Cloud App Management

Google Cloud Teams Up with StackPath to Expand Edge-Forward Cloud

Google Cloud Teams Up with StackPath to Expand Edge-Forward Cloud

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 Security

Lacework Announces Enterprise Multicloud Platform Updates

PR Newswire | October 25, 2023

Lacework, the data-driven cloud security company, today announced a series of updates that expand the platform's enterprise-grade capabilities to help customers do more in the cloud, securely. Lacework is extending its platform support to new cloud providers in order to give customers more choice as they secure their multicloud environments, adding integrations into leading project management tools to increase operational efficiency around risk management, and enhancing agentless workload scanning, among other updates. Expanded Enterprise Multicloud Support Enterprises implement multicloud strategies for various economic, technical, and legal reasons, and Lacework is committed to supporting its customers' cloud or clouds of choice. Lacework has extended cloud security posture management to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), giving teams visibility into their OCI resources and their associated risks. Whether enterprises are using Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Azure, OCI or a combination, the unified Lacework platform gives them visibility from a single location, resulting in better context, better outcomes, and faster investigations. We are excited that Lacework has added support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It gives us the opportunity to utilize Cloud Security Posture Management capabilities across our multicloud environment with a single platform, said Karen Prichard, Managing Director Group Security, Liberty Global. Our team can continue to reduce our risk and address our threats quicker with the added visibility and context provided by this new integration. Additionally, the Lacework platform is expanding its industry-leading attack path analysis to Google Cloud and Azure. Attack path analysis from Lacework allows security teams to see their cloud environment through the eyes of an attacker, identifying targets and mapping out how each threat could be exploited to breach a cloud environment. Now Lacework customers leveraging Google Cloud or Azure can gain attack path analysis that is bespoke to each cloud's unique environment. "My colleague already had the chance to identify configuration issues, it immediately flagged something we had to look at — giving us the opportunity to fix it," Simen Kildahl Eriksen, Security Engineer at Cognite, shares. "It provides an invaluable means of identifying potential configuration problems before they escalate into more significant security breaches." In the cloud, organizations routinely create and tear down services and containers quickly in order to meet changing demands. Whether testing-development or running batch jobs, ephemeral workloads and containers are opportunities for bad actors to gain access. It's important that security teams do not lose sight of these short-lived instances. To meet this growing need, Lacework agentless workload scanning has been upgraded to check customer workloads every five minutes for new instances. This granular visibility of what is running and its associated risk assures teams that they have comprehensive visibility into rapidly changing environments and gives confidence that short-lived instances are not falling through the security cracks. Operationalized Risk Management with ServiceNow and Jira Integrations It's not enough for an organization to have a list of vulnerabilities, they need to be able to quickly fix them. To enhance its industry-leading threat visibility tools, the Lacework platform now features integrations with ServiceNow and Jira that improve the process of mitigating vulnerabilities. Now, security and development teams have the premium vulnerability feeds with all the context Lacework is known for integrated into their ticketing system of choice. By connecting these systems to streamline response efforts, the appropriate teams can move faster when securing vulnerabilities. "With the rise of cloud adoption and migration, securing the enterprise has never been more important for organizations," said Deepak Kolingivadi, Head of Security Products at ServiceNow. "The Lacework integration with ServiceNow Vulnerability Response enables our enterprise customers to streamline their response processes by simplifying assignment, collaboration, and remediation of critical vulnerabilities. Using business context in ServiceNow, customers can detect and report the security posture of IT and application environments within the Now Platform. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Lacework and helping mutual customers address cybersecurity threats more quickly and efficiently." Lacework's integration with ServiceNow Vulnerability Response offerings for infrastructure and container applications is currently available in the ServiceNow marketplace. Lacework's integration to Security in Jira is in private preview. About Lacework Lacework keeps organizations secure in the cloud, allowing them to innovate faster with confidence. Cloud security requires a fundamentally new approach and the Lacework platform is designed to scale with the volume, variety, and velocity of cloud data across an organization's cloud environment: code, identities, containers, and multi-cloud infrastructure. Only Lacework provides Security and Development teams with a correlated and prioritized end-to-end view that pinpoints the largest risks and handful of security events that matter most. Learn more at www.lacework.com.

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Cloud App Management

dbt Labs Announces Major Enhancements to dbt Cloud to Enable Collaboration at Scale

