traditional distribution but Ingram Micro Cloud’s ability to align with us strategically and support us with our customers has made cloud distribution an absolutely critical function in the success of our AWS business.”

Ingram Micro Cloud

Ingram Micro Cloud brings together innovators and problems solvers to help the world accomplish more. It facilitates and manages the cloud’s complex digital value chain—all powered by CloudBlue technology. Ingram Micro Cloud operates in 64 countries with over 55,000 reseller partners, and its Cloud Marketplace serves 14 million seats, offering more than 120 cloud solutions. With unmatched global reach, easy access to automated go-to-market and integration tools, deep technical expertise, and a curated selection of scalable SaaS and IaaS solutions, Ingram Micro Cloud helps vendors, resellers and managed service providers by offering More as a Service

As cloud adoption rises, so does cloud “sticker shock.” That tremendous savings seen from the switch to up-front CapEx investments in information technology to subscription mode soon gets soured as the rising monthly bills come in for services nobody knows where and when they are being used.

If you feel your organization is behind the curve with automating even the most routine parts of cloud, and cloud spending is an unseen disaster waiting to happen, don’t feel so bad — even the most informed financial experts are still trying to figure these things out.

We’re talking about those who are part of a rising new discipline called “FinOps” — the practice of monitoring, measuring and mitigating the costs and value delivered from cloud. The perspectives of FinOps practitioners (yes, they are out there) provide a good look at understanding what lies ahead in cloud. Here, we see automation is still a struggle to fully attain, and cloud spending a big question mark.

These are the findings of the FinOps Foundation, a non-profit trade association focused on codifying and promoting cloud financial management best practices and standards, detailed in a recent survey of more than 800 FinOps practitioners from around the world with a collective $45 billion in annual cloud spend. “The dirty little secret of cloud spend is that the bill never really goes down,” says J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation.

The results show massive adoption of public cloud spend, and the struggle to contain and optimize cloud spend. Nearly half of survey respondents (49%) had little or no automation of managing cloud spend. Of those with some automation, almost one-third automated notifications (31%) and tagging hygiene (29%.) Only 13% automated rightsizing and 9% spot use. This “indicates that companies are likely missing opportunities to optimize cloud spend,” the survey’s authors note.

Half of compute spend on public cloud was for on-demand, the highest-price service; and 49% for reserved, savings or committed use coverage, the next-costliest option. Only 13% was for spot use, the least expensive service, even though respondents identified 28% as being an “excellent” target for that option.

Getting engineers to act on cost optimization was cited by 40% of respondents as the biggest challenge, followed by dealing with shared costs (33%) and accurate forecasting spend (26%.)

The most oft-used tools used for managing cloud costs include AWS Cost Explorer, Cloudability (Apptio), CloudHealth (VMWare), Azure Cost Management, GCP Cost Tools, and Cloudcheckr. About half, 46%, use cloud native tooling as their primary technology, 43% use a 3rd party platform, and 11% use home grown tools or spreadsheets. At the same time, many FinOps practitioners still rely on data collection, collation, and analysis via spreadsheet. Almost all practitioners use a combination of tooling, while still relying on spreadsheets for some tasks — with forecasting being the biggest Excel use.

The survey’s authors project that significant growth is ahead for FinOps, the field of cloud financial management, as more companies accelerate their cloud plans, especially amid COVID-19, and struggle to contain and optimize cloud spend. The survey respondents predicted an over 40% growth in FinOps team size in the next 12 months.

For the most part, FinOps is a part-time pursuit, and organizations need to buy into supporting efforts to monitor and manage cloud costs. Some challenges cited by respondents in the survey include the following:

Measuring real-time cost analysis between the various cloud providers.
Providing foundational education for engineering teams.
Having visualization of cloud architecture, versus cost of those parts of the infrastructure.
Facilitating robust tag enforcement, with easy ability to export cost and presentation to teams.
Enabling reporting total spend, cloud spend, service management spend and contract spend, the entire cloud spend picture.
Achieving container control, network and hardware integration at the scale and speed of cloud.”
Highlighting and fostering conversations around cloud cost management from a behavior change perspective.

