devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • Pinpoint brings Agile ceremonies directly into engineering workflow

    Automated ceremonies within Pinpoint leverage predictive AI and team feedback to make tasks actionable and deliver smart workflow recommendations
    Today, Pinpoint announced fully automated, interactive and integrated Agile ceremonies. Engineering teams can now run and collaborate on sprint planning, standups and retrospectives in one shared workspace. By connecting that shared workspace to teams’ historical and predictive code and issue data, Pinpoint makes traditional agile processes instantly actionable, streamlining the software process for everyone.
    “Agile is an essential framework for software-building, but teams have always had to interpret and manually input feedback from scrum meetings into sprint execution,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Pinpoint. “With Pinpoint, we’ve already built a platform that provides one space for teams to work and code with all the relevant data from source systems. Bringing these ceremonies into the product gives teams a complete, more productive, engineering workflow without creating more data silos or layering on additional tools.”
    Pinpoint is a fast-growing engineering operations application, and the first to integrate these three Agile ceremonies into an AI-enabled platform with the full context of a team’s history and capabilities. That context includes measuring how long certain issues typically take to resolve, and an understanding of who is best-suited to take on specific tasks based on bandwidth and experience – ultimately allowing Pinpoint to create personalized assignments. Teams eliminate manual work and save time on tasks related to process, reporting, and organization so they can focus on collaborative sprint execution.
    Automated ceremonies mean more flexible meeting options, with no spreadsheets or whiteboards needed. Teams collaborate online through the shared workspace in Pinpoint to complete ceremonies. And, teams are able to use submit updates or feedback in real time rather than manually translating the information into another tool. Tasks or changes made during the ceremony, like assigning work, are then seamlessly fed into the appropriate source system and reflected in their team dashboard.
    “We’re always looking to streamline our team’s operations – not just how our developers write code but how we collaborate, plan and improve over time, especially now that we’re all working remotely, ” says Lisa House, Director of Engineering Performance at Skywatch. “Pinpoint has been a supportive partner in this, bringing the Agile processes we use into an actionable platform. Our developers prefer Pinpoint’s retrospective capability to any other tool we’ve tried. It gives us the smoothest integrated retrospective experience so the team can execute on sprints seamlessly.”
    About Pinpoint
    Pinpoint® improves the process of making software by enhancing the operations of engineering teams. Pinpoint contextualizes, analyzes and forecasts work across existing tools so engineers can do more of what they love – build great products. By providing teams with a unified way to view and simplify their work, Pinpoint increases productivity and speeds up innovation. For more information, visit pinpoint.com.

  • Katalon Releases Selenium Migration Feature and Demonstrates Maturity With Codeless Testing

    ATLANTA, May 27, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Katalon LLC, provider of the world’s leading test automation solution, announced its latest feature release to support the migration of Selenium test scripts to Katalon Studio’s testing platform. This feature is made to simplify the testing process for QA teams and make automation approachable for all businesses with or without programming expertise, making it the ideal alternative solution for Selenium.

    “Katalon has shown steady growth in recent years, and that is an outcome of our constant effort to improve Katalon’s adaptability and extend the scope of testing for our users,” said Dzung Ngo, VP of Product at Katalon. “We understand that testing with applications like Selenium is complicated and requires a significant amount of resources and effort from teams. This migration feature is one step closer to make Katalon the perfect alternative to Selenium, thus, simplifying the journey of automation better,” he added.

    Built on top of Selenium’s platform, one of Katalon’s key missions is to address the challenges and limitations of applying test automation for teams at any scale, with any level. Katalon Studio effectively solves Selenium’s common issues. For instance, the tool offers SmartWait to solve Selenium’s WebDriverWait issue, requires no setup process, compatible with all platforms regardless of application complexity, and more.

    Katalon Studio, with its codeless testing capabilities, makes automation achievable for teams that are still held back by the much-needed programming skills and self-build nature of Selenium. By going codeless, it shortens the time and the length of the learning curve for QA professionals without limiting the testing capability for businesses.

    By migrating tests to Katalon Studio, Selenium users can start developing codeless tests. The migration process is done by simply importing Selenium projects to Katalon Studio without any additional installation or setup required. Empowered by a friendly GUI and comprehensive IDE, all the Selenium tests that are written on the JUnit or TestNG framework migrate to Katalon Studio smoothly and continue developing robustly.

    After the migration of Selenium test cases, users can then leverage Katalon Studio to enable CI/CD integrations, cloud testing, and smart analytics without having to start from scratch.

    See Katalon Documentation for detailed tutorials on how to migrate Selenium tests here.

    About Katalon

    Katalon is a leading provider in software test automation solutions. The company offers a flexible platform for web, API, mobile, and desktop testing that fits teams and projects of any size, for any purpose — from creating tests, execution, reports, to seamless integration with the CI/CD ecosystem.

