Veeam announces program enhancements and new integrations with ConnectWise for additional partner support of Veeam-powered BaaS and DRaaS solutions

Veeam® Software, the leader in Backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management™, today celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program with the release of program discounts and updates, and the release of NEW Veeam Service Provider Console v4. Veeam Service Provider Console v4 includes new capabilities that make it easier for service providers to remotely manage and monitor their customers’ Veeam environments and is offered FREE to VCSP partners.

Launched in March 2010, the VCSP program enables service providers to leverage Veeam software to offer reliable, revenue-generating Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings. Driven by more than 25,000 Cloud & Service Provider partners, the VCSP program reported an annual recurring revenue (ARR) increase of 33 percent year-over-year (YoY) for Q4’19. A decade after launching, Veeam continues to add value and innovation to its VCSP program.

“Veeam’s vision has always been to deliver simple, flexible and reliable backup solutions to customers. Some customers prefer to set up and manage their own backup and recovery solutions while others prefer this as a service. This is why Veeam has invested in building a robust ecosystem of cloud and service providers, allowing companies of any size to have a Veeam-powered solution delivered in the manner that’s best suited for them,” said Jim Kruger, CMO at Veeam. “To celebrate 10 years of the VCSP program, we are introducing new discounts and capabilities that will help cloud and managed service providers profitably scale their managed BaaS and DRaaS business. Today, many of our VCSP partners are reporting double, even triple, digit growth in their businesses. We look forward to celebrating future successes with our VCSP partners as we focus on our ‘better together’ strategy.”

To mark the 10-year anniversary, Veeam is releasing the new VCSP program discounts and updates for 2020, including:

• Point Reduction for Enterprise Plus: Bring Veeam’s top features to market and build competitive BaaS and DRaaS offerings without eating into margins, as the result of a 15 percent price reduction on Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise Plus edition.

• Volume Rental Agreement (VRA) Discounts: New VCSP VRA tiers help super-charge margins by rewarding new partners ready to commit to Veeam and our long-time high-consumption partners.

• Veeam Universal Licensing (VUL) for Rental: Leverage all Veeam features with a simple pay-as-you-grow program that makes it easy to create or expand any Veeam-powered BaaS and DRaaS offering, without needing expensive CapEx to build from.

• VCSP Pulse: EMEA and APJ partners will now be able to join the 6,000+ North America VCSP partners that are able to connect with Veeam and their Aggregator on a single, purpose-built platform, offering the simplicity and reliability needed to build Veeam-powered BaaS and DRaaS solutions at scale.

In addition to new discounts and tier changes for the VCSP program, Veeam is launching NEW Veeam Service Provider Console v4. Formerly Veeam Availability Console, the product now includes remote monitoring and management capabilities directly integrated with ConnectWise Automate. This integration consolidates client data into a single, proactive and centralized user interface, reducing resources and enabling faster response times. As a result, service providers can invest more time in growing their business and less time with administrative tasks.

Veeam Service Provider Console v4 makes offering Veeam-powered services easier than ever with new capabilities to help scale partner offerings, collaborate with channel partners, and manage Veeam consumption all in one place. New features include:

• Enhanced Usage Reporting Engine: Automatically generate the single usage report for all workloads without spending time manually aggregating points and  workload counts .

• Full Support for Veeam Backup & Replication™ v10: Leverage powerful new capabilities of NAS Backup and Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows v4.

• Enhanced API Interface : Construct advanced pathways to further automation for service providers and their customers with NEW RESTful API actions and endpoints, with API usage now extended to the users with the Reseller role.

Veeam Service Provider Console v4 is available now and free to all VCSP partners. For more information, visit https://www.veeam.com

Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced today that it has been named by Gartner, Inc. as a 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Hyperconverged Infrastructure. This is the second year that Nutanix has been recognized as a Customers’ Choice.

