devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Deborah Schalm

  • IBM Research – Confidentiality and Governance of Cloud Services 

    Our team has spent months developing, tuning and perfecting a complex deep neural network to classify important financial, medical or government data. The application has been containerized, packaged, and is finally ready to deploy as a public service on the cloud, but one thing stands in the way. How do you get assurance that your trade secret code, as well as the highly sensitive data it handles can be kept confidential and private? In addition, how can you provide workload and data governance in highly regulated industries?

    The problems of privacy and confidentiality, and governance is in the center of what IBM Research is tackling. To improve these aspects of container and cloud technology, we have recently contributed two open-source projects: Encrypted Container Images, which ensure that container images remain encrypted and private, and Trusted Service Identity, that ensures that data processed by these images remains secure.

    We will first go through how these technologies enable confidentiality of code and data, and then show how they can provide governance.

    Protecting the confidentiality of workloads and secrets

    To provide high assurance, we want to ensure both data and code are encrypted, which are provided by Encrypted Container Images and Trusted Service Identity respectively.

    Encrypted Container Images protects the confidentiality of the workload/code by extending the OCI (Open Container Initiative) container image specification with +encrypted media types, which allows developers to encrypt container images, so that they can only be decrypted by authorized parties (developers, clusters, machines, etc.). This ensures that the workload stays encrypted from build to run-time. Without the appropriate key, even in the event of the registry compromise, the content of the image remains confidential.

    Ensuring that the workload is encrypted is only one side of the story. Every workload needs some access to data sources or other services. In order to do this, it must authenticate itself, using a password, API key or certificate. Today, this is typically done through Kubernetes secrets. The problem with the Kubernetes secrets is that once they are stored, they would be also available to administrators, cloud operators or anyone with access to this namespace. However, the admins might be third-party employees just managing the resources, might not be certified to access the data or might not have security clearance.

    Trusted Service Identity protects sensitive data access by ensuring only attested services are able to obtain credentials. This is done through the use of workload identity, composed of various run-time measurements like the image and cluster name, data center location, etc, to identify the application. These measurements are securely signed by a service running on every hosting node, using a chain of trust installed during the secure bootstrapping of the environment.

    Extending Governance: Geofencing execution and Location++ based data policy

    When it comes to highly regulated industries, confidentiality of workloads and data is just the tip of the iceberg. Often, more fine-grained controls need to be put into place. And the technologies described above address them.

    • The first type of control is geofencing execution. How do we ensure that this workload is only run in particular clusters or regions? How do we enforce export control or digital rights management? These are natural uses of Encrypted Container Images. By only providing the appropriate decryption keys through attestation, authorization and key management, we can create a trust binding between certain clusters/workers and workloads. This will provide assurance of knowing WHERE workloads are running.Another control is to be able to express, enforce and audit data access via location (or other properties) of the workloads, i.e. GDPR. Trusted Service Identity provides just that. By exposing the properties of workloads in the definition of policies governing secrets, it provides the ability to create policies such as “Only workload X (with this image), running in datacenter DAL05, in kube cluster hipaaCluster can access medical records in this Cloudant database“. This method of governance has very fine-grained controls, that might apply to a wide spectrum of use-cases. In addition, the entire audit trail is retained, tracking every interaction and what process received what secret and when.

      These are just a couple examples of how these technologies can be used to enhance governance in the container cloud ecosystem.

      Find out more

      We have only scratched the surface of exploring these technologies in this article. If you’d like to find out more about these technologies.

     

  • IBM Boosts Security and Productivity with Red Hat OpenShift 4.3 on IBM Cloud

    As more businesses journey to the cloud, they need ways to easily deploy and manage their critical workloads securely across public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises environments. This is particularly crucial when faced with the ongoing demands to support remote workforces.

    The IBM public cloud has been rebuilt on a foundation of open source innovation, security leadership, and enterprise-grade infrastructure, which makes it easier for clients to rapidly develop new applications and reducesthe complexity in managing teams and technologies. And this is why our public cloud has become the preferred destination for businesses to run their most complex workloads.

    Today we’re taking this a step further by announcing enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloudwith the availability of OpenShift 4.3 – and we’re the first major cloud provider to offer this. The effort is jointly engineered and supported by IBM and Red Hat.

    Most notably for our clients, we’ve added unique security and productivity features designed to help eliminate substantial time spent on ongoing maintenance like updating, scaling, securing and provisioning. We’re delivering the resiliency needed to handle unexpected surges in use, as well as protection against attacks that lead to breaches or outages and potential productivity losses. Now development teams can focus more on what matters – accelerating cloud native application development so they can drive new, competitive capabilities.

    With this fully cloud managed offering, the master for your clusters is protected by IBM Cloud’s unique architecture, configuration and tools. Below are the technical benefits designed to help save time, reduce outages, and boost security.

