CLOUD SECURITY
Elastic | September 26, 2022
Kyndryl the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, and Elastic the company behind Elasticsearch, today announced an expanded global partnership to provide customers full-stack observability, enabling them to accelerate their ability to search, analyze and act on machine data (IT data and business data) stored across hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and edge computing environments.
Under the partnership, Kyndryl and Elastic will collaborate on creating joint solutions and delivery capabilities designed to provide deep, frictionless observability at all levels of applications, services, and infrastructure to address customer data, analytics and IT operations management challenges.
The companies will focus on delivering large-scale IT operations and AIOps capabilities to joint customers by leveraging Kyndryl’s data framework and toolkits and Elastic’s Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security solutions, enabling streamlined migrations, modernized infrastructure and tenant management, and AI development for efficient and proactive IT management.
As part of the partnership, Kyndryl and Elastic plan to collaborate to support customer needs and requirements via joint offerings and solutions across the following areas:
IT Data Modernization – Helping organizations manage exponential storage growth and giving them the capability to search for data wherever it resides.
IT Data Management Services for Elastic – Providing flexibility to users of Elastic by letting Kyndryl manage the entire stack infrastructure and analytics workloads for IT operations.
Intelligent IT Analytics – Enabling actionable observability through AI/ML capabilities that deliver unified insights for proactive and efficient IT operations with technology domain-specific insights.
Data Migration Services for Elastic – Delivering the capability to streamline migrations and deploy self-managed Elastic workloads to the hyperscalers of a customer’s choice.
Kyndryl’s global team of data management experts will also participate in the global Elastic certification program to expand their expertise in advising, implementing and managing Elastic solutions across critical IT projects and environments.
“Customers in all industries are seeking to improve their capacity to search and analyze the data stored in the cloud and on edge computing environments, We are happy to partner with Elastic to create and bring forward a unified approach that will help customers overcome hurdles and improve their ability to access and gain insights at scale from their business data.”
Nicolas Sekkaki, Applications, Data & AI global practice leader for Kyndryl
“Enabling customers to gain actionable insights from their data is a key enabler of data-driven digital transformation,” said Scott Musson, Vice President, Worldwide Channel and Alliances at Elastic. “The combination of Kyndryl’s global expertise in managing mission-critical information systems and the proven scale and flexibility of the Elastic Search Platform provides the critical foundation to help organizations drive speed, scale, and productivity, and address their observability needs across hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and edge computing environments.”
About Kyndryl
Kyndryl is the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider serving thousands of enterprise customers in more than 60 countries. The Company designs, builds, manages and modernizes the complex, mission-critical information systems that the world depends on every day. For more information, visit www.kyndryl.com.
About Elastic
Elastic is a leading platform for search-powered solutions. We help organizations, their employees, and their customers accelerate the results that matter. With solutions in Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security, we enhance customer and employee search experiences, keep mission-critical applications running smoothly, and protect against cyber threats. Delivered wherever data lives, in one cloud, across multiple clouds, or on-premise, Elastic enables 18,000+ customers and more than half of the Fortune 500, to achieve new levels of success at scale and on a single platform.
Read More
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.
Read More
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).
Read More