Trend Micro Brings DevOps Agility and Automation to Security Operations through Integration with AWS Solutions

Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), the leader in cloud security, enhances agility and automation in cloud security through integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS). As a result, Trend Micro delivers flexible and scalable all-in-one security that helps DevOps engineers securely build and innovate as they migrate to and build in the cloud. 

Trend Micro has demonstrated the strength of its collaboration with AWS since 2012 with a deep understanding of customer use cases and by integrating with leading AWS security services at launch. Most recently, Trend Micro Cloud One™ offerings have been natively integrated with AWS Control Tower and AWS Systems Manager Distributor. These additions are designed to bring immediate benefit to security, cloud, and DevOps teams leveraging AWS by automating enforcement of security capabilities earlier in the account and resource provisioning process. 

"Trend Micro is an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) with  a long-standing history of providing security solutions to help customers address their portion of the shared responsibility model," said Siva Padisetty, General Manager, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon Web Services, Inc. "Trend Micro's continuing investment in integrations with native AWS capabilities, such as AWS Control Tower and AWS Systems Manager Distributor, reduces onboarding and management friction while adopting an enhanced security posture." 

According to a recent report from IDC, "Trend Micro is the dominant leader in Software-Defined Compute (SDC) workload protection," making up 29.5% of the worldwide hybrid cloud workload security market share, proving the company's hybrid cloud security expertise, capabilities and trust by customers. As the leading cloud security experts, Trend Micro engineers develop security solutions designed to meet the needs of cloud engineers. 

"We understand that security teams don't always have complete control or visibility into how cloud instances are being spun up, configured and used across the company," said Sanjay Mehta, senior vice president of business development and alliances for Trend Micro. "Listening to and understanding customer needs and feedback drives our innovations and collaboration with AWS. Having our solutions plug in natively with AWS offerings like AWS Control Tower and AWS Systems Manager Distributor adds visibility and automates security for our customers." 

Through this collaboration, Trend Micro Cloud One offers the broadest platform support and API integration to protect your AWS infrastructure whether building with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, containers, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), or Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) networking. 

Trend Micro Lands Industry’s Most Comprehensive XDR Platform in Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa

Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704); the leader in cloud security, today announced that its XDR suite is officially available in Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa (AMEA). Trend Micro XDR is the first in the cybersecurity industry that offers the most extensive correlated detection going beyond endpoint detection and response (EDR). It collects and analyzes activity data from emails, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks, enabling security operations center (SOC) teams to detect, investigate, and respond to threats more effectively.  

Today’s SOC analysts are up against sophisticated threats that are designed to circumvent the most advanced protection. Adding fire to the fuel is the massive volume of alerts they have to triage on a daily basis. Low job satisfaction and cybersecurity talent shortage are commonplace challenges for SOCs across the region.  

Trend Micro’s XDR is designed to address such operational nightmares in a SOC. It delivers three major benefits, unparalleled by any other existing point solution:  

Reducing alert fatigue: XDR automatically correlates and analyzes data from multiple security vectors to tell a bigger story. With XDR, level one SOC analysts no longer have to comb through mountains of noisy alerts and logs to identify a potential attack. XDR does it automatically for them and generates a few high-fidelity alerts instead of a thousand low-confidence ones, significantly reducing alert volume.  

Powerful workbench that provides contextual visibility for alerts: The XDR dashboard presents attacks in a visualized manner, enabling SOC analysts to see the different stages, attack vectors, dwell time, and the spread and impact. XDR also offers contextually aware response options so SOC analysts can take quick actions within the platform.  

Augmenting SIEM and effortless API integration: Trend Micro XDR augments SIEM for the SOC team, with centralization of normalized data and incident response capability that improve operational efficiency and productivity. XDR provides pre-built SIEM connector for Splunk to pull high-fidelity alerts into SIEM dashboards. For customers with their preferred SIEM solution, a public API can be used for the integration.  

Trend Micro’s XDR is also available as a managed service (MDR), to further alleviate the pressure of constrained in-house teams. The MDR team conducts 24/7 full-threat analysis and threat hunting, and provides response plans and remediation recommendations.  

“EDR is only one piece of the whole detection and response puzzle. It’s great but it has limited reach, as it only collects data on the endpoints. To have integrated visibility across multiple security vectors is a top-priority item on any SOC’s to-do list. And XDR ticks that box”, says Dhanya Thakkar, senior vice president for AMEA. “There has been tremendous demand from our customers in the region for XDR capabilities since last year. Now they will be able to have the full XDR experience.”  

“XDR gives us an additional dimension in threat detection - it allows for faster correlation of endpoints events to related services, such as network and email, to help us quickly identify entry point and the spread of infection visually. This is a tremendous boost to the efficiency of our incident response teams”, shares Ian Loe, Senior Vice President, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure & Performance Architecture, at NTUC Enterprise Co-operative Limited.  

Trend Micro’s XDR is recently named by Forrester as a Leader in enterprise detection and response, and achieved the highest initial detection in the MITRE ATT&CK Framework.  

Huawei Launches Digital Payment Cloud Solution at Better World Summit 2020

Huawei launched a new Digital Payment Cloud Solution recently at its Better World Summit 2020 designed to help digital payment service operators build super app centered payment ecosystems that will accelerate digital financial inclusion in emerging markets.

Ryan Wu, Director of Huawei Software Marketing & Solution Sales Dept.

“According to GSMA , mobile money today has over 1 billion registered users after more than 10 years of development,” said Ryan Wu, Director of Huawei Software Marketing & Solution Sales Dept. “However, merchant payment is still at its infancy. We all know that the key to success in the mobile payment business relies on the ecosystem. Super app is a critical platform and engagement point for ecosystem partners and provides an efficient merchant marketplace. Huawei’s digital payment cloud is designed to provide a payment platform and super app that helps mobile payment operators build an ecosystem quickly and efficiently.”

Huawei’s digital payment cloud solution brings value to payment operators from three aspects:

* Extremely Digital Experience: With the digital architecture, both user and transaction data can be opened in real time, ensuring real-time query experience for users and merchants. In addition, real-time risk control can be built based on AI analysis capabilities to identify fake transactions and avoid cash-out risks.

* Expedite Service TTM: With the open ecosystem, the solution provides API (application programming interface), H5, mini apps, and UI bricks technologies that  enable partners to launch the service on super app within one week and marketing campaigns from idea to launch within three weeks.

* Agile Iteration: With a cloud native platform, the solution supports container/micro-service, auto-scaling, grayscale release, and enables software updates in days.

In Myanmar, Huawei has cooperated with KBZ Bank to launch KBZPay and within 18 months successfully grew the service to six million registered users, over 1000 partners, and more than 290 thousand merchants. KBZPay’s transaction value has reached over $7 billion, cementing KBZ as Myanmar’s number 1 mobile payment service provider.

Netmagic, Zerto Partner to Expand its Disaster Recovery as a Service

Netmagic, an NTT Company, and India's leading managed hosting and multi-cloud Hybrid IT solution provider, today announced its partnership with Zerto to enrich its Disaster Recovery as a Services (DRaaS) portfolio. The partnership will enable enterprises with faster and cost-effective disaster recovery of critical IT infrastructure. Zerto, a leader in IT resilience, replaces legacy solutions with a single platform to enable disaster recovery (DR), data protection, and workload mobility across hyperscale clouds, hosted services, and on-premise data centers.

Netmagic DRaaS is a complete DR Management platform with a pay-per-use model. With workflow automation capabilities, it simplifies DR processes and dashboards to provide real-time visibility that is tied into the organization's objectives in terms of availability, Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). With this new partnership with Zerto, customers will get a lower-cost alternative to traditional DR solutions. With Netmagic managing the entire DR process, customers can stay focused on their core critical business.

