CLOUD STORAGE
Alibaba Cloud | September 23, 2022
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has announced its latest international strategic roadmap at the 2022 Alibaba Cloud Summit. During the three-day summit, the trusted cloud provider has revealed new products to support technology innovation among enterprises, an investment of USD1 billion for a global partner ecosystem upgrade, and enhanced customer services to provide comprehensive support throughout a customer's digitalization journey.
Technology innovation to power rapidly increasing cloud consumption
With more enterprises moving to the cloud and an increase in demand for cloud services in a hybrid environment, Alibaba Cloud has made available globally a series of its proven infrastructure products, a multi-model cloud-native database and distributed cloud services. This range of new products aims to provide enterprise customers with a wider scope of cloud services covering network, storage and compute.
Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) 2.0, the newly available network services, provides global intelligent networking to support enterprises' global expansion. CEN 2.0 supports ultra-large-scale networking capabilities with higher availability, lower latency, enhanced security capability and greater flexibility in pricing options for enterprises, compared to the previous version.
Alibaba Cloud has also unveiled a storage product called ESSD Auto PL, which provides block storage services and supports automatic scaling within seconds to allow businesses to handle sudden traffic surges. As the world's leading elastic block storage product with auto-scaling function, it offers up to one million IOPS (input/output operations per second), significantly higher than the industry average.
Lindorm, the cloud-native multi-model database developed by Alibaba Cloud, successfully supported Alibaba Group's 11.11, the world's largest shopping festival, last year. Designed for fusion-processing requirements for wide tables, time series, space-time and various unstructured data, Lindorm has also been supporting customers in various industries in China – including automotive, finance and manufacturing – thanks to its high availability and low storage cost.
Alibaba Cloud also introduced ACK One (Alibaba Cloud Distributed Cloud Container Platform), a multi-region and multi-cluster container management platform to provide a consistent management, delivery and operation experience for enterprises. It allows users to implement container cluster management, resource scheduling, data disaster recovery and application delivery through a unified platform, whether in a public cloud, private cloud or on-premise environment. ACK One is the latest addition to ACK Anywhere, Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes. Earlier this year, among the eight significant industry players evaluated, Alibaba Cloud was named a "Leader" in The Forrester Wave™ Public Cloud Container Platforms Q1 2022 for the first time.
Lastly, to support enterprises' need for hybrid cloud, CloudBox integrates Alibaba Cloud's public cloud infrastructure technologies such as compute, storage and network to provide enterprises with fully managed cloud services for deployment close to customers' business premises. CloudBox delivers a consistent experience as Alibaba Cloud's public cloud, while meeting enterprises' demand for on-premise data processing and low latency compute. CloudBox is designed for multinational companies with business operations in China.
Alibaba Cloud has been strengthening its capabilities in computing, storage, network and security. For example, its recently unveiled Cloud Infrastructure Processing Unit (CIPU), a dedicated processing unit designed for its Apsara Cloud operating system, can reduce network latency to as low as five microseconds and improve computing power performance in data-intensive AI and data analytics scenarios by as much as 30%.
Prioritizing partner benefits to build inclusive technology ecosystem
With its revamped ecosystem strategy, Alibaba Cloud has announced that it is committed to investing USD1 billion to support partners' technology innovation and their market expansion with Alibaba Cloud in the coming three fiscal years. This investment consists of both financial and non-financial incentives, such as funding, rebates and go-to-market initiatives.
To accelerate partners' growth, Alibaba Cloud also launched a "Regional Accelerator" program to provide partners operating in different markets with a localized business collaboration model. The model is designed around factors such as a market's level of technical maturity, vertical focus, digitalization needs and business demands, with an aim to boost partners' income and strengthen their technical expertise. Alibaba Cloud ecosystem partners including resellers, technology partners (ISV, SaaS and SI), service and consulting partners can benefit from the program.
"Partners have always been a key focus for Alibaba Cloud, and we are committed to providing them with strong support for our ongoing co-creation and value-add – both technologically and commercially to further empower our joined customers, Our revamped partner strategy prioritizes our partners' growth. By continuing to support our partners' business expansion, we can build an inclusive ecosystem benefiting partners and customers."
Selina Yuan, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence International President
To address complications with partners' international business operations, Alibaba Cloud has also upgraded its collaboration model with its ISV partners, with a focus on enhancing industry collaboration, standardizing go-to-market process, and accelerating technical solution integration to increase efficiency. Looking ahead, Alibaba Cloud hopes to recruit more financial services, retail, internet and manufacturing ISVs to co-develop products and support customer innovation.
Alibaba Cloud currently works with about 11,000 partners worldwide, including Salesforce, VMware, Fortinet, IBM and Neo4j.
Empowering customers with comprehensive support
In order to provide all-round cloud-based solutions and services to all customers, Alibaba Cloud also launched a "Global Delivery and Service Program" to enhance the cloud adoption process for customers. Under the program, it has unveiled three Customer Service Centers in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Porto (Portugal), and Mexico City (Mexico), to support customers in their cloud adoption journey, providing timely and regionalized cloud migration and consulting services.