VMware and Accenture have announced the launch of a business group aimed at guiding companies through their adoption of a cloud-first strategy, as part of a newly expanded partnership between the two organisations.

The Accenture VMware Business Group’s primary mission will be to encourage and accelerate migration to the cloud, build modern apps and use the cloud as a foundation for new business models. It is supported by around 2,000 Accenture cloud professionals trained in VMware services.

The move represents a multi-million dollar investment from both companies, which have a relationship spanning more than two decades.

“Cloud is the single most powerful tool for mastering change,” says Accenture CEO Julie Sweet.

“As organisations accelerate their move to the cloud and edge over the next few years, the Accenture VMware Business Group will help deliver the speed, scale and security they need to fundamentally reinvent their businesses and create more value.”

The new business group will make several new investments: training more Accenture employees in VMware tech, developing new service offerings based on VMware solutions, and go-to-market and sales operations. The two companies will also develop pre-engineered vertical industry solutions, including a platform to help telecommunications companies accelerate the rollout of 5G and edge computing services.

“To meet the demands of today’s unprecedented business environment, organisations must employ a multi-cloud strategy – more rapidly than ever before,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

“Increasingly, customers are running their applications on one or more clouds, data centres and the edge and the Accenture VMware Business Group will bring together the world-class teams and expertise required, with the speed, agility, and resilience that organisations demand, today and tomorrow.”

Another development stemming from the Accenture VMware Business Group is the launch of a specialised VMware Cloud Migration Factory to migrate computing workloads to the cloud. The VMware Cloud Migration Factory will give clients access to resources to plan, test, migrate and modernise applications at scale to their preferred cloud.

“The pandemic brought about a new ‘next normal’ for organisations, one where they need to accelerate their use of cloud to modernise the business and serve as a foundation for innovation,” said Rick Villars, group vice president of worldwide research, IDC.

“They recognise that public, private and hybrid cloud all play a critical role in this transition and they require technology cloud partners and service providers who are able to execute the strategies and provide the skills needed to drive this transformation faster than ever before.”

Anchore, the leading providers of continuous security and compliance for containers, has announced an integration with GitLab, the complete DevSecOps platform, delivered as a single application. With this integration, organizations will be able to automate security and compliance checks from the early stages of the development cycle, speeding software development and reducing risks. Anchore also announces it has joined the GitLab partner program.

Anchore now integrates seamlessly with GitLab to simplify security and compliance workflows for developers and to enable DevSecOps practices. Anchore performs deep container image scanning that identifies vulnerabilities and surfaces a wide range of security and policy infractions, including vulnerabilities and other risks during development. Together, the Anchore and GitLab security integrations will:

Display vulnerability results of container scans directly in GitLab security dashboards
Surface these findings in merge requests that identify changes needed to remediate issues
Enable updating of merge requests with a package version to resolve vulnerabilities
Seamlessly manage the risk profile in one place through GitLab’s Risk Management Framework (RMF), reducing the friction of typical software security scanning

Digital transformation has changed software development practices as organizations seek to deliver applications more quickly and update them more frequently. This shift, combined with increasing cybersecurity threats, requires developers to implement security and compliance checks throughout the DevSecOps life cycle. The integration between Anchore and GitLab helps to automate these DevSecOps best practices for enterprises, government agencies, and open source communities,” said Saïd Ziouani, Anchore CEO and Cofounder.

“Strengthening the software development security and compliance postures of enterprises and public sector organizations is paramount to the missions of both GitLab and Anchore. We are pleased to partner through this integration to help our joint customers to increase their speed to mission delivery and to reduce the risks associated with software development,” said GitLab Vice-President of Global Channels, Michelle Hodges.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) uses both Anchore and GitLab as part of their Platform One Initiative to speed the development of secure and compliant software. Anchore is used to develop hardened containers for Iron Bank (DoD’s software repository for containers) based on DoD best practices.

“Today, more than ever before, security is the most essential aspect of software development for government and critical infrastructure—and is the core of the DoD DevSecOps Initiative and Platform One. Now developers have the ability to push validated code into production on an ongoing basis, resulting in shorter development cycles, less debugging, and more rapid feature development,” said Major Robert Slaughter, Director of DoD Platform One.