Speaking about this, Nitin Mishra, Chief Product Officer, Netmagic (An NTT Company) said, “The partnership with Zerto will enable us to boost up our existing capabilities in DRaaS. With the Zerto IT Resilience Platform, we will be able to provide Cold DR Solution which will enable on Demand DR and a reduction in TCO for customers. This will be an end-to-end DR service allowing for the design, plan, and implementation of DR, with the key highlights being automated failover and failback operations beside dashboards for governance. By leveraging Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform, we will provide managed services for all aspects of DR planning, testing, and management.”

With organizations shifting to a new normal and work from home approach, data security and digital transformation initiatives are more significant than ever. Netmagic is a pioneer in offering the best tech-based solutions and with Zerto, these offerings will be further enhanced. Netmagic DRaaS service is based on per protected workload (Virtual machine) on a pay as use model. Customers will not only benefit by an upscale data continuity but also a much-optimized pay per use infrastructure.

“We are excited to have Netmagic join Zerto’s ecosystem of partners. We see Netmagic as a critical component to our strategy of providing DRaaS to the marketplace in India. Netmagic’s offering will allow customers to consume DRaaS, with the ability to scale on demand.  This offering will meet the needs of customers who need world class DR while taking advantage of the cost benefits of the pay-per-use model,” said Greg Bailey, Director of Channel & Cloud Sales EMEA, Zerto.

Trend Micro Cloud-Powered XDR Drives Monumental Business Value

Trend Micro Incorporated, the leader in cloud security, today shared the significant business value driven by cloud-powered XDR and Managed XDR offerings, which optimize threat detection and response across all critical vectors. In a recent survey commissioned by Trend Micro and conducted by ESG, organizations surveyed experience faster detection and less alert fatigue as a result of intelligently using data from all their security controls (including those covering endpoints, email, servers, cloud workloads and networks). 

According to the recent findings from ESG*, previewed here with a white paper to publish in August, 85% of organizations claim that threat detection and response is getting harder due to an exponentially more sophisticated threat landscape and a lack of highly skilled security experts over the last two years. 

Trend Micro's XDR solution is both a SaaS-based offering as well as a managed service with the "X" referring to the most extensive sets of data from more protection points, which is critical to find hidden threats. It was recently named by Forrester as a Leader in enterprise detection and response and achieved the highest initial detection in the MITRE ATT&CK® Framework. 

City of Tyler, Texas CIO and Trend Micro customer, Benny Yazdanpanahi said, "Our citizens and employees have a right to expect that their data and public services are secured from cyber-threats, but our small IT workforce can't do everything, so we turned to Managed XDR. Finding a strong, committed partner with knowledge and expertise we don't have was a game-changer for us. Our city motto is 'We are called to serve,' but the same could equally be said of Trend Micro. They care about their customers." 

Today's organizations are faced with sophisticated threats that may bypass even advanced protection. However, most current detection and response approaches are siloed, incomplete and overwhelm limited security teams with disconnected alerts that lack actionable information. Security practitioners currently report being able to find critical alerts but not necessarily having the clarity to resolve the issue due to lack of additional details.  

In fact, ESG found that only 30% of organizations are confident that their threat detection and response functions can perform at the speed needed to keep up with threats over the next 12-24 months. Additionally, on average, organizations and overtaxed IT teams ignore 32% of security alerts. 

Trend Micro XDR was the first solution to launch that offers correlated detection beyond the endpoint: collecting and analyzing data from email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks to more effectively hunt, detect and contain threats. It amounts to greater context, greater understanding and faster, more accurate incident response. ESG found that organizations that employ automated data aggregation techniques, like those enabled by Trend Micro XDR, enjoy improved security outcomes. For example, they are generally able to restore in hours vs. days by a ratio of 83% vs. 66%. 

The solution is also available as a managed service (MDR), to further take the pressure off constrained in-house teams with 24/7 full-threat analysis, threat hunting, response plans and remediation recommendations. 

"There's no such thing as 100% prevention anymore, which puts the focus on effective threat detection and response. With XDR, we've broken the mould with correlated detection across traditional siloes to help stretched IT teams optimize their response to stealthy threats," said Steve Quane, executive vice president at Trend Micro. "I'm proud of the fantastic value our solution offers businesses and of once again delivering on our commitment to secure the connected world. It's a privilege to remain a trusted cybersecurity advisor for our global customers." 

*ESG Research Insights Report, Validating Trend Micro's Approach and Enhancing GTM Intelligence, 2020, to be published August 2020. 

IBM Report: Compromised Employee Accounts Led to Most Expensive Data Breaches Over Past Year

IBM Security announced the results of a global study examining the financial impact of data breaches, revealing that these incidents cost companies $3.86 million per breach on average, and that compromised employee accounts were the most expensive root cause. Based on in-depth analysis of data breaches experienced by over 500 organizations worldwide, 80% of these incidents resulted in the exposure of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Out of all types of data exposed in these breaches, customer PII was also the costliest to businesses.  

As companies are increasingly accessing sensitive data via new remote work and cloud-based business operations, the report sheds light on the financial losses that organizations can suffer if this data is compromised. A separate IBM study found that over half of employees new to working from home due to the pandemic have not been provided with new guidelines on how to handle customer PII, despite the changing risk models associated with this shift.  

Sponsored by IBM Security and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, the 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Reportis based on in-depth interviews with more than 3,200 security professional in organizations that suffered a data breach over the past year.1Some of the top findings from this year’s report include: 

Smart Tech Slashes Breach Costs in Half: Companies who had fully deployed security automation technologies (which leverage AI, analytics and automated orchestration to identify and respond to security events) experienced less than half the data breach costs compared to those who didn’t have these tools deployed – $2.45 million vs. $6.03 million on average.  

Paying a Premium for Compromised Credentials: In incidents where attackers accessed corporate networks through the use of stolen or compromised credentials, businesses saw nearly $1 million higher data breach costs compared to the global average – reaching $4.77 million per data breach. Exploiting third-party vulnerabilities was the second costliest root cause of malicious breaches ($4.5 million) for this group.    

Mega Breach2Costs Soar by the Millions: Breaches wherein over 50 million records were compromised saw costs jump to $392 million from $388 million the previous year. Breaches where 40 to 50 million records were exposed cost companies $364 million on average, a cost increase of $19 million compared to the 2019 report.  

Nation State Attacks – The Most Damaging Breaches:  Data breaches believed to originate from nation state attacks were the costliest, compared to other threat actors examined in the report. State-sponsored attacks averaged $4.43 million in data breach costs, surpassing both financially motivated cybercriminals and hacktivists. 

“When it comes to businesses’ ability to mitigate the impact of a data breach, we’re beginning to see a clear advantage held by companies that have invested in automated technologies,” said Wendi Whitmore, Vice President, IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence. “At a time when businesses are expanding their digital footprint at an accelerated pace and security industry’s talent shortage persists, teams can be overwhelmed securing more devices, systems and data. Security automation can help resolve this burden, not only enabling a faster breach response but a significantly more cost-efficient one as well.” 

Employee Credentials and Misconfigured Clouds – Attackers’ Entry Point of Choice  

Stolen or compromised credentials and cloud misconfigurations were the most common causes of a malicious breach for companies in the report, representing nearly 40% of malicious incidents. With over 8.5 billion recordsexposed in 2019, and attackers using previously exposed emails and passwords in one out of five breaches studied, businesses should rethink their security strategy via the adoption of a zero-trust approach – reexamining how they authenticate users and the extent of access users are granted. 