    ·        Protect your Master with Automated Recovery
    We’re automating recovery so you don’t lose time with customer support and other tasks that you might have otherwise had to do yourself (like strategy, staffing, storage.)
    By continuously backing up etcd, we’re minimizing the threat of data loss in the unlikely case of a complete master outage. Masters are by default highly available, and you can further protect your master from a single data center failure by adding multizone clusters. So, if one data center goes down there is no impact to availability because IBM Cloud runs an active-active-active master.
    ·        Full Admin Access with Built-in Protection
    Only Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud provides cluster-admin access without the risk of an admin being able to take down the master.  Master nodes for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud are physically network-isolated from the worker nodes. Therefore the master nodes are not accessible from any of the worker nodes within the cluster (network diagram).

    With this new functionality, you’re no longer faced with recovery as the only viable solution to an outage, and your access is not limited either, as you might experience with other offerings. This means better access to controls and easier cluster management.

    ·        Increase Productivity by Autoscaling the Master
    Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud provides autoscaling masters with an industry-leading  99.99% SLA in multi-zone regions. This means your workloads can expand quickly, while you don’t worry about capacity. You can also autoscale your workersto meet your app’s capacity needs.
    For example, in the heat of delivering a big feature, admins might overlook manually scaling the master, and without this new functionality, you’d have no SLA and your admins would be faced with scaling the master components as your grow – leading to a big loss in productivity.
    ·        Automate Worker Management and Provisioning Based on Workload Needs
    Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud provides total control over worker node provisioning and flexibility with worker pools, so you no longer worry about over- and under-provisioning your apps. IBM automates the worker management and provisioning to help ensure you’re matching workloads with the proper resources.
    Other vendors may limit your ability to provision more node types and flavors, so you can’t easily automate how and when users get resources. Now you can easily mix node types and flavors to realistically match workloads that require a mix of data, compute, and services.
    ·        Managed Security with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud
    When your CISO, NetOps admin, or DevSecOps admin comes to your door, you know that you’ve got another security and certification mountain to climb.
    The master and its components (compute, networking, and storage) are continuously monitored by IBM Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). They apply the latest security standards in order to detect and remediate malicious activities, and work to help ensure reliability and availability of Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud. Plus they follow relevant cybersecurity practices from the Kubernetes master benchmark that is published by the Center of Internet Security (CIS). Review IBM’s responsibilities for security.
    No other cloud vendor helps you as much as IBM with OpenShift security and compliance, which includes chores for PCI, HIPAA, ISO27K, SOC1, and SOC2 Type 2.
    These benefits were born from common enterprise use cases we’ve solved for our customers: security, resiliency, and productivity. In Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, we’ve leveraged the experience we’ve gained from running Kubernetes for years — now with 20,000+ clusters in production.

    Additionally, with OpenShift 4.3, users can access the following new capabilitiesas-a-service:
    ·        Operators: Focus on app development with automated updates and health checks of your tools deployed into OpenShift
    ·        Knative: Serverless app development for event-based workloads
    ·        Service Mesh: Microservices management for distributed componentized applications
    ·        Increased security: Built-in authentication, auditing and secrets management

    The IBM Developer Advocacy Program also shared their perspective on the advancements made to Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud. You can view the blog here.

    Additionally, to support today’s announcement and reinforce IBM’s continued commitment to driving open source innovation, IBM Research unveiled two container-based open-source projects that will enable confidentiality of code and data. You can read more about Encrypted Container Images and Trusted Service Identity here.

    Get started today:
    ·        If you have questions or comments, engage our team via Slack. You can register hereand join the discussion in the #openshift channel on https://ibm-cloud-success.slack.com.
    ·        Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud
    ·        Check out a free cluster for a quick test driveor do a tutorialon Red Hat OpenShift 4.3 on IBM Cloud

  • Instana Announces Integration with Coralogix Log Analytics Solution

    Company Becomes First APM Vendor to Release Direct Integration with ELK-Stack Based Solution

    Chicago and San Francisco – April 23, 2020 – Instana, the leading provider of real-time application performance management (APM) solutions for cloud-native microservice applications, today announced the availability of one-click integration with Coralogix, the first ELK based Log Analytics solution to be integrated with Instana.

    Instana’s integration with Coralogix provides a seamless experience when using the solutions to troubleshoot microservices and cloud native applications. The integrated solution allows Dev and Ops team members to jump from isolating problems with Instana to drilling into platform investigation with Coralogix in the exact context, with the search criteria and date time range already set.

    Achieving higher visibility is now much easier with zero to minimal configuration. With direct integration with Coralogix, Instana becomes the first and only APM solution to provide seamless integration with an ELK based Log Analytics solution.

    ELK, which stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, is comprised of three open-source tools typically used for log analytics solutions. The ELK stack is designed for users to be able to search, analyze and visualize data in real-time, from any source and in any format.

    “IT Operations and Dev teams tasked with delivering high performance applications want to leverage any and all resources to solve application problems,” said Chris Farrell, Technical Director and APM Strategist at Instana. “The seamless Instana integration with Coralogix enables Dev and Ops teams to quickly move from finding application problems to deeper log-based investigation with a single click.”

    The integration between Instana and Coralogix is the latest one-click navigation from Instana’s automated APM solution into a log analysis tool, handled via a button in the Instana GUI on key component dashboards (i.e., Services, Containers or Kubernetes). When the button is clicked, Instana starts up an instance of Coralogix, along with a pre-executed analysis filter into the specific logs of the application components and associated infrastructure. Additionally, timing is synchronized, so users don’t have to search for the specific log or timeframe needed to solve problems.