    Katalon is widely adopted by a global community of users across 160+ countries. It is recognized as a top automation tool by prestigious reports such as Gartner, Capterra, and IT Central Station. Katalon solutions include Katalon Studio, Katalon TestOps (beta), Katalon Recorder, Katalium, and Katalon plugins. For more information, visit https://www.katalon.com.

     

  • Progress Breaks Down DevOps Barriers with DataDirect

    Leader in data connectivity enables unified view of DevOps, improving the software development lifecycle for enterprises

    BEDFORD, Mass., June 18, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), the leading provider of application development and digital experience technologies, today announced the availability of a set of new data connectors to improve the integration of analytics and reporting within the DevOps process. Complementing an expansive collection of pre-built, high-performing, standards-based data connectors, Progress has introduced connectors for TeamCity, GitHub, Aha! and Jira. With these new connectors, users can gain a more unified view of the DevOps process, enabling new levels of efficiency and performance, leading to improvement across the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

    “A key tenant of DevOps is continuous improvement and critical to that success is information – analysis of productivity metrics, feature functionality, quality and adoption and more. But when this information is within discrete systems and teams, it is difficult to measure the overall impact and where improvements need to be made. This is where data connectivity tools, such as DataDirect, offer tremendous value – enabling a cross-process view of data that results in better decision making,” said Stewart Bond, research director, Data Integration and Intelligence software research at IDC.

    Progress® DataDirect® continues to be a leading, trusted solution for 350+ ISVs and 10,000+ enterprises by addressing a multitude of analytics, integration and data management needs. The new DevOps connectors deliver on the exceptional performance, reliability and security standards the DataDirect portfolio is known for, including:

    • Access to disparate data using SQL — No need to learn proprietary APIs or query languages. Every system is accessed the same way. The write-once, consume-anything model saves time and increases developer productivity.
    • The highest data throughput performance, including bulk data access — Ability to access data quickly resulting in decreased latency while data loads. No manual data workflows increase process and automation efficiencies. In the cloud, faster data processing means compute instances operate for a shorter period of time, decreasing the cost of AWS and Azure instances.
    • Security and support — Progress DataDirect is unmatched in attention to security, including update cadence, hotfix policies, support procedures and more.

    “The number of applications being used across the DevOps process is going to continue to increase and our customers and partners rely on us to always deliver the tools and connectors needed for businesses to stay competitive,” said John Ainsworth, SVP, Core Products, Progress. “This is why we are the leader in data connectivity. We understand the impact that data, or a lack thereof, has on a business’s success and we enable our customers and partners to gain the insight they need to make informed decisions.”

    Progress DataDirect connectors for DevOps are available today. For more information, go to https://www.progress.com/datadirect-connectors.

    About Progress
    Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS) offers the leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications. We enable customers and partners to deliver modern, high-impact digital experiences with a fraction of the effort, time and cost. Progress offers powerful tools for easily building adaptive user experiences across any type of device or touchpoint, the flexibility of a cloud-native app dev platform to deliver modern apps, leading data connectivity technology, web content management, business rules, secure file transfer, network monitoring, plus award-winning machine learning that enables cognitive capabilities to be a part of any application. Over 1,700 independent software vendors, 100,000 enterprise customers, and two million developers rely on Progress to power their applications. Learn about Progress at www.progress.com or +1-800-477-6473.

    Progress and DataDirect are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation and/or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the US and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

                                                             

  • Copado Raises $26 Million to Accelerate the Delivery of Digital Transformation in the New Unpredictable World

    Demand for digital agility and visibility during uncertain times fuels the hyper growth of native Salesforce DevOps platform backed by international investment leaders

     

    Chicago – June 18, 2020 – Copado, a leading native DevOps platform for Salesforce, today announced $26 million in series B funding, bringing the total raised to $47 million. The financing was led by Insight Partners who also led Copado’s Series A round, with participation from existing investor Salesforce Ventures and new partners Lead Edge Capital, ISAI Cap Venture (Capgemini and ISAI joint fund), and Perpetual Investors. Copado will use the new funding to expand global distribution and accelerate product innovation, including its new DevOps analytics platform, DevOps 360.

     

    The impact of COVID-19, distributed virtual workforces and an unpredictable economy are forcing companies to adopt DevOps platforms to digitally transform their businesses. These seismic events have redefined executive expectations on the speed, quality and visibility their technology investments must deliver to enable rapid business pivots and effectively disrupt markets.

     

    Copado continues on an exponential growth trajectory. In the last year, the company more than doubled its revenue, tripled its headcount, expanded operations globally, and launched programs expected to train more than 10,000 Copado certified DevOps professionals in 2020. More than 500 market and brand leaders, including Amgen, Conga, Cox Communications, KUKA, Linde, Orange S.A., The Coca-Cola Company and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, trust Copado to deliver digital transformation projects on time with the highest levels of trust and quality.