In addition to the Customer Service Centers, Alibaba Cloud has set up three Service Delivery Centers in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Dubai (United Arab Emirates) and Hong Kong (Greater China), to provide extra technology support to its regional offices and customer project delivery in Asia Pacific and the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
Fueling new innovations with reliable infrastructure
During the summit, Alibaba Cloud has inked nearly 30 agreements to help customers and partners accelerate their digital innovation capabilities with leading cloud computing technologies.
In collaboration with JP Games, Japan's leading game development studio, Alibaba Cloud has unveiled a set of new services to create virtual spaces and realistic avatars for global customers venturing into the metaverse.
Together with MetaverseXR, Thailand's leading metaverse company, Alibaba Cloud rolled out a comprehensive suite of metaverse solutions for the Thai market in order to fulfill growing local demand for embarking on a Web 3.0 journey.
Alibaba Cloud also teamed up with UMG Group in Myanmar, to power the country's digital transformation – especially in traditional industries.
With BeLive and VisionTech from Singapore, Alibaba Cloud is expanding its regional outreach in the media and Fintech verticals.
Alibaba Cloud is collaborating with OnFinality, a leading New Zealand-based blockchain infrastructure provider, to offer robust cloud-computing capability and a strong global network for Web 3.0 developers looking to scale globally.
More than 300 Alibaba Cloud customers and partners around the globe are attending the summit, including Accenture, Tiger Brokers, DANA, Thai Data, and Lala station.
About Alibaba Cloud
Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, management and application services, big data analytics, a machine learning platform and IoT services. Alibaba maintained its position as the third leading public cloud IaaS service provider globally since 2018, according to IDC. Alibaba is the world's third leading and Asia Pacific's leading IaaS provider by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner.
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CLOUD SECURITY
Tecnotree | September 27, 2022
Tecnotree, a global provider of Business Support Systems (BSS) for the telecoms industry announces it will provide Digital BSS products built on Microsoft Azure to Digital Service Providers (DSPs). Through this integration, service providers will be empowered to innovate and adapt quickly while delivering superior customer experiences.
Tecnotree, a global provider of Business Support Systems (BSS) for the telecoms industry announces it will provide Digital BSS products built on Microsoft Azure to Digital Service Providers (DSPs). Through this integration, service providers will be empowered to innovate and adapt quickly while delivering superior customer experiences.
As 5G and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) reshape the industry landscape, service providers’ IT infrastructure today is more agile & cloud-native along with the underlying applications to support charging, billing & partner functions in a dynamic way. Tecnotree's Digital Suite-5 for consumers and business monetization is built natively to run on Kubernetes and is aligned with the Microsoft Azure cloud to drive multi-tenant, multi-region transformations that allow enterprises to lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) by eliminating significant upfront investments. Tecnotree Moments for enterprises and consumers enables a Digital Ecosystem of microservices as an extension of the Digital-BSS-Suite-5 by converting the Moments pre-integrated partner ecosystem into instant revenue generators across industries like: Sports, Gaming, Health & Wellness, Education, and other verticals. This allows Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to seamlessly transform into DSPs, with the opportunity to galvanize their IT ecosystems and launch innovative digital offerings.
While tier-1 providers have a clear path defined about migrating to the cloud in the next few years, tier-2 & 3 providers are considering the merits of cloud-based systems. At the same time, new-age providers, and Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) are moving quickly towards cloud BSS.
"By integrating Tecnotree products with Microsoft Azure, we help service providers bring new services to the market, With this combined offering, DSPs now have the ability to unlock the full potential of 5G investments while having speed at the center of the transformation. As Tecnotree Moments for B2B2X headless commerce launches in different markets around the world as an extension of our Digital offering, the change will redefine the future of digital business.”
Padma Ravichander, CEO-Tecnotree Corporation
Rick Lievano, CTO WW Telecom at Microsoft says, “With Tecnotree Digital Suite 5 on the Microsoft Azure cloud, Tecnotree enables digital transformation for service providers. By combining Tecnotree’s deep domain expertise and Microsoft’s software capabilities, we help service providers create enhanced user experiences and unlock new revenue streams for the telecom ecosystem.”
About Tecnotree
Tecnotree is a 5G-ready digital Business Support System (BSS) player, with AI/ML capabilities and multi-cloud extensibility. Tecnotree is the first company in the world to be Platinum Certified by TM Forum Open API standards, and our agile and open-source Digital BSS Stack comprises the full range (order-to-cash) of business processes and subscription management for telecom and other digital services industries creating opportunities beyond connectivity. Tecnotree also provides Fintech and B2B2X multi-experience digital marketplace to its subscriber base through the Tecnotree Moments platform to empower digitally connected communities across gaming, health, education, OTT, and other vertical ecosystems. Tecnotree digital platform products and services today serve over 1 Billion Subscribers globally in over 70 countries. Tecnotree is listed on Helsinki Nasdaq (TEM1V).