“At a time when many organizations are struggling with the day-to-day realities of running a business remotely, we are continuing to focus on our customers by delivering an IT infrastructure that is invisible and automated, allowing teams to focus on more immediate business needs,” said David Sangster, Chief Operating Officer at Nutanix. “To us, being recognized as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Hyperconverged Infrastructure is a great honor, and only strengthens our commitment to deliver cloud computing solutions that are flexible, simple, resilient and adaptable to customers’ changing needs, including widespread remote work.”

Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) integrates compute, virtualization, storage, networking and security, making tasks like deploying a virtual desktop environment much easier and faster. Something that would take weeks with legacy IT, can take just hours with Nutanix. Portable, subscription-based software licenses deliver valuable flexibility so IT infrastructure is no longer coupled to specific hardware devices and configurations, which could be critically important in situations where the global supply chain is impacted.

 This Customers’ Choice recognition is based on detailed feedback from 68 customer ratings in the past year across multiple vendors in the hyperconverged infrastructure space. Nutanix has 301 reviews since the market began to be tracked within the Gartner Peer Insights platform and holds an average score of 4.7 out of 5.*

Nutanix customers said:

Can Handle Complex Data Center Workloads Across All Industries

“We have fully implemented our Nutanix platform here. The staff at Nutanix have been very helpful from helping us plan our implementation to providing us with solution architects to help us through solving how to incorporate some of our challenging gaming software pieces.”

• Database Administrator in the services industry

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform Review

“Nutanix is clearly making IT jobs easier due to its capacity of Virtualization, compute and storage. Well I have to say, not only for IT, also for the company since it reduces cost a lot! […] The platform delivers scalable high performance storage and virtualization services. Giving us the tools to upgrade our VM in a very easy way and basically with the same price. Something that would be really hard to do in a regular environment because we have to think in many factors before doing it. ”

• Computer Engineer in the services industry

 The Best Hyperconvergence Infrastructure Of All Time

“The best hyperconvergence infrastructure, I have used for several years helping us manage our entire virtual environment and at the same time monitoring the services and something very important maintaining the continuity of the business since it is composed of nodes that share their resources and this is shown as a single resource say disks, memories, CPU and other resources found in each of the nodes. ”

• System Operator in the healthcare industry

Easy Implementation And An Ever Growing Product

“The product and professional services exceeded our expectations. We are still using VMware with Nutanix, but the swap from the traditional 3-tier system to Nutanix was simple. We used professional services as well, but after having them onsite, I think we could have gone without them it was that easy to setup. The product works great, it’s easy to navigate, and it’s pretty intuitive. Nutanix continues to innovate and create new products and integration. ”

• IT Manager in the finance industry

Easy Installation And [An] Awesome Growing System

“It’s a complete 100% software defined beast that works well. We have not had any issue[.] I still have yet to see something not working.”

• Network Engineer in the education industry

Customer focus is one of Nutanix’s core tenants, and the commitment to delighting customers is recognized in the company’s average net promoter score of 90 over the past six years, as well as the 97% customer retention rate as of the end of the second quarter of fiscal year 2020.

As many companies are gearing up for remote work, Nutanix continues to deliver intelligent, easy and resilient cloud software solutions, along with excellent customer service, to its nearly 16,000 customers worldwide, including nearly 880 Global 2,000 customers. The company’s flexible and scalable hyperconverged infrastructure solutions deliver the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed during these uncertain times, along with the easy deployment and management Nutanix products are known for.

More customer reviews on Nutanix are available here.

Disclaimer: 

*Ratings and reviews current as of March 24, 2020. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.

Author: Sherifa Hady, Channel Sales Director, EMEA, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

 

In a world of consumer changes and connectivity everywhere, channel partners are primed to sell new services and products and play a key role in the development of the next wave of technology trends. The channel is now being driven by three key trends: partner digital transformation; new business models with a focus on services; and customer trends driving new types of demand.

It’s not just about what’s in the box anymore, we’re seeing networks open up a new world of services and solutions for the channel to offer, and customers who are eager to tap into these to deliver a cutting-edge customer experience.