     

    “Using DevOps to deliver high-quality software releases with speed and trust is more critical than ever as companies adjust to a COVID world,” said Nikitas Koutoupes, Managing Director at Insight Partners and Copado board member. “Remote work and digital customer engagement are the new normal. DevOps helps delivery teams increase release velocity and quality to support new digital strategies. By bringing those tools to Salesforce — the #1 customer relationship platform — Copado is fast becoming a must-have technology for any company looking to meet the demands of accelerated digital transformation. We are excited to continue our partnership with the Copado team as they scale to deliver the in-demand tools and training for the fourth industrial revolution.”

     

    “We are thrilled to strengthen our relationship with Copado and look forward to helping accelerate its growth,” said Terence Goudriaan, Head of the Digital Customer Experience practice in Europe at Capgemini. “Copado’s ability to provide a consistent development and deployment process and being the single source of truth for delivery, combined with Capgemini’s expertise in managing complex digital transformation programs is a strong assurance for client success.”

     

    Copado is redefining how to measure success on the Salesforce platform with its data-driven approach to delivering faster, higher quality releases and improving trust across customer transformation projects. As Salesforce continues to lead the market in digital transformation, the technical sophistication and the size of the delivery teams continues to grow exponentially resulting in the need for a more disciplined delivery process based on DevOps best practices. Organizations that implement DevOps best practices have been shown to deploy more often, fail less often and recover faster.

     

    “We are building a foundation for growth based on real customer pain points that we can successfully solve for nearly any Salesforce implementation,” said Ted Elliott, Chief Executive Officer for Copado. “It is a critical time for businesses in every industry. They need the native tools, the right staff, the intelligent analytics and the key performance metrics to optimize their digital transformation projects. Copado offers the complete package to successfully implement a digital go-to-market strategy for any company.”

     

    Additional Resources

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/copado-solutions-s.l/

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/CopadoSolutions

    Copado blog: https://www.copado.com/learning/blog/

     

    About Insight Partners

    Insight Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight Partners has invested in more than 400 companies worldwide and has raised through a series of funds more than $30 billion in capital commitments. Insight’s mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on software expertise to foster long-term success. Across its people and its portfolio, Insight encourages a culture around a belief that ScaleUp companies and growth create opportunity for all. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit www.insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @insightpartners.

     

    About Copado

    Founded in 2013, Copado is a leading DevOps platform for Salesforce. For enterprises wanting to accelerate their Salesforce deployments, Copado simplifies the release process, increases developer productivity and maximizes return on investment. The platform is comprised of Agile Planning, Release Management and Compliance & Testing. Backed by Insight Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, Copado counts more than 250 enterprises as customers, including Fair Trade, MassMutual, Shell and Vlocity. With more than 50 million transactions per month, Copado has received the top rating of 100 percent positive feedback on Salesforce AppExchange. More information can be found at: https://www.copado.com/

  • Wasabi Launches New Marketing Campaign to Empower the Oft-Overlooked IT Professional

    Nate, the IT Hero Serves as the Face of the Campaign and Urges Cloud Migration “Before It’s Too Late”

    Boston, June 17, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Wasabi, the hot cloud storage company, today launched a digital campaign (#MigrateWithNate) featuring, ‘Nate,’ the every-person IT pro with a critical message directed squarely at businesses: “Enterprises need to move their data to the cloud in the next five years or they are going to lose their competitive advantage.”

    Wasabi worked with digital marketing firm Walk West for the marketing campaign, along with viral content creator Penn Holderness of The Holderness Family, who served as creative lead. The campaign is squarely aimed at elevating the profile of IT professionals who are in charge of making IT decisions, while singing the praises of cloud storage.

    The centerpiece is a three minute music video for a power-ballad co-composed by David Friend, Wasabi’s CEO and long-time pioneer in the music industry. In the song, Nate highlights IT workers’ sometimes thankless yet always business-critical “everyday heroics” with their company’s prized data through lyrics that give his boss a clear call to action: “Listen to Nate, it’s time to migrate” to the cloud.

    In helping to compose the song, Friend tapped his unique expertise — the six-time tech CEO studied composition at Yale with a double degree in Music and Engineering and started a company, ARP Instruments, whose synthesizers powered famous tracks from beloved artists such as Stevie Wonder, The Who, George Harrison and Led Zeppelin.

    The reality is that only a small percentage of companies have moved to the cloud while the majority continues to struggle with the harsh realities of on-premise storage. One of the barriers of moving to the cloud is skepticism and cost, but as Nate advises his boss, “We need to move our data to Wasabi cause we’re out of space unless we move into the lobby.”

    “Nate represents the many IT department leaders and decision makers who are struggling to keep all company data accessible and secure while dealing with on-prem storage,” said Friend. “But as the global economy and disruption from the current environment has forced more organizations to accelerate their cloud implementation strategies and as they look to cut costs and increase efficiencies, as Nate says, ‘You’re not going to set your business up for success unless you move your data to the cloud.’”

