Cloud App Management
StackPath | September 20, 2023
StackPath Edge Compute is now accessible via the Google Cloud Marketplace, allowing Google Cloud customers to expand their environment to the internet's edge. StackPath, a leading edge computing platform, has made its Edge Compute Virtual Machines and Containers available on the marketplace, with purchases counting towards users' committed Google Cloud expenditure.
StackPath offers cloud computing instances at edge points of presence within 38 major global markets, ensuring proximity to data sources and destinations. This proximity enhances application distribution options.
Tom Reyes, Chief Product Officer for StackPath, emphasized the synergy between edge and cloud computing, highlighting the cost and performance benefits of utilizing Google Cloud for latency-neutral workloads and StackPath for latency-sensitive tasks.
Dai Vu, Managing Director at Google Cloud, reportedly stated,
As a part of their digital transformation strategies, many enterprises are seeking solutions that help them optimize their workflows. With its solutions now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, StackPath is enabling companies of all types and sizes to achieve the speed, security, and efficiency they require.
[Source: PR Newswire]
Additionally, StackPath recently added support for Virtual Kubelet in StackPath Edge Compute, facilitating seamless integration of StackPath Edge Compute Containers into multi-cloud Kubernetes (K8s) clusters. K8s, born on Google Cloud, remain popular among Google Cloud users.
Key features of StackPath Edge Compute include deploying VMs with certified Linux distributions, image capture for autoscaling and rollbacks, deploying compliant container images, and rapid provisioning in StackPath Edge locations.
About StackPath
StackPath is an edge cloud platform offering cloud services in close proximity to end users compared to core cloud providers. Its edge compute solutions, including virtual machines and containers, along with edge applications such as CDN and WAF, are strategically positioned in densely populated areas. These services are connected through a secure private network fabric and managed through a single system. Clients, ranging from Fortune 50 enterprises to startups, rely on StackPath to optimize the performance, security, and efficiency of their latency-sensitive workloads and applications. Headquartered in Dallas, TX, StackPath was founded in 2015 and specializes in SECaaS, CDN, WAF, and various other cloud-related services.
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Cloud App Management
PR Newswire | October 19, 2023
dbt Labs, the pioneer in analytics engineering, today announced several new product capabilities to its dbt Cloud platform at its annual customer conference, Coalesce 2023. New dbt Cloud capabilities enable customers to adopt dbt at scale and include dbt Explorer, Cloud CLI, new partner adapters, and the next generation of the dbt Semantic Layer. dbt Labs also announced the new dbt Mesh paradigm, which equips teams to collaborate across projects to support a data mesh architecture, enabled by the new capabilities. These announcements provide organizations with a centralized data transformation platform where everyone can contribute to data in a governed manner with increased velocity, quality, consistency, and coordination.
"We first introduced dbt Cloud to help data analysts and engineers productionize dbt deployments," said Tristan Handy, CEO and founder of dbt Labs. "With today's announcements, dbt Cloud customers can create a mesh of interconnected, domain-owned, dbt codebases. The developments we've made this year are central to enabling collaboration across multiple projects, a requirement for managing dbt at scale."
Centralized, Secure, and Scalable Governance with dbt Mesh
Historically, organizations have relied solely on a central data platform and data team to deliver analytics to the entire business, resulting in bottlenecks, overworked teams, shipping delays, and low data quality. Today, dbt Labs has launched dbt Mesh, a new paradigm that makes it possible for domain teams to build and maintain their own data products, without compromising on governance or creating silos. By doing so, data products can quickly and easily build on each other. Instead of centralizing business logic in a monolithic dbt project, central data teams can make platform decisions and set global standards for governance.
The dbt Mesh paradigm allows users to:
Declare interfaces between contributors inside of dbt, with the use of model access levels, model contracts, and model versions.
Natively support dependencies across projects, which allows each domain team to own their own data products.
Democratize ownership by allowing every team to own and contribute to their own data products instead of requiring a single, monolithic dbt project for the entire organization.
Launched in public preview, the capabilities enabling dbt Mesh are currently available for no additional cost to current dbt Cloud customers.
Intuitively Navigate and Discover Data Products with dbt Explorer
dbt Labs also announced dbt Explorer, a next generation documentation and lineage visualization experience. In addition to supporting the dbt Mesh paradigm, dbt Explorer allows any organization to more easily discover and understand their dbt assets across teams and projects.
dbt Explorer makes it easier for data teams to share context, troubleshoot issues, and reuse assets across different parts of the organization – significantly reducing friction in the data development workflow, and allowing teams to better control their data platform spend at the same time.