TREND ONE: Channel business models – it’s not just about the box, it’s about what the box gives you Across the entire channel, from alliance partners to distributors and systems integrators, we’re seeing partners start to ready themselves, and their business models, for a new technological landscape and how to keep their offerings relevant within it. Partners are looking five years ahead to anticipate what they will be selling, and where their revenue will be coming from.

Distributors who once would have been a logistics partner or driving channel enablement are now rethinking their role for example. The cloud is a prime example of this – it’s changed the business model of partners significantly. Hardware is no longer the key revenue driver, and whereas before you might have expected hardware sales to account for most of your business, it’s now completely swapped to be a software-first market instead.

The role of the vendor to help support and enable partners through this transition is vital. It’s about ensuring the incentives and support you give your partners is correctly aligned to the market they are trying to sell to. It’s also about how you advise on the advantages and disadvantages of CAPEX and OPEX installations, and ensuring you’re embedded within the channel to give your partners the use cases, case studies, and best practice to sell in this new type of market.

 Some partners are already there and know where they want to go next. Others are still figuring out what their path ahead looks like.

TREND TWO: Channel partners race to bring new service offerings to the market  

The channel knows that services are an essential part of their business model. The future lies in consumption.

There are three ways that partners are pursuing this now. They might be reselling the services offered through vendors, managing assets and services for customers, or developing their own services and intellectual property offerings.

Here again, we can clearly see the role that the cloud has played in influencing the market. It was a wake-up call for partners – if everyone goes straight to the cloud provider to buy their services then how do you sell around this? The cloud has hugely disrupted how people consider buying IT.

For partners who embrace services however the rewards can be significant. From a profitability perspective, if everyone is just selling the same AP then the opportunity for margins is limited – but if you can sell maintenance and services on top of this then there’s a huge business opportunity.

It also means you can get much closer to your customers. Longer term service agreements mean you learn to understand their challenges and how you can solve them together. The benefits for customer retention are huge.

Finally, partners with the technology and technical skills to develop their own IP offerings will be able to really stand out and differentiate themselves in the market. It drives their capabilities beyond just vendor specific offerings.

By the end of 2020, this is one of the most significant developments we expect to see in the channel market.

TREND THREE: Partners who focus on selling based on business outcomes can win big

Customer needs will always be a driving force in the market. For many companies, IT is no longer just a cost centre in their business, used for data analysis and report creation. Instead it’s often a profit centre, driving revenue, new business models, and enabling the creation of billion-dollar companies along the way.

For partners, reacting to these changes is central to setting themselves up for success in the year and decade ahead.

Fundamentally the usage of IT has become very different. The customer may want a new system for their hotel in order to allow their guests to check in via their phone and get straight onto the Wi-Fi, but they’re unlikely to be interested in the detail of the systems they are buying. They just want to be able to deploy.

 This is a huge opportunity for partners to talk to their customers about business outcomes and take a more significant role within solution development. However, as customers move away from hardware to services partners won’t be able to rely on them ringing up to order new parts – this sell requires a much more proactive approach.

The rise of the Edge is one of the final parts of this puzzle. Over the course of this year we will continue to see the exponential growth of connected devices, and within that a need for data and network power to sit at different points of the network.

Integrated Next-Generation Firewall Security, Advanced Routing and Open Fabric Ecosystem Allow MSSPs to Better Meet Customers’ Evolving Business Needs

 

News Summary

Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated, and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced increasing global momentum with managed security service providers (MSSPs), including Node4, Zain Jordan and Liquid Networx, leveraging Fortinet’s industry-leading Secure SD-WAN solution to provide customers additional high-value services.

 

SD-WAN provides organizations reliable and cost-effective connectivity to support their digital innovation goals. Recent research from IDC found that the SD-WAN infrastructure market is poised to reach $5.25 billion in 2023. As an increasing number of businesses look to deploy SD-WAN, many are turning to MSSPs to fill skill shortages and other gaps within their teams. MSSPs can fill this growing need by creating value-added services for customers that want to enhance user experience and reduce WAN complexity and cost, while securing their distributed networks.