    “Coralogix is thrilled to be integrated with Instana’s APM solution,” said Ariel Assaraf, CEO and Founder of Coralogix. “This integration represents more than just having metrics and other data collected by Instana, allowing Coralogix and Instana to work seamlessly in tandem so that IT Operations can find and fix problems quicker.”

    Coralogix’s machine learning-powered logging solution automatically clusters millions of log records back into their patterns and finds connections to form the baseline flows of each application. Coralogix helps accelerate CI/CD pipelines by decreasing the time to identify problematic versions and allowing teams to fix issues before reaching production. Coralogix automatically monitors and benchmarks versions from the earliest stages of development through integration with common CI/CD tools.

    Unlike traditional APM tools, Instana’s automated Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution discovers all application service components and application infrastructure, including Cloud infrastructure such as Azure, orchestration infrastructure like Kubernetes and Docker, application services and DevOps processes. Instana automatically deploys monitoring sensors for each part of the application technology stack and traces all application requests – without requiring any human configuration or even application restarts. The solution detects application and infrastructure changes in real-time, adjusting its own models and visualizing the changes and impacts to performance in seconds.

    The integration with Coralogix and other log analysis tools is available today in all Instana APM solutions. Additional information can be found at https://www.instana.com/coralogix.

     

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    ABOUT INSTANA

    As the leading provider of Automatic Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions for microservices, Instana has developed the automatic monitoring and AI-based analysis DevOps needs to manage the performance of modern applications. Instana is the only APM solution that automatically discovers, maps and visualizes microservice applications without continuous additional engineering. Customers using Instana achieve operational excellence and deliver better software faster. Visit https://www.instana.com to learn more.

  • Aryaka’s Fourth Annual State of the WAN Report Reveals 2020 Insights From 1000+ Global Enterprises

    Top Issues Include WAN Complexity, SD-WAN Adoption and Migration to Managed Services; Future Plans Include AI/ML, 5G and IoT Adoption 

     

    SAN MATEO, Calif. – April 22, 2020 – Aryaka®, the Cloud-First WAN company delivering the #1 managed SD-WAN solution, today published its fourth annual 2020 State of the WAN report that reveals application performance, impacted by network complexity at the edge and in the cloud, is the key enterprise concern this year for organizations implementing SD-WAN.

    “Modern applications are being distributed across on premises data centers, multiple public clouds (IaaS & SaaS) and edge locations. This is creating more complexity and greater dependency on the network to ensure optimal application performance as confirmed by the Aryaka report,” said Bob Laliberte, Sr. Analyst and Practice Director at ESG.  “Organizations need WAN solutions that deliver performance, flexibility and simplicity to overcome that complexity. This is driving interest in managed SD-WAN offerings that combine application optimization and secure connectivity, to any location, from any location, including access and support for remote workers.”

    Study Methodology

    The Fourth Annual Global Aryaka 2020 State of the WAN study surveyed over one thousand global IT and network practitioners at enterprise organizations across all verticals, headquartered in NA, APAC and EMEA. The survey asked respondents about their networking and performance challenges, priorities and their plans for 2020 and beyond.

    Complexity and Application Performance Play a Large Role in SD-WAN Selection Criteria

    Enterprise complexity at the edge and within the cloud are creating a challenging environment for IT organizations. IT managers identify complexity and slow performance of both on-prem and cloud-based applications as their biggest concerns. Complexity (37 percent) replaces cost as the number one concern, followed by slow on-prem performance (32 percent) and slow access to cloud and software as a service (SaaS) apps (32 percent). Security (31 percent) and long deployment times (30 percent) are also in the top four.

    With so many applications in use, many of which are cloud-based, IT is consumed by managing application performance and access to the cloud.  And it’s only getting more complex, highlighting the need for a managed service for many organizations. The biggest IT time consuming issues identified by respondents were remote and mobile (47 percent), application performance at the branch (43 percent) and accessing the cloud, which doubled from 20 percent in 2019 to 42 percent in 2020.

    Challenges Surrounding Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)

    This year’s survey showed that while network managers have high expectations as performance, UCaaS is still challenging to deploy globally, and, once again, complexity is the culprit. Respondents identified set-up and management as the number one challenge for voice and video (48 percent in 2020; 27 percent in 2019), highlighting the need for managed solutions that hide the complexity. Lag/delay was a close second (43 percent in 2020; 30 percent in 2019), which illustrates network performance issues. This was followed by dropped calls (39 percent).

    It’s All About the Apps and Where They’re Connecting From

    Most of the enterprises surveyed this year are leveraging over 10 SaaS applications (51 percent in 2020 versus 23 percent in 2019), which speaks to the criticality of cloud performance. In terms of where these SaaS apps are hosted, it’s a multi-cloud world, with AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Alibaba Cloud all well represented. What’s more, enterprises are continuing to increase the number of applications deployed. A growing number of companies are deploying 100+ applications: 59 percent in 2020 compared to 43 percent in 2019.  Please refer to the report for more detailed, per-vertical data and year-on-year comparisons.

