SAS has been named a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms for the eighth year in a row.

The report analysed vendors based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. It states, “To achieve fully mature, advanced analytic capabilities, organisations must plan for and invest in the end-to-end data science life cycle.

“The lifecycle includes processes for accessing and transforming data, conducting analysis and building analytic models, operationalising and embedding models, managing and monitoring models over time to reassess their relevancy, and adjusting models to reflect changes in the data and business environment.”

According to SAS, its position as a leader is thanks to its Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning platform, which is a visual and programming interface build on the SAS Viya engine.

The company states that SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning supports users of all skill levels to conduct end-to-end data mining and machine learning processes, so that they can handle all tasks in the analytics lifecycle in a way that is simple and automated.

The SAS Viya Platform, which is cloud-native software that enables organisations to leverage analytics, was released in February. The company says the platform is designed for continuous delivery and updates.

“SAS Viya helps organisations see their data, customers and operations in new ways that encourage confident decision making,” explains SAS CEO and founder Jim Goodnight.

“Organisations expect to accelerate innovation and reduce costs when they operationalize analytics.”

The company says that SAS Viya provides the missing layer between models developed in multiple languages and the systems where they’re deployed, eliminating the need for time-consuming recoding to deploy models.

At launch, SAS Viya was made available on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, building on the companies’ strategic partnership announced last year.

Microsoft vice president of global ISV sales, Casey McGee, says the innovation will provide customer experience and analytics that can enable businesses to make decisions faster.

“The partnership we have with SAS has helped our customers accelerate growth and expand their digital transformation initiatives,” says McGee.

SAS AI strategist Susan Kahler adds, “Across the globe, organisations are aspiring to operationalise analytics and accelerate artificial intelligence adoption to facilitate better, more intelligent business decisions.”

“SAS advanced analytic solutions, which offer innate integrations with popular open source tools, give users at all levels of an organisation access to agile, powerful advanced machine learning to help master the complex data that’s in cloud environments.”

With the UK in the midst of its third lockdown of the last twelve months, the enforced shift to remote learning has been a learning curve for schools, universities and other education providers, with teachers and students now required to access course materials and administrative documents via digital means. It has shown just how essential digital solutions are to creating a successful learning environment online.

Additionally, continued advances in the education sector mean that it’s an industry generating huge troves of data. The data produced is vast and varied: from research data to digitised library assets, student and faculty information, and video assets. As institutions continue to operate remotely, the scale of data is increasing rapidly.

The changing landscape of education requires that students and staff become more data literate. It also means that IT departments need to develop a comprehensive data management strategy for planning and implementing increasingly data-intensive education systems – one that’s efficient, compliant, and doesn’t cost the earth.

Keep your data secure
As data proliferates, one of the biggest demands for educational institutions is how to store their data cheaply and in a way that is easily and quickly accessible from everywhere.

Unless checked, organisations can easily lose control of where data is stored and how it is used. This can especially become a problem where IT security policy is concerned, so it is worth enforcing system wide protocols such as two-factor authentication to protect data against potential breaches from external threats or insiders.

A backup and disaster recovery solution is also essential. Here I’d advise adopting the ‘3-2-1 rule’ in association with cloud backups: keeping three copies of your data on at least two different formats with one copy offsite is also a good strategy. Should something happen to the primary copies of your data, your copies in the cloud will remain unaffected and will enable you to get back up to speed with little business impact. Moreover, a good storage provider should offer immutable buckets – a means of storage which renders contents fixed and unchangeable according to the minimum data immutability standards, to guard against accidental alterations or deletions.

Keep costs down
Given the growth in digital data, educational institutions are consuming far more storage space than they did a few years ago. In addition to student records and digital coursework, it’s increasingly common for institutions to need to store video lectures and other supplementary materials. Some universities have even created entire digital libraries and archives from offline resources that are accessible online to students and staff to bolster their offerings to students, teachers and faculty members.

When dealing with the petabytes of data generated by educational institutions, primary, on-prem storage can quickly eat up the IT budget as you keep needing to store more data. Cloud storage takes advantage of economies of scale, providing the ability to dynamically scale resources up or down as required, and is therefore a more cost-effective option for universities looking to store and access their data in a way that’s fast and easy to access.

However, that’s not to say all cloud storage solutions are equally economical. Many first-generation cloud providers, like Amazon or Google, don’t just charge customers based on the amount of data stored, but charge extra for accessing the data. This could quickly prove problematic for universities, if faculty members need frequent access to files. Fortunately, not all storage providers work on these models – a number of second generation services operate on all-you-can eat data models without any surprises in the form of egress fees.

IT decision makers should act as their own managed service providers (MSPs) – offering support for multiple cloud services, rather than being the gatekeepers of one provider. Rather than relying on outside MSPs to help them set up networks, provision compute resources, recommend and implement software, and so forth, education IT departments should play an active role in considering staff and student needs internally to help them choose the right solutions and avoid incompatible and fragmented services.

Embrace the hybrid cloud
Adopting a hybrid cloud approach can give you the ability to flexibly scale up on existing on-premises legacy systems. This approach enables you to keep on hand a larger amount of storage whilst relieving the stress on IT teams by moving some applications into public clouds.

With a hybrid cloud solution, IT decision makers can optimise infrastructure to meet a plethora of needs and diverse workload requirements. For example, there are applications that require rapid deployment and/or rapid scaling which are a better fit for public cloud. Other systems such as HR can be moved to a software as-a-service (SaaS) model to free up storage and on-prem capacities. With hybrid cloud, educational systems can dynamically shift workloads between on and off-premises environments based on specific performance, regulatory needs or for specific periods of time.

A hybrid cloud approach is also useful from a security perspective and can help combat the “shadow IT” problem. Key systems containing sensitive student and school data can remain in-house and behind an educational organisation’s firewall to safeguard student privacy and meet compliance regulations, whilst employees can be empowered to use public clouds for different use cases as appropriate.

There’s no doubt that the pandemic has showcased the importance of transitioning an organisation’s infrastructure to a cloud-centric approach, something that’s been recommended as far back as 2019 by the UK’s Department for Education. Today, educators can see huge benefits from adopting next-generation cloud technologies, and the transition needn’t be costly nor complex – and to protect the future of remote learning and collaboration, it’s no longer a want, but a need.

In a power packed ‘AWS CXO’ panel that saw participation of Sourabh Chatterjee, President and Head – IT, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Co, Balkrishna Singhania, EVP and Head – Digital, HDFC Life and Manish Verma, CTO, SonyLiv agreed on a common view that cloud computing is the most important technology for their digital transformations during the past five years.

The session was chaired by Puneet Chandok, President – Commercial Business, Amazon Internet Services Private Limited, AWS India and South Asia.

In his opening remark Chatterjee of Bajaj Allianz said, “At Bajaj Allianz we decided to move our core policy admin platform to a public cloud, and this is easier said than done, because we needed top-down commitment and other approvals, and we were fortunate to have that. So for us, agility and future-readiness was the primary driver of digital transformation. From a pure tech standpoint, besides the infra and provisioning, more importantly, we had clearly defined the business outcomes for each of the areas of transformation. I think the thing that worked for us and we’re just still working on, is a variable cost model, and the Covid pandemic times proved that fixed infra and high capex is not needed.”

Sharing SonyLiv’s story of digital transformation, Verma said, “We started our transformation journey sometime in December last year, and we put an aggressive target for ourselves to relaunch our application with the revised product and content positioning in the next four-five months. So you can imagine what it takes to launch 20 different applications across 20 different platforms. And we also had content in different types – GEC audience content is more organic, as compared to sports and live sports content with cricket and football, where we see spikes in traffic, and having a reliable tech backend and cloud infrastructure hence becomes important. To address these different types of traffic pattern and consumer behaviour, we had to use a reliable tech platform and ensure we were able to offer a seamless consumer experience across 20 different platforms. Since we launched, we have seen a 5x increase in subscription traffic and a 70-80 per cent increase in the traffic for content consumption.”