 

John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO at Fortinet

“Fortinet’s global partners leverage our innovative Secure SD-WAN solution to take advantage of the new business opportunities presented by the rapidly growing SD-WAN market. Increasingly, MSSPs in particular are delivering new managed services built on Fortinet’s industry-leading Secure SD-WAN solution to meet customers’ evolving business needs. Our MSSP partners realize that delivering connectivity-only SD-WAN services is not sustainable long-term and are choosing to differentiate their services through the inclusion of security, which Fortinet Secure SD-WAN uniquely provides offering networking and security functionalities through a single offering.”

 

Fortinet Enables MSSPs to Unlock SD-WAN Opportunity

Recognizing this opportunity, Node4, Zain Jordan and Liquid Networx join a growing number of MSSPs who have chosen Fortinet Secure SD-WAN to deliver new managed services to their customers. Fortinet’s Security-Driven Networking approach to SD-WAN integrates both networking and security functionalities in one offering, enabling MSSPs to offer advanced security across their WAN infrastructure with a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Below is an overview of how three of Fortinet’s partners are utilizing Fortinet Secure SD-WAN to benefit their customers.

 

Node4

Node4 uses Fortinet’s SD-WAN technology to provide Secure SD-WAN managed services to its customers in the United Kingdom. Its offering provides customers with security at the edge for enhanced protection to multi-site businesses and Quality of Service (QoS) to protect voice and latency-sensitive applications, maximizing user experience.

 

“Fortinet gives us a competitive advantage over other service providers as we’re able to provide continual service innovation in line with our customers’ biggest SD-WAN challenges and requirements,” shared Paul Bryce, CCO at Node4. “Since using Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution, Node4 has seen our business grow with an increase in network sales, all while reducing our operating costs and overall TCO by about 40 percent.”

 

Additionally, using Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN technology in its own network has also allowed Node4 to improve performance for its cloud and SaaS services, which contribute up to 80 percent of Node4’s network traffic, by blending MPLS and internet facing connectivity. As a result, Node4 can provide its customers with accelerated cloud connectivity by reducing latency and removing WAN complexities.

 

Zain Business

Zain Business selected Fortinet to deliver Jordan’s first secure SD-WAN managed services to existing and new enterprise customers. Through its new services built on Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution, Zain Business can ensure customers run their applications with advanced security, performance and reliability, helping customers realize their business goals. Zain Business’ new SD-WAN service is particularly beneficial for distributed enterprises in verticals such as banking and retail with distributed branches and locations.

 

“The addition of these services powered by Fortinet Secure SD-WAN to our portfolio will make Zain Business a one-stop-shop for all information and communications technology (ICT) services required by many of today’s businesses, including connectivity, security, cloud, colocation and WiFi management,” said Mohannad Audeh, Director of the Enterprise Business Unit at Zain. Business. “Zain Business’ customers will benefit from our simple and cost-efficient SD-WAN offering that delivers security and enhanced connectivity all in one.”

 

Zain Business is also using Fortinet solutions to enhance its overall security services with Fortinet’s Next-Generation Firewall, Unified Threat Management, Advanced Threat Protection with Sandboxing and SIEM offerings.

 

3Lateral uses the power of NetApp’s technology to offer a ‘friendlier face’ for artificial intelligence, biometrics, healthcare and life sciences

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), the leader in cloud data services, has been selected by 3Lateral, a global leader in the “digital humans” industry, to help deliver a data-driven approach for the creation of incredibly realistic human characters for video games, movies, and wider industrial and AI applications.

3Lateral, part of Epic Games, has pioneered the concept of digital humans for over a decade with its work featured in award-winning game, and film. “Creating digital humans requires a deep understanding of every aspect of our appearance and motion, both of which portray our inner self and tell stories around us,” said Vladimir Mastilovic, founder and director of 3Lateral. “We read all these visual cues with great precision as instinct to analyze an image of another human being is deeply embedded in our DNA.”

