- Friday Tech News
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- 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:
Cloud Computing, Security, Trends
Developer & Security Tools
Networking & Infrastructure Tools
End User Tools & Workspace Tech
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 đź“°
The first of many AI related announcements this week, Adobe has collaborated with Google to bring AI image creation to Bard from Firefly.
Partnerships include Traceable AI, Salt Security, BigID, Dig Security, Vulcan Cyber, Laminar, Cyware, Axonius, Contrast Security, Noname, Armis, Anecdotes, and more! I spared you reading all their press releases by summing it up here. Judging by the amount of partnerships that are going into this program, I’m really starting to see the “future state” of cloud security programs as it relates to tooling.
New hardening support to 11 apps including GitHub, Slack, and Zoom.
Super cool integration here. This will enable customers to use natural language queries (NLQ) to find and analyze their sensitve data across cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, GCP, O365 and more.
Barracuda | Barracuda urges customers to remove and replace vulnerable hardware exploited by hackers
You read that right. Full bore rip and replace of existing vulnerable hardware. If you’re still running Barracuda (which I don’t often see in the enterprise) you need to act fast. Call your trusted partner to help with immediate design and redo of your existing environment and if you need a recommendation give me a call.
74% of Darktraces’ active customer base have employees using AI in the workplace. New risk and compliance models make it easier for businesses to understand who’s making connections to items like ChatGPT etc.
AI Cloud integrates a number of SFDC technologies including Einstein AI, Tableau, Mulesoft, and Slack to real time generative AI experiences across all applications and workflows.
New Gen AI services that leverage Sensei AI model to help customers create content, data, and insights from existing data. Pretty cool stuff.
New partnership where mimecast will feed Stellar Cyber’s XDR platform.
It’s called CIMON. Cimon uses extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) that provides visibility into the build system to inspect network connections, running processes, and file modifications within the CI pipeline. It’ll look for and prevent abnormalities and malicious actions too.
More announcements from the AI superpowers. Exciting to see.
First report of expansion I’ve seen in a while. Great to see from ServiceNow although I was hopeful to see some more US expansion.
Abbreviated to VWB, this platform leverages smart data derived from network traffic and packet data to provide insights into the complexity and risk of the IT environment. Hopefully it’ll allow customers to proactively identify and resolve issues that affect performance and security of their mission critical apps and services.
ServiceNow | ServiceNow unveils Now Assist for Virtual Agent, a generative AI solution for self-service
Designed for more intelligent self service, this is the newest Gen AI solution from ServiceNow. It’ll be within the Virtual Agent chatbot and connect workflows across ServiceNow’s platform. It’s designed to be more intelligent and conversational and can also be configured with a drag and drop environment that’s sure to please a lot of users.
More companies coming out with AI strategies and announcements for their products every week. Look for Appian to release features such as instant generation of digitized forms from PDFs and automated code generation from natural language specifications.
Good to see here. If you’re a CTERA customer this is a nice enhancement that comes with additional real time attack monitoring and a slick admin dashboard to view what’s going on.
Automation Anywhere | Automation Anywhere and Google Cloud join forces to accelerate the adoption of AI
Very interesting partnership. From my understanding, AA is utilizing GCP’s LLMs via V ertex AI to build and launch new gen AI features on the AA platform to help businesses automate front and back office processes.
New features and enhancements to improve UX, dashboard quality, and overall security of the platform. They’ve also fine tuned the onboarding process, have three new visualization panels, and a lot more. This is the first major upgrade to the platform in nearly 2 years to coincide with the companies 10th anniversary.
Great announcement from Lacework on enhanced anomaly detection in GuardDuty. Lacework also integrates with AWS Security Hub to enhance existing security alerts while introducing these new “composite alerts” that build on GuardDuty findings to provide richer investigative context for security teams.
