CLOUD SECURITY
Wolters Kluwer | September 30, 2022
Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting announced that its innovative TeamMate+ suite of cloud-based expert audit solutions was recognized by the Business Intelligence Group as a global leader in cloud computing and awarded the 2022 Stratus Awards for Cloud Computing in their annual business award program. TeamMate+ was recognized as a global leader in the Software as a Service category. Through these awards, the Business Intelligence Group sought to identify the companies, products and people that are offering unique solutions and technology that will continue to lead the industry.
“We are honored to be recognized by the Business Intelligence Group for our part in the evolution of cloud solutions for the internal audit profession, TeamMate continues to help organizations redefine their risk assessment methodology to ensure they stay ahead of risk while optimizing human resources and adhering to professional standards.”
Frans Klaassen, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Wolters Kluwer TeamMate
TeamMate+ supports all phases of audit work, from overarching audit plans aligned with organizational objectives to individual project planning, which guides day-to-day work. It enhances workflow using request and tracking features to ensure appropriate data is provided and captured within the tool during audit execution. And provides reporting capabilities that allow audit teams to craft output appropriate to various audiences including audit management and stakeholders. In addition, the TeamCloud hosting provides a secure and stable environment to access a customizable TeamMate environment from the web.
Earlier this year, TeamMate achieved authorization status from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) for the TeamMate+ FedRAMP cloud hosting environment. Achieving authorization means that auditors within US Federal agencies can create, manage, and execute audits all while staying aligned with the Red and Yellow Book standards.
“Wolters Kluwer is at the forefront of the cloud helping to drive practical innovations in the cloud,” said Maria Jimenez, Chief Nominations Officer of Business Intelligence Group. “The cloud is now part of the fabric of our society, and we are thrilled that our volunteer judges were able to help promote all of these innovative services, organizations and executives.”
About Business Intelligence Group
The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry and business award programs, business executives—those with experience and knowledgejudge the programs. The organization’s proprietary and unique scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and then rewards those companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers.
About Wolters Kluwer
Wolters Kluwer (WKL) is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the healthcare; tax and accounting; governance, risk and compliance; and legal and regulatory sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with advanced technology and services.
Wolters Kluwer reported 2021 annual revenues of €4.8 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,800 people worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands.
Wolters Kluwer shares are listed on Euronext Amsterdam (WKL) and are included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices. Wolters Kluwer has a sponsored Level 1 American Depositary Receipt (ADR) program. The ADRs are traded on the over-the-counter market in the U.S. (WTKWY).
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CLOUD SECURITY
Spectro Cloud | September 30, 2022
Spectro Cloud, a leader in modern Kubernetes (K8s) management software, today announced a major new release of its Palette Edge platform.
Kubernetes at the edge has spurred the interest of businesses around the world as they seek to enhance competitiveness and agility. To date, however, K8s at the edge has failed to realize its true potential. Why? A study by Dimensional Research found 72% of Kubernetes users effectively said: “It’s too challenging to deploy and manage Kubernetes on edge devices.”
The Palette Edge platform, first launched in March 2022, earned Spectro Cloud recognition as a 2022 Gartner Cool Vendor in Edge Computing solves this problem, enabling organizations to re-define how cost-efficiently they can deploy and manage edge K8s clusters at scale, including at locations with small form factor devices, no on-site IT skills and marginal connectivity. Palette Edge delivers remote troubleshooting, zero-downtime rolling upgrades and patch management, even in single-server edge deployments, due to its unique A/B OS partition, multi-node failsafe design and support for both ARM and x86 architectures, including Intel’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
Palette Edge derives its functionality from Spectro Cloud’s core Palette platform, which enables organizations to consistently manage K8s clusters across their full lifecycle, across public clouds, virtualized or bare metal data centers, as well as edge locations. Through a unique extension of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF’s) Cluster API, Palette enables IT teams to model their full Kubernetes stacks from the OS to the application in a true declarative model, creating project-curated, reusable Cluster Profiles while providing a choice of operating systems, K8s distributions and tools from the broad K8s ecosystem. Palette is architected to scale, delivering centralized and automated management combined with decentralized orchestration and policy enforcement — together enabling a virtually infinite scale from few to tens of thousands of clusters.
Extending this core Palette foundation, Palette Edge today adds unique security, visibility and usability capabilities, setting a new industry standard for deploying and centrally managing edge K8s at scale, dramatically lowering total cost of ownership and risk for organizations of any size expanding to the edge. Palette Edge is purpose-built to support key industry use cases including Internet of Things device management and orchestration, data ingestion, streaming, analytics and AI inference.