Similarly, companies’ struggle with security complexity – a top breach cost factor – is likely contributing to cloud misconfigurations becoming a growing security challenge. The 2020 report revealed that attackers used cloud misconfigurations to breach networks nearly 20% of the time, increasing breach costs by more than half a million dollars to $4.41 million on average – making it the third most expensive initial infection vector examined in the report. 

State Sponsored Attacks Strike Heaviest

Despite representing just 13% of malicious breaches studied, state-sponsored threat actors were the most damaging type of adversary according to the 2020 report, suggesting that financially motivated attacks (53%) don’t translate into higher financial losses for businesses. The highly tactical nature, longevity and stealth maneuvers of state-backed attacks, as well as the high value data targeted, often result in a more extensive compromise of victim environments, increasing breach costs to an average $4.43 million. 

In fact, respondents in the Middle East, a region that historically experiences a higher proportion of state-sponsored attacks compared to other parts of the world3, saw an over 9% yearly rise in their average breach cost, incurring the second highest average breach cost ($6.52 million) amongst the 17 regions studied. Similarly, the energy sector, one of the most frequently targeted industries by nation states, experienced a 14% increase in breach costs year over year, averaging $6.39 million.  

Advanced Security Technologies Prove Smart for Business  

The report highlights the growing divide in breach costs between businesses implementing advanced security technologies and those lagging behind, revealing a cost-saving difference of $3.58 million for companies with fully deployed security automation versus those that have yet to deploy this type of technology. The cost gap has grown by $2 million, from a difference of $1.55 million in 2018. 

Companies in the study with fully deployed security automation also reported significantly shorter response time to breaches, another key factor shown to reduce breach costs in the analysis. The report found that AI, machine learning, analytics and other forms of security automation enabled companies to respond to breaches over 27% faster than companies that have yet to deploy security automation – the latter of which require on average 74 additional days to identify and contain a breach. 

Incident response (IR) preparedness also continues to heavily influence the financial aftermath of a breach. According to the report, companies with neither an IR team nor testing of IR plans experience $5.29 million in average breach costs, whereas companies that have both an IR team and use tabletop exercises or simulations to test IR plans experience $2 million less in breach costs – reaffirming that preparedness and readiness yield a significant ROI in cybersecurity. 

Some additional findings from this year’s report include: 

 

Remote Work Risk Will Have a Cost – With hybrid work models creating less controlled environments, the report found that 70% of companies studied that adopted telework amid the pandemic expect it will exacerbate data breach costs.  

CISOs Faulted for Breaches, Despite Limited Decision-Making Power: Forty-six percent of respondents said the CISO/CSO is ultimately held responsible for the breach, despite only 27% stating the CISO/CSO is the security policy and technology decision-maker. The report found that appointing a CISO was associated with $145,000 cost savings versus the average cost of a breach.  

Majority of Cyber Insured Businesses Use Claims for Third Party Fees: The report found that breaches at studied organizations with cyber insurance cost on average nearly $200,000 less than the global average of $3.86 million. In fact, of these organizations that used their cyber insurance, 51% applied it to cover third-party consulting fees and legal services, while 36% of organizations used it for victim restitution costs. Only 10% used claims to cover the cost of ransomware or extortion. 

Regional & Industry Insights: While the U.S. continued to experience the highest data breach costs in the world, at $8.64 million on average, the report found that Scandinavia experienced the biggest year over year increase in breach costs, observing a nearly 13% rise. Healthcare continued to incur the highest average breach costs at $7.13 million — an over 10% increase compared to the 2019 study.  

 

About the Study 

The annual Cost of a Data Breach Report is based on in-depth analysis of real-world data breaches taking place between August 2019 and April 2020, taking into account hundreds of cost factors including legal, regulatory and technical activities to loss of brand equity, customers, and employee productivity.  

What COVID-19 Means for the Data Breach Landscape?

A three-month analysis on the possible impact of COVID-19 on the data breach landscape has shed light on an increasing number of threat actors worrying cyber-security specialists.  The Verizon Business study reviewed 474 data breach incidents from March – June 2020 based on contributor data, publicly disclosed incidents and Verizon’s own observations drawn from its collective years of experience. It focuses on 36 confirmed data breaches which were identified as being related directly to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“ In view of the COVID19 pandemic,  many large and small organisations have adopted new technologies such as software- as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, increased cloud-based storage and the use of third-party vendors in record time to continue to support their customers. While the  SaaS solutions mentioned above, or the cloud itself, are not inherently less secure, however the  concern arises from the fact that due to the conditions the pandemic has created, most organizations are adopting them in a hurried fashion, and they are often forced to do so while relying on fewer resources in terms of both personnel and revenue thereby multiplying the risk.. ” said Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions, Verizon Business.  

The analysis has thrown up an increasing number of commonly seen threat actors, which include: 

Increase in Error -- The Verizon Business 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) outlined that almost a quarter of all breaches were due to human error and this trend continues during the pandemic. This is due in part to organizations operating with a reduced number of staff due to illness, redundancies and/or with staff who have limitations due to their remote status. At the same time, these organizations are often experiencing unusually heavy workloads with a much higher reliance on new and unfamiliar solutions that need to be deployed quickly. 

Stolen credential-related hacking -- The DBIR shows that over 80 percent of breaches within the hacking category are caused by stolen or brute­ forced credentials. During the pandemic, this is now being exacerbated by the large number of employees working from home and the maintaining external workstations for remote access, leaning on SaaS platforms. Business IT departments are being challenged to secure company assets on the corporate network while the majority of the workforce is out of the office. 

Phishing -- In order to utilize stolen credentials, an attacker must first be able to obtain them and phishing remains one of the most commonly used methods. Prior to COVID-19 the 2020 DBIR flagged that credential theft and social attacks such as phishing and business email compromises were at the root of the majority of breaches (over 67 percent) and this trend has continued. Specific terms in combination with "COVID" or "CORONAVIRUS," such as "masks," "test," "quarantine" and "vaccine” were found to be widely used within the time period. In March, a phishing simulation, conducted by a DBIR contributor, performed on approximately 16,000 people found that almost three times as many people not only clicked through a phishing link, but also provided their credentials to the simulated login page.  

“Businesses need to start taking far greater responsibility in protecting their technology infrastructure. From deploying more robust security protocols to ensuring timely data breach disclosure policies. Once you lose public confidence, gaining that credibility back can often be an uphill task”, said Dr Zaki Qureshy, Founding Father, Hyderabad Security Cluster. 

Verizon Business 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report 

The Verizon Business 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report, analysed 32,002 security incidents, of which 3,950 were confirmed breaches; almost double the 2,013 breaches analysed last year. These cases came from 81 global contributors from 81 countries including the Government of Telangana and the Hyderabad Security Cluster.  

Trend Micro Announces Cloud Solution to Strengthen Misconfiguration Protection for Microsoft Azure

Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), a global leader in cloud security, today announced its Trend Micro Cloud One™ – Conformity offering is now available to Azure customers, helping global organizations tackle misconfigurations, compliance challenges and cyber-risks in the cloud.

The company also achieved the CIS Microsoft Azure Foundation Security Benchmark. This certifies the Conformity product has built-in rules to check for more than 100 best practices in the CIS framework. 

“The security of the cloud is a cloud providers’ responsibility, but security in the cloud falls to the customer, which is where we fit,” said Wendy Moore, vice president of product marketing for Trend Micro. “Our Cloud One platform integrates closely with Microsoft Azure allowing DevOps to easily deploy against any hybrid cloud environment during their migration to the cloud.”