Data-driven approach

Behind the realistic models that can be controlled in real time is a data-driven approach which requires the studio to collect data with a unique facial scanner, soon to be peaking at 1 PB per scanning session. Multiple teams at 3Lateral using both custom software and cloud environments use this data to generate realistic models and scenes. The data pipeline has to integrate with multiple project requirements for a variety of unique hardware, software and synthesize technologies.

3Lateral and NetApp developed a data fabric based on AFF and FAS platforms that could follow up the immediate challenges, which also meets the needs for further development, storage capacity demands and workflow changes. The data fabric allows seamless access to petabytes of data that spans multiple technology foundations. In preparation for the massive performance requirements of the future, the teams are experimenting with enhancing their data fabric with NetApp Memory Accelerated Data (MAX Data). The integration could then be extended with a NetApp Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and NetApp Kubernetes Services (NKS), enabling the studio to further simplify and accelerate their development environment.

Enhancing data collaboration

The teams at 3Lateral predict an increase in data density and Mastilovic aims to develop a framework which enables people to create new applications in industries beyond the entertainment sector. A wide range of applications in medicine, biometrics and research are possible. For this purpose, Mastilovic considers scaling up the cloud capacities of 3Lateral to cover further spikes. According to him, a data fabric strategy offers the necessary “gateway to the cloud”.

“Working with 3Lateral has been an exciting project that showcases the potential of a data fabric enabled by NetApp solutions,” said Matt Watts, CTO EMEA at NetApp. “Through the adoption of a data-driven approach, 3Lateral has built a foundation, which solved the immediate challenges of inflexible data silos that have hindered innovative collaboration. The new infrastructure design can deal with the issues of increasing data collection speed and capacity. 3Lateral’s data fabric will adapt and evolve with them as they are looking to solve new and future challenges.”

To learn more about the digital human concept carried out by 3Lateral, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMQmWW5w_1s

Anker Innovations, committed to delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation, and exceptional products has selected a set of products that makes our life at home easier during isolation and the upcoming Ramadan and Eid holidays.

Gifting gadgets from Anker for special occasions satisfies different personalities with different tastes as products range from Bluetooth speakers, headphones, security cameras, smart scales to desktop chargers

The products below make our life more musical, ease household chores, keep us secured, keep the communication devices fully charged and we can enjoy a state-of-the-art cinema experience in the comfort of our home.

eufy Smart Scale C1

eufy Smart Scale C1 is the easy way to keep track of your health journey. Just step onto the scale to track 12 essential body measurements such as Weight, Body Fat, BMI, Bone Mass, Muscle Mass, and more. The rounded-glass top plate safeguards you from bumping into pointed edges and the anti-slip top plate and low, stable design ensure stability when you step on. Two pairs of super-sensitive G-shaped sensors ensure more precise measurements.

Users can also switch from pounds to kilograms and back in one second and fast wireless data transfer means you can view your measurements in seconds on your mobile phone and see all the historical data of your progress and health trends with ease. Eufy Smart Scale is also compatible and allows tracking of measurements on third party apps like Apple Health, Google Fit, and Fitbit.

Easy to use, eufy Smart Scale C1 can connect up to 16 users and is intelligent enough to match measurements to the correct user profile, automatically.

Nebula Apollo Pocket Projector

Nebula Apollo Smart Pocket Projector is a new generation pocket cinema in a compact, mobile and soda-can size cubical design. Powered by Android 7.1 Nebula Apollo Hosts loads of capabilities such as Google Assistant, remarkable clarity with Sharp 200 ANSI lumen image, improved 360^o audio and In-built video & movie streaming apps like Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Prime it is the perfect entertainment partner.