Highlighting the cloud journey of HDFC Life, Balkrishna Singhania stated, “We setup a separate team that focused on developing applications solely on the cloud. At some part earlier this year, as a part of our migration of our infrastructure. We did a ‘lift and shift’ of our core applications from on premise machines to the cloud, with the whole idea that if we wanted to be cloud-native and digital-native, we couldn’t afford to build patch-up systems where some part of it is on the cloud, and some cloud system is talking to on premise machines for data, and so on. Insurance is more B2B2C business than a B2C business. Enabling our partners was important – having our API installed in our partners’ systems, to enable them to query our systems for a particular customer, could become seamless with the cloud.”

The CIOs also shared their challenges and experiences during the pandemic. Responding to the big business focus area that tech and cloud will enable or drive in 2021, Chatterjee shared, “For us, it’s very clear the data and analytics piece, and all the modeling that we are doing around fraud, retention propensity, the entire claims experience, I think, across the value chain, anything that is data and insights. And I will be careful in using the term ‘analytics’, because in a lot of areas we use analysis and we incorrectly call it analytics, but the idea is, cloud will enable the entire data and insights as a capability within the organisation. This is something big for us and will be driven by the cloud.”

For SonyLiv, the focus is on harnessing the use of data. “We as an organisation, are digital and are using data in each and every decision that we make, whether it is on the infrastructure side, content programming, content production, churn analysis, retention – everywhere. I think it is all about data and democratisation of the data. We are working big time on introducing some of the prediction models, machine learning models, which can help us to retain users. So, I think data is going to play a critical role. The other area which I feel we as a business, is on the OTT side. As we have seen that especially cricket in India, each match is a new benchmark,” Verma highlighted.

Lastly, Singhania of HDFC Life mentioned, “Focus on making our applications intelligent is the next big thing, so data and analytics definitely comes there. And as a company where you have multiple touch points with customers, being able to take all the pieces of information and what customers need, where they need it, how they need it, and being able to give them in a nice and intelligent fashion, is the key according to me. When you add to technology a recommendation engine, propensity models, etc., you can make the systems intelligent. Making a lot of our systems intelligent is the key for us.”

Sharing some of the best practices for the Indian counterparts of BFSI sector, Chandok highlighted, “AWS work globally, and we’re the world’s largest and most broadly adopted cloud platform, including in financial services. And globally, we’ve got Capital One, Intuit, HSBC, Barclays – many large organizations building and scaling upon the cloud. And there’s a real network effect to this. And that’s the beauty of a cloud platform like AWS, where some of the largest organisations, not just enterprises, but even startups, small and medium businesses, government organizations are building on it and everything they build, you are able to democratize that and bring that to all your customers. The best practices very quickly get democratized, and we learn from each other. “

He also reiterated that, “India is leading from the front on this right. And you can see this in this conversation, two of the largest insurance in the country, are thinking big and bold and moving fast onto the cloud and leveraging it. And not just in financial services, virtually every vertical business segment today is being reinvented by the cloud, due to its cost effective, functionalities.”

Today, many companies are facing a strong push towards the cloud, especially in light of this year’s events. However, organisations are often finding that the pure-play public cloud is not the panacea that they thought it would be.

In practice, they find that they have to juggle working across multiple public cloud providers, along with their own private cloud solutions. In particular, the growing need to put computational capacity near the edge has spurred many companies to realise that they require more than a simple pure-play public or private cloud and instead need to embrace a hybrid cloud environment.

The hybrid cloud is well suited for the complex and often messy world of today’s business operations, as it allows businesses to harness the benefits of public, private and on-premises capabilities.

However, in virtue of the fact that a hybrid environment potentially has to integrate and coordinate public, private and on-premise components, it also happens to be a much more complex infrastructure for teams to manage than a pure-play public or private cloud.

To ensure that the constituent parts of a hybrid cloud interface can communicate with one another, many IT teams will need technical training know-how. However, to make the hybrid cloud work in the long run, teams often also need to be trained in an entirely new way of thinking.

A DevOps culture may be essential to delivering on the promise of the hybrid cloud, and it’s crucial to cultivate it among a team and secure buy-in. So, what is a DevOps culture, how does it relate to the hybrid cloud, and what can you do to help educate and train your team in adopting it?

The DevOps paradigm
Adopting the hybrid cloud should coincide with a transition to DevOps. That is, the combining of development and operations teams within an organisation, and automating the processes that traditionally occur between these teams.

DevOps lends itself well to the hybrid cloud because it helps ensure IT teams can rapidly adapt and change their application delivery so as to reflect developments in hardware, software and best architectural practices that affect their public and private infrastructure and the way business applications are delivered.

The efficiency that comes with DevOps is particularly fitting for a hybrid cloud context. According to a 2016 report, DevOps teams experience 200 times more deployments, 2,555 times faster lead times, and spend 22pc less time redoing work.

These improvements drive a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, which sees multiple teams of developers continually iterate on software in parallel, which cuts down on errors and further speeds up deployment time. And so, a virtuous cycle is created, where efficiencies among the team adopting DevOps drive up CI/CD, which in turn increases the team’s efficiency.

The transition to DevOps – including educating and securing buy-in for it – will be somewhat disruptive, as it means ending the siloed processes that some team members have grown accustomed to.

However, the result is that you have a team that is much better prepared to deal with changes in the technology behind your public, private and on-premises facilities. This will bolster your resilience in the face of disruptions or sudden changes, while also meaning that iterations and improvements in your services and infrastructure are far more efficiently delivered.

Bringing in new technologies with DevOps
Transitioning to DevOps drives adoption of new technologies and architectural designs, such as microservices, to assist in the automation of processes and speed up the iteration time it takes to deliver new services.

Dismantling monolithic applications and breaking them down into constituent microservices helps create a common language and set of tools between development and operations teams, which will prove vital for handling the complex environment of the hybrid cloud.

This is in addition to all the other new technical know-how that has to be done to make a hybrid cloud transition work, so a well-developed training programme should be developed in conjunction with vendors that know the hybrid cloud and have worked with many other teams who’ve made this transition.

Approaching the culture of DevOps
As much as DevOps is a set of processes and systems, it’s also a new cultural paradigm. Taking culture seriously and changing it where appropriate is a virtual prerequisite for DevOps – many organisations that try to switch to DevOps without changing their culture and structure will fail.

Organisations need to open up communications between teams, and encourage them to harmonise their processes. This relies on encouraging the free flow of information among teams so they can break down their silos and adjust to frequent collaboration with one another.

When it comes to helping teams break down the silos for DevOps, the best place to start is encouraging your development and operations teams to see how the other works. Encourage your developers to spend a few days working with the operations team, learning the processes they go through and watching a production roll-out.

Then encourage your operations team to take stock of how many steps or service tickets it takes for a developer to request a new virtual system, so they have a realistic appraisal of how easy it is for developers to build or tweak new systems. This process will help both teams understand how the other works in situ and see outside of their particular silos.

When it comes to adopting the hybrid cloud, the DevOps transition is one that has to be approached through taking incremental steps. Throughout this process, educating and training your teams to make this change should always be framed in terms of the benefits it provides to them – quicker deployments, fewer errors and a more resilient infrastructure.