    What’s Being Done to Reduce Complexity

    To address increased complexity and the time spent managing the WAN, enterprises regardless of size are undergoing major initiatives that include automation, the cloud and newer areas of interest such as internet of things (IoT), AI/ML and blockchain. For broad IT initiatives, automation grew substantially to 41 percent of respondents in 2020 from only 31 percent in 2019, as did IoT (29 percent in 2020 from 18 percent in 2019), AI/ML (27 percent in 2020 from 12 percent in 2019), and blockchain (21 percent in 2020 from only five percent in 2019).

    On the cloud front, regardless of company size, upgrades and management are important as well as a keen interest in 5G. This last initiative reflects the interest in 5G as a future primary connectivity option for SD-WAN. Respondents identified cloud upgrades (37 percent) and management (38 percent) as top networking initiatives. A whopping 42 percent of respondents also named 5G as a top initiative for this year.

    Barriers and Expectations for Today’s SD-WANs

    Buyers are at various stages of their SD-WAN evaluation, but most are still gathering information or evaluating vendors. Forty-four percent of respondents are gathering information, 23 percent are evaluating SD-WAN vendors, 11 percent are building a business case, 13 percent are in the middle of deploying, six percent have deployed and assumed to be happy while only two percent are deployed, but not happy.

    When evaluating SD-WAN, the top three potential barriers include application performance, knowledge gaps and complexity.  Overall, cost seems less a consideration this year versus performance and complexity, with SD-WAN ROI better understood and valued than in previous years.

    Beyond the barriers mentioned above, SD-WAN planners have certain expectations they’d like met. Respondents said, the cloud and WAN optimization are still key requirements to a successful SD-WAN solution, but NFV, support for remote workers and the desire for a managed service have grown substantially. Add in security, and all of these features illustrate the many moving parts critical to a successful SD-WAN deployment. Their top SD-WAN features wish lists included expected responses such as security, cloud and WAN optimization, but also network functions virtualization (NFV), which more than doubled from 2019 (35 percent in 2020 from 13 percent in 2019) and support for remote employees, which also grew by over 50 percent (33 percent in 2020 from 21 percent in 2019).  Organizations are increasingly expecting the mobile workforce to be included as part of the total SD-WAN solution.

    The desire for a fully managed SD-WAN also increased to 37 percent in 2020 from 28 percent in 2019.  This aligns with a growing acceptance for managed offerings, likely in response to the increasing complexities and challenges detailed earlier, with 87 percent of respondents saying they would consider a managed SD-WAN as compared to 59 percent in 2019.

    “We are living in a complex multi-cloud and multi-SaaS application world. As global enterprises continue to innovate by embracing new technologies and migrating to the cloud, they also face new challenges, and the network is increasingly a strategic asset” said Shashi Kiran, CMO of Aryaka. “Whether it’s an increasing number of global sites through expansion, poor performing cloud-based applications, increasing costs or the time it takes to manage multiple vendors, many organizations are at an inflection point: transform the WAN now or risk falling behind and losing out to competitors.”

    Aryaka to Host 2020 The State of the WAN Webinar

    Join us at the following dates/times for a lively panel discussion on the “Aryaka 2020 Global State of the WAN,” where we also present regional observations:

    • North America            April 29, 11am EST, 8am PST              Register Here
    • EMEA                          April 30, 10am GMT                            Register Here
    • APAC                           April 30, 1030am IST, 2pm Tokyo       Register Here

    This interactive format will allow our panel of experts to deep dive into our 4th annual State of the WAN report, with further analysis of the key findings driving digital transformation.

    Download these assets to plan your WAN for 2020

    Aryaka 4th Annual Global State of the WAN Ebook

    Aryaka 4th Annual Global State of the WAN Infographic

    Aryaka’s State of the WAN 2021 Survey is Now Open

    To respond and receive a copy of the results, click  here for more information.

    For more on Aryaka, please visit: https://www.aryaka.com/

    Visit the Aryaka blog: https://www.aryaka.com/blog/

    Follow Aryaka on Twitter: @AryakaNetworks

    Visit Aryaka on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aryaka-networks/

    About Aryaka

    Aryaka, the Cloud-First WAN company, brings agility, simplicity and a great experience to consuming the WAN-as-a-service. An optimized global network and innovative technology stack delivers the industry’s #1 managed SD-WAN service and sets the gold standard for application performance. Aryaka’s SmartServices platform offers connectivity, application acceleration, security, cloud networking and insights, leveraging global orchestration and provisioning. The company’s customers include hundreds of global enterprises including several in the Fortune 100.

  • Announcing HashiCorp Cloud Engineering Certifications

    The HashiCorp Cloud Engineering Certifications are designed to help technologists demonstrate their expertise with fundamental capabilities needed in today’s multi-cloud world.

    Organizations of all sizes have embraced cloud technology and are adopting a cloud operating model for their application workloads. This new model of computing is inherently multi-cloud and driven by a need for heterogeneous, on-demand, self-service infrastructure; identity-based secure access; and dynamic, flexible network perimeters separate from physical servers. We believe that the job of cloud engineer — and the mastery it requires over the new competencies in these multi-cloud environments — will play a critical role in helping thousands companies transform their IT investments.