Nebula Apollo provides 4-hours of video playtime with single full charge and offers big 360^o sound with a 6W speaker. Nebula Apollo offers an advanced entertainment experience, anytime, anywhere with your loved ones.

eufy RoboVac 30C

Stronger, slimmer, and the most convenient RoboVac to use, the RoboVac 30C makes a perfect gift as it comes with Wi-Fi, Amazon Alexa, and the Google Assistant-compatibility, meaning it is 100% hands-free cleaning.

The slim 2.85in profile glides under sofas and beds with super-strong 1500Pa suction power and three brushes that effectively cleans up dust and furs for up to 100 minutes, leaving the house spotless.

RoboVac uses drop-sensing technology to avoid falling down stairs and specialized dual-hall sensors detect Boundary Strips that ensures RoboVac only cleans the areas you want. Nine anti-collision infrared sensors helps RoboVac avoid bumping into obstacles and clean non-stop.

EufyCam 2C

The neweufyCam2C is a wireless Home Security Camera System with 180 -Day Battery Life and comes with features that include HD 1080p for clear crystal footage, IP67 Weatherproof that withstands cold, heat, dust and rains, state of the art Advanced Night Vision and is compatible with Amazon Alexa and Homekit.

It has a 2-Cam Kit and does not bind users to a monthly fee which means a one-time purchase that combines WIFI security with convenience. Eufy Security products store, process, and calculate user data locally using military grade encryption.

The Smart Image Enhancement feature gives a clearer, brighter view of the people in-shot while the built-in AI technology identifies and focuses on the human in the image. The Instant Mobile Alerts notifies users in seconds when suspicious motions are detected while Real-Time Response allows being able to speak directly to anyone who approaches your home via a two-way audio giving you complete control over your surveillance.

Anker Premium 60W 5-Port Desktop Charger:

The Anker 5 Port desktop charger comes with one 30W Power Delivery Port for Apple MacBook, Nexus 5X/6P, and 4 PowerIQ Ports for iPhone, iPad, and More that intelligently recognizes your device to boost charging speeds up to 2.4A per port.

When working from home, the entire family have access to simultaneous charging for everyone from just one wall outlet. With advanced safety features like surge protection, temperature control, and more, you can charge devices with total peace of mind.

Soundcore Liberty Air 2

Download your favourite songs and listen to them using Soundcore Liberty Air 2. The true wireless in-ear headphones come with four built-in microphones with noise cancellation and filters out ambient noises.

Environmental noises are reduced by 60% to 95% to ensure crystal-clear diamond enhanced sound with twice the amount of bass. The HearID technology maps hearing sensitivity at multiple frequencies and intelligently analyzes results for a truly personalized listening experience.

For convenience, the one-Step Pairing ensures automatic connection to your device. The earbuds allow for 7 hours of playtime but the charging case provides a longer battery life of 28 hours on the go. Liberty Air 2 can also recharge its power through wireless chargers.

With a comfortable fit and the IPX5 (Splash Proof, Liberty Air 2 gives freedom from messy wired headphones and offers the convenience of listening to music by the pool, during morning walks or while cooking and relaxing.

 

Written by, Anthony Webb, EMEA Vice President at A10 Networks

As more and more organisations embrace cloud as part of their digital transformation efforts, it is becoming more popular for those organisations to adopt two or more clouds within their infrastructure. But here optimisation and security are key to managing multiple clouds.

In fact, according to a global survey that we have undertaken here at A10 Networks, around two-thirds of companies have now deployed enterprise applications across two or more public clouds.  The survey, conducted by the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network on our behalf, shows that over four-in-five (84%) expect to increase their reliance on public or private clouds over the next 24 months.

The vast majority of organisations are not just thinking about moving to a cloud, they’re living in a world where managing multiple clouds is already a reality. However, there is a knock-on effect from this – they have to operationalise different environments. Based on the survey data, there is a need to make sure that enterprises can provide reliability and security across all clouds, no matter which ones they are. Additionally, as budgets don’t necessarily go up when new technology is introduced, there is a need to optimise the organisation’s IT staff to make them more efficient.

