Thunder® Containers Solutions Enhance Application Performance and Security for Multi-cloud Environments

A10 Networks(NYSE: ATEN) has announced a cloud-ready, light-weight set of container-based solutions to provide secure application services. They offer the industry’s highest performing container solutions with up to 200 Gbps of throughput for A10 Networks’ Thunder Application Delivery Controller (ADC), Carrier-Grade Networking (CGN), and Convergent Firewall (CFW) solutions. The addition of Thunder Containers extends the company’s multi-cloud portfolio and increases the performance, security and availability of applications, enabling customers to confidently run their critical workloads in multi-cloud environments at hyperscale. Customers can meet the increased traffic demands, while maintaining predictable service levels when deploying applications in multiple geographic locations and across public and private clouds.

Enterprises today are leveraging almost five clouds[1]for their application infrastructure. Multiple disparate environments to manage, on top of inherent application complexity, make deploying applications more complex. Organizations need efficient, agile and high-performance solutions that also provide centralized management and analytics across the entire application infrastructure.

Agile, Cloud-Native Application Infrastructures

A10 Networks Thunder Containers-based solutions can help solve many issues faced by organizations today. The addition of a container-based solution to the A10 Networks’ portfolio helps support a mix of application architectures, from traditional monolithic to distributed microservices, with the same code, the same management all-inclusive API and the same feature-set to help organizations combine new and legacy services for more agile infrastructures. In addition, it can eliminate the struggle between NetOps/SecOps and DevOps with unified and consistent application, feature-set and policy control across traditional data center and multi-cloud environments.

“With the new Thunder Containers, we are delivering to the market the highest performance load balancing, firewall and carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) solutions for a very complex multi-cloud world. We are extending our portfolio across traditional, virtual and microservices form factors, giving customers a unified solution to ensure agile and scalable infrastructures. And seamless integration with A10 Harmony® Controller gives customers visibility and centralized management for consistent operations and security across multi-cloud environments,” said Raj Jalan, CTO of A10 Networks.

Thunder Containers is also supported with Kubernetes. The highly portable solution is supported on standard Intel x86 servers and can be deployed across the largest cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), as well as private data centers, allowing businesses to benefit from agility, flexibility and security. Combined with the unique FlexPool® licensing model, customers can aggregate capacity for flexible allocation and redistribution of resources for applications running in the cloud.

Thunder for Containers will be available in Q3, 2019.

 

[1]RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report by Flexera

By: Claude Schuck, regional manager, Middle East at Veeam

 

Last year, cloud computing entered the Slope of Enlightenmenton Gartner’s infamous Hype Cycle for the first time in its history. This marked the inflection point at which cloud stopped being something CIOs and IT managers talked about, but didn’t necessarily implement, and became a must-have for any digital business.

 

At the same time, if you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle for data management, there are a raft of technologies all with different levels of understanding, relevance and importance. From DataOps and Machine Learning-Enabled Data Management at the entry stage of Innovation Trigger to Data Integration and Information Archiving approaching the Plateau of Productivity. While cloud is fast-becoming recognised as an industry-standard for modern IT infrastructure, data management is growing rapidly in its importance to businesses.

 

Moreover, businesses are beginning to understand their data much better. Being able to access the right data at the right time, and recover it when it’s lost or damaged, can determine the success of a business.

 

Enter Cloud Data Management

With Cloud Data Management: an inherent part of Intelligent Data Management, data is available across the business, centrally managed, controlled and located where it will deliver the most value for the organization. In today’s digital and data-driven economy, organizations of all types and sizes require the ability to manage data across multi-cloud environments and ensure it is protected no matter where it resides. Maintaining data availability at all times is key to enabling teams to respond instantly and appropriately to what matters anywhere across the enterprise’s infrastructure.

 

Veeam’s 2019 Cloud Data Management report, which surveyed over 1,500 business leaders globally, found that almost half (44%) see data management as critical to their businesses’ success in the next two years. Amongst the businesses making the most intelligent use of data management, there were four common components: cloud, confidence, capabilities and culture.

 

Scaling with the cloud

European Commission statisticsshow that over half of EU enterprises are now using advanced cloud services relating to financial and accounting software applications, customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise applications. This percentage is only rising as hyperscalers continue to layer value-add services onto their stacks – enabling customers to leverage AI and machine learning, big data analytics, and voice and image searching to deliver greater business value from their data.

 

This notion is backed up by the fact that nearly three-quarters (72%) of companies are looking to Cloud Data Management to enable more intelligent use of data across the business. Business leaders are looking to data management to deliver benefits through increasing productivity, maintaining corporate stability and improving their ability to forecast and make better informed decisions. The majority stated that they are using Software as a Service (77%), citing reliability, flexibility and data security as their top three reasons for doing so.

 

Investing with confidence

Given the emphasis the needs of the digital business place on its IT infrastructure, CIOs need to have confidence in its ability to help their organization stay responsive, available and on the front foot. Incidents such as outages can sap this confidence, stunt future innovation, and damage customer confidence. Almost three-quarters (73%) of organizations are unable to meet users’ demands for uninterrupted access to applications and data. This may partly explain why only 25% of business leaders reported total confidence in their capability to meet their digital challenges.