    We have created our Cloud Engineering Certifications so you can demonstrate your knowledge, capability, and expertise working with the de facto standard open source multi-cloud automation tools from HashiCorp. You can become certified today in Infrastructure Automation and Security Automation, with Network Automation coming later this year. The online, proctored, multiple-choice exams will assess fundamental knowledge for each discipline and evaluate core implementation skills using HashiCorp Terraform, Vault, and Consul.

    Exam Preparation

    To help you prepare for the certification exams, we have created three tools. First, if you are fairly new to HashiCorp products, we have built a curated list of Learn guides (Terraform, Vault), Katacoda scenarios, and documentation pages that cover the exam core objectives, organized sequentially to help practitioners learn from first principles. Second, if you are experienced with our tools, we have created a comprehensive review guide (Terraform, Vault) that identifies root documentation for each topic tested to help you pinpoint specific areas that you may want to brush up on. Third, we have provided examples of what types of questions to expect on the exam. These include multiple choice, multiple answer, and text match-style questions (Terraform, Vault).

    Taking the Exam

    The certification exams are taken online and facilitated by a proctor via video conferencing. The proctor verifies your identity, goes over exam procedures, and stays with you during your exam. You can take the exam at home or at work instead of driving to a testing center and there are exam appointment slots in all time zones. The proctor is responsible for ensuring that you don’t receive assistance (in-person, audio, or digital) during the exam, and that exam procedures are followed correctly for the duration of the test. To increase your likelihood of success, please make sure that you conduct the exam with a clear desk, where you will not be disturbed and can be visible via webcam for the whole test. You will get a list of the complete exam rules when you sign up.

    Sharing Results

    HashiCorp will inform you of your test results immediately upon exam completion. We have partnered with Credly’s Acclaim platform to offer you a digital badge upon passing the certification exam. There is no fee for this service and acceptance is up to you. Sharing your badge via social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter links back to a real-time verification feature that describes your qualifications and lets you gain instant recognition from your professional network. You can also include the badge in your email signature, digital resume, and embed it on your personal website or blog. Once you earn your first HashiCorp certification badge you can share it on social media with the #CloudEngineer and #TerraformCertified or #VaultCertified hashtags.

    Schedule Your Certification Exam

    The certification exams are managed through our exam platform partner and will require practitioners to create an account, purchase, schedule and take the exam. You can schedule a Terraform or Vault Associate exam today. Consul and advanced exams are coming soon.

    We at HashiCorp are committed to helping you solve some of the most challenging cloud engineering problems. We expect that the HashiCorp Cloud Engineering Certifications will become the benchmarks for multi-cloud competency that enterprises, system integrators and technology companies will use to ensure the success of their digital infrastructure efforts.

  • Exadel Announces Appery.io COVID-19 Virtual Hackathon to Engage Global Developer Community

    Global hackathon invites developers to build digital solutions designed to support individuals and businesses during coronavirus pandemic

    WALNUT CREEK, Calif., April 22, 2020 — Exadel (www.exadel.com), a global provider of digital platform engineering solutions and services, today announced it will be hosting the “Appery.io COVID-19 Virtual Hackathon” that invites developers from all over the world to build digital solutions that solve challenges posed by the Coronavirus. The Appery.io COVID-19 Virtual Hackathon begins April 22, 2020 at 9 a.m. PDT with final submissions due May 6, 2020 by 11:59 p.m. PDT. Applications will be judged by a panel of experts with up to $1,000 in cash prizes awarded.

    Sign-up for the Appery.io COVID-19 Virtual Hackathon today: (https://covid.appery.io/)

    Using Appery.io, a low-code application development platform created by Exadel and used by nearly 500,000 developers worldwide, participants are encouraged to build applications that help groups and businesses most impacted by COVID-19. Projects should focus on areas like healthcare, mental health, assistance for the elderly or vulnerable, improving remote work, financial stability or maintaining a sense of community. Developers are free to be as innovative and unique as possible with minimal restrictions on application type or theme.

    Participants are welcome to register and submit their applications starting April 22, 2020. Submissions close May 6, 2020 and will be judged by a panel of experts according to a range of relevant criteria. A virtual, live ceremony will take place on May 10, 2020 where finalists will be recognized. Prizes will be awarded as follows:

    1. First-Place – $1,000 and an Appery.io Annual Pro Subscription
    2. Second-Place – $500 and an Appery.io Annual Pro Subscription
    3. Third-Place – $250 and an Appery.io Annual Pro Subscription

    For more information on how to get started, FAQ’s and guidelines please visit: (https://covid.appery.io/)

    “While physical interaction is being limited in many global communities, it’s important to find ways to connect and support one another in alternative settings,” said Fima Katz, CEO and President of Exadel. “By hosting this hackathon, we hope to bring together the developer community in a meaningful way where they can innovate and experiment with projects aimed at helping those who need it most. We look forward to reviewing and gaining inspiration from the submissions.”