There is also a compounding problem in that when comparing one cloud provider against another, the services they are offering in the cloud are different. And then even the services they offer to support the application have nuanced differences in terms of how they work.

Think of it in terms of video streaming services, these all have different interfaces and different ways of working. For cloud environments, the critical services that provide reliability and security have different capabilities between cloud providers. For example, if an organisation wants to deploy load balancing for reliability, there’s going to be different levels of functionality among providers. That functionality may be the lowest common denominator when offered by a cloud provider.

As a counterpoint, on-premises infrastructure has a lot of the supporting services, which have been developed over decades and have a lot more advanced functionality.

Meeting the mandates of security and reliability

Organisations trying to meet mandates for reliability and security have to look at the overall environment. When organisations have infrastructure running in multiple clouds, they may have different reasons for doing so, such as better service quality in a remote part of the world or using a specific cloud when a preferred provider doesn’t have a viable presence in a particular region.

Additionally, a lot of organisations may want to move their Microsoft applications to Microsoft Azure or believe that the Oracle Cloud infrastructure is the best place for their Oracle cloud apps. Our survey revealed that many organisations have moved from phase one of deployment of clouds to a second phase where they need to operationalise their environments by making sure IT has the tools to control them.

This means that businesses should look at how they centrally manage their cloud and on-premises environments. IT staff need to have visibility to deal with any incidents as they come in and be able to set consistent policies across the entire environment so that they don’t have to worry about the differences in each individual cloud or on-premises environment.  

Centralised control is key

The survey found that centralised visibility, management and automation will be essential to improving and ensuring the security, reliability and performance of their environments. They point to centralised visibility and analytics into security and performance (56%), automated tools to speed response times and reduce costs (54%), and centralised management from a single point of control (50%) as their most important requirements.

Using a centralised management tool can give IT teams visibility of both on-premises and multi-cloud environments all in one location. This makes it easy for IT teams to see what is really going on in their Polynimbus infrastructure.

It should also help them be more efficient and normalise the disparate cloud environments. Such a strategy of automation and intelligence is key to how organisations move to operationalise multiple clouds and make them more efficient.

By: Ashraf Sheet, Regional Director, Middle East & Africa at Infoblox

As companies across sectors encourage—and even mandate—that their employees work from home to protect themselves and others from the spread of coronavirus, IT professionals are tasked with the increasingly complex and challenging responsibility of cyber safety for employees’ devices and companies’ networks.

Individuals and organizations are likely to face increased cyberthreats from malicious actors attempting to target weakened network security as a result of more people teleworking.

For organizations that already offer work-from-home options for all or many of their employees, their network infrastructure and institutional awareness are most likely prepared to protect them from outside cyberthreats. But for companies and employees where the option to work from home is new, it is important that IT professionals and individual employees take the steps necessary to prevent attacks.

Infoblox recommends that businesses implement the following guidelines and best practices to ensure the security of their networks and corporate data while employees are working from home.

Develop and communicate clear and consistent cyber safety policies

It is essential that employees have clearly defined IT policies and protocols in place for working from home. These cyber safety guidelines should include, but are not limited to:

• Making sure that employees use only approved devices to access and store corporate data, where possible
• Mandating the use of strong passwords—at least 12 characters—when accessing corporate networks; and
• Implementing multi-factor authentication—ideally with hardware tokens instead of text messages (which can be spoofed).

 Leverage technological solutions for cyber safety

Companies most likely already have a robust security infrastructure in place to ensure the cyber safety of their corporate networks. With users increasingly working from home, the traditional corporate security perimeter has vanished and VPNs are often no longer necessary to get work done. Instead, employees are increasingly using cloud applications, many of which have not been vetted for security issues.

Network managers and security teams need to ensure that technologies used when working from home are ready and secure, including:

• Ensuring that all corporate security products are patched and updated to the most recent version across users
• Providing a fast, secure, reliable and easy way to protect users, enforce acceptable use policies and ensure business continuity
• If they continue to use VPNs, ensuring that they are encrypted, updated and protected with strong passwords and 2-factor authentication
• Increasing the monitoring of endpoint, email and remote access security events.

