Friday Tech News

Good morning and Happy Friday!

Thank you so much for making this a part of your Friday morning coffee time. I'm Phil Moroni, and I'm an Account Executive in the Information Technology Services Industry here with another edition of Friday Tech News!

What is this? This is a newsletter that provides updates and insights on the latest trends and developments in the technology industry. I am a professional who specializes in supporting IT leaders in evaluating, investing, and managing people, processes, and technology tools that support their businesses.

Each week, I summarize relevant industry updates from popular Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's), software publishers, and managed providers. The goal of my research and newsletter is to keep you informed about current trends and events that may impact your business from a trusted and reputable source. It's just information I'm sharing, and, I follow and work with hundreds of partners in the industry, keeping track of their growth, changes, and evolution so that you don't have to.

Bottom Line: As you focus on improving your business through digital initiatives, my commitment is to keep you informed of the fast-paced changes and trends taking place so that you can plan ahead and stay ahead of the game.

Key areas of focus for me are:

1. Cloud Computing, Security, Trends

2. Developer & Security Tools

3. Networking & Infrastructure Tools

4. End User Tools & Workspace Tech

5. Emerging Technologies and Future Concepts

If you have any questions, would like information about any specific vendors I follow, or would like to have a conversation about any topic that is challenging you, I invite you to engage with me! I value feedback immensely and would love to know what you find valuable about this newsletter so feel free to reach out!

Thank you for reading, and stay digitally and physically safe!

Phil

OEM News & Updates 📰

Splunk | Splunk unveils Splunk AI to ease security and observability through generative AI

• New product from Splunk that leverages GenAI to atuomate security and observability tasks (anomaly detection, RCA, IR). Aims to reduce complexity and cost a fortune I’m sure 🙂 .

Splunk | Splunk and Microsoft Collaborate Through Strategic Partnership to Advance Digital Resilience

• Good announcement for existing Splunk customers at their conference this week. This partnership will enable customers to leverage Splunk’s data capabilities across Azure and in M365 data sources.

Commvault | Commvault Announces Metallic- Enterprise Cloud Marketplace

• Metallic ECM enables customers to easily access and deploy Metallic’s cloud backup service from a curated catalog of cloud providers and to benefit from flexible pricing models.

Exabeam | Exabeam: User Behavior Monitoring Solution Designed For Federal Departments And Agencies Revealed

JFrog | JFrog Curation Automates Risky Package Detection for Open Source Software

• JFrog Curation will scan the metadata of open source packages hosted on JFrog Artifactory or JFrog Xray and flag those that have known vulnerabilities or licensing issues. It’ll also help developers and security teams to identify and remediate risky packages before they are deployed into prod.

Code42 | Code42 confirms 'difficult but necessary' layoffs

Appdome | Appdome ties up with Microsoft Azure DevOps to automate delivery of secure mobile apps

Knowbe4 | Egress Software Technologies Ltd: KnowBe4 partners with Egress to enhance organizations' inbound and outbound email security defenses

JAMF | Jamf Launches Jamf Safe Internet for Microsoft Windows

MongoDB | MongoDB expands its global partnership with Microsoft

• Allows customers to access MongoDB Atlas, MongoDB’s fully managed cloud db service on Azure.

Dynatrace | Dynatrace Announces Expanded Multi-Year Consumption Commitment and Go-To-Market Partnership with Microsoft

• Good announcement from Dynatrace who is a leader in their space for APM and other TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms). I’m excited to see how they expand their portfolio into the cloud providers to provide better insight and faster time to context for their customers. This allows users to consume Dynatrace’s software intelligence platform on Azure.

Cohesity | Cohesity Expands Cloud Services Reach Through Cisco, HPE Partnerships

Microsoft | Microsoft Expands Logging Access After Chinese Hack Blowback

• You’ll need to purchase a premium E3 of better license to analyze the data but, this is a legit move.

Microsoft | Furthering our AI ambitions – Announcing Bing Chat Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing

• $99 per user per month to have Bing Chat Enterprise perform tasks, generate content, and provide insight based on web searches. If you’re not using Bing today, you are and have been missing out. Don’t worry - if you’re a Chrome user it’ll import all your settings and bookmarks and 3rd party extensions.

Microsoft 365 | Microsoft 365 Backup to launch in Preview - fast backup for OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange

• Microsoft is slowly eating the tech industry of 3rd party SaaS products. They just announced SSE recently. Now backup? If it’s me, I’m not trusting this for a WHILE.

OpenAI | Moving AI governance forward

Articles I Liked This Week 💡

CIO Dive | IT spending soars, generative AI investments barely leave a mark

• CIO Dive’s take on the recent Gartner report (linked here). What I found most interesting was the decline ⤵️ in Data Center spend (again) and devices (again) and the increase ⤴️ in Professional Services spend. Couple that with the job and talent shortages, I believe strong professional services partners will become truly vital to the mid-market and enterprise customer as they go through both digital transformation as well as innovation.

WSJ | Combining Cybersecurity and Tech Roles Helps Solve Security Challenges for Smaller Companies

• In the SMB, I see CIO and CISO roles combined often. It’s obviously a lot to tackle and I liked this article because it shows the real side of managing both priorities of leading overall IT efforts + Cybersecurity efforts.

Forbes | Preparing For The Cyber Risks Of Generative AI

CIO | CIOs are bullish on the possibilities for generative AI: report

CSO | Infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick dead at 59

• If you’ve never seen or heard Kevin speak, I’m sorry you missed out. Luckily there’s tons of youtube content with him and you can still learn so much from him by viewing these videos. I read a post by a friend of his that really did a good job commemorating his life (Shoutout to Roger Grimes ) and it’s a sad moment for the Infosec community for sure. RIP Kevin.

Tech Funding & M&A 💸

Graylog | Graylog Acquires Resurface.io

• Resurface is a Colorado based API security platform that offers solutions such as threat intelligence and incident response for businesses.

Moogsoft | Dell Technologies Announces Intent to Acquire Moogsoft

• Moogsoft is a California based AIOps platform that provides solutions such as incident management, data observability, anomaly detection, and cloud migration for businesses.

PingSafe | Cybersecurity Startup PingSafe Raises $3.3 Mn In Seed Funding

• PingSafe is an Israeli cybersecurity platform that offers solutions businesses for cloud security and finding exploitable vulnerabilities at scale.

Armorblox | Generative AI on a Larger Canvas: Armorblox Joins Cisco to Bring Gen AI to Cisco Security

• Armorblox is a California based Generative AI platform that offers solutions such as threat protection and data loss prevention for businesses.

Meme of the week 🤣

Recommendations 👉🏻

This is a section that I intend to build out more! Know fantastic newsletter resources for information? Please let me know so I can start linking appropriate reads here!