Securing buy-in throughout this process relies on making sure that they have the confidence that after the disruption of the transition, the infrastructure that they’re working on will be more robust than ever. When it comes to making the leap to the world of the hybrid cloud, your team will likely ultimately find that the DevOps culture that you’ve inculcated hasn’t just improved service delivery for end users, but it has also made the IT team’s lives much easier.

DevOps is a set of practices that looks to combine and automate the processes between software development and operational teams during an application life cycle.

Although the current DevOps mindset is certainly an improvement on the traditional method of software development where the development and operations teams were kept separate, it could still do with an upgrade to ensure the best outcomes for businesses.

As the tech industry constantly experiences changes and developments, we must also always be on the lookout for ways to improve methods and ensure rapid results. The main problem with DevOps is that there is a lack of focus on security, which can cause disruptions in the process of developing and deploying applications. The next step towards increasing efficiency throughout an application lifecycle is to include security throughout this process, thereby adopting a DevSecOps approach.

DevSecOps combines development, security and operations and puts heavy emphasis on security checks throughout the development process. The inclusion of security throughout the process has become a great asset in a world where cyber threats are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated.

Putting the security into DevOps
Businesses will only gain from the incorporation of security into the process if they take the necessary steps to implement the models in the right way. Although security has always been a vital stage in the development process, its position within the current DevOps framework presents flaws and can hinder the overall process. In order to deliver high level security decisions and actions, adopting a DevSecOps mindset should be a main priority for CISOs.

Indeed, operating in the current DevOps approach means evaluating security in the final stages, often as an afterthought. Security was separate from development which created the potential for last minute issues that would delay processes and, as a result, delay the release of an application. It is now clear that security needs to be the focus of all departments as an ongoing consideration throughout the process. This reduces the chance of costly risks during the application building process. The shift to DevSecOps will allow unity in the workflow and shared responsibility of security, both of which will enable the faster delivery of applications.

Shifting mindsets
How this is managed will differ between organisations. Change management in DevSecOps is inherently more difficult, as it involves integrating each individual contributor, rather than just looking to one team, to reach a shared mindset. The role of security management cannot be left in its entirety to the cloud provider or the security team. Instead, the CISO should look to create a culture and strategy of vigilance towards security issues and requirements across all of the teams.

To create the necessary culture of unity, leaders must take the time to retrain their teams and educate them on the methods and benefits of shifting to a DevSecOps mindset. In order to effectively implement the changes, the team must be aware of the why, as well as the what. This will create a cohesive process, producing better results for the application. It would be detrimental to simply implement the tools and changes as a way of saving time, teams must be able to ask questions and be given time to understand the shift.

Additionally, ensuring that developers are educated about cybersecurity helps to avoid instances where hackers deploy malware within the building stage of the process, and it goes unnoticed. Giving the developers part of the responsibility for security will increase the chances of these problems being spotted early on in the application life cycle. It will also give them more time and control to analyse and defend against potential cybersecurity risks.

The move from DevOps to DevSecOps will require the CISO to engage and educate the teams so that there is complete co-operation and understanding of the change. This will ensure a unified environment where the benefits of the DevSecOps mindset will be reached enabling efficiency in implementing cloud native development to deliver high standard applications.

SAP and Microsoft have launched a new partnership that will see the pair enabling their customers to design and operate intelligent digital supply chain and Industry 4.0 solutions in the cloud and at the edge.

The partnership builds on an existing agreement between the two companies and will have a significant impact in the supply chain and manufacturing sectors.

“SAP is excited to bring our proven and innovative solutions to Microsoft Azure for our manufacturing and digital supply chain customers,” said Franz Hero, SAP Senior Vice President for Digital Supply Chain Solutions.

“This partnership gives our customers the ability to subscribe to our digital supply chain and manufacturing solutions in the cloud and enhances our offerings for Industry 4.0. Building on this, SAP solutions will soon be available at the edge in factories, plants, and automated warehouses in close proximity to sensors, machines, and control systems.”

Businesses and enterprises will now be able to use a comprehensive set of SAP Digital Supply Chain solutions on Microsoft Azure, including SAP solutions for digital manufacturing, SAP Intelligent Asset Management solutions, SAP Integrated Business Planning, and SAP Logistics Business Network.

Mobile edge and cloud computing technologies are set to play a starring role in the evolution of the logistic and supply chain sectors.

A recent report, published by IDC claimed that 70% of IoT deployments by 2023 will include edge-based decision-making to support organisations’ operational and strategic agendas. The report also states that by “2023, 70% of enterprises will run varying levels of data processing at the IoT edge. In tandem, organisations will spend over $16 billion on IoT edge infrastructure in that time.”

Thales has announced a new collaboration with Google Cloud that will accelerate the ability of enterprises to safely migrate sensitive data between public cloud, hybrid and private IT infrastructures.

Together, the two companies will offer new capabilities that enable security teams to own and control their encryption keys while helping to fulfill heightened regulatory requirements amidst today’s highly-distributed workforce.

Building on a multi-year history of innovation around a variety of cloud security initiatives, Thales and Google Cloud will now empower customers to leverage the full potential of Google Cloud technology for sensitive workloads while gaining the external key management needed to control and secure data across hybrid cloud IT environments.

Securing the new IT frontier

This collaboration marks a significant moment for organisations to finally seize full control of their data and encryption keys, especially as they pursue hybrid, multi-cloud strategies. Addressing both private and public cloud environments, Thales and Google Cloud will provide a turnkey solution that manages, brokers and stores encryption keys completely controlled by the customer, effectively enabling companies to move data assets to the cloud with confidence. As uncovered in the Thales 2020 Data Threat Report-Global Edition, this is increasingly becoming more critical as greater than half of the world’s corporate data – of which 48% is sensitive – is stored in the cloud.

“New capabilities are critical to cloud migration and security, especially with such accelerated growth in this area,” said Sunil Potti, VP and GM of Google Cloud Security. “True to our mission, we have forged this deeper relationship with Thales to further protect our customer’s most sensitive information. Companies of all shapes and sizes are dealing with an extremely fluid and dynamic business environment where even the best lines of defence are constantly being battle tested. Together with Thales, we acknowledge the current set of circumstances and remain vigilant to provide customers with the most advanced solutions that address today’s cybersecurity needs as well as those that are emerging on the horizon.”

This collaboration greatly simplifies the security of moving to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and edge-cloud environments – a journey more companies are making today to address the post-pandemic remote world.

According to 451 Research, 62% of enterprises today are pursuing a hybrid IT strategy. In addition, by working with Thales to handle application and data security in the cloud, Google Cloud customers can now maintain strong data sovereignty with encryption key visibility and lifecycle management. Customers also can address heightened regulatory requirements stemming from recent data and privacy regulations.

“Our collaboration with Google Cloud truly embodies the technology leadership needed to place the control of data directly into the hands of our customers,” said Sebastien Cano, SVP for Cloud Protection and Licensing at Thales. “Companies no longer need to put their sensitive data in untrusted environments and relinquish control of their coveted encryption keys. It has become abundantly clear that an evolution in data protection is taking place at a global level as security professionals work together to build a shared-responsibility security model between enterprise customers and providers. With this joint innovation effort, we’re supporting organisations as they move to the cloud with confidence.”

The cloud is becoming an increasing part of our lives, integrated throughout many aspects. Our phones sync photos of family and friends with the cloud, as well as an ever growing list of contacts.

Gaming consoles ensure that we don’t lose achievements from the hours spent. Even in offices, our software offers the option to back up to the cloud.

This technology is capable of so much more than simply providing backup – it is driving digital transformation, economic growth and job creation. The cloud has become an essential tool for organisations of all shapes and sizes, from government to corporate, from conglomerate to startups.