“For us, edge is an enabler to help clinicians deliver better patient outcomes by deploying technology closer to the user,” said Vignesh Shetty, SVP & GM Edison AI and Platform at GE Healthcare Digital. “The need for a secure, cost-effective approach to manage Kubernetes at the edge at scale is more relevant than ever before.”
The new Palette Edge delivers on the key priorities for edge K8s users with:
Tamperproof security for Kubernetes at the edge: Spectro Cloud research found that security is the #1 concern when adopting edge Kubernetes.
Edge Kubernetes devices deployed in remote, unmonitored locations are particularly vulnerable to deliberate tampering and unintentional configuration drift, where their operating system, distribution and other software elements move out of compliance through ad hoc configuration changes.
Palette Edge now enables operations teams to build highly secure configurations for edge devices, including their preferred Kubernetes distribution and the underlying OS, which once deployed become immutable, read-only and unmodifiable by the application user, just like the firmware on a smartphone. The now-immutable stack also enables zero-downtime rolling upgrades, due to a failsafe deployment design.
Palette eXtended Kubernetes Edge (PXK-E): This new edge-optimized Kubernetes distribution version of Spectro Cloud’s CNCF-upstream Kubernetes distribution is available now to all Palette customers.
PXK-E incorporates Palette’s new immutability capability, along with NIST-800 security hardening. It is certified for more than 50 open source and commercial cloud native integrations and provides high availability and zero-downtime rolling upgrades even in single-server configurations.
With Palette Edge, businesses can choose the PXK-E distribution or Palette-optimized versions of any other K8s distribution, verified and supported by Spectro Cloud.
A powerful NOC-like dashboard: Now organizations scaling to thousands or tens of thousands of edge devices have the power to manage their fleet more easily and with greater control than ever before.
Palette Edge’s Network Operations Center-like (NOC) dashboard provides a highly intuitive user experience with live status for key events, plus advanced capabilities to filter, tag and drill down to clusters by location, status or other attribute. Importantly, operators can define powerful workflows for managing clusters, with almost infinite possibilities: for example, they can phase deployments of cluster updates by location for canary testing, or schedule patching to follow the sun.
Ultra-simple edge device onboarding: In edge Kubernetes projects, organizations can find the act of deploying new devices in remote locations incredibly problematic; often, costly field engineering truck rolls are needed.
Palette Edge makes it easy for non-specialist staff to quickly power up and onboard a new device into a managed cluster, using a variety of methods, such as through Palette Edge’s user interface, leveraging its open API, the Spectro Cloud Terraform provider, or by simply scanning a QR code on the edge device itself.
The features delivered in this new Palette Edge release reflect real customer requirements of K8s at the edge. To address them and also contribute to the broader cloud native community, Spectro Cloud is now leading a unique open source project which delivers failsafe immutability at the edge: Kairos. Version 1.0 of Kairos is now generally available with extended community support, and is free to download and use. For more information, visit www.kairos.io. This is another example demonstrating Spectro Cloud’s continued commitment to foster innovation as a member of the CNCF and Linux Foundation, contributing to major Kubernetes ecosystem projects such as Cluster API and the Cluster API Provider for Canonical MAAS.
These major new features are available today in Spectro Cloud’s Palette Edge edition and further position Palette as the first choice for organizations running Kubernetes at the edge at scale, enabling them to bring modern applications and data close to their end-users. Customers of Palette Edge are already realizing significant benefits by avoiding otherwise necessary field engineering visits at edge locations, which can result to up to 90% reduction in operational costs.
“A key use case for 5G Edge compute is mission critical, ultra-low latency, workloads. That means cyber-security is a foundational principle for Edge and not an afterthought. Spectro Cloud is delivering a customer solution for deploying modern apps to the Edge that can integrate readily into end-to-end Zero Trust architectures,” said Dr. Ken Urquhart, Global Vice-President, 5G at Zscaler.
“This brand new set of capabilities is making edge K8s locations as easy as a cloud for our customers, With a platform that can scale to tens of thousands of edge locations, requirements like security, resiliency and ease-of-use can be game changers, and this has been our focus in the latest release. At Spectro Cloud we are committed champions of the innovation coming out of the open source community, and we couldn’t be more excited to collaborate with some of the most interesting projects to deliver some of those new capabilities.”