    Tweet this: .@exadel announces @apperyio COVID-19 Virtual Hackathon to bring together #developer community to build projects aimed at solving common challenges faced today #ApperyHackathon

    About Exadel

    Exadel is a leading digital platform engineering services provider. Through technical software development, Exadel helps Fortune 500 clients accelerate their digital transformations by providing innovative solutions, services and engineering expertise. Exadel enables clients to engage competitively with their customers by delivering products and platforms at optimal efficiency. With 20+ locations and delivery centers across the US and Europe, Exadel solves the most complex engineering problems using recognized agile practices, offering a high-quality and skilled mix of multi-shore resources with deep knowledge of advanced technologies.

    About Appery.io

    Appery.io is a low-code, rapid development, integration and deployment platform created by Exadel for delivering cross-device apps in the enterprise. It combines enterprise-grade integration middleware with a browser-based rapid development environment and mobile backend services to accelerate enterprise mobilization. Appery.io enables developers and business analysts to rapidly create and run apps that help businesses of all sizes increase revenues and improve productivity.

     

     

  • ScienceLogic’s Behavior-Based Monitoring Forges a New Path for IT Service Delivery

    Pioneers a new AIOps approach to troubleshooting and remediating service disruptions using real-time anomaly detection across multimodal data types

    Supporting Resources:

    Beyond Event Correlation – Building a Brighter Future with Behavior-Based AIOps

    RESTON, VA—ScienceLogic, a leading provider of monitoring solutions for multi-cloud management and hybrid IT infrastructure, today unveiled its latest innovation in context-infused AIOps. With the introduction of Behavioral Correlation, ScienceLogic is transforming how IT teams identify, troubleshoot and remediate service-disrupting events—before end-user impact can even be detected.

    Modern IT environments breed complexity through the proliferation of applications and data, outstripping human capacity for analysis and response. Operations teams pressured to hunt down and fix customer-impacting IT events are often constrained by antiquated methods founded on human-centered analyses. With Behavioral Correlation, ScienceLogic introduces a radically more efficient approach, leveraging machine-speed detection and remediation. Real-time service health and risk can now be understood at a glance, allowing IT teams to rapidly address issues when they occur or even intercept potential service-impacting issues before they happen.

    Behavioral Correlation for ScienceLogic SL1 is delivered through tightly integrated core capabilities:

    • A comprehensive, real-time data lake that captures multimodal data types and their relationships
    • The ability to map and visualize IT services, their underlying dependencies, and associated health, availability, and risk
    • Machine-learning techniques that reason over these service topologies to detect the root cause of issues or anomalous behavior, and can recommend actions to address

    The end result is a system that provides holistic visibility into complex IT estates through an intuitive, service-centric lens. Decision-makers can quickly understand the impact, root causes, and relative priority – ensuring IT is spending time on what matters most to the business.

    “This is a game-changing innovation that buries the old-school, reactionary approach to IT event management. We can now instantly provide a real-time picture across the entire ephemeral state of IT – pinpointing where service degradation is happening, which issues should be prioritized, and the potential business impact,” said Dave Link, ScienceLogic CEO. “The cohesive, service-level view alleviates IT teams scrambling from one incident to the next and empowers providers worldwide to deliver a resilient customer experience.”

    With IT teams free from the 1990s war rooms and defensive positions battling “event storms,” they can embrace a new standard for situational awareness to help drive faster root-cause analysis and time to resolution.

    ScienceLogic customers will be able to access this new capability through the latest Colosseum Release due out in late Q2, 2020. Current users can see a live demo at the upcoming virtual ScienceLogic Symposium on April 21 & 22.

    Supporting Resources:

    Beyond Event Correlation – Building a Brighter Future with Behavior-Based AIOps

    About ScienceLogic

    ScienceLogic is a leader in IT Operations Management, providing modern IT operations with actionable insights to predict and resolve problems faster in a digital, ephemeral world. Its solution sees everything across multi-cloud and distributed architectures, contextualizes data through relationship mapping, and acts on this insight through integration and automation. Trusted by thousands of organizations across the globe, ScienceLogic’s technology is designed for the rigorous security requirements of United States Department of Defense, proven for scale by the world’s largest service providers, and optimized for the needs of large enterprises. https://sciencelogic.com

  • Research Reveals Demand for Mainframe Innovation Will Surpass Non-mainframe Innovation in 2020, Requiring New Ways of Working

    A new global survey of 400 senior IT leaders highlights that the mainframe is continuing to grow in importance – so much so that the deployment frequency of new mainframe application features is set to surpass that of non-mainframe application features in 2020.

    The survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Compuware, reveals that organizations expect to increase the frequency of new mainframe application feature deployments by an average of 41% in the next 12 months, vs. 38% for non-mainframe applications. This comes as 47% of organizations say the mainframe is running more business-critical applications today than ever before. Indeed, the mainframe provides crucial support for a growing number of customer-facing and revenue-driving services.

    “Today, every company is a software company, as applications have become the main driver behind the way that disruptive business models and compelling customer experiences are built,” said Chris O’Malley, CEO, Compuware. “Given the increasingly crucial role the mainframe plays in innovation, continuously improving the quality, velocity and efficiency of software development and delivery on the platform should no longer be a wishful IT aspiration – it’s an urgent strategic imperative. Enterprises must find ways to translate ideas for meeting and exceeding customer expectations into digital services that make a difference – continuously.”