Not only that, the cloud is accessible for all and considerably more cost effective than on-site data centres, with the ability to scale up and scale down according to need – and thus suitable for every size of business and budget.

At tipping point
Spending on traditional, non-cloud, IT infrastructure is on the decline but still accounts for the majority – 57.2 per cent – of total spending on IT infrastructure. There are a number of benefits to utilizing the cloud, including the ability to scale up and scale down, which provides a cost-effective solution.

However, the benefits are so much beyond initial investment as a solid RoI (return on investment) is provided in a variety of areas.

With increasing complexity of local data residency and governance – as the region increasingly becomes a mature market – businesses of all shapes and sizes can meet compliance needs in a cost-effective manner. What’s more, the cloud can achieve the broadest compliance, security, privacy and certification standards with the most effective prevention and mitigation measures in the industry.

The cloud has applications for every level as it drives digital transformation for governments, organizations and startups, enabling them to better engage their customers, empower employees, optimize operations and transform their products and services.

view
During the course of this year, we have seen how remote work has been enabled by the cloud, with communication apps and remote capability of devices providing an office from home. We’ve also seen how frontline workers have kept hospitals up and running and staffed grocery stores’ engage in curb-side pick-ups

The cloud has better connected these workers with corporate offices, digitize manual processes, equipping them with the right devices, and all on a foundation of security.

This technology provides an empowering capability, accelerating innovation by enabling companies to adopt AI, machine learning and other innovative technologies. This provides an in-reach option for start-ups and SMEs, providing increased competitiveness.

Instant connection
The cloud also enables organizations to immediately connect with IT resources. With the data centre migrated out, there is no need to wait for hardware deployment or procurement as this is part of the cloud service.

In the UAE there are now two Microsoft Cloud data centers, which integrate into a broader network across more than 60 regions. This is greatly aiding the entrepreneurial spirit that has long driven forward the UAE business environment, driving digital transformation, economic growth and job creation.

More customers in the Middle East can move with confidence to the cloud. We have particularly seen this come to light during the pandemic, where many businesses have experienced a response and recovery journey, with a first taste of cloud technology through business continuity.

Businesses will find they become even more competitive as they continue a digital transformation journey to reimagine their ways of working and empowered by the cloud.

Thales announced a new collaboration with Google Cloud that will accelerate the ability of enterprises to safely migrate sensitive data between public cloud, hybrid and private IT infrastructures.

Together, the two companies will offer new capabilities that enable security teams to own and control their encryption keys while helping to fulfill heightened regulatory requirements amidst today’s highly-distributed workforce.

Building on a multi-year history of innovation around a variety of cloud security initiatives, Thales and Google Cloud will now empower customers to leverage the full potential of Google Cloud technology for sensitive workloads while gaining the external key management needed to control and secure data across hybrid cloud IT environments.

This collaboration marks a significant moment for organisations to finally seize full control of their data and encryption keys, especially as they pursue hybrid, multi-cloud strategies. Addressing both private and public cloud environments, Thales and Google Cloud will provide a turnkey solution that manages, brokers and stores encryption keys completely controlled by the customer, effectively enabling companies to move data assets to the cloud with confidence.

As uncovered in the Thales 2020 Data Threat Report-Global Edition, this is increasingly becoming more critical as greater than half of the world’s corporate data – of which 48% is sensitive – is stored in the cloud.

“New capabilities are critical to cloud migration and security, especially with such accelerated growth in this area,” said Sunil Potti, VP and GM of Google Cloud Security. “True to our mission, we’ve forged this deeper relationship with Thales to further protect our customer’s most sensitive information. Companies of all shapes and sizes are dealing with an extremely fluid and dynamic business environment where even the best lines of defence are constantly being battle tested. Together with Thales, we acknowledge the current set of circumstances and remain vigilant to provide customers with the most advanced solutions that address today’s cybersecurity needs as well as those that are emerging on the horizon.”

This collaboration greatly simplifies the security of moving to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and edge-cloud environments – a journey more companies are making today to address the post-pandemic remote world. According to 451 Research, 62% of enterprises today are pursuing a hybrid IT strategy.

In addition, by working with Thales to handle application and data security in the cloud, Google Cloud customers can now maintain strong data sovereignty with encryption key visibility and lifecycle management. Customers also can address heightened regulatory requirements stemming from recent data and privacy regulations.

“Our collaboration with Google Cloud truly embodies the technology leadership needed to place the control of data directly into the hands of our customers,” said Sebastien Cano, SVP for Cloud Protection & Licensing at Thales. “Companies no longer need to put their sensitive data in untrusted environments and relinquish control of their coveted encryption keys. It has become abundantly clear that an evolution in data protection is taking place at a global level as security professionals work together to build a shared-responsibility security model between enterprise customers and providers. With this joint innovation effort, we’re supporting organisations as they move to the cloud with confidence.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has ‘extended its strategic relationship’ with videoconferencing provider Zoom, casting doubt on the latter’s dealings with Oracle.

Amid the plethora of announcements which have come out of re:Invent, AWS’ major annual event, this week, the news that Zoom is using AWS as its preferred cloud provider flew somewhat under the radar.

AWS made the point that Zoom had been a customer since 2011, with the companies ‘collaborating to develop new solutions for Zoom’s enterprise users, leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS to integrate Zoom services with Amazon devices and capabilities to make it easier for organisations to run hybrid office and remote work models’, in the words of the press materials.

One of the biggest tech stories around the Covid-19 pandemic was how Zoom had seized the zeitgeist and become the de facto conferencing platform. In June, Synergy Research found that the company had caused a spike in the wider conferencing software as a service (SaaS) market virtually on its own.

To accommodate the anticipated uptake as lockdowns hit, the two companies’ engineers added ‘tens of thousands’ of EC2 instances, according to AWS. Alongside this, the company has used Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops to help with the increased demand for helpdesk support, as well as integrating Zoom video meetings into Amazon Alexa-enabled smart displays to aim for more seamless integration between home and office working.

“Covid-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe, and AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight,” said Andy Jassy, AWS CEO in a statement.

This news comes as something of a contrast with an announcement made by Oracle Cloud in April. Seen at the time as a major coup, the company said Zoom had selected it for requiring immediate additional cloud capacity with Oracle’s second-generation infrastructure ‘helping Zoom scale to continue to deliver flawless service to its customer base.’

SAS has now brought its SAS Cloud platform to Australia, with the help of Microsoft Azure.

Customers in Australia and the wider region can now access SAS Cloud on Azure in Sydney, meaning that cloud tools such as analytics and artificial intelligence are closer to home than ever before.

“Australian organisations are increasingly aware of the power of data, analytics and AI to support their people, to deliver exceptional customer experiences and to ensure businesses thrive and succeed,” comments Microsoft Australia chief partner officer Rachel Bondi.

“Our partnership with SAS and the establishment of the SAS Cloud on Azure streamlines access to this capability for local organisations and we are delighted to partner on this initiative.”

The announcement follows the formation of a global partnership between SAS and Microsoft, which was announced in June 2020. The partnership focuses on promoting Microsoft Azure as the preferred SAS Cloud provider.

According to SAS, Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) is a strong market for SAS Cloud, which demonstrate strong local demand for cloud services.

SAS Australia and New Zealand region vice president Lynette Clunies-Ross says that the combination of SAS and Microsoft could underpin a new ‘operating system’ for digital transformation.

“It represents a tangible local investment in the global strategic partnership when coupled with the establishment of our SAS Cloud Centre of Excellence in Sydney to serve Australia and the Asia Pacific region”.

Further, Clunies-Ross adds that the local commitment means that customers and partners can be confident that they have access to the tools they need to continue their digital transformation initiatives.