Rezilion | Rezilion Launches Breakthrough Agentless Runtime Monitoring Solution for Vulnerability Management
Yep, read that one again. Agentless Runtime Monitoring. It uses cloud API's indirect access to instances to reconstruct how code was executed along the life-cycle of various hosts and containers. It then reverse engineers the entire code loading and execution history from a snapshot of a host or a container. Pretty awesome stuff!
Apptio (and TBM if you’ve never heard of it, give TBM Council the google - super fascinating stuff around the business of Cloud) is a great company to pay attention to. They launched a new approach to cloud FinOps that helps orgs optimize spend across multiple clouds and look at things like cost management, TCO, budgeting and forecasting, chargeback/showback, AND governance and compliance which is huge. If you’re a large enterprise, you’re likely running Apptio and this should be a welcomed announcement.
Overall improvements to OpenAI + cheaper pricing for GPT 3.5 and 4. AI is here to stay IMO and with Microsoft backing OpenAI to the extend they have, I think we’re just scratching the surface of how pervasive this will be (and hopefully affordable) in our lives.
Cisco once again trying to pivot from Hardware sales to Software sales with the introduction of this platform (which is a good thing). The FSO platform includes quite a lot from cloud native application observability to cost insights, NPM, Security, and more.
Probably one of the bigger announcements from the week, this article was packed full of updates. HashiCorp has updated Vault, Terraform, Consul, Nomad, Boundary, Waypoint, and Packer. I see Terraform the most in the wild and people will likely be excited over this update for the GitHub Actions integration it provides. Another I see a lot of is Vault, which now has a new secrets engine for AWS KMS, a new plugin for Azure Key Vault, and a new integration with Boundary.
Articles I Liked This Week đź’ˇ
Featured Article: CIO | How the modern CIO grapples with legacy IT
I liked how Jo Abernathy talked about relating to the Business about why to modernize systems and how to develop an approach that focuses on business goals. IT leaders need to assess the value and feasibility of modernizing legacy systems and communicate with the business on why it’s important to leverage strategic partnerships for modernization.
Google has put out A TON of AI related announcements over the past couple weeks. Microsoft hasn’t been as bullish in providing something such as a framework for securing AI technology yet, but, I’m sure we’ll see something like that on the horizon from them. They just like to get things to market and adopted and worry about how to adopt them after.
InfoWorld | 6 finops best practices to reduce cloud costs
More practical advice for those in the cloud looking to reduce cost. Other things to do would be taking a hard look at data transfer costs amongst systems and an overall architecture review of current state for improvements and enhancements.
If you don’t have a central Cloud team to help you manage spend as you grow, you’re not doing Cloud right. IT asset managers also need investments from IT to reduce cloud waste and learn FinOps.
API’s must be a priority for businesses in the back half of 2023 and into 2024. Companies like Salt, Traceable, and Noname are all trying vehemently to get awareness out there (I especially like the content from Traceable here) on how to protect yourself from API vulnerabilities. Don’t wait, do something and vocalize the impact of unsecure API’s sooner rather than later.
Tech Funding & M&A đź’¸
CloudZero is a Massachusetts based cloud platform that provides solutions such as cloud cost monitoring and optimization and insight for businesses.
Kodem is an Israel based SaaS platform that offers solutions such as vulnerability management, compliance, and application security for businesses.
Cohere is a Canada based AI platform that enables businesses to build and deploy products such as chatbots and search engines.
Tesserent is an Australia based IT services firm that offers security consulting, testing, and data management services.
I like Thales (pronounced Tal-lez, not phonetically) a lot, especially in their encryption suite. They do a lot of things and this is an interesting pickup from them to secure more market share in ANZ.
Rubicon is a California based digital platform that enables developers to build AI storage infrastructure.
Privitar is an England based SaaS platform that provides solutions such as data security, privacy management and compliance.
OpsCruise is a California based observability platform that provides solutions such as edge cloud observability and automated fault isolation for enterprises.
Scality is a California based cloud platform that offers solutions including file and object storage and data management 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!
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