    Luckily, for IT directors and heads of organizations looking to save money and store data securely, Wasabi has a disruptively predictable pricing model that is 1/5th the cost of legacy cloud storage offerings with no fees for egress or API requests.

    The demand for storage, and cloud storage in particular, is exploding and growth in storage will speed up even more with the introduction of 5G networks. With all that bandwidth, there’s going to be a lot more data generated and collected and a lot more headaches for the Nates of the IT world if data isn’t migrated to the cloud. Don’t give IT departments a headache or trap them in overheated server rooms. Meet Nate here.

    About Wasabi:

    Wasabi provides simple, predictable and affordable hot cloud storage for businesses all over the world. It enables organizations to store and instantly access an infinite amount of data at 1/5th the price of the competition with no complex tiers or unpredictable egress fees. Trusted by customers worldwide, Wasabi has been recognized as one of technology’s fastest growing and most visionary companies. Created by Carbonite co-founders and cloud storage pioneers David Friend and Jeff Flowers, Wasabi has secured $110 million in funding to date and is a privately held company based in Boston.

    Follow and connect with Wasabi on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and our blog.

  • FortressIQ and Blue Prism Team Up to Accelerate Enterprise Automation

    ogether, FortressIQ and Blue Prism enable companies to harness the power of the Digital Workforce with greater speed, agility, and scale

    SAN FRANCISCO – June 17, 2020 – FortressIQ, the company delivering end-to-end process insights for the modern enterprise, and Blue Prism, a global leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), today announced a strategic partnership that brings together business process discovery, intelligent automation, and operational analytics.

    Achieving automation at enterprise scale is a critical component for companies’ digital transformation journeys. However, the biggest obstacle to complex, large-scale change is the lack of detailed knowledge on current state activities. Most organizations do not fully understand how they operate on a daily basis, making it difficult to compile requirements and prioritize initiatives.

    FortressIQ helps businesses drill down to the sub-task details of their processes across the enterprise, so that they can then determine where and how Blue Prism’s Digital Workers will be most effective. Proper process discovery limits rework so that customers can streamline their Blue Prism deployments up to 90 percent faster than traditional methods.

    “Best-in-class organizations are continuously looking to improve their operations and deliver better experiences for their customers. The combination of process intelligence and automation play a vital role in making this possible,” said Jay Sivachelvan, vice president of global partnerships at FortressIQ. “We’re thrilled to join forces with Blue Prism and help companies get the most out of their Digital Workforce. By using FortressIQ and Blue Prism in tandem, enterprises can fast track their transformation agenda.”

    When embarking on automation initiatives, organizations generally allocate one-third of the project time to document their processes and prioritize them for RPA deployment. This creates an upfront bottleneck that may lengthen timelines, negatively impact costs, and increase the chance that rework will be necessary.

    FortressIQ and Blue Prism address this bottleneck by empowering organizations to digitally detail their current state user activities and automatically pinpoint the most optimal areas for RPA. From there, they can quickly execute on automation initiatives with Blue Prism’s robust, secure, agile, and highly scalable RPA solutions that feature built-in compliance capabilities and governance. Enterprises in financial services, retail, CPG, and telecommunications are leveraging this approach for a quicker path to successful RPA deployments, and are seeing greater success.

    “We’ve partnered with FortressIQ so that our joint customers can get their Digital Workforce up and running fast—and realize ROI—quicker than ever before,” said Linda Dotts, chief partner strategy officer at Blue Prism. “With this new partnership, users can easily create an automation roadmap that streamlines and enables rapid digital worker deployment at scale in as little as a few weeks.”

    Blue Prism will be hosting its annual user conference, Blue Prism World, virtually on June 23-24. Conference sessions will arm attendees with everything they need to begin implementing and scaling a market-leading Digital Workforce. In addition to sponsoring the event, FortressIQ will be exhibiting via a virtual booth. For registration information, please visit: https://bit.ly/2ZMfZZ7.

    About Blue Prism

    Blue Prism’s vision is to provide a Digital Workforce for Every Enterprise. The company’s purpose is to unleash the collaborative potential of humans, operating in harmony with a Digital Workforce, so every enterprise can exceed their business goals and drive meaningful growth, with unmatched speed and agility. Fortune 500 and Public-Sector organizations, among enterprise customers operating in nearly 70 countries and across 70 commercial sectors, trust Blue Prism’s enterprise-grade connected-RPA platform. For more information, visit www.blueprism.com.