Clunies-Ross was appointed as SAS’ A/NZ region vice president just this month. She was previously SAS A/NZ chief operating officer before leaving in 2017, and she has now rejoined the company.

“I am thrilled to re-join SAS as the region vice president in Australia and New Zealand, passionate about SAS’ mission to make it easier for more people to use powerful analytics every day, and to inspire bold new discoveries that drive progress,” she says.

“As we move into 2021, our focus is supporting organisations with their cloud-based digital transformations, as well as continuing to bolster our Academic Outreach Program where we connect corporates with academia and learning resources to help democratise and educate executives on AI and analytics technology.”

“As the lifeblood of businesses, it’s important in-house teams are deepening their knowledge of innovative analytics software and services, so they can work with their IT partners to fully maximise their data,” concludes Clunies-Ross.

Patch management is far easier said than done, and security teams may often be forced into prioritising fixes for several business-critical systems, all released at once. It’s become typical, for example, to expect dozens of patches to be released on Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, with other vendors also routinely getting in on the act.

Below, IT Pro has collated the most pressing disclosures from the last seven days, including details such as a summary of the exploit mechanism, and whether the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild. This is in order to give teams a sense of which bugs and flaws might pose the most dangerous immediate security risks.

Zero-day flaws in multiple VMware products
VMware has warned customers about a critical command injection flaw in a number of its products, including Workspace One Access and Identity Manager, for which a patch is not currently available.
The critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-4006, could allow hackers to take control of vulnerable machines if successfully exploited. To do so, they would need to be armed with network access to the administrative configurator on port 8443, as well as a valid password to the admin account.

With a patch still in development, VMware has outlined a workaround that can be applied to some product lines, but not all. Potentially affected customers should consult the security advisory and follow the steps outlined to safeguard their systems.

Facebook Messenger calling bug
Facebook patched a vulnerability in its widely-used Messenger app for Android that could have allowed a remote attacker to call targets and listen to them before they picked up an audio call.

Discovered by Google’s Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich, the flaw could have granted an attacker logged into the app the ability to initiate a call and send a specially crafted message to targets signed into multiple devices. This would trigger a scenario where, when the device is ringing, the caller would receive audio either until the person being called answers, or the call times out.

The bug lay in the WebRTC framework Session Description Protocol (SDP), which defines a format for the streaming of media between two endpoints, and has since been fixed.

GitHub patches severe three-month-old flaw
The development platform GitHub has released a fix for a bug that was first reported more than three months ago by Google’s Project Zero security research team.

The flaw, which Google argues is highly-severe but GitHub insists is moderately-severe, affected the developer workflow automation tool, known as Actions. This was highly susceptible to injection attacks, according to researcher Felix Wilhelm, and GitHub finally addressed the bug by disabling the feature’s runner commends.

Remarkably, Google first informed GitHub of the flaw in August, but held back on publishing details in accordance with its 90-day disclosure policy. Google then granted GitHub a further 14-day grace period in which to fix the flaw, before finally revealing its existence on 2 November. Although GitHub requested an additional 48 hours, this was denied, and the details were published. The bug was subsequently patched on 16 November.

Warnings over MobileIron Android vulnerability
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned businesses about a vulnerability that can compromise the networks of UK organisations if successfully exploited.

Tagged as CVE-2020-15505, the remote code execution flaw affects the MobileIron Core and Connector software, which forms the company’s mobile device management (MDM) suite. It also affected the Monitor and Reporting Database software.

Although a patch was released in June 2020, organisations that haven’t updated their systems might be vulnerable to attack. Nation-state hackers have been attempting to exploit the vulnerability since the publication of a proof-of-concept exploit in September, according to the NCSC.

2FA brute-force bypass flaw on cPanel
The cPanel & WebHost Manager (WHM) web hosting platform contained a vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to effectively bypass the two-factor authentication (2FA) mechanism.

The now-fixed 2FA cPanel Security Policy inadvertently allowed users to repeatedly submit 2FA codes, essentially allowing attackers to bypass the 2FA check using brute force techniques. Although user credentials were required to gain access to the 70 million sites hosted on the platform, the exploit still bypassed a crucial additional layer of security that many users rely on. To fix the situation, incorrect 2FA codes are now treated as the equivalent of a failed password validation attempt.

Every successful company needs a scalable infrastructure that can support complex functions, faster delivery of time-sensitive information, data transformation, and visibility on all data that flows in and out of their ecosystems. Hence major businesses across verticals are now adopting the cloud.

In the past decade, digitalisation has moved and skyrocketed in new and unexpected directions. As digital technologies are shaping industries, enterprises are pursuing these measures to drive business goals and gain a competitive edge. The cloud has been the most significant disruption in the technology space with adoptions accelerating at breakneck speeds. The adoption of cloud services is influenced mainly by essential components like internet connectivity coverage, latency & cost, and policies pertaining to data storage on the cloud. It also offers unmatched flexibility in resource utilisation and scalability. Interconnections offering low latency and downtimes have now become the keys to success.

Maintaining data within the confines of the office space and behind a firewall was the traditional and only offering available to organisations until a few years ago. However, critical industries like banking, healthcare, government, manufacturing, retail, tech, customer servicing, etc. are now moving to the cloud due to avoid the high costs involved in building, maintaining, and raising those facilities to current standards. Data centers instead offer these industries excellent access, state-of-the-art infrastructures, and cloud services at less than half that price.

Edge computing as a solution to latency, involving processing capabilities delivered closer to the applications they serve, is further opening new markets and developing unique software ecosystems that are now attracting significant investments. Servicing heavy-content demands has made edge data centers a go-to for many large and mid-size firms due to its ability to deliver time-sensitive data at high speeds and minimal latency. The 5G rollout will also bring in revolutionary changes in cloud adoptions.

Through its ability to provide latencies in less than ten milliseconds, it will soon allow organisations to deploy low latency 5G applications like IoT, AI, etc. This, in turn, will also open newer avenues like cloud gaming, industrial loT, and on-site augmented reality guidance. These new avenues and solutions will bring in a lot of information at a faster pace, thus increasing overall storage consumption on the cloud and in data center setups. This data needs to be collected faster and processed further to make it meaningful, requiring organisations to develop a holistic approach while moving towards the cloud computing platform. They will need to classify data, its objective, comply with policies, and design an IT architecture that could utilise cloud storage and on-premise data center.

The rapid spread of Covid-19 significantly increased data traffic from March 2020. Businesses and trade were massively impacted, and firms began to realise that conventional methods wouldn’t be enough to ensure normalcy and continuity of business. Circumventing these negative effects of the Covid-19 pandemic required companies to build technological infrastructures, secure business continuity, and manage data. Maintaining on-premise data in a lockdown was a major challenge and also involved high costs of power, poor access to critical systems, shutting down of telecoms, and most importantly no labour for on-site operational support. In addition to that, loss of data and downtime could seriously impact business and incur irrecoverable losses which brought into light business continuity and disaster recovery options that mitigate risks, maintain and recover data immediately and keep the business running normally even in the face of disasters. This drove many organisations to partially use cloud computing services for addressing their business continuity needs while some moved from conventional methods to the cloud permanently.

In recent years the concept of hybrid cloud is slowly coming up as an answer to increasing workloads. The hybrid cloud is a combination of cloud services and an on-premises data center. While India has already adopted cloud services for its mainstream data processing, this has also resulted in enterprise customers exploring cloud computing platforms beyond a typical on-premise setup. In a couple of years, the hybrid cloud market is expected to grow exponentially as more enterprises start exploring the cloud computing world without disturbing their on-premise setup. In fact, a hybrid cloud setup provides the best of both the worlds -enterprises can store/ process their critical data on their on-premise setup also while they burst on the cloud platform for their unexpected workloads.
Organisations also prefer to move towards a cloud platform to keep unknown users or roaming users away from their core on-premise setups. In addition to that, scenarios including multi-city solution deployments like loT require enterprises to rely on Edge Clouds to relay data to their core setups, and requirements such as these drive organisations to adopt more and more hybrid setups. Additionally, with the government developing data protection laws, many enterprises are adopting or are on the verge of developing hybrid cloud strategies to keep certain customer information on-premise in order to ensure regulatory compliance.