In-house skills are often overloaded with the challenge of managing hybrid cloud complexities. The proliferation of shadow IT projects in the enterprise also means IT functions are often the last to know if cloud accounts have been created by business units without adequate care and attention paid to compliance, security and governance controls.

Conformity tackles these challenges by providing powerful visibility and control of Azure environments. Its continuous cloud security and compliance posture management capabilities alert customers to the risk status and provide easy-to-action remediation recommendations. These can help prevent common mistakes such as unauthorized database access and public access to Blob storage accounts. 

By implementing the Conformity API into a CI/CD pipeline and existing workflows, DevOps teams can identify potential risk in their cloud infrastructure before they are deployed to live environments for automated, proactive prevention of vulnerabilities. 

Trend Micro Cloud One – Conformity identifies around 230 million cloud misconfigurations for its global Azure and AWS customers every single day. 

Trend Micro’s experience securing multi-cloud environments is a key differentiator to many organizations. “Trend Micro is one of just a few vendors that provides the same full security and monitoring capabilities across both Microsoft Azure and AWS,” said Mario Mendoza, Team Lead, Cyber Security Architecture and Engagement at Blackbaud. “Blackbaud adheres to a DevOps approach internally, so any shift in security vendors requires buy-in from the DevOps teams. The fact that Trend Micro is able to protect Blackbaud’s hybrid cloud environment without slowing down its DevOps teams was critical in our decision for Trend Micro.” 

Trend Micro helps Blackbaud maintain constant vigilance for security and monitoring across its cloud operations. Trend Micro is always on the cutting edge of new threats, and they include us in those efforts. As a market leader, that’s what we look for in partners,” said Mendoza. 

A New Season Every Week: How Myntra is Using Data to Disrupt the Fashion Industry

Using Azure Machine Learning, Myntra is enabling international and domestic fashion brands to cater better to consumer demands in the current COVID world and beyond.

As the threat of COVID-19 started emerging in the country, the biggest worry on Amar Nagaram’s mind was the safety of his employees, delivery partners, and customers. As the CEO of Myntra, India’s leading online fashion retailer, Nagaram and his management team not only had to think about business continuity but more importantly the role the organization could play in a world so profoundly changed by the pandemic.

Like almost every business, Myntra also had to move all their employees to work from home overnight just days before one of their biggest annual sale events.

“From a vibrant office to working from home, I was pleasantly surprised how quickly we adapted to working from home. Thanks to being on Azure, we were able to deliver one of our most successful End of Reason Sale remotely,” Nagaram says.

Taking stock

For Myntra, which has a strong delivery network across 27,000 PIN codes in India, one of the first order of business was to secure essential personal protective equipment like face masks, which were in acute short supply and difficult to procure.

“We realized that face masks were the need of the hour. Together, with our partners, we decided to serve our customers in the most meaningful way right at their doorsteps,” says Nagaram.

Myntra partnered with Wildcraft, India’s fastest-growing outdoor gear, clothing, and footwear brand, to manufacture and sell face masks on its platform. Within days, other brands too launched their masks and a new category for masks emerged on Myntra.

“One of the things I’ve realized in the past three months, after how we regrouped, recouped, and reimagined our business, is that the pandemic showcased the significant role we can play in an unfortunate situation like this,” Nagaram adds.

Selling what customers want

Face masks were just the beginning. With physical brick and mortar stores shut due to lockdowns and consumers staying away from shopping centres, major fashion brands had to reimagine their go-to-market strategy overnight. Myntra found itself uniquely placed to help them.

Right before the pandemic, Myntra had migrated its entire data platform including supply chain management, inventory, and website capabilities to Microsoft Azure. Apart from providing Myntra the elasticity to cater to demand spikes, Azure’s built-in Machine Learning tools expedited the development of advanced analytics capabilities to understand their consumers better.

“The amount of data from which we learn today is six to seven times more than the pre-COVID world. Microsoft Azure has enabled us to scale-up overnight and Azure Machine Learning gave us the right kind of levers to expedite our learnings,” explains Nagaram.

As a result, right from the early days of the lockdown Myntra was able to provide actionable insights to partner brands about what consumers were looking for and helped them prioritize their offerings accordingly.

Some of the immediate insights from what consumers were searching, viewing, and buying, highlighted how a larger set of customers was now staying at home, balancing between work and household chores, and needed clothes that were functional yet comfortable.

As a result, Myntra was one of the first out of the block to identify these changing needs and introduced ‘Work from Home Edit’ on its app that focussed on categories like comfort wear, loungewear, athleisure, home wear, and ethnic wear.

“The use of technology to generate actionable insights is a big reason for the success of our recent End of Reason Sale. We’re now selling what consumers want and not what we want to sell. The credit also goes to the brands that responded to these insights in a matter of days and not weeks,” Nagaram says.

Apart from gleaning insights from what consumers are searching and buying, Myntra is also understanding the aspirations of its consumers thanks to Myntra Studio. A personalized content destination, it features fashion style guides from influencers and brands that users can shop directly from Myntra.

During the early days of the lockdown, insights from customer behavior on Myntra Studio suggested a spike in interaction with certain categories like DIY makeup, among others. These insights enabled Myntra’s partner brands to move their inventory from their physical stores, which were shut due to the lockdown, to Myntra.

“We saw that COVID blurred the lines between online and offline retail. The economy is going to be more digital for sure, but retail isn’t going to be online only. It will be a mix of online and offline,” Nagaram says. “We have witnessed offline retail embracing technology at a large scale in the last three months. Some of the brands that used our omni-channel technology during the End of Reason were able to sell inventories out of their stores that they could not sell due to the lockdown.”

Making data fashionable

Nagaram’s vision for the use of technology in fashion goes far beyond helping brands navigate the current uncertainties. The way Myntra has managed to help brands in their go-to-market strategy at the onset of the pandemic is just the beginning of using data insights to make the industry more consumer focussed.

“I’ve always believed the fashion industry could use technology to disrupt some of the orthodox practices that have been going on for a very long time and make them more eco-friendly and business friendly,” he says. “The industry has always relied on the concept of seasons—Spring-Summer and Autumn-Winter. The trends are decided a year in advance, and they go into production. It is the bets that the industry makes—this design will work, and that pattern will work— that leads to the unsold inventory problem which the industry faces.”

Myntra is disrupting the age-old practices of the fashion industry with data and machine learning. It is now able to provide brands with consumer insights that take into account not only the consumer’s profile but also variables like their location, the weather patterns, and what other consumers with similar parameters are buying.

“We’re no longer following the traditional seasons of the fashion industry. The calendar has been expedited, it is no longer an annual calendar, in many ways it is a weekly calendar,” he says.         

The Holy Grail, however, is to be able to provide a personalized fashion shopping experience to consumers. Myntra already has implemented one of the most comprehensive sizes and fit recommendations when customers are buying on its platform, which has brought down returns significantly. The next phase is to be able to provide highly customized experiences to its users.

“We’re trying to learn about our consumers at an individual level. So when you open our app, we should be able to show things based on your style preferences,” Nagaram says. “Having the right Cloud and AI partner is key to enable this. We’re happy to have Microsoft on our side as a partner to make it happen.” 

In the age of digital interactions and experiences, data is fashionable.

How Old Storage Tapes are Surpassing the New Age Drives Today?

You must be wondering why is there a surge in old storage tapes in the age of Cloud?  Especially considering the enormous growth in data volumes around the globe-. Also, why Storage tapes are considered as an ideal solution for several next-generation applications like Internet of Things, hyper-scale computing, entertainment, cloud storage services, and Big Data? 