Spectro Cloud co-founder and CEO Tenry Fu
About Spectro Cloud
Spectro Cloud uniquely enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes in production, at scale. Its Palette enterprise Kubernetes management platform gives IT Operations and DevOps engineering teams effortless control of the full Kubernetes lifecycle even across multiple clouds, data centers, bare metal and edge environments. Ops teams are empowered to support their developers with curated Kubernetes stacks and tools based on their specific needs, with granular governance and enterprise-grade security.
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CLOUD DEPLOYMENT MODELS
CoreStack | September 27, 2022
CoreStack, a global multi-cloud governance provider, today announced the company’s acquisition of Optio3, an AI-powered operations management company based in Seattle, WA. As a result, CoreStack will acquire 100 percent of Optio3’s technology and IP and will integrate Optio3 team into the CoreStack team. Optio3 Co-founder and CEO Sridhar (Sri) Chandrashekar will be joining the CoreStack leadership team as Chief Digital Officer (CDO).
“We’ve been leveraging Optio3’s technology in our platform for 9 months and have had tremendous success with it,” said Ezhilarasan (Ez) Natarajan, CoreStack Founder and CEO. “We now have the opportunity to bring the Optio3 team’s expertise in-house and can further tailor the technology to support our enterprise customers’ needs.”
CoreStack helps enterprises unleash the power of cloud on their terms by providing a NextGen multi-cloud governance platform that is Continuous, Holistic, Autonomous, Integrated, and Nimble (CHAIN). This NextGen governance solution enables proactive multi-cloud governance and 360-degree visibility across financial management (FinOps), security operations (SecOps), and cloud operations (CloudOps) in a unified dashboard. The Optio3 acquisition will further facilitate CoreStack’s delivery of these NextGen multi-cloud governance capabilities, bringing their deep industry experience in building scalable SaaS products as well as a proven technology framework that strengthens the platform, automates the cloud infrastructure, and increases the speed of innovation and delivery.
“CoreStack is at an inflection point in its growth curve with a phenomenal pipeline of Fortune 5000 customers,” said Sri Chandrashekar, CoreStack’s new CDO. “The Optio3 team is highly specialized in delivering high-scale platforms and SaaS solutions to those enterprise customers. I’m excited that we’re working together to achieve CoreStack’s ambitious vision and product roadmap for NextGen Cloud Governance.”
Founded in 2016, CoreStack is a multi-national corporation with headquarters in Bellevue, WA, an engineering Center of Excellence is in Chennai, India, and sales and support personnel located across the globe to ensure seamless support. Since January 2022, CoreStack has hired more than 150 people, won significant deals, and added numerous marquee partners. Booked annual revenues have grown by more than 100%, and customer renewal rates remain at 100%. Annual cloud spend across all customers and partners governed by CoreStack is crossing $2B, and the company has doubled down on partnership engagements with AWS, Azure, Google, and Oracle.
“We are thrilled to be bringing Optio3’s technology and team into our family,” said Ez Natarajan. “CoreStack was born with the mission of establishing a robust, NextGen governance layer on top of even the most complex multi-cloud ecosystems. We are now perfectly positioned to offer our customers a highly scalable, manageable, and reliable solution – one that drives digital transformation and delivers next-level performance.”
“We are delighted to bring in Optio3’s technology, CoreStack was born with the mission of establishing a robust, NextGen governance layer on top of even the most complex multi-cloud ecosystems. We are now perfectly positioned to offer our customers a highly scalable, manageable, and reliable solution one that drives digital transformation and delivers next-level performance.”
Sabapathy Arumugam, CoreStack Co-Founder and CTO
About CoreStack
CoreStack provides a NextGen Cloud Governance platform that empowers enterprises to predictably increase top-line revenues, improve bottom-line efficiencies, and gain a competitive edge through AI-powered real-time cloud governance on autopilot. CoreStack's FinOps, SecOps, and CloudOps solutions embrace, enhance, and extend native-cloud capabilities, enabling reporting, recommendation, and remediation and providing single pane-of-glass governance across multi-cloud. Through executive dashboards for comprehensive real-time insights, CoreStack delivers transformative value such as 40% increase in operational efficiencies, 50% decrease in cloud costs, and 100% security assurance and compliance. CoreStack helps 500+ global enterprises govern $2+ billion in annual cloud consumption. Gartner, Frost & Sullivan, Forrester, S&P Global and IDC have recognized CoreStack as an innovator and leader in cloud management solutions. CoreStack is backed by strategic advisors, including the ex-CEO of Wipro and ex-CIO of Microsoft. The company is a Microsoft Azure Gold Partner, Amazon AWS Advanced Technology Competency Partner, Oracle Cloud Build Partner, and Google Cloud Build Partner.
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