With data centers now becoming the nucleus of digital transformations the regional demand for data centers is growing rapidly, with investment in data storage in India is estimated to be at $4.5 billion and grow at a CAGR of 20 per cent by 2022. Data protection and data localisation initiatives by the government add incentive to the physical presence of cloud service providers, thereby increasing data center service revenue in the country. This spells huge scope for the region in terms of the growth of data centers and is allowing both new as well as existing data center providers to scan for opportunities to invest here. Together with the rise of multiple hyper-scale cloud data centers, cloud services have also been seen ramping up. While local vendors dominate the colocation market in India, state governments particularly Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana have announced incentives attracting FDI’s for data center development in the country.

Every successful company needs a scalable infrastructure that can support complex functions, faster delivery of time-sensitive information, data transformation, and visibility on all data that flows in and out of their ecosystems. Hence major businesses across verticals are now adopting the cloud to gain their competitive edge through new-age application services and advanced analytics. Cloud computing is the refreshed approach and the much-required response that businesses should opt for to thrive in opportunities presented by globalisation along with challenges characterised by political, economic, financial, and social instabilities and accommodate growth and support business.

The most mature organisations in their devops journeys rely on self-service internal platforms, automated change management processes, and integrated security, according to the 2020 State of Devops report by Puppet and CircleCI.

The report surveyed more than 35,000 technical professionals around the world about their continued adoption of devops and agile practices, with three key themes emerging from the most mature, high-performing organizations: leveraging internal platforms, establishing effective change management processes, and tightly integrating security. Let’s tackle them one by one.

Build internal platforms
Internal platforms emerge when organisations have strong, product-focused teams, each responsible for the end-to-end delivery of a product or service.

This internal platform tends to be a homegrown one-stop-shop for self-service provisioning of infrastructure, test environments, deployment pipelines, APIs, tools, knowledge, governance, and support. The team responsible for that internal platform will typically gather business requirements, provide a product roadmap, and help onboard new users.

The internal platform enables application development teams to build, deploy, and run their applications in a standardised way and differs from generic platforms-as-a-service as sold by providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM/Red Hat, or VMware.

As with any grand idea, this can often fall flat on its face when applied to a highly complex enterprise, with hundreds of products or services and various teams serving each one with their own unique processes and tech stack.

“One reason devops often fails to expand further is that most enterprises are structured in ways that create misaligned incentives and lack of accountability or ownership over the outcomes they’re supposed to be driving,” the report authors write.

Enterprise DevOps challenges
That lack of standardisation leads to a common set of enterprise devops challenges. The report identifies three:

Governance becomes expensive, and nearly impossible to manage
Separate stacks reduce knowledge sharing across the organization
Many of your product teams don’t actually have the skills or expertise to operate a full infrastructure and application stack
Organisations that are able to build a platform, with the developer experience in mind, can start to standardise DevOps practices and reduce toil and overhead across the board. This platform should allow for self-service provisioning, configuration, and management, so that each team can focus on its product without having to wait for a centralised team to provision infrastructure for them.

“Focus on developer experience and flow. We can’t stress enough that empathy is a critical skill set. Empathy means understanding someone’s position, and it’s impossible to build a good product without having empathy for your user,” the report warns.

Building an internal platform is an approach that is increasingly popular among respondents to the State of DevOps survey, with 63% saying they have at least one self-service internal platform. Of those who had internal platforms, 60% had between two and four and almost a third of those with internal platforms had 26% to 50% of their developers using at least one internal platform.

The reason for platform proliferation is that the most successful devops practitioners start small, by building platforms for a specific team or for a certain type of infrastructure – like public cloud – and scaling up from there. This approach is better than trying to build one platform to rule them all based on a set of broad assumptions about what your teams need. A ‘build it and they will come’ approach here is destined to fail.

More importantly, the most highly evolved firms, as defined by the report authors, were almost twice as likely as mid-level organisations to report high usage of internal platforms, and six times more likely to report high usage than low-level organisations.

Standardise change management
For those organisations still working their way up towards an internal platform, effective change management is the best on-ramp.

The macro shift from waterfall projects and big software releases to microservices and faster, more regular deployment cycles has enabled devops to flourish, and requires teams to fully embrace constant change. Making that change management process consistent is one of the hardest parts of enterprise-scale DevOps. It’s also a key differentiator for anyone looking to release more software more often.

Survey respondents cited incomplete test coverage as the biggest barrier to effective change management, followed by established organisational mindsets and tightly coupled application architectures.

Only by breaking down silos between change management, release management, and audit and compliance teams, by creating effective feedback loops, and by tracking progress are organizations able to mature their change management processes.

Change management success can be measured by tracking key metrics such as change failure rate and deployment frequency, the level of efficiency around approvals, and the level of acceptable risk to the business.

According to the report, the most effective change management processes come when teams employ:

A high degree of testing and deployment automation
A high degree of automated risk mitigation
Less rigid and much less manual approval processes
Writing changes in code
Allowing employees more scope to influence change management
Devops processes and culture
In short, increased automation breeds confidence in change management. The report found that firms with highly orthodox approvals are nine times more likely to see high levels of inefficiency in their change management process than those with low levels of orthodox approvals.

The spectrum of automated change management starts with secondary review – ie, no automation – all the way to the holy grail of fully automated deployment and testing, with built-in risk assessment and immediate progression capabilities.

Focus on security integration
Lastly, the report focused on security integration. “We found that firms that have achieved higher levels of security integration are much more likely to be at a high stage of devops evolution,” the report concluded.

By security integration the report specifically calls for “a completely different approach, one that emphasises cross-team collaboration and empowers delivery teams to autonomously prevent, discover, and remediate security issues. Breaking down knowledge silos between teams, and collaborating to improve security both raise overall awareness of security concerns, making it more likely that everyone – even those outside the security team – will adopt known patterns for security protection.”

The report showed a strong correlation between the ability to integrate security fully into the software delivery process and an organisation’s ability to remediate critical vulnerabilities quickly.

Specifically, 45% of companies with full security integration reported being able to remediate critical vulnerabilities within a day, while just 25% percent of companies with low security integration could do the same.

After gaining traction among some of the smaller banks, Amazon Web Services, the Cloud computing business of e-commerce giant Amazon, is planning “to go deeper across some of the larger banks as well in India,” a top company executive has said.

AWS said that amid the pandemic, it has seen an acceleration both in terms of customer adoption and how they ae using the cloud.

“I can give you an example of RBL Bank which has been a customer but they’ve started adopting and accelerating their journey,” Puneet Chandok, President, Commercial Business, India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd., told IANS in an interview.

They started with 40 apps, and are now increasing the pace of adoption, he said.

Similarly, IndusInd Bank launched a very interesting artificial intelligence-based voice assistant, using Alexa Skill, IndusAssist, which is enabling their customers to conduct financial and non-financial banking transactions using Amazon Echo.

“So again, we have seen a lot more traction in challenger banks, we would love to go deeper across some of the larger banks as well in India, as they continue to adopt the cloud,” Chandok said, adding that the company is “focused on customers across sectors”.

Besides banking and financial services, other areas, where AWS has seen huge traction in India include media and entertainment and automotive sectors, Chandok said.

