Influential Cloud Computing Executives Named on the CloudInstitute.io Advisory Council

  • CloudInstitute.io, announces the inclusion of industry's most influential cloud professionals, with decades of experience in the field, as members of its advisory council.

  • QuickStart – the award-winning IT workforce readiness and career enhancement platform – launched CloudInstitute.io in September, 2019 to assist individuals and organizations.

  • The newly inducted advisory members bring with them decades of experience in the field and proven methodologies around cloud implementation and transformation.


QuickStart – the award-winning IT workforce readiness and career enhancement platform – launched CloudInstitute.io in September, 2019 to assist individuals and organizations accelerate Cloud transformation, achieve deployment goals and maximize cloud ROI. Today, CloudInstitute.io takes another step to strengthen the cloud computing environment by taking in some of industry's highly recognized cloud professionals on its advisory team.

The newly inducted advisory members bring with them decades of experience in the field and proven methodologies around cloud implementation and transformation. This will serve to provide strategic guidance in further enriching the platform and its ability to offer learners the next level of learning experience.

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The CloudInstitute.io Advisory Council members are:

Joseph Holbrook: Consulting Blockchain Architect, Certified Brocade Distinguished Architect

Joseph has been in the computer field since 1993 when he was exposed to several HPUX systems on board a U.S. Navy flagship. He has migrated from UNIX world to Storage Area Networking (SAN) and Enterprise Virtualization and Cloud Architecture. He worked for numerous companies like HDS, 3PAR, Brocade, HP, EMC, Northrup Grumman, ViON, Ibasis.net, Chematch.com, SAIC and Siemens Nixdorf. Apart from being a coveted cloud professional, he is also a writer, speaker, educator and engineer.

Seth Floyd: Lead DevOps Engineer at Terbium Labs

Seth has been in the field of IT since 1999. He has mainly worked in the Marketing, ISP, and Security industries — originally working as a Jr Oracle DBA before moving into Configuration Management. From there, Seth's career evolved into DevOps and has recently, in the last few years, started to focus more on DevOps Security. Some of his trigger words are Automation, Cloud, Terraform, Gitlab, and CI/CD. In his off-time Seth is a husband, dad, and Level 2 Olympic weightlifting coach and runs his own USAW recognized club.

Naveed Khan: Cloud Services Country Manager at Sahara Net

Naveed has been involved in hard core sales in the IT industry for over a decade. He solves business problems by improving processes to enhance operational efficiency, governance, reliability, reduced turnaround time, reduce cost, improve quality and develop measurable dynamic KPIs to sustain increasing performances and profits. Khan works with the C level to align the existing company performance with their vision and mission.

Everyone at CloudInsitute.io is working hard and working smart to continue offering the best cloud certifications training, and these veterans in cloud computing will provide us strategic guidance in expanding our offerings. Their visionary sense and decades long experience, paired with our AI based, cognitive learning platform CLIPP, will identify and serve the current needs in the cloud learning and professional training environment.

- Ed Sattar, CEO of QuickStart



About CloudInstitute.io:

CloudInstitute.io takes pride in being industry's first cloud workforce readiness and career development platform. It provides cloud certification training with a personalized learning experience using artificial intelligence, adaptive learning and multi-modal delivery of learning content to help achieve certifications and IT business goals.

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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 Deployment Models

LightEdge Offers Secure, Scalable LightEdge Cloud with 100% Uptime

LightEdge | October 12, 2023

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Cloud Security

Orca Security Simplifies Cloud Asset Discovery with AI Technology

Orca Security | September 14, 2023

Orca Security, a leader in agentless cloud security, has unveiled a groundbreaking AI-driven cloud asset search feature within its Orca Cloud Security Platform. This innovation positions Orca as the first provider to offer an AI-powered cloud asset search that's as simple as asking a question. This development empowers not only security professionals but also developers, DevOps teams, cloud architects, and risk governance and compliance teams to swiftly and effortlessly gain insights into their cloud environments. Building upon its existing integrations with ChatGPT and Microsoft Azure OpenAI GPT-4 for generating remediation instructions, Orca's new AI-driven search functionality revolutionizes accessibility by enabling users to pose natural language queries like, ‘Do I have any Log4j vulnerabilities exposed to the public?’ or ‘Are there any unencrypted databases with sensitive data accessible on the internet?’ This democratizes cloud security, making it accessible to individuals across the organization, regardless of their expertise, to rapidly respond to zero-day risks, optimize cloud assets, and assess exposure to threats. Gil Geron, CEO and co-founder of Orca Security, emphasized the platform's user friendliness, stating, With our latest AI-powered cloud asset search, we are delivering on our promise to provide cloud security that is easy to operate. We built the industry’s first agentless cloud security platform to eliminate lengthy and labor-intensive deployments. Now we are focused on democratizing cloud security by introducing solutions that do not require reading through lengthy documentation or extensive training to operationalize, allowing security teams, developers, and DevOps teams to get value from day one. [Source: Business wire] Cloud asset discovery is a critical process involving the identification, categorization, and mapping of all digital assets within a cloud environment. This includes virtual machines, databases, storage instances, containers, networking components, and applications. Yet many organizations lack access to this vital information. Orca's patented SideScanning technology offers 100% visibility for asset discovery and is now presenting this data intuitively to various teams across organizations, enabling a comprehensive understanding of their cloud environments. This capability is particularly crucial during zero-day threats, where speed is essential, facilitating faster and more effective mitigations. Orca's solution also eliminates the need for users to understand different naming conventions for each cloud provider. Instead, users can ask general questions, and Orca will automatically search for the relevant status names for each provider, streamlining the search process and ensuring accurate results. The AI-powered cloud asset search feature is immediately available through a feature request in the Orca Cloud Security Platform. About Orca Security Orca Security is a leading provider of cloud security solutions that offer full-stack visibility of the complete cloud infrastructure. It provides deep insights into vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, and more across various platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Kubernetes. The platform is designed to provide complete visibility of the entire cloud estate, from development to production, without requiring an agent. The company is known for innovative SideScanning technology that delivers instant-on, workload-level security.

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Cloud App Management

Couchbase Shines: Ranks 9th in Battery Ventures’ Top Cloud Firms 2023

Couchbase | October 09, 2023

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