Further, you will be surprised, but nowadays businesses prefer “olden” method of storing data on tape drives – How? According to Solomon Sukumar, Head – RM & IP Business Fujifilm India.

Recent progresses have caused an exponential increase in the quantity of data generated worldwide. As the use of accumulated big data rapidly increases, so does the need for reliable and cost-effective long-term storage of such data for future use and storage tapes have always been the preferred medium of backing up data permanently.  The benefits have been numerous especially in storing legacy data/archival data – a data which is 10 years old or more.  Certainly, saving such data in a disc invites a huge cost unlike the Fujifilm storage tapes where the data can be stored offline without any cost and can be availed anytime. Fujifilm holding a prowess in the realm of storage solutions have always contributed effectually in the sphere of archival data solutions for various industries and financial institutions. We have been a leader in this industry since long and we look forward to continue contributing our expertise in the same. We are proud to see that our storage tapes are surpassing the new age drives and how effectually our technology is considered as the safest in saving the archival data. So, Fujifilm has always been ahead of the times with this technology – we are proud to be a key contributor in the evolution  of data storage”.

Now Let’s delve how data storage addresses the growing demand for long-term data storage by companies, governments, II Sector, banks and research institutions around the world etc - 

Data is Valued

In the present epoch, data has value like never before, and it’s often mentioned to as “the money of the digital economy.” As such an important asset because for effective working of the organisation it’s very important that organizations have workable, economically-sound strategies in place for data backups, disaster retrieval, and archiving. More than before, now brands rely on the data. Often, it’s a business’s data—and how well it is used—that differentiate one business from another. So, valuing the trending strategies – it is important to adhere to the old cassette format to keep yourself forward whist keeping the data in place.  

Effective Data Management -

Management of exponential data growth continues to be one of the great challenges for businesses, IT managers and others. They finding the data management difficult in light of shrinking IT budgets and environmental concerns.  However, Tape storage tackles the challenge in meeting the data in a substantial way while achieving a maximum storage capacity of 30 TB (12 TB of uncompressed data), or twice that of the previous version (LTO7).  For instance - The Magnetic Tape FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium 8 Data Cartridge is better than hard disk storage and often faster than the cloud.  This open format for this magnetic tape is highly multipurpose and used most extensively around the world. `. 

Fujifilm has also been striving to address the need to store and manage constantly increasing volumes of data by presenting effective data management that is setting a benchmark for computer data storage, professional video production and TV broadcasting. Whether recording dramatic footage or safeguarding corporate data, Fujifilm is striving to assure reliability for effective data management backed by strong innovation.   

Safe and Cost Effective –

With recent virus and malware threats, tapes have also become the cheapest way to protect data on a threat-capable media and store it at an off-site location.  Further the reason is that there is an enormous amount of data nowadays that incessantly consumes electric power and huge amounts of energy, resulting in hazardous impact on the environment and functioning costs. And so, the magnetic storage tapes, as a means of addressing these issues, have been considered as a lucrative option. It is safe, low-cost, energy-saving recording medium for long-term data storage.  Also, it allows offline storage with minimum risk of data damage or loss. For instance- Financial services organizations face exceptional challenges when it comes to shielding their data. Between massive data growth, budget limitations they need scalable, cost-effective, end-to-end solutions that make it easy to store, protect and access data.

Progression in the Tape Technology

Magnetic tape has been around since the early days of computing. This long occupancy has obstructed tape’s image over the years. So, the emergence and aggressive marketing of new storage technologies has increased the demand too. But tape technology has advanced, and substantial investment continues to be made in tape storage technologies. Unlike before magnetic tapes have more storage than before and these tapes are highly multipurpose and used most extensively around the world. Thereby this progression has led to an increase in the demand.

Long Term Perspective of Preserving Data for Future –

Magnetic tapes can address needs from a long-term perspective as their storage capacity continues to increase into the future and there is really low risk of data loss too. Also, Magnetic Storage tapes preserve Data for Future Generations due to an upsurge of the cloud, IoT, and AI across business sectors for preserving digital content and which leads to increase in data. These tapes are designed in such a way that there is less data loss. For instance - Fujifilm tape like 3592 Tape Cartridge has an exceptionally smooth surface that assures improved head contact and minimal spacing loss and which why data can be preserved for long and thus can be preserved for future.

Leverages advanced technologies

The demand of Magnetic Data is increasing in manufacturing process of IT Industry.  Magnetic Tapes, tackle the test to enable Smart Manufacturing by actively leveraging advanced technologies. Also, the magnetic tapes help in Developing a Coating Process for Manufacturing Next-generation Products. In the coating process, magnetic particles in the form of liquid that functions as the recording layer are applied on the thin base layer at a high speed and dried. To enable high-quality magnetic tapes, a control of the magnetic particle alignment is essential since well-aligned particles allow data to be stored in higher capacity as well as reducing data noise.

Reliable - Tested with time and experience

Magnetic tape has been used for data storage since the 1950s. Though it’s been overshadowed by machineries focused on high-performance needs, however again we continue to see emerging use cases where tape offers the impeccable solution for some puzzling storage trials. Also, Fujifilm is revamping their storage strategies for some reasons, contributing to the resurgence of tape. It has already created a benchmark with each new generation of LTO tape technology having the native transfer speed have almost doubled,

Thereby with increase of data – and the up-surging use of big data – The tape industry has recognised the ways of meeting data challenges by realising on how to meet the customer’s needs and expectations.  Similarly, Fujifilm aims to protect irreplaceable data for future and is determined to play the key role in continuing to support the technological breakthrough in the data tape technology.

Industry 4.0 and 4 Ways to Leverage and Connect Industrial IoT

The fourth wave of the industrial revolution, known as Industry 4.0, connects industrial devices and permits organizations to use arranged information from IoT gadgets and PC controlled frameworks. Applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to this information makes fully automated smart factories, smart cities and more.

Industry 4.0 is all about being digitally enabled and data driven, bringing together new technologies and compute services across edge and cloud assets to drive productivity, create new business models, and innovate faster. These technologies include everything from advanced analytics and AI to augmented reality, digital twins, and industrial IoT platforms, and, together serve the core needs of the manufacturing sector.

IoT and Industrial IoT power mission-critical applications that require high reliability and unwavering quality. An excellent arrangement joined with a top-notch programming process for these gadgets during assembling is fundamental to the general execution of the application.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) seeks to drive operational efficiencies in industrial settings through automation, analytics, and connectivity. Utilizing a network of sensors and communications technologies, all parts of an industrial process can be interconnected and managed from a single platform. It analyses the data captured by the sensors and organizes it into actionable information. The goal of IIoT is for manufacturers to achieve unrivalled perceivability into production stages and processes, recognise any tricky holes or torment focuses, and fix them before they develop into critical or complex issues. The outcome is a progressively effective modern procedure with more uptime and higher production quality.

Regardless of whether it's a mechanical arm in a manufacturing plant or a drone monitoring agricultural fields, these machines work under altogether different conditions, and will require the right connectivity solution to optimally handle the deluge of data they will produce, process, and devour.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) grows its span and limit with regards to operational efficiency, increasingly industrial facilities are seeing the advantages of IoT connectivity for industrial applications. Industry 4.0, the IIOT is one of the quickest developing segments of IoT. Accenture report estimates that IIoT could add $14.2 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

While the conversations encompassing IIoT focus on what is conceivable when everything is connected, some companies still are at a loss when it comes to utilizing connectivity to take data-driven action. A study by McKinsey found that, of the companies who have deployed an enterprise-level IoT solution, more than half have used only 10% or less of the information they collect. As the future of manufacturing is likely to be dominated by those who appropriately leverage Industry 4.0, companies that would like to remain significant must look to the current chiefs in IIoT advancement and decide how their techniques can be applied to improve operations.