“We have hundreds of thousands of active AWS customers today in India. And, as I said earlier, we are working with all of them to drive their digital and technology journey even faster, and get them business results much faster than what they are used to.”

AWS will invest $2.77 billion to set up multiple data centres in Hyderabad, the Telangana government said earlier this month.

The company will set up Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region with three Availability Zones (AZs). It is expected to start operations by mid of 2022.

Chandok said that AWS also has “big plans for India, especially around SMB digitisation”.

Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos who was in India earlier this year, announced a pledge of digitising 10 million micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in India at an investment of $1 billion.

“AWS is a big part of that pledge. We have customers across large enterprises, digital businesses, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), startups, and SMBs,” Chandok said.

“We are working hard to bring this ecosystem together and move the country forward. We continue to invest in India in our infrastructure, teams and so on,” he added.

According to industry tracker International Data Corporation’s recent Covid-19 Impact on IT spending Survey, as a result of the spread of the pandemic 64 per cent of the organisations in India are expected to increase demand for cloud computing while 56 per cent for cloud software to support the new normal.

From today, organisations can run the Google Cloud VMware Engine from Google’s Sydney cloud region.

The Engine is an integrated first-party offering and fully owned and operated service that enables enterprises to migrate or extend their VMware-based applications to Google Cloud without any major changes to application policies, tools or processes.

This allows customers to keep what they like about their on-prem application environment and tap into next-generation hardware and application services with minimal effort.

“VMware technologies form the cornerstone of many customers’ enterprise IT environments and we’re focused on giving customers a simple way to be able to run what they want, where they want and how they want. As part of our ongoing commitment to enterprise customers, this is a significant step forward, building on the support we have already added for the likes of SAP, Oracle and Windows over the last year,” says Google Cloud Australia and New Zealand vice president Mark Innes.

Google Cloud VMware Engine provides a hyper-converged architecture so organisations can run and scale their infrastructure to power enterprise workloads that they would traditionally have needed to manage on-premise.

Enterprises can also modernise existing IT investments and leverage on-demand self-service provisioning of VMware private clouds with integrated connectivity to Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud Operations, Cloud Storage, Kubernetes, and Cloud AI.

Businesses in the A/NZ region can deploy Google Cloud VMware Engine closer to their operations and unlock new growth opportunities.

The Engine’s worldwide presence allows multinational customers to benefit from the service’s networking capabilities, such as a global routing service to allow VMware workloads to securely communicate across regions.

Partner ecosystem

This availability builds on VMware Cloud Foundation joining Google Cloud in July 2019 and the acquisition of CloudSimple in November 2019.

Google Cloud VMware Engine is also VMware Cloud Verified, the highest level of validation for VMware-based cloud services.

“VMware’s partnership with Google Cloud is about accelerating our customers’ digital transformation journey, so we’re pleased Google Cloud VMware Engine is now available in the Sydney region. Local customers can now maintain the familiarity of their VMware tools and training and protect their investments as they execute on their cloud strategies. We look forward to helping our mutual customers bring new services to market rapidly and operate them seamlessly and more securely across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments,” says VMware vice president and Australia and New Zealand managing director Brad Anderson.

Swiss health and InsurTech firm dacadoo, which provides digital health engagement and health risk quantification systems to insurers, has coined the term “integrated insurance operators” to describe insurers that will truly grow and define the next 10-20 years in the industry.

Such insurers offer a fully integrated digital ecosystem, including a tangible health and wellbeing proposition, to elevate the customer experience and engage their members through mobile-first digital health engagement platforms.

“They will drive the disruption from within,” said Mr Peter Ohnemus, president & CEO of dacadoo.

He said that few insurers are operating based on today’s consumer behaviour, and they do not reflect the expectations of the mobile-first, digital and dynamic generation.

Consumers’ shifting demands are now combining with digital innovation to transform analogue business models, with record funding being allocated towards InsurTech developments, even against a backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Many insurers have failed to fully grasp the magnitude of the changes that are happening,” said Mr Ohnemus.

“For the insurers, building and leading integrated health and wellbeing digital ecosystems means they will have a unique understanding of a consumer’s life, while the consumer gains relevant health advice and personalised lifestyle navigations,” said Mr Ohnemus. “Such micro-services and lifestyle-based insurance products will become extremely popular, as long as customer privacy and trust are retained and a good mobile experience is delivered.”

dacadoo has conducted an insurance industry research project, the Global Integrated Insurance Operator Survey, which ran throughout October 2020 and collected responses from over 300 Life & Health insurance executives globally.

One of the main objectives behind this research initiative was to discover how insurance executives see their organisations changing within the near future and whether digitisation and customer-centricity have become an important part of that transformation.

The survey report, titled “Global Market Report on the Integrated Insurance Operator—Becoming a digital leader within the life and health insurance industry in the new normal”, shows that:

60% of insurers either already have a digital health engagement platform or are planning and/or implementing it 86% believe that implementing an integrated insurance operation sits either high or middle in their rank of strategic initiatives

68% agree that their digital transformation has become a business survival imperative

69% reveal that they are implementing new products and services as part of an integrated insurance operation, whereas 17% say that they will consider implementing new products and services in the next three years or more.

Forescout Technologies has expanded its partnerships and integrations with Splunk, CrowdStrike and CyberArk to enable joint customers to bridge security gaps and strengthen the cyber-physical risk posture across the entire network, while maintaining operational integrity of critical systems.

“Organisations with complicated networks struggle with outdated methods of managing industrial control system (ICS) and OT assets across their infrastructure. Forescout’s integrations with industry-leading technologies from Splunk, CrowdStrike and CyberArk deliver cohesive and contextual insights of all assets, improve operational integrity and manage associated security threats down to the device level,” says Forescout chief product and strategy officer Pedro Abreu.

Splunk

Security operations teams can leverage a new Forescout and Splunk integration to defend an organisation across all device types and network tiers.

The new Forescout OT Network Security Monitoring for Splunk App integrates Forescout eyeInspect with Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Enterprise Security.

The app consolidates contextual device data and alerts into pre-built dashboards and prioritises security and operational alerts to defend OT and ICS networks against operational failures and cyberattacks, such as Ripple20, EKANS, WannaCry, NotPetya and TRITON.

The full Forescout and Splunk integration enables organisations to streamline enterprise security across the entire threat lifecycle.

This app will also support the new OT Security Add-on for Splunk, which accelerates time to insight with structured data models that make it easy to correlate OT data from various sources.

CrowdStrike

Forescout’s expanded partnership with CrowdStrike now includes the eyeInspect OT solution for joint threat hunting in internet of things (IoT) and ICS/OT infrastructure.

Delivered through the Forescout eyeExtend module, enhanced integration with the CrowdStrike Falcon platform ensures customers receive threat intelligence data across enterprise networks and critical infrastructure.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform correlates 4 trillion endpoint-related events per week in real time from across the globe, fuelling one of the world’s most advanced data platforms for security.

CyberArk

The Forescout platform now integrates Forescout eyeInspect device intelligence with the CyberArk Privileged Access Security Solution to centrally discover, manage and secure privileged accounts across a broader range of devices, common to IoT, OT and ICS environments.

Forescout’s privileged account discovery capabilities now include Mac and Linux endpoints.

The integration also empowers organisations to automatically segment and enforce credential and user compliance. This is critical for organisations that need to preserve the continuity and accountability of the systems.

The integration includes IoT/OT/ICS orchestrated workflows between CyberArk and Forescout to reduce manual workloads and rapidly respond to threats without operational disruption.

Telkomtelstra has deployed VMware SD-WAN solutions to more than 5000 sites across Indonesia, delivered as one managed services project nationwide.