Develop Anywhere with the Cloud CLI
The dbt Cloud platform has been enhanced to now provide data developers more flexibility in how they write dbt code. In addition to its in-browser Integrated Development Environment (IDE), dbt Cloud now offers a dedicated Command Line Interface (CLI), giving more advanced practitioners the flexibility to contribute via any terminal or IDE software of their choosing.
This gives data practitioners the best of both worlds: they can eliminate many of the hassles of local development—such as the complexities of manual configuration, authentication, and version upgrades—while enjoying the benefits of a hosted solution, all from the comfort of their preferred development environment.
With the introduction of the Cloud CLI, data teams can operate with confidence knowing that the entire organization is collaborating from a consistent platform, while each developer is free to work from wherever they are most comfortable.
Expanding the Ecosystem with Microsoft adapters
Additionally, dbt Labs is expanding the ecosystem of cloud data platforms that dbt Cloud inter-operates with, announcing upcoming adapters for Microsoft Azure Synapse and Microsoft Fabric. Existing Synapse and Fabric customers will soon be able to leverage dbt Cloud's full-service data transformation capabilities, providing mutual customers even more flexibility into how and where they develop and deliver data products. dbt Cloud support for Fabric is currently in private preview, and Synapse support will be made available before the end of 2023.
Power Consistent Metrics with the dbt Semantic Layer
dbt Labs also announced the next generation of the dbt Semantic Layer following its acquisition of Transform in February 2023. The dbt Semantic Layer now enables organizations to centrally define business metrics in dbt and then query them from a number of integrated analytics tools including Tableau, Google Sheets, Hex, and Mode. This allows organizations to ensure that critical definitions such as "revenue," "customer count," and "churn rate" are universally consistent, in every downstream application, by every user and team. The new dbt Semantic Layer is accessible to data platforms supported by dbt Cloud, namely BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, and Snowflake.
About dbt Labs
Since 2016, dbt Labs has been on a mission to help analysts create and disseminate organizational knowledge. dbt Labs pioneered the practice of analytics engineering, built the primary tool in the analytics engineering toolbox, and has been fortunate enough to see a fantastic community coalesce to help push the boundaries of the analytics engineering workflow. Today there are 30,000 companies using dbt every week, 90,000 dbt Community members, and 3,600 dbt Cloud customers.
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Cloud Infrastructure Management
Lacework | September 25, 2023
Lacework, the data-driven cloud security firm, has been selected by TSB Bank, a prominent British banking institution, to safeguard its cloud infrastructure. TSB Bank's decision to choose Lacework as its cloud security provider demonstrates its commitment to protecting sensitive data and ensuring the highest level of security for its customers. With Lacework's expertise in data-driven security solutions, TSB Bank can confidently rely on their cloud infrastructure being safeguarded against potential threats and vulnerabilities.
TSB's Chief Information Security Officer, Paul Branley, expressed his excitement about the development, stating that the Lacework Polygraph data platform would transform the way their security teams operate. He mentioned that it would enable their developers to concentrate on value-added tasks while also substantially reducing security alerts.
TSB, a longstanding player in the banking sector with over two centuries of heritage, is serving over five million customers through various channels, including digital, phone, and branches across the UK. With a growing digital business, TSB needed a unified cloud security platform to support its multi-cloud landscape. Lacework will facilitate secure and innovative cloud scaling, eliminating vulnerabilities across various cloud configurations and applications.
Andreas Schneider, Field-CISO at Lacework, reportedly mentioned,
Partnering with Lacework, TSB will be able to reduce complexity in their tool landscape, and our anomaly detection will allow them to embed security at any speed and scale."
[Source – Cision PR Newswire]
Lacework's platform will enable TSB to automate audit and compliance processes while seamlessly integrating into DevOps and CI/CD pipelines, ensuring security acts as an enabler of innovation velocity. The adoption of Lacework’s technology by TSB Bank may entail integration challenges, risks related to automation, and uncertainties about real-world effectiveness that could affect TSB's security strategy. TSB Bank's selection of Lacework promises improved cloud security, enhanced developer focus, and support for its multi-cloud landscape, with automation and integration into DevOps pipelines to boost innovation.