    About FortressIQ

    FortressIQ delivers real-time, end-to-end process insights for the modern enterprise. It leverages computer vision and artificial intelligence to add human-level observability to any application, with zero integration and universal compatibility. FortressIQ’s automated process discovery enables enterprises to uncover insights and analytics previously unattainable with traditional methods, so that they may confidently make decisions and strategically implement them across the enterprise. These capabilities assist in improving employee experience, system optimization, process redesign, value engineering, and augmented intelligence. Founded in 2017, FortressIQ is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Boldstart Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Eniac Ventures, M12 and Tiger Global. To learn more, please visit www.fortressiq.com.

     

  • Contentful secures $80M in Series E Funding, announces new CMO, and scales rapidly to power the digital-first era

    Contentful is leading a major industry shift away from traditional content management systems to an omnichannel content platform

    SAN FRANCISCO, June 17, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Contentful announced today $80 million in Series E funding led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Salesforce Ventures and five other new and existing backers. This round brings Contentful’s total funding to $158 million to date. Contentful also announced hiring a new CMO, Bridget Perry, who most recently led Adobe marketing across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

    Contentful, a pioneer and global leader in headless content management systems (CMS), is now leading the industry with its next-generation content platform, which enables builders — developers, designers and content creators — to create and deliver digital experiences for any channel or device.

    Contentful is helping businesses compete in the massive market shift to a digital-first economy. With Contentful, brands can adapt to a changing landscape by quickly scaling up digital offerings across the entire customer journey. In recent months, the COVID-19 pandemic increased the reliance of brands on digital channels as the primary means of customer engagement. Contentful is helping businesses quickly respond to what has become, almost overnight, a digital-only economy.

    Contentful’s strong growth is fueled by rapid adoption: 28% of the Fortune 500 and 2,200 paying customers worldwide use Contentful to manage and deliver content across websites, mobile apps, wearables and digital displays.

    “Since pioneering headless CMS six years ago, Contentful has been transforming how companies manage and deploy content across all of their properties,” said Andreas Weiskam, Managing Director of Sapphire Ventures, which also led Contentful’s Series D funding. “As consumers access digital content across more channels, legacy CMS suites are unable to support the demand. We believe Contentful’s API-first approach makes it easy for companies to integrate hundreds of tools and scale up their digital presence on any channel.”

    In recent years, companies of all sizes increased their investment in digital to reach customers through a growing array of channels, devices and displays. This exponential growth, as well as the need for builders to reuse, adapt and deliver content dynamically, quickly exceeded traditional CMS capabilities.

    “Legacy content management systems were built for a web-only era, before mobile devices became the front door to nearly every business on the planet,” said Steve Sloan, CEO of Contentful. “In this new digital-first era, companies must deliver content across devices and around the world. This changes the game, requiring new capabilities to create the next generation of digital experiences.”

    More than 200 billion-dollar global brands, as well as innovative disruptor brands, use Contentful’s content platform, including Spotify, Urban Outfitters, Jack in the Box, Telus and Intercom.

    “When we decided to replatform, we weren’t just looking for technologies that met our business needs,” said Thomas Thomas, Director of Technology & Operations at British television network ITV. “They needed to integrate with each other easily and be flexible enough for future growth. Contentful proved to be a great choice for our content platform, and we’re excited to see how much more powerful this platform will become.”

    Alpro, part of Danone Group and pioneer of plant-based food, said Contentful’s content platform played a key role in the success of Alpro’s latest multi-market rebranding campaign. “Contentful enabled us to quickly launch across 15 markets thanks to its modular architecture, intuitive user interface and multiple integrations with our preferred technical services and business tools,” said Ralph Urmel, Digital Experience Manager at Alpro. “We will be doubling our presence in global markets in the next few quarters with Contentful.”

    Contentful’s rapid growth, with revenue roughly doubling each year for the past four years, was fueled by developers who looked for faster and better ways to build digital experiences. Contentful’s cloud-native, API-first platform has attracted a community of more than 400,000 developers and users who integrate Contentful with other third-party services such as Cloudinary, Commercetools and Smartling to extend the capabilities of the platform. With the recent release of the Contentful App Framework, an additional wave of technology partners now offer integrations with Contentful.

    Developer preference also drove adoption of Contentful in leading digital agencies and system integrators. Contentful’s ecosystem of 300+ partners includes top-tier digital agencies such as Publicis Sapient, Huge, Valtech and AKQA.

    “Today, the market is full of CMSes that were designed for the needs of the past, and old ways of working,” said Abhishek Kumar, Manager of Content Management Systems and eCommerce for Deloitte Digital AB. “Contentful brings in the latest advancements in content management and enables teams to deliver digital experiences faster. It’s the best of both worlds.”

    With its most recent funding, Contentful will scale quickly to meet the demand and momentum in the market.

    In addition to announcing Bridget Perry as CMO to lead marketing and partnerships, Contentful’s senior leadership team expanded late last year with CEO Steve Sloan and Chief Legal Officer Margo Smith. In total, eight senior leaders joined in the past year.