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CLOUD SECURITY
Gigamon | September 28, 2022
Gigamon, the leading deep observability company, is guiding the industry forward today, bringing application and network-level intelligence together for the first time to help network, security, and cloud IT operations teams eliminate security blind spots and deliver defense in depth across their highly distributed hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure. Leading market intelligence firm, the 650 Group, forecasts the deep observability market’s CAGR to grow over 60 percent to reach $2 billion by 2026. They predict Gigamon will take a commanding lead with 68 percent market share in the first half of 2022. Together with an expanding ecosystem of technology alliance partners, Gigamon harnesses actionable network-level intelligence that amplifies the power of cloud, security, and observability tools, ultimately empowering large organizations to achieve the transformational promise of the cloud.
A recent IDC global survey of 900 large organization IT executives and managers* revealed that 'strengthened cybersecurity posture and practices' is the number one benefit of deep observability intelligence and insights. And to overcome their concerns for security vulnerabilities, 79 percent of respondents indicate they have made good-to-excellent progress in leveraging network intelligence and performance metrics for security insights. When asked specifically where the alignment of NetOps and SecOps efforts and tools have improved security management, a strong majority of respondents cited the following: provide complete visibility into on-premises systems and cloud services, reduce false positives, improve speed and accuracy of triage, and validate remediation.
To further underscore the urgency for organizations to address security blind spots, a recent Vitreous World State of Ransomware for 2022 and Beyond survey revealed more than 95 percent of the more than one thousand global respondents, consisting of large organization IT and security executives, had experienced ransomware attacks in the past year. The research also revealed that 89 percent of global security leaders surveyed agree deep observability is an important element of cloud security with 50 percent of global CISOs/CIOs strongly agreeing with this statement.
“As a cloud-first dental support organization, we are continuously seeking new ways to fortify our security posture and equip our supported owner doctors with the latest, proven technology and highly skilled support staff, so they can focus on providing the perfect patient experience to patients with an extraordinary, differentiated care experience,” said Nemi George, vice president of IT and information security officer and IT service operations at Pacific Dental Services. “With the deep observability we gain from Gigamon, we can eliminate security blind spots at the network layer of our hybrid cloud infrastructure, deliver defense in depth, and confidently scale our operations.”
A New Frontier: Deep Observability
The Gigamon Hawk Deep Observability Pipeline harnesses actionable network-level intelligence to amplify the power of cloud, security, and observability tools, enabling IT organizations to assure security and compliance governance, speed root-cause analysis of performance bottlenecks and lower the operational overhead associated with managing today’s highly distributed hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure. Gigamon extends the value of these tools with real-time network intelligence derived from packets, flows and application metadata to deliver defense in depth and performance management. Gigamon has an extensive ecosystem of technology alliance partners that includes leading observability vendors Dynatrace, New Relic and Sumo Logic.
“We are proud to partner with Gigamon and integrate their network-level intelligence with the Dynatrace platform’s full-stack observability, application security, and AIOps capabilities to enable our joint customers to innovate faster and more securely,” said Bob Wambach, vice president of product marketing at Dynatrace. “Large organizations continue to embrace hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, and cloud-native technologies as the foundation for their digital services and innovation. As a result, applications have become increasingly complex and distributed. The combination of Dynatrace and Gigamon gives customers unprecedented abilities to simplify cloud complexity. The actionable, network-level intelligence of the Gigamon deep observability pipeline provides additional network-security context to the precise answers and intelligent automation delivered by Dynatrace.”
“At Trace3 we help our customers design, move and re-architect workloads to the Cloud. One of the challenges we face is maintaining visibility into key applications regardless of cloud architecture pattern, in alignment with guidance from well-architected frameworks,” said Chris Nicholas, vice president cloud and cloud solutions group at Trace3. “Gigamon Hawk helps us deliver actionable network-level intelligence against many advanced security and observability use-cases. The built-in performance tools help us accelerate troubleshooting while lowering operational costs.”
“IT organizations are navigating an unprecedented increase in cyber threats across all vectors of their hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, and the underlying complexity and disparity of tools used to manage these environments introduces blind spots that can expose their organizations to risk, Gigamon is at the right place at the right time to capitalize on this high growth market and deliver more value to our customers by extending the value of tools they have already deployed and empowering them with actionable network-level intelligence for the hybrid cloud so they can run fast, stay secure, and accelerate innovation.”
Shane Buckley, president and CEO of Gigamon
About Gigamon
Gigamon offers a deep observability pipeline that harnesses actionable network-level intelligence to amplify the power of observability tools. This powerful combination helps IT organizations to assure security and compliance governance, speed root-cause analysis of performance bottlenecks, and lower operational overhead associated with managing hybrid and multi-cloud IT infrastructures. The result: modern enterprises realize the full transformational promise of the cloud. Gigamon serves more than 4,000 customers worldwide, including over 80 percent of Fortune 100 enterprises, 9 of the 10 largest mobile network providers, and hundreds of governments and educational organizations worldwide.
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