Below are three examples of commercial companies where cutting-edge IIoT solutions are driving the industry forward. Through their innovative approaches to IIoT deployment, manufacturers and other industry leaders have a roadmap to help them stay ahead of the curve.

Paragon footwear advanced their operational productivity with IoT Solutions

India’s leading footwear brand Paragon deployed an integrated IoT solution and managed services from Aeris in partnership with Sify.

Paragon faced challenges like unexpected delays due to vehicle breakdown or wrong routes taken which led them to the search for an IoT-based solution to remotely track and monitor Paragon’s fleet in real-time in order to prevent vehicle misuse, idle time in the logistics chain and even driver behaviour.

Since footwear is a distributor-retailer led business, all of these were critical to ensure that supplies reach the market on time, every time. Paragon decided to use technology to manage their nationwide fleet. As a first step towards digitizing their supply chain, Paragon decided to implement the Aeris IoT solution across its nation-wide fleet, thus making them a single connected entity. To address the growing need of data management arising from the accelerated growth projection of IoT in India, Aeris collaborated with Sify Technologies, to develop niche IoT offerings with managed services for the Indian enterprises. At the core of Sify’s Digital Transformation model is the cloud iteration of IoT services.

How BSNL provides bandwidth for IoT solutions

IoT is the next wave of growth in telecom sector. State owned telecom player BSNL, entered into a landmark strategic alliance with Aeris to take IoT solutions to the masses, in India. Together the companies are offering packaged IoT solutions and services to enterprises, small and medium businesses and public sector undertakings among other segments in India. This partnership has opened the doors for wider propagation of IoT projects across the country as part of India’s digital transformation drive.

BSNL is the only service provider making efforts and planned initiatives to bridge the rural-urban digital divide in the ICT sector in India. Through its wide and unmatched network, BSNL will enable IoT projects through solutions designed to meet various end uses such as improving supply chain efficiency, enhancing customer experience, tracking and monitoring assets, improving logistics and empowering smart cities through a bouquet of solutions.

How Omnicomm helps fuel monitoring across various segments of logistics

Fleet Industry of India is undergoing a lot of difficulties ranging from lack of data for fleet utilization and management, to lack of vehicle safety and most importantly, the fuel theft. Fleet operators of all scale are facing difficulties in preventing fuel thefts. Siphoning and high consumption of fuel due to overspeed are compelling issues in the transportation industry in India. Finding reliable ways to monitor actual fuel consumption requires automation without human intervention.

Aeris added fuel monitoring feature from Omnicomm in its portfolio of packaged IoT solutions to address fuel pilferage across segments like logistics & transportation, construction equipment, locomotives, etc.

Altizon delivers Industrial Internet of Things Solutions for the Manufacturing Sector in India

With a global footprint of more than 100 enterprise users, Altizon is a leading Industrial IoT platform provider and its proven technology helps enterprises accelerate their Smart Manufacturing initiatives, modernize Asset Performance Management services and launch new business models for service delivery, among other processes. To provide end-to-end connected  technology and smart solutions for the  manufacturing sector,  Aeris and Altizon have integrated Altizon’s machine learning and IoT Edge technologies with Aeris’ IoT Services platform. Altizon’s proven technology is successfully being used in a number of industries, including the automotive, tire, steel, chemical, energy and Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) markets.

Utilize the Complete IIoT Ecosystem with Aeris

Aeris provides IIoT solutions that allow businesses to set up customized and automated processes within factories, warehouses, and in the field, leading to more efficient and cost-effective processes and procedures. Our purpose-built infrastructure provides real-time business data regarding operational inefficiencies and monitors machinery to see exactly what would happen if an accident or hold up on the line occurred.

Microsoft Kicks Off - Microsoft Inspire 2020: Empowering Partners to Make More Possible Via Digital Platform

Microsoft has kicked off its annual global partner conference, Microsoft Inspire, via an all-digital experience. In its 17th year, the event on July 21 and 22 (PDT) unites partners in new and exciting ways and encompasses a wider community than ever before, allowing partners to develop increasingly valuable business relationships. Along with industry leaders and motivated partners from around the world, this is a unique platform to strengthen partnerships, learn from experts and help one another thrive in unprecedented times.

Here's a quick snapshot of the top announcements from Microsoft Inspire:

Enhancements to Azure Lighthouse bring Multi-Factor Authentication and Privileged Identity Management support

Two new playbooks help partners build an effective cloud practice to last: the Microsoft Azure Center of Excellence playbook guides partners on how to scale an Azure-focused practice, and the App Innovation Practice Development playbook outlines how partners can be successful using Microsoft’s cloud-based applications

New Power Platform solutions enable customers with Location Readiness, Employee Health and Safety Management, Workplace Care Management, and Location Management tools, which will help bring employees back to the workplace safely. Innovation across Dynamics 365 applications including Customer Voice, Connected Store, and Fraud Protection are focused on making sure we’re helping customers weather the current crisis while also setting them up for future agility and resilience

Azure Stack HCI, the latest in Microsoft’s hybrid portfolio and now in public preview, brings hybrid capabilities to customers’ datacenters while enabling them to leverage existing skills and investments

New capabilities in Teams help Firstline Workers connect and engage with information, apps, and coworkers, while enabling organizational agility. New public preview of Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention in Microsoft 365 helps customers identify and protect information on endpoints. New enhancements to the Power Platform experience within Teams make Teams an even more powerful hub for teamwork and business process.

You can get to know more about these announcements from the blog post by Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft. News and highlights from Microsoft Inspire will be available at https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire.

Netmagic Launches SaaS Based Application Performance Monitoring Services Based on the AppDynamics Platform

Netmagic  (An NTT Company), and a leading managed hosting, security and multi-cloud hybrid IT solution provider in India, today announced its partnership with AppDynamics, a Cisco company, to provide Application Performance Monitoring (APM) as a service to enterprises in India to ensure deep visibility into their customers’ critical applications and end user experience.

This service enables businesses to deliver flawless digital experiences consistently by connecting end-user experience and application performance to business outcomes. APMaaS is intuitive to configure and deploy, automatically discovers business transaction, consumes little production overhead, monitors every line of code, and dynamically baselines performance to proactively identify and resolve application performance issues before they impact customers and the business.

Contemporary businesses rely heavily on digital technology to deliver a superior customer experience. Technology today includes a complex fabric of multi-cloud, IOT, distributed services, microservices, containers, APIs and much more that need to work in harmony to ensure that the application performance as experienced by the end user is of high quality.

Speaking about this, Nitin Mishra, Senior Executive Vice President, and Chief Product Officer, Netmagic (An NTT Company) said, “We are extremely pleased to partner with AppDynamics to offer Application Performance Monitoring Service (APMaaS) empowering businesses to navigate this turbulent pandemic period and emerge stronger and more scalable. With the business transaction-centric management of most complex and distributed applications, the APM service will bring value and enhance customer experience by providing clear visibility on the underlying components of the application. Apart from narrowing down to the source of the problem in the entire application flow, it will also provide deep user insights and analytics that will help the customer deliver significantly improved end user experience”

Adding further, Abhilash Purushothaman, Managing Director, India & SAARC, AppDynamics, said, “Our partnership and joint solution offering with Netmagic is a significant milestone for the AppDynamics India business. In India, adoption of online application-led services has sky-rocketed across all industry verticals in recent years. Now with the recent pandemic and increased reliance on remote working, our customers have shared that managing digital user experience in real time is no longer nice to have but a necessity. This strategic partnership will help us scale and deliver APM as a service across all business and industry segments.” 

