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.