    The research further reveals that the overwhelming majority (97%) of application development managers say IT is under more pressure than ever to deliver software innovation faster. It is perhaps unsurprising then, that a similar number (95%) also said their IT teams are under pressure to adopt modern development practices on the mainframe to accelerate delivery and innovation.

    As they work towards these goals, 52% of organizations have adopted DevOps on the mainframe and 42% have adopted Agile methodologies. While these findings show that organizations have made great strides to implement modern development practices on the mainframe, there is still a long way to go before adoption of DevOps and Agile methodologies on these core systems is as widespread as today’s digital economy demands.

    “Mainframe developers are more critical to business success than ever before,” said David Rizzo, VP of Engineering, Compuware. “However, to truly innovate on existing core systems and deliver new digital services for customers, developers need the best possible experience and environment to work in. The basis of this should reside in an open and collaborative culture, where developers can work on inspiring and challenging projects, with modern methods and tools, and receive fast feedback that continuously improves their abilities. Providing this kind of developer experience is crucial to enabling organizations to compete effectively in the digital age.”

    The survey included the responses of 400 senior IT leaders responsible for application development in organizations with a mainframe and 1,000+ employees, and was conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Compuware.

    Compuware Corporation

    Compuware empowers the world’s largest companies to excel in the digital economy by taking full advantage of their mainframe investments. We do this by delivering innovative software that enables IT professionals with mainstream skills to develop, deliver and support mainframe applications with ease and agility. Our modernized solutions uniquely automate mainframe work, integrate into a cross-platform DevOps toolchain and measure software delivery quality, velocity and efficiency. Learn more at compuware.com.

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  • ForgeRock Surpasses $100M ARR, Raises $93.5 Million To Fuel the Next Wave of Growth & Cloud Innovation

    Series E Funding Led by Riverwood Capital. Existing investors: Accel, Meritech Capital, Foundation Capital and KKR Growth participated in the raise.

    SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — ForgeRock®, the leading provider in digital identity, today announced that it has completed a $93.5 million Series E round of fundraising. This latest funding round was led by Riverwood Capital. Existing investors, including Accel, Meritech Capital, Foundation Capital and KKR Growth also participated. ForgeRock has now raised more than $230 million in growth capital since its founding. Riverwood Capital co-founder and managing partner Jeff Parks will join the ForgeRock board of directors.

    ForgeRock’s revenue is north of $100 million and its annual recurring revenue growth is 75%, a sign of customer satisfaction and strong demand. Today more than 1,100 organizations use the ForgeRock Identity Platform.

    The company’s plans for the funding are straightforward: ForgeRock will invest in research and development, cloud, global sales and market awareness so it can accelerate growth and continue to enable its customers to create exceptional digital identity experiences for their workforces, consumers and things. The company will continue to invest in ForgeRock Identity Cloud, aimed at making it easier for enterprises to scale by offering a full range of cloud deployment options.

    “To be competitive today, companies need to deepen their relationships with their customers and improve the productivity and connectivity of their workforce. ForgeRock is the only AI-driven platform that empowers organizations to create amazing digital experiences for both workforce and consumer segments as well as things,” said ForgeRock CEO Fran Rosch. “Increasingly, our platform is becoming mission critical to the largest organizations in the world, and we take our responsibility seriously to deliver on their expectations. This has become even more pronounced as remote work and E-commerce has surged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Completing this funding round in the current climate is a testament to the relevance of ForgeRock.”

    The latest funding round occurs at a time when companies across all industries are looking to increase their investment in solutions that enable powerful digital experiences for both employees and customers. This reality has fueled massive growth in the $16 billion digital identity market, which is growing at a 13% annual rate, according to Gartner.

    “ForgeRock’s comprehensive platform is very well-positioned to capitalize on the enormous opportunity in the Identity & Access Management market,” said Jeff Parks, co-founder and managing partner of Riverwood Capital. “ForgeRock is the leader in solving a wide range of workforce and consumer identity use cases for the Global 2000 and is trusted by some of the largest companies to manage millions of user identities. We have seen the growth acceleration and are thrilled to partner with this leadership team.”

    Since January, the company has earned the SC Magazine Trust Award for Best Authentication and achieved the highest score in the 2020 Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer” research for Identity Governance and Administration (IGA). Its growing customer list includes the BBC, BMW, the UK’s Department for Work & Pensions and many more.

    A Fast Pace

    In 2010 fewer than 50 people worked at ForgeRock; today more than 600 team members contribute from offices around the world. In 2019, the company released a wave of new capabilities aimed at serving the needs of companies looking to replace their legacy or homegrown systems with a more modern platform such as ForgeRock. The company released ForgeRock Identity Cloud and added new products like Identity Governance and Autonomous Identity that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help customers make smarter identity decisions and create better identity experiences for their employees and customers.

    About Riverwood Capital

    Riverwood Capital is a technology-focused growth equity firm with over $3 billion in assets under management. Riverwood offers a unique combination of operational, strategic, technology, and financial insight to portfolio companies that need both growth capital and expertise to scale. Riverwood invests globally and leads both minority and control deals. The firm has offices in Menlo Park, CA; New York, NY; and Sao Paulo, Brazil. For more information about Riverwood and its portfolio, please visit www.riverwoodcapital.com.