    “As a marketing leader responsible for ensuring brand consistency, I know firsthand how challenging it is for builders to deliver a consistent digital customer experience while using outdated technology,” said CMO Perry. “Established CMSes and DXPs aren’t agile enough to manage and deliver dynamic, omnichannel content. Contentful’s agile content platform is on a fast path to disrupting the market.”

    About Contentful
    Contentful’s nearly 400 employees are located in Berlin and San Francisco, and globally distributed worldwide. It was among the first companies to stress-test and then move all operations to fully remote during stay-at-home orders, enabling 100% business continuity throughout the COVID-19 crisis. The New York Times reported in February 2019 that Contentful was among 50 companies on track to achieve unicorn status — a startup valued at more than $1 billion — according to research from CB Insights. For more information, visit https://www.contentful.com/.

  • JumpCloud Releases Directory Insights, a 360° View of User Access Activity

    Admins Gain Total Visibility into User Access Activity – Who, What, When, Where, How – and Audit Logging of Admin and User Changes

    Louisville, CO — June 11, 2020 – JumpCloud, the world’s first Directory-as-a-Service®, today announced the General Availability of its new premium feature, Directory Insights™. JumpCloud Directory Insights gives system administrators, IT admins, and security operators a complete, centralized view of activity data detailing what users did, when, and from where when accessing corporate resources. Further, Directory Insights logs all user and admin changes to access, group membership, password changes, and more. This feature adds robust auditing capabilities to JumpCloud’s consolidated identity access control and device management platform.

    Leveraging Directory Insights’ full directory visibility, customers can use this data to audit, report on, and investigate all user and resource activity, providing a comprehensive view of a user’s access pattern. Directory Insights consolidates access and change-control data into one view of a user’s access pattern, eliminating the need to compile data from disparate log sources. Historically, IT admins needed to capture, normalize, and store log data from a wide range of solutions. Now, with one place to review all user data, IT admins can pinpoint security breaches, troubleshoot access problems, and ensure proper access rights.

    “Having a concise and clear view of what an employee is accessing, when they accessed it, and now from locations outside an office’s protected domain, is incredibly hard for IT and security personnel,” said Greg Keller, CTO at JumpCloud. “To see a complete picture, often a cacophony of tools and solutions need to be cobbled together. Directory Insights provides the first, 360 degree view of employees’ access patterns across their applications, networks, servers, and endpoints, regardless of whether the resource is in the cloud or on-premises, helping our customers to remediate threats, and ensure compliance.”

    “We’re thrilled with Directory Insights,” said Justin Price, IT manager at Chase International. “We can rest easy that we have a single pane of glass for identity access control and device management, and now full 360 degree audit and compliance visibility into our computers, networks, and applications.”

    IT teams can use Directory Insights in the JumpCloud Admin Portal with its Activity Log UI, as well as via the API or the JumpCloud PowerShell module, eliminating the need for admins to manually search for, export, and integrate data across a number of different tools.

    Auditing Features:

    • Complete event logs and user action data for auditors to certify compliance with industry standards and procedures, including SOC2 and HIPAA

    • Event logs are accessible via Directory Insights’ Activity Log UI, which can be captured with screenshots or exported (JSON and CSV) and ingested into a SIEM or other tool, as well as demonstrated live to prove compliance standards

    • Enforcement for organizational data policies that require storing historical records over time, or expunging data for privacy

    User Activity and Authentication Tracking Features:

    • Full visibility into what users did, when, and from where across JumpCloud’s directory authentication endpoints: SAML applications, LDAP resources, RADIUS networks, MDM commands, and Mac®/Windows®/Linux® authentications

    • Admin and user changes to access rights, group membership, passwords, and more are also logged

    • UI- and API-accessible logs with detailed event information, including search, and filtering capabilities

    Directory Investigation Features:

    • Capability to analyze event trends and user behavior to spot anomalies and threats, including authentication attempts from unknown actions and locations

    • Search functionality for diagnosing problems that allows full review of a trail of events surrounding what happened before and after reported issues

    • Directory Insights API to extract logs and ingest the data into security monitoring and analytics tools

    “Especially now, organizations of all sizes recognize the need for total visibility into user access activity,” said Mitchell Ashley, Accelerated Strategies CEO and managing analyst. “JumpCloud’s Directory Insights gives IT teams a panoramic view of directory and user access activity along with the flexibility to export that data to existing SIEMs, making auditing and generating compliance reports easy. Directory Insights adds one more critical layer of functionality to JumpCloud’s comprehensive platform.”

    Availability:

    Directory Insights is available for organizations now. JumpCloud customers get access to 90 days of Directory Insights events; JumpCloud free account users get access to the most recent 15 days of events.

    Additional resources:

    About JumpCloud

    JumpCloud® Directory-as-a-Service® is Active Directory® and LDAP reimagined. JumpCloud securely manages and connects users to their systems, applications, files, and networks. Try JumpCloud today.