About Lacework
Lacework, a leading cloud security company, offers innovative and scalable solutions for robust cloud security. Their flagship product, the Polygraph Data Platform, automates security processes, providing comprehensive risk insights for security and development teams. Lacework's unique ability to analyze data across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes environments is a significant advantage for businesses worldwide. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, Lacework excels in breach detection, audit and compliance, and container security.
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Cloud Security
Business Wire | October 27, 2023
Lookout, Inc., the data-centric cloud security company, today announced enhancements to its Lookout Cloud Security Platform that are designed to help organizations better discover, assess and protect their data as it moves across any network, from the endpoint to the cloud. These enhancements provide organizations with a unified solution that will expertly secure their data by maximizing visibility and protecting access across all applications.
The Lookout Cloud Security Platform, the Company’s Security Service Edge (SSE) offering, continuously monitors the risk posture of users and their devices to provide dynamic and granular zero-trust access based on the sensitivity level of apps and data, enabling organizations to protect their workers, devices, applications and data from unauthorized access and modern-day internet-based threats. Services in the platform include: Secure Private Access (ZTNA), Secure Internet Access (SWG) and Secure Cloud Access (CASB).
Lookout’s data-centric cloud security innovation helps safeguard customers’ sensitive information as it moves across networks, clouds, applications and devices:
Discover and onboard all private apps with enterprise app discovery:When it comes to protecting sensitive corporate data, ZTNA offers a far more secure approach compared to traditional VPNs.Unlike VPNs that provide access to the entire network for example, ZTNA offers granular access control, which limits users to specific applications. This reduces the overall attack surface and prevents lateral movement of threats, minimizing the risk of compromised accounts or devices compromising the entire infrastructure.Lookout Secure Private Accessdiscovers and helps onboard private applications running on an organization’s network hosted on-prem or in the cloud, and currently being accessed by a VPN. Using this functionality, IT can now see all private applications being accessed by their users and take steps to seamlessly define and enforce access and data protection policies for these apps.
Extend zero trust protection with firewall as a service:The Lookout Cloud Security Platform has an integrated cloud firewall that extends inspection of incoming and outgoing traffic across all ports and protocols, enabling granular visibility and access control into non-web traffic to stop zero-day threats. With this enhancement, customers can apply more granular security and access policies across all of their apps (web, TCP, UDP, ICMP) and both internet and intranet traffic.
Expand data classification and protection capabilities in Google Drive:Google Labels Classification expands data classification capabilities across the Lookout Cloud Security Platform through an integration with Google Drive labels. This integration helps Lookout customers classify sensitive data with Google Drive labels and enforce security policies based on these labels to protect sensitive data stored in Google Drive’s API mode.
Secure traffic and enforce policies on guest networks and IoT devices:Organizations need visibility and control over all endpoints and users within their network in order to reduce the risk of malware infections and data exfiltration through these channels. Lookout has enhanced traffic inspection capabilities, expanding data and threat protection to guest users of company networks and traffic coming from IoT devices. This helps ensure company networks are not compromised from these access points, thereby preventing data exfiltration.
Advanced threat protection from phishing and zero-day threats:Lookout has enhanced its integration with remote browser isolation (RBI) and cloud sandboxing to improve the user experience and provide robust threat protection for organizations, preventing users from accessing malicious sites and content.
“In today’s digital world, data is the lifeblood of every organization,” said Pete Finalle, Research Manager, IDC. “It is vitally important that organizations protect their data and ensure that it is secure, no matter where it resides or how it is accessed. Lookout's new cloud security features offer greater assurance to IT organizations that their data is safe and their users are protected.”
Lookout continues to innovate the Lookout Cloud Security Platform in ways that strengthen the protection of users and data from security threats and enhance the end-user experience, said Aaron Cockerill, Executive Vice President of Product, Lookout. We are the only vendor that unifies cloud and endpoint security into one platform. With this latest release, Lookout continues to build upon our strategic vision to put data security at the intersection of today’s workplace and modern cybersecurity threats.
About Lookout
Lookout, Inc. is the data-centric cloud security company that delivers zero trust security by reducing risk and protecting data wherever it goes, without boundaries or limits. Our unified, cloud-native platform safeguards corporate data across devices, apps, networks and clouds and is as adaptive and simple as the modern digital world. Lookout is trusted by enterprises and government agencies of all sizes to protect the sensitive data they care about most, enabling them to work and connect freely and safely. To learn more about the Lookout Cloud Security Platform, visit www.lookout.com and follow Lookout on our blog, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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