In response to heightened demand for SD-WAN technologies at a local level, the roll-out comes eight months after the managed services provider (MSP) partnered with VMware to help enterprise customers overhaul networking capabilities to drive digital transformation agendas.

Operating as a joint venture between Telkom Indonesia and Telstra Australia, Telkomtelstra offers VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud – acquired in late November 2017 – to help businesses optimise workload performance over a cloud-enabled network with the aim of improving bandwidth allocation and application performance across multiple branch offices.

“We understand the business challenges of delivering high availability network and the difficulty of managing IT branches over the expansive geography of Indonesia with many remote sites,” said Agus F. Abdillah, chief customer officer of Telkomtelstra. “As a leading managed service provider of network solutions in Indonesia, we are proud of our accomplishment in deploying an advanced network of SD-WAN to thousands of sites that can support the needs of today’s businesses, regardless of branches’ geographical location.”

With 12,000 inhabited islands and over 17,000 total islands in Indonesia, Abdillah said enterprise organisations operating locally must expand branches into remote areas, which presents “unique challenges” in terms of resources, network and security.

According to Abdillah, traditional WAN is “not suitably equipped” to accommodate the scalability of cloud usage for high business productivity, with MPLS considered an “expensive technology” in the market.

“For large enterprises with branch offices spread across regions that require cloud access and exceptional customer experience, our solution will leverage key capabilities of SD-WAN, such as automation and dynamic multi-path optimisation,” Abdillah added. “This will help give enterprises the power to distribute rules, make policy changes, and implement new network configurations across highly distributed branches at any scale in seconds from anywhere.”

Delving deeper, Abdillah said Telkomtelstra plans to also leverage zero-touch provisioning and auto failover to help customers minimise reliance on routing hardware as well as manual network maintenance or new deployments.

“Enterprise branches across Indonesia will now have access to dependable, high performance connectivity with intrinsic secure access to applications and data to optimise and transform branch operations,” he said.

According to Cin Cin Go – country manager of Indonesia at VMware – the expanded alliance with Telkomtelstra will provide enterprise customers with “much-needed flexibility” through enhanced connectivity and security, spanning applications, data and users from the data centre to the cloud and branch.

“VMware is excited to work with Telkomtelstra in delivering our industry-leading VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud to future-forward Indonesian enterprises,” added Cin Cin, when speaking at the time of the partnership launch. “Indonesia is a vast country with over 17,000 islands, and such geography presents a unique challenge for businesses both from a resource and network standpoint.

Cloud buying is getting renewed attention as enterprises seek added cost savings after migrating systems to the cloud in response to Covid-19. It’s time for corporate cloud buyers to learn more about the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Savings Plans, launched in November 2019, which provide cost savings of up to 72 per cent for cloud buyers.

A recent survey of more than 50 IT executives on Pulse.qa, a social research platform, showed that only 16 per cent of IT executives believe that AWS Savings Plans are saving them money on their cloud spending. While the potential for cost cutting is real, you need to understand the nuances of this offering to ensure you’re reaping the biggest savings.

How AWS Savings Plans work

AWS Savings Plans involve a one-year to three-year commitment to a consistent amount of usage measured in dollars per hour. For example, if CIOs commit to $100 of compute usage per hour, they will get the Savings Plans prices on that usage up to $100, and AWS will charge on-demand rates for any usage beyond the commitment.

AWS offers two Savings Plans:

The Compute Savings Plan is the most flexible of the two plans. Compute pricing on this plan are up to 66 per cent off on-demand rates
The EC2 Instance Savings Plan provides savings up to 72 per cent off on-demand rates. Customers must commit to a specific instance family in their chosen AWS region. This plan applies automatically to usage regardless of size, operating system, and tenancy within the specified family in the region
Businesses can’t increase a Savings Plan budget in the middle of a period of performance however. Instead, they’ll need to provision a new and separate Savings Plan.

If a CIO is running a new AWS account, they may encounter some limitations to their Savings Plans. If this happens, it’s best to work with the system integrator or AWS account representative to resolve any restrictions.

One advantage of AWS Savings Plan is being able to apply savings to on-demand instances, instead of only reserved instances. Compute Savings Plans can apply to instances across different AWS regions. Organisations can also apply Savings Plans to Fargate (instance-based PaaS for containers) and Lambda.

AWS Savings Plans don’t apply to Relational Database Service (RDS), Redshift, or ElastiCache (in-memory database and cache). Savings Plans also don’t cover any services CIOs provision from the AWS Marketplace.

Visualising the spend is vital to both the end customer and the systems integrator. A business’ AWS utilisation and coverage reports offer the ability to understand AWS Savings Plans cost and usage better. These reports show an aggregate Savings Plan utilisation trending over time. CIOs can also use these reports to view each Savings Plans with their respective utilisation, costs, and savings in a tabular format.

Navigating AWS Savings Plans

Cloud buyers who wants to take full advantage of AWS Savings Plans need to “shift left” with cloud spending management. While an organisation may not have a cloud economist on staff (or even contract), CIOs can use a cloud management platform to track cloud spending over the past three to six months to get a historical perspective.

That historical data should feed decision-making processes to determine if Savings Plans save money. The data should also serve businesses well in any service provider negotiations.

CIOs can get started with AWS Savings Plans from the AWS dashboard by using the AWS Cost Explorer or by using the API/CLI. If buying cloud services through a systems integrator, then it’s best to inquire about their use of Savings Plans.

Understanding cloud workloads is key to making good use of AWS Savings Plans, according to Venkat Ramasamy, COO for FileCloud, an enterprise file sharing, sync, back-up, and remote access solution provider.

Ramasamy stresses knowing if a business is running a variable or static workload. Unless they’re building and operating SaaS applications, chances are they’re running static loads, so AWS Savings Plans would make sense and could save a lot of money.

Scott Dix, senior solutions delivery manager for Cloudtamer.io, a cloud management platform provider, suggests using a cloud roadmap to guide the decision-making process about AWS Savings Plans. With a cloud roadmap in place, CIOs can model savings from reserved and on-demand instance spending from the early phases of cloud projects—not after the first cloud billing surprise.

AWS Savings Plans and the system integrator

The AWS Savings Plan, when used by a system integrator, has the potential to create more profit margin when a customer orders on-demand EC2 Instances. The aforementioned Pulse.qa survey of IT executives showed that 64 per cent negotiated hard with their system integrators for the best discounts on their cloud spending. Negotiating is essential because Savings Plans can deliver around 25 per cent savings overall for the system integrator.

System integrators run into risks when they don’t put themselves in their customers’ shoes, according to Amir Shariff, vice president of product and marketing at Opsani, a cloud optimisation solutions provider. He said that SIs need to be an agent for their customer when managing AWS Savings Plans.

“Use the golden rule and guide them through bringing their cloud costs down through shifting their cloud resources,” Shariff advises.

Shariff emphasises the need for the system integrator to know about the customer’s business so they can best advise them on how to lower their cloud spending. CIOs should expect as much from their system integrator.

AWS Savings Plans and the business

Dix from Cloudtamer.io recommends erring on the side of caution when committing to reserved instances and AWS Savings Plans. “What ends up happening is folks jump in and think the savings are incredible, so let’s go to the maximum and pay for the long term,” he explains. Proceed slowly, keeping a close eye on usage and savings.

Beyond the commitment that Dix mentioned, treat AWS Savings Plans as a cloud economics exercise. Take a systematic approach. Do the historical analysis and make the process adjustments and reporting changes necessary to give the business and stakeholders the full confidence that AWS Savings Plans are working to deliver significant savings on the overall AWS bill.