     

  • Ethyca raises $13.5m to automate data privacy and compliance

    With businesses focused on getting CCPA-compliant, Ethyca also announces a new self-service product that automates privacy compliance in one click.

    Investors in Series A round include IA Ventures, Max Levchin, Michael Ovitz, Scott Belsky, and Neil Blumenthal

    June 11th, 2020, New York – Ethyca, a New York-based global data privacy solution today announced $13.5m in Series A funding, bringing their total funding to $20m.
    Ethyca also announced a new, self-service product that businesses can begin using for free, enabling automated privacy compliance for a range of companies from startup to Enterprise. Ethyca will now allow businesses of all sizes to implement comprehensive privacy management within a few clicks and without a lengthy onboarding process.
    Ethyca can confirm that their premium product, Ethyca Pro+, is now being used by major  consumer-driven brands like Away, Parachute Home and Aspire IQ. Companies everywhere are under greater pressure to comply with new privacy regulations such as California’s CCPA – its enforcement is set to begin later this year -in spite of the Coronavirus-related challenges facing businesses today.
    The funding comes following Ethyca’s seed round in July 2019. IA Ventures followed on its previous investment in the company with Roger Ehrenberg joining Ethyca’s Board of Directors.
    Others that participated in the round include; Affirm and PayPal cofounder Max Levchin’s SciFi VC, CAA cofounder Michael Ovitz, Warby Parker cofounders Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa, Harry’s cofounder Jeff Raider, Allbird’s cofounder Joey Zwillinge, Behance cofounder Scott Belsky, former Chief Data Scientist of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy DJ Patil, Lachy Groom, as well as Abstract Ventures.
    Founded in 2018 by Cillian Kieran and Miguel Burger-Calderon, Ethyca powers companies’ ethical data privacy in the same way Stripe powers payments. The firm takes charge of the continuous changes in privacy legislation so that its users can continue building products. Ethyca has built a privacy platform and API, for fast-growing, data-driven companies of every size counting startups and enterprises among its users.
    Cillian Kieran, CEO and co-founder of Ethyca, emphasised the pressing need for companies to get privacy right: “Right now companies are concerned with applying a ‘band aid’ for the likes of GDPR and CCPA to avoid risk of fines, but are not thinking holistically about what our industry is facing. Not only is it necessary to comply with the increasingly complex web of privacy regulations globally, but it’s more and more important to consumers that the services they use respect and manage their data ethically. Companies must seize the chance to gain competitive advantage here and differentiate themselves – those who take a transparent and considerate approach towards user data will be rewarded when consumers vote with their feet.”
    Investor Roger Ehrenberg of IA Ventures said ethical management of data would be a key business focus for many companies going forward: “Companies can no longer simply strive to be compliant and get by – enterprises need to think long-term and show their customers that they can be trusted with their data. Forward-thinking companies have recognised the value of Ethyca’s product to their bottom line as you can see from looking at the growing set of blue-chip brands and technology customers so far.”
    Josh Beser, the General Counsel at Away, noted the effortless process of integrating Ethyca throughout its systems: “At Away, the privacy of our customers is a high priority. In the search for a scalable privacy platform, our team was drawn to Ethyca’s technology-first solution as a means to decrease the manual effort for our data and engineering team, while providing an intuitive, respectful user experience for our community.”
    The funding comes almost two years after the implementation of GDPR and California’s landmark CCPA regulation being enforced from July 1st. Additionally, LGPD is due in Brazil this August and PDPB in India currently in draft form. Similar legislation is expected in South Korea and Thailand as the world wakes up to the importance of privacy and data management.
    About Ethyca:
    Ethyca was founded in 2018 in New York by Cillian Kieran and Miguel Burger-Calderon. Ethyca’s infrastructure provides developers and product teams the ability to ensure consumer data privacy throughout applications and services design with minimal developer friction. Other available “privacy” solutions operate by looking for personal information in data that has already been created while privacy was being ignored. But these are costly retroactive band-aids that do not solve the root problem: privacy failures during upstream collection and processing. Ethyca prevents the need for costly post-hoc patches by automatically solving the root cause.
    Further details are available at https://ethyca.com/
    Founder Bio:
    Cillian Kieran
    Privacy expert and engineer Cillian Kieran is the CEO and founder of privacy company Ethyca. Cillian has extensive technical experience working with legacy enterprise organizations such as Heineken, Sony, Dell and Pepsi building data platforms, visualization tools and leading strategic advisory in change management and data governance policy definitions, liaising with CIO, CDO and legal counsel.
    Miguel Burger-Calderon
    Miguel Burger-Calderon is the President and Co-Founder of Ethyca, which powers companies’ ethical data privacy management in the same way that Stripe has managed payments through an API. Ethyca’s infrastructure provides developers and product teams the ability to ensure consumer data privacy throughout applications and services design with minimal developer friction. Miguel was previously the Global Head of Business Development at Group Nine Media and before that served as President at Elite Daily, which he helped build to become a premier online destination before its ultimate acquisition by DMGT in 2015.