    About ForgeRock

    ForgeRock®, the leader in digital identity, delivers modern and comprehensive Identity and Access Management solutions for consumers, employees and things to simply and safely access the connected world. Using ForgeRock, more than a thousand global customer organizations orchestrate, manage, and secure the complete lifecycle of identities from dynamic access controls, governance, APIs, and storing authoritative data – consumable in any cloud or hybrid environment. The company is privately held, and headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices around the world. For more information and free downloads, visit www.forgerock.com or follow ForgeRock on social media:

    Facebook ForgeRock |Twitter @ForgeRock | LinkedIn ForgeRock |

  • IBM Z Deepens Data Privacy Capabilities with New Air-Cooled Models and IBM Secure Execution for Linux

    By Ross Mauri, GM of IBM Z

    In September 2019, IBM announcedIBM z15™, delivering industry-first data privacy capabilities with the ability to manage the privacy of customer data across hybrid multicloud environments, and to scale from one to four frames. For our clients on their journey to cloud, IBM z15™ and IBM LinuxONE IIIwas a major step forward around encrypting everywhere, cloud native developmentand IBM Z Instant Recovery– but we aren’t stopping there.

    Announcing z15 T02, LinuxONE III LT2 and IBM Secure Execution for Linux

    Every day, clients of all sizes are examining their hybrid IT environments, looking for flexibility, responsiveness and ways to cut costs to fuel their digital transformation. To help address these needs, today IBM is making two announcements: two new single frame, air-cooled platforms – z15 T02 and LinuxONE III LT2 – designed to build on the capabilities of z15, and IBM Secure Execution for Linux, a new offering designed to help protect from internal and external threats across the hybrid cloud. IBM Secure Execution for Linux, z15 T02 and LinuxONE III LT2 will become generally available on May 15, 2020.

    Expanding privacy with IBM Secure Execution for Linux

    According to the IBM sponsored Ponemon Institute’s 2020 Cost of an Insider Breach ReportPonemon and IBM Cost of Insider Threats report 2020: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/LQZ4RONE, insider threats are steadily increasing. Since 2016, the average number of incidents involving employee or contractor negligence has increased from 10.5 to 14.5 in 2019 – and the average number of credential theft incidents per company have tripled over the past three years, from 1.0 to 3.2. The 2016 data only pertains to US companies. The 2019 data includes North America, Europe, Middle East & Africa and Asia-Pacific. We believe the data is comparable because US companies represented in the 2016 report are multinationals. IBM Secure Execution for Linux helps to mitigate these concerns by enabling clients to isolate large numbers of workloads with granularity and at scale, within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) — available on all members of the z15 and LinuxONE III families.

    For clients with highly sensitive workloads like crypto and blockchain services, we know that keeping data secure is even more critical – which is why IBM Secure Execution for Linux works by establishing secured enclaves that can scale to host these sensitive workloads and provide both enterprise-grade confidentiality and protection for sensitive and regulated data. For our clients, this is the latest step toward delivering a highly secure platform for mission critical workloads.

    For years, Vicom has worked with LinuxONE and Linux on Z to solve clients’ business challenges as a reseller and integrator. Upon learning about how IBM Secure Execution for Linux can help clients, Tom Amodio, President, Vicom Infinity said, “IBM’s Secure Execution, and the evolution of confidential computing on LinuxONE, give our clients the confidence they need to build and deploy secure hybrid clouds at scale.”

    Simplifying your regulatory requirements for highly sensitive workloads

    In addition to the growing risk of insider threats, our clients are also facing complexity around new compliance regulations like GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulation)  and CCPA (the California Consumer Privacy Act), demonstrating that workload isolation and separation of control are becoming even more important for companies of all sizes to ensure the integrity of each application and its data across platforms. IBM Secure Execution for Linux provides an alternative to air gapped or separated, dedicated hardware typically required for sensitive workloads.

    Delivering cyber resiliency and flexible compute

    Building on recent announcements around encrypting everywhere, cloud native and IBM Z Instant Recoverycapabilities, as well as support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platformand Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z, these two new members of the IBM Z and LinuxONE families bring new cyber resiliency and flexible compute capabilities to clients including:

    ·        Enterprise Key Management Foundation – Web Edition: provides centralized, secured management of keys for robust z/OS management.
    ·        Flexible compute: Increased core and memory density with 2 CPC drawer design, provides increased physical capacity and an enhanced high availability option. Clients can have up to 3 I/O drawers and can now support up to 40 crypto processors.
    ·        Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3 – the latest release, planned for general availability this month on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

    Complementary IBM Storage enhancements

    In addition, IBM also announced new updates to our IBM Storage offerings for IBM Z. The IBM DS8900 all flash array and TS7700 virtual tape library both now offer smaller footprint options. This week the TS7700 family announced smaller footprint, with flexible configurations for businesses of all sizes and different needs that can be mounted in an industry standard 19-inch rack.

    For more information, visit
    ·        IBM Z: https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z
    ·        IBM LinuxONE: https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/linuxoneFor more details on the announcement, watch our launch video:  https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/0_vczkd5zx