 

As well as investing in robust, scalable and flexible solutions to mission-critical issues such as backup, disaster recovery and data protection, organizations need the right skills and capabilities to manage their data estates. That’s why business leaders said that they will spend an average of $41 million on deploying technologies to build a more intelligent business within the next 12 months.

 

Combining technological and human capabilities

Clearly, the expectations of what data management can deliver for the business are high and the appetite for return on technology investment is insatiable. Once new technologies are deployed, business leaders expect to see financial benefits in nine months, with operational benefits in seven months.

 

For effective results to be realised within a short space of time, businesses must ensure that they have the necessary skills to on-board employees with new systems. In fact, the vast majority (91%) of organizations view upskilling employees’ digital skills as vital to their success. This sometimes requires an element of cultural transformation, particularly when an organization is looking to establish more data-driven decision-making processes.

 

Establishing a data-driven culture

The cloud is a great equaliser for businesses – levelling the playing field in terms of the technological haves and have nots. Most businesses are now producing data at a rate of knots, so it’s more about how that data is managed, analysed and used to inform faster and more effective decision making. A business can produce huge amounts of data but if it doesn’t adopt a data-driven culture at the C-level, it can be a burden rather than an advantage.

 

More than two-thirds (69%) of business leaders agree that company culture needs to become more open and accepting as they digitally transform, while 93% agree that leadership styles will also need to change. Cloud Data Management is an opportunity for every business and something which must be implemented at the most senior level of the business and executed right across the pyramid.

 

In summary, building strong digital foundations that centre on data availability will be vital to the future of every organization. Within this context, technology has never been so important to a business’ success. Organizations around the world rely on a whole host of digital platforms for everything from keeping the lights on to creating ground-breaking, new offerings for customers. This, combined with implementing a data-driven culture which maximizes the value of the data available to the business, will enable the next-generation of industry disruptors and innovators to scale securely.

Fortinet to secure applications on AWS with FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service

 “As organizations increasingly build out their business in the cloud and use web applications, they increase their exposure to known and unknown targeted attacks,” said John Maddison, EVP of Products and Solutions at Fortinet. “Delivered through the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiWeb Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)-as-a-Service allows organizations to rapidly deploy web applications while providing best-in-class security for mission-critical applications.”

The Evolving Attack Surface in the Cloud

To keep up with digital transformation, IT teams are increasingly deploying applications to the cloud and building cloud-native applications. However, this rapid deployment can introduce vulnerabilities and requires robust security to defend the evolving attack surface and protect applications from threats. Organizations’ disaggregation of security tools compounds the challenge of protecting the attack surface. IT teams need security solutions that accurately protect web assets, are intuitive and are simple to deploy and easy to manage in order to truly take advantage of the benefits of migrating applications to the cloud or building cloud-native applications. Pairing this with the shortage of general cybersecurity expertise and web application security in particular, DevOps teams managing web applications are especially in need of security solutions that are easy to use as the resources to monitor threats across hybrid cloud environments are limited.  

Reaping the Benefits of the Cloud with Fortinet’s Security-Driven Approach

Fortinet is addressing the issues that IT teams, including DevOps, face with the addition of FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Serviceto its cloud security portfolio. FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Serviceis available for purchase on AWS Marketplaceor through your preferred Fortinet reseller and leverages the flexibility of AWS by automatically provisioning security protection for customers across multiple AWS Regions. As part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Serviceprovides the following benefits:

 

• Accurate and easy to manage Cloud WAF offering: As one of the first machine learning-enabled WAF technology in the industry, customers deploying FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Servicebenefit from high accuracy of detection and threat prevention, eliminating false positives and ensuring applications keep running. The solution also gives users the ability to perform a comprehensive self-tuning of policies to eliminate the operational overhead of managing a WAF service. FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Servicealso provides web application security that is easy to deploy and maintain with minimal configuration and management. The solution allows access to advanced configuration options when needed, removing the usual complexity required when setting up a WAF.
• Advanced threat protection for web applications: FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Servicesafeguards applications from vulnerability exploits, bots, malware uploads, DDoS attacks, advanced persistent threats (APTs), both unknown and zero-day attacks, among others. It also includes services from Fortinet’s award-winning FortiGuard Labs, providing signatures, sandboxing and IP reputation to ensure organizations have the latest protection and updates on threats.

 

• Low total cost of ownership (TCO): As a cloud-native SaaS solution deployed in the same AWS Region as an organizations’ applications, FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Servicedoesn’t require maintenance of hardware or software and can reduce outbound data transfer costs significantly. Organizations pay Intra-Region Data Transfer rates for traffic to the service and FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Service handles the data transfer out costs as part of its subscription. IT teams can leverage the benefits of low latency and intra-region bandwidth rates for traffic between applications and the WAF.

 

• Simplifies compliance requirements: Fortinet delivers FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Serviceusing a colony of WAF gateways in the same AWS Region as an organizations’ application. This avoids potentially subjecting the application to additional regional regulatory requirements.

 

• Flexible purchasing options: Whether customers prefer pre-provisioned capacity or paying by the volume of processed data, FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-Servicesupports the most suitable option for customers’ business priorities and budgetary considerations.