  • Zerto to Transform Global Data Protection Market by Offering Continuous Data Protection to All Application Tiers

    Delivering on customers’ need for always-on business, continuous journaling eliminates the need for legacy snapshot-based backup solutions

    Boston, June 10, 2020 – Zerto, an industry leader for IT resilience, today at ZertoCON announced its plans to transform the global data protection market by opening up the benefits of its continuous data protection (CDP) through a single platform to all application tiers. Built to address customers’ need for always-on business, Zerto’s software-only IT Resilience Platform will provide best-in-class, cost-effective resilience for all applications across mission-critical, back office, and test/dev use cases. This will ensure low RPOs and RTOs without compromising on cost or application performance.

    “Enterprises require data protection strategies and cost optimization models tailored to their unique needs,” commented Gil Levonai, CMO and senior vice president of product, Zerto. “Historically, top-tier, customer-facing applications would be protected with multiple data protection and disaster recovery solutions while lower-tier applications would be protected with high RPO backups only, or not protected at all. Zerto is levelling the playing field by applying its CDP technology to each of these important applications, transforming the backup market.

    Decoupling operational recovery from backup, Zerto leverages continuous journaling to eliminate the need for snapshot-based backup solutions. For decades, organizations have relied on backup technology to help solve every day, routine disruptions that require the quick restore of recent files, folders, or VMs. With Zerto’s market-leading journaling technology, these “operational recovery” use cases benefit from unmatched granularity, RPOs, and speed-of-recovery.

    Innovative Capabilities Will Protect All Application Tiers

    Zerto continues to innovate within its IT Resilience Platform, with new capabilities in forthcoming releases including:

    • Mix and Match Architectures will allow total flexibility for a business to apply the right protection policies and cost structures to the right applications—whether on-premises, in the cloud, or next-gen—without compromising RPOs and RTOs for operational recovery. The flexibility of a software-only architecture, one-to-many replication, local and remote journaling, long-term repositories, and both short-term and long-term retention policies will give companies the flexibility to meet business service level agreements and cost constraints.
    • In-Cloud Data Protection and Disaster Recovery enables protection of applications across regions and zones for true cloud-native resilience, whether in AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure. Zerto will extend its platform to offer unparalleled simplicity and orchestration across all use cases, whether recent data restores due to user error or disaster recovery from an infrastructure outage, for both cloud-first businesses and businesses just starting their cloud journey.
    • Optimized Tiering to Cloud utilizing native cloud object storage for long-term retention offers both cost and recovery speed benefits. Zerto will offer native support for efficient, cost-effective public cloud storage as a long-term retention target with built-in data reduction technology.
    • New Workflows simplify file or VM restores back to production from a local or remote journal, enabling maximum flexibility.
    • Automated Data Protection with policy-driven management, allows IT to simplify operations and reduce overhead using VM auto-protection and Zerto’s data-rich, API-first analytics platform.
    • Additional Features include added encryption and security, automatic VRA lifecycle management for maintenance, features for our managed service providers, new Zerto Analytics functionality, an improved licensing mechanism, and many more.

    Accelerating Business Resilience and Digital Transformation

    “By deploying Zerto’s single IT Resilience Platform for all applications, IT departments can ensure business resilience and focus on their digital transformation initiatives,” added Levonai. “This transformation of people and processes ensures that IT resilience is seamless, automated, and consistently repeatable, enabling the business to move fast, be agile, disrupt the market, and never themselves be disrupted.”

    Zerto’s cost optimization across tiers lowers TCO by providing businesses flexible architectures, SLA policies, and storage choices. It also offers huge IT efficiencies by reducing time-to-recovery and hours wasted on restoring out-of-date data from backups. The software-only platform is hardware and storage agnostic, enabling maximum flexibility to allow enterprises to choose the right infrastructure for their business without any constraints.

    This flexibility allows IT departments to eliminate multiple tools and tedious manual processes to better align IT resources, while end-to-end data protection minimizes data loss and downtime with unbeatable RPOs and RTOs.

    About Zerto

    Zerto helps customers accelerate IT transformation by reducing the risk and complexity of modernization and cloud adoption. By replacing multiple legacy solutions with a single IT Resilience Platform, Zerto is changing the way disaster recovery, data protection and cloud are managed. With enterprise scale, Zerto’s software platform delivers continuous availability for an always-on customer experience while simplifying workload mobility to protect, recover and move applications freely across hybrid and multi-clouds. Zerto is trusted globally by over 8,000 customers, works with more than 1,500 partners and is powering resiliency offerings for 450 managed services providers. Learn more at Zerto.com.