 Educate employees about the increased risk of cyberthreats

Above all, employers should make sure that employees are aware of the increased risk of cyberthreats tied to the coronavirus pandemic and train them on how to avoid them, including:

• Alerting employees to expect an increase in phishing attempts and other malware, and to not respond to any emails seeking personal, corporate or financial information
• Reminding employees that malicious actors often disguise themselves using legitimate-looking email addresses and to verify a sender’s identity before clicking on a link in an email. Avoid clicking on links in unsolicited emails and to be wary of email attachments (for example, malicious actors are using fears of coronavirus to distribute the LokiBot malware)
• Teaching employees how to make sure their work-from-home setup is secure and that WiFi and other devices are properly configured; and
• Re-enforcing with employees the importance of reporting suspected security events.

As networks continue to be more decentralized and more employees take advantage of the benefits of working from home, securing networks from malware and other cyberthreats will remain a challenge. Emphasizing and implementing these cyber safety best practices for working from home will help IT managers ensure that corporate networks remain cyber-safe.

Partnership Brings Educational Opportunities to IT Professionals with 5,000 Scholarships

Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced a partnership with Udacity, the global online learning platform, resulting in a new Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree program. This program will enhance learning opportunities in the emerging cloud technologies market that are essential for organizations to uplevel their IT infrastructure. As part of the collaboration, Nutanix will also sponsor 5,000 scholarships to help IT professionals advance their knowledge with this initiative.

As more services move to the cloud, IT teams require the knowledge and expertise it takes to properly manage these infrastructures that increasingly stretch across on-premises and public cloud in a hybrid model. Although hybrid cloud technology continues to grow and evolve, educational opportunities in this field remain at a standstill. In Nutanix’s recent Enterprise Cloud Index survey, 85% of respondents said that hybrid cloud is the ideal operating model. However, 32% of respondents reported a lack of in-house hybrid cloud skills.

To fill this educational gap, Udacity and Nutanix have collaborated closely to develop a Nanodegree program that will advance the knowledge of seasoned IT professionals. To strengthen professional development in this space, the Nanodegree program will cover modern private cloud infrastructure and the design of hybrid application deployment. Ideal students are those managing traditional business applications, legacy infrastructure, or cloud-native applications on public cloud infrastructure.

“One of our primary goals at Nutanix is to ensure that cloud technology professionals continue to stay on the cusp of innovation in this developing field,” said Wendy M. Pfeiffer, CIO at Nutanix. “We are excited to have worked closely with Udacity to develop the Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree program, and now open access to thousands of leading cloud professionals through this scholarship program.”

To ensure all participants looking to increase their education within the cloud environment have an opportunity to do so, Udacity is opening applications to the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Scholarship program. For the first phase of the scholarship program, Udacity will select 5,000 applicants to participate in the Hybrid Cloud Fundamentals course. From those 5,000 students, 500 high-performing students will be awarded a full scholarship to the Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree program.

“At Udacity, we strive to empower professionals with the most demanded, forward-looking skills in their fields,” said Udacity CEO Gabe Dalporto. “We’re delighted to team up with Nutanix, a pioneer and leader in the cloud computing field, to create the new, cutting-edge Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree program.”

The Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree program will focus on four subject areas:

• Modern Private Cloud Infrastructure: Learn to configure and manage a hyperconverged infrastructure cluster, providing a scalable, distributed storage, network, and compute fabric for virtual machines and advanced services.
• Hybrid Cloud Application Design: Learn about the evolution of hybrid cloud workload management and design for multiple infrastructures.
• Automating Private Cloud: Create a scalable web application and life cycle operational model with governance to enable on-demand, self-service workloads on-prem with fiscal oversight and quotas.
• Designing Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: Learn public cloud concepts, manage hybrid workloads, and drive to global load balancing of workloads.

More information on the Hybrid Cloud Nanodegree and Scholarship program is available here.