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 Security

Sysdig Debuts New Benchmark for Cloud Detection and Response

Business Wire | November 03, 2023

Sysdig, the leader in cloud security powered by runtime insights, today released at SANS CyberFest 2023 the 5/5/5 Benchmark for Cloud Detection and Response, a new framework that outlines how quickly organizations should detect, triage, and respond to attacks in the cloud. Operating securely in the cloud requires a mindset shift in regard to time, and with that, cloud security programs need to hold themselves to a modernized benchmark: five seconds to detect, five minutes to correlate insights and understand what’s happening, and five additional minutes to respond. Recent findings by the Sysdig Threat Research Team published in the 2023 Global Cloud Threat Report note that, after discovering an exploitable target, malicious actors require less than 10 minutes to execute an attack. Cloud attacks are swift and sophisticated, requiring robust threat detection and response programs that move at the speed of the cloud. On-premises attacks take 16 days on average and antiquated frameworks challenge security teams to respond to a breach within 60 minutes, which is simply insufficient for the cloud. Bad actors are exploiting the automation and scale of the cloud, along with new techniques, to accelerate all stages of an attack and inflict damage within minutes. The 5/5/5 Benchmark guides organizations to detect and respond to cloud attacks faster than adversaries can complete them. The Challenge Detect threats within five seconds.Organizations should be able to gather detection signals from their cloud security tools in real time to ensure visibility into ephemeral assets. Correlate and triage within five minutes.Teams should be able to gather full context for all correlated signals within five minutes of receiving the first relevant alert. Initiate a response within five minutes.Organizations should be able to initiate a tactical response within five minutes of confirming that an attack is in progress. What people are saying People are always looking for security metrics, especially when the industry evolves into new operating models. We have plenty of 'best practices,' but no real way to quantify cloud security agility — until now, said Anna Belak, Director, Office of Cybersecurity Strategy at Sysdig. The 5/5/5 Benchmark, built in partnership with our customers, industry analysts, and the Sysdig Threat Research Team, sets a new standard for operating securely in the cloud. “As organizations move to the cloud, traditional on-premises security standards become outdated and too slow. In the cloud, both innovation and attacks happen quickly – companies need security tools, processes, and standards designed to operate at the speed of cloud-native environments,” said Phil Bues, Research Manager for IDC Cloud Security. “I don’t want to know 15 minutes after someone breached my system. I need to know instantly so that we can shut it down before the blast radius expands,” said Kuldeep Tomar, Head of Information Security at India’s leading digital skill games company and 5/5/5 Benchmark Advisor. “To move at the necessary speed, you need to not only be alerted to the right things, but also respond appropriately. Having a benchmark gives us a goal to hold ourselves to.” About Sysdig In the cloud, every second counts. Attacks move at warp speed, and security teams must protect the business without slowing it down. Sysdig stops cloud attacks in real time, instantly detecting changes in risk with runtime insights and open source Falco. Sysdig correlates signals across cloud workloads, identities, and services to uncover hidden attack paths and prioritize real risk. From prevention to defense, Sysdig helps enterprises focus on what matters: innovation. Sysdig. Secure Every Second.

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Cloud Storage

DigitalOcean Introduces Cloud-Hosted Scalable Storage for Managed Databases

Business Wire | October 06, 2023

DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:DOCN), the cloud for startups and SMBs, today announced the launch of Scalable Storage for DigitalOcean PostgreSQL and MySQL Managed Databases, which enables small and medium-sized businesses to only pay for the data resources they need, preventing cloud underutilization and optimizing customer spend. With this new offering, DigitalOcean customers can increase the disk storage of their Managed Databases without needing to change compute and memory to meet higher data utilization demands. As businesses continue to grow and face ever-increasing customer demands, they need a database solution that can seamlessly scale alongside them, said Megan Wood, Chief Strategy & Product Officer at DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean’s portfolio is tailored to meet the needs of startups and tech entrepreneurs, enabling them with flexible and cost-effective solutions like Scalable Storage. With this new offering, businesses can easily accommodate dynamic database storage requirements and expand their data footprint with confidence, making it easier to grow in the cloud. Almost all businesses require a database that can scale to meet their needs, whether it’s an AI company storing voice recordings to train their large language model or an e-commerce website keeping inventory data up to date. For startups and SMBs with limited resources, the ability to have flexible and affordable storage options is also critical. Scalable Storage gives users the flexibility to add storage to MySQL and PostgreSQL Managed Databases at cost-effective prices with minimal friction and downtime. With a variety of shared and dedicated configuration plans, DigitalOcean customers can benefit from more customizable options that better fit their businesses. Add disk storage without adding compute and memory: Through this offering, users can add disk storage in 10 GB increments each priced at $2/month to meet constantly shifting demand without needing to increase compute and memory. Customers at different user levels can make changes to their disk storage capacity through various ways of interactions, including the Cloud Console or via API, allowing for a simpler and more intuitive experience. Greater disk storage capacity: All Managed Database plans come with a range of disk storage options beginning with a minimum amount that customers can increase from two to five times the starting amount. With storage capacity now up to 15 TB, users can future-proof their databases by helping to ensure they can handle the largest of database production workloads. Monitoring to optimize costs: Customers can scale compute, memory, and storage when it matters most by monitoring utilization data and setting alerts. By only paying for the database compute and storage resources needed, businesses can continue to optimize costs while maintaining peak performance. Alongside DigitalOcean Scalable Storage, DigitalOcean has been making investments in its product and infrastructure offerings to provide peace of mind, increased productivity, and more affordable solutions for SMBs and startups. About DigitalOcean DigitalOcean simplifies cloud computing so builders and businesses can spend more time creating software that changes the world. With its mission-critical infrastructure and fully managed offerings, DigitalOcean helps developers at startups and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rapidly build, deploy and scale, whether creating a digital presence or building digital products. DigitalOcean combines the power of simplicity, security, community and customer support so customers can spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time building innovative applications that drive business growth. For more information, visit digitalocean.com.

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