The modules of this tool that will help in delivering the APM services include Application Performance Management – Core, Performance Management – Microservices Application Performance Management – SAP, Synthetic Transactions Monitoring, Browser Real User Monitoring, Mobile Real User Monitoring, Database Visibility, Infrastructure Visibility, and Business Analytics.

The benefits of the service that would add value to customers’ applications management are –

* Uptime and availability of the applications.

* Slowness in response in terms of time and database can be identified using this service.

* Application performance monitoring for end-users who use browsers and mobiles, tablets etc. to access the applications.

The modules will be wrapped under different packages and offered to customers. The APM solution is based on the package and can be scaled up depending on business requirements. This service can be delivered as a standalone offering or as an enhancement integrated with Netmagic’s Infra Manage Services.

About Netmagic (An NTT Company)

Netmagic, an NTT Company, is India’s leading Managed Hosting and Multi-Cloud Hybrid IT solution provider serving more than 2000 enterprises globally. Headquartered in Mumbai, Netmagic also delivers Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) services to various enterprise customers globally across Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific region. The Company was the first in India to launch services – Cloud Computing, Managed Security, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) and Software-Defined Storage. Netmagic has been recognized with 8 awards at the CIO Choice 2020, and 2 awards at the Datacenter Dynamics India 2019.

OVHcloud Launches Managed Web Hosting Offers for India Businesses

OVHcloud is responding to India’s rapidly growing digital economy by introducing a new all-in-one web hosting and domain names solution, to further its commitment to partners and resellers competing in the web hosting market. In addition to its extensive portfolio of Cloud solutions, OVHcloud offers small and medium tech businesses, regional web hosting service providers, and web and digital agencies a comprehensive suite of solutions with the best price-performance ratio to give them an edge in pursuing small office/home office (SOHO) and small and medium enterprise (SME) markets.

OVHcloud’s decision to provide its web hosting and domain names offerings in India to resellers and partners comes at a time where businesses are looking to accelerate or kickstart their digital presence upon witnessing the digital economy’s massive potential in the current digital-first world. It has been predicted that by 2021, digital transformation will add an estimated US$154 billion to India’s GDP, and increase the growth rate by 1.0% annually. Beyond Asia Pacific, the web hosting and domain name offerings are also available in Europe, Latin America and Canada, enabling OVHcloud to support international scaling and development.

A secure offer, a predictive price, a powerful plan

The addition of web hosting and domain names enhances OVHcloud’s Asia Pacific portfolio of solutions which already consists of Dedicated Servers and Public Cloud offerings. From the design of servers, management of datacenters to the orchestration of the fiber optic network, OVHcloud maintains the integrity of the entire chain in order to generate maximum value, ease of use and seicurity.

With a diverse set of tools, OVHcloud’s new offerings are easy to use and scale for a wide variety of users, ranging from small businesses to large multi-faceted organisations, making it simple for resellers and partners to support professional websites, blogs, online retailers – any project that needs the support of the cloud to launch and scale.

In India, OVHcloud's web hosting offers guaranteed optimal online visibility and centralisation of all services, with the Performance Hosting package catering to web agencies, developers and resellers in particular. Designed for the most complex or growing web activities, including multi-sites or ecommerce sites, the Performance Hosting package allows the easy adjustment of resources to manage the most demanding projects on an ad hoc basis, using the Boost option or permanently leveraging the four performance levels.

These adjustments ensure users always have the resources guaranteed to help to absorb peak loads. In an all-inclusive offer with content delivery network (CDN), structured query language (SQL) and SSL, the Performance offer will support the development of online stores, web agencies and developers, small and medium enterprises, software as a service (SaaS) publishers, resellers and corporate websites. The high performance and ultra-competitive hosting include unlimited monthly traffic, anti-DDoS protection, free domain name for the first year, free Let’s Encrypt Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, choice of four content management system (CMS) modules and the following features:

1 free domain name

500 GB of disk space

Boost Option

Up to 1000 email addresses

Optimised for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Prestashop

An idea, a project, a domain name

Every web project starts with a domain name that is included* across all hosting options. With over 800 extensions available (generic, thematic, geographic), professionals and distributors can build a project in their own image. They also benefit from OVHcloud's security expertise to safeguard their digital identity and protect against fraudulent transfers.

Additionally, the ultra-competitive price and the absence of hidden fees upon renewal makes OVHcloud domain names the ideal offer to optimise the lifespan of online projects. Advantages of OVHcloud domain names include:

Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC): protection against cache poisoning (Domain Name System (DNS) server poisoning)

Easy Redirect: simplified implementation of a redirection from your domain name to a social network, for example

DNS zone management for greater flexibility and customisation

Renewal without hidden fees

For Indian users, OVHcloud will provide local extension i.e. “in” as a TLD (Top Level Domain) for businesses looking to create country-targeted websites; Will be available at US$ 10.49 (ex. GST) per year.

OVHcloud will also provide SLDs (Second-Level Domain) such as .co. in, firm.in and .ind.in

Since 1999, OVHcloud has established itself in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific as the Cloud alternative, perfecting an open, reversible and transparent model that places freedom of choice and data protection at the heart of its priorities. Today, the European leader in Cloud solutions powers more than 3 million websites and 18 million applications in its 30 data centres around the world, with strict respect for the digital sovereignty of each of its users.

OVHcloud also supports local customers with Sales, Research & Development and Support teams based in Bengaluru.

*Free domain name offered for the first year on all hosting offers

About OVHcloud

OVHcloud is a global player and the leading European cloud provider operating 400,000 servers within its own 30 data centres across 4 continents. For 20 years, the Group has been leveraging an integrated model that provides full control of our value chain, from designing our servers to managing our data centres through to orchestrating our fibre-optic network. This unique approach enables OVHcloud to cover, independently, the full spectrum of use cases for our 1.5 million customers in more than 130 countries. OVHcloud now offers customers latest-generation solutions that combine high performance, predictable pricing and full data sovereignty to support their unfettered growth. 

Trend Micro Finds 72% of Remote Workers Have Gained Cybersecurity Awareness During Lockdown

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, today released survey results that show how remote workers address cybersecurity. Nearly three quarters (72%) of remote workers say they are more conscious of their organisation’s cybersecurity policies since lockdown began, but many are breaking the rules anyway due to limited understanding or resource constraints.

Trend Micro’s Head in the Clouds study is distilled from interviews with 13,200 remote workers across 27 countries on their attitudes towards corporate cybersecurity and IT policies. It reveals that there has never been a better time for companies to take advantage of heightened employee cybersecurity awareness. The survey reveals that the approach businesses take to training is critical to ensure secure practices are being followed.

In India, the results indicate a high level of security awareness, with 84% of respondents claiming they take instructions from their IT team seriously, and 83% agree that cybersecurity within their organisation is partly their responsibility. Additionally, 67% acknowledge that using non-work applications on a corporate device is a security risk.

However, just because most people understand the risks does not mean they stick to the rules.

For example:

44% of employees admit to using a non-work application on a corporate device, and 46% of them have actually uploaded corporate data to that application.

83% of respondents confess to using their work laptop for personal browsing, and only 45% of them fully restrict the sites they visit.

42% of respondents say they often or always access corporate data from a personal device – almost certainly breaking corporate security policy.

14% of respondents admit to watching / accessing porn on their work laptop, and 14% access the dark web.

Productivity still wins out over protection for many users. 52% of respondents agree that they do not give much thought to whether the apps they use are sanctioned by IT or not, as they just want the job done. Additionally, 44% think they can get away with using a non-work application, as the solutions provided by their company are ‘nonsense.’

Dr Linda K. Kaye, Cyberpsychology Academic at Edge Hill University explains: “There are a great number of individual differences across the workforce. This can include individual employee’s values, accountability within their organisation, as well as aspects of their personality, all of which are important factors which drive people’s behaviours. To develop more effective cybersecurity training and practices, more attention should be paid to these factors. This, in turn, can help organisations adopt more tailored or bespoke cybersecurity training with their employees, which may be more effective.”

Nilesh Jain, Vice President, Southeast Asia and India, Trend Micro, said, “It’s really heartening to see that so many people take the advice from their corporate IT team seriously, although you have to wonder about the 16% who don’t. At the same time those people also accept their own role in the human firewall of any organisation. The problem area seems to be translating that awareness into concrete behaviour. To reinforce this, organisations to take into account the diversity across the organisation and tailor training to identify and address these distinct behavioural groups. The time to do this is now, to take advantage of the new working environment and people’s newfound recognition of the importance of information security.”

The Head in the Clouds study looks into the psychology of people’s behaviour in terms of cybersecurity, including their attitudes towards risk. It presents several common information security “personas” with the aim of helping organisations tailor their cybersecurity strategy in the right way for the right employee.

Indian Software Programmers are Rooting for Cloud Certifications Amid COVID Lockdown: TechGig Survey

Survey Report

●    COVID-19 lockdown has catalysed the willingness of techies to getting certified, finds TechGig survey

●    Deep understanding of a new-age technology emerged the biggest reason for techies to take a certification

●    Freshers and new joiners are more interested in getting certifications than working professionals

●    Around 35% of respondents admit that the prices of certification courses are out of their budget

Cloud technology – which is facilitating communication and remote working amid the present COVID-19 lockdown – is also the preferred choice for upskilling for the Indian developers, reveals a survey conducted by TechGig. The preference for Cloud overshadowed other new-age technologies as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. 

The jobs of the future would require expertise in new-age niche skills, and upskilling is the only resolve for a long term career in technology. Hence certification programs are gaining popularity among the IT professionals.

Over 1,750 IT professionals participated in the TechGig ‘IT Certification Survey’, where around 78% of respondents belonged to the 25-30 years age bracket. More than 82% of respondents were already employed in the IT sector. About 55% of the survey respondents were freshers with 0-2 years of work experience.

Commenting on these findings, Sanjay Goyal, TimesJobs and TechGig said, “In today’s peculiar COVID-19 time, technology is the only thread which is holding the world together. From Cloud computing – which are assisting work-from-home to Artificial Intelligence – which is helping Banking, Retail and critical sectors run operations; and even Robotics – which is helping the front-line hospital staff; new-age technologies are helping the world connect in the present time. The TechGig survey reveals that eagerness of Indian developers to upskill on these new-age technologies. Also, about 86% of people said that their career got a boost because of upskilling – which is an actual proof that employers prefer people skilled in these technologies”. 

Here are the key takeaways from the survey -

IT certifications help boost career

More than 86% of the respondents had previously joined a certification program and said that their certification had boosted the career prospects.

Adoption of certification courses is on the rise

Over 90% of the respondents revealed that they are planning to have an IT certification soon. About 58% of people are more inclined to learn new and niche technologies rather than upskilling in a known one.

Deep understanding of technology is the biggest reason for certification

The TechGig survey revealed that the biggest reason for people to go for an IT certification is the willingness to deeply understand a modern-age technology. However, more than around 25% of people said that they want to take a certification to upskill and get ready for a better job.

People are inclined to leave their organisation after certification

Surprisingly, people who are joining a certificate program are more interested in leaving the current organisation once their certification is complete. Getting an appraisal in the current organisation is the last thing in their minds and only 18% of people want to stay in the same organisation after their certification.

COVID-19 pandemic has catalysed the desire to get certified 

The COVID-19 pandemic and home isolation have worked as catalysts for around 93% of techies to motivate them to go for a certification. When asked if they will continue their certificate course once the pandemic has ended and bans are lifted, 91% of the respondents gave it a nod.

Cloud technology is the hottest domain for upskilling

One of the most interesting findings of the survey is that despite the emergence of a whole bunch of ultra-modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Quantum Computing, the favourite domain with 28% votes goes to Cloud computing.

Budget is a major concern for techies in choosing a certificate course

The survey reveals that most of the techies (83%) seek a certification course that is under INR 10,000. No one wants to spend a big amount on certification. Around 35% of respondents admit that the prices of certification courses are out of their budget. Also, people are more inclined to join a free certification program. Only 38% of people say that they are willing to pay a fee only if the certificate adds great value to their resume.

Short-term certifications are most in-demand

Around 87% of people said that they do not want to spend more than 3 months on a certification program.

People understand that certification is a need of the hour

When asked who advised them to take a certification program, more than 83% of the respondents say that they are self-motivated to become a highly-skilled professional.

VMware Partners with Netmagic to Launch CloudHealth Service in India

Netmagic, an NTT Company, and India’s leading Managed Hosting and Multi-Cloud Hybrid IT solution provider, today announced its partnership with VMware to launch SimpliInsight Services powered by VMware CloudHealth service in India. VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP) s is a global ecosystem of providers offering cloud services based on VMware technology.

Netmagic is one of the largest VCPP partners in India to develop the orchestration layer on top of the VMware virtualization platform.

Netmagic has achieved VMware Cloud Verified status and becomes the first Cloud verified partner to launch SimpliInsight Services powered by VMware CloudHealth in the country.

The Cloud Verified badge signals to customers that Netmagic offers a service running on top of the complete VMware Cloud infrastructure. Through Cloud Verified partner services, customers attain access to the full set of VMware Cloud Infrastructure capabilities including integration and interoperability, cost optimization and flexibility.

With SimpliInsight Services powered by VMware CloudHealth, Netmagic will deliver a consistent and actionable view into cost and resource management, security, and performance for applications across multiple cloud environments. SimpliInsight Services powered by VMware CloudHealth will help Netmagic’s customer realize costs saving across multi-cloud deployments such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), etc.

“We are extremely pleased to partner with VMware. Netmagic's SimpliInsight service powered by VMware CloudHealth will support businesses with in-depth visibility on cost, performance and security – allowing our customers to make informed strategic decisions for their deployments across hyperscalers like AWS, Azure and Google,” said Nitin Mishra, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Netmagic.

Pradeep Nair, Managing Director, VMware India, “Cloud infrastructure services spend hit yet another record in Q1 2020, growing 34% (YoY) to $31 billion[1]. This growth in cloud services is driven in no small part by the global shift to remote working and increased push for digital transformation. Organizations in India are cognizant of the value delivered by cloud and we are witnessing a significant upswing in cloud adoption across sectors. At VMware we strive to help our customers manage their cloud infrastructure seamlessly and efficiently for maximum ROI. With CloudHealth, organizations in India can effectively manage multiple cloud environments through a single pane of glass.  Our partnership with Netmagic will enable a wide range of Indian customers to benefit from our unified cloud management solutions and help accelerate the Indian cloud adoption narrative further.”

David Bate, VP, Cloud, VMware Asia Pacific & Japan, VMware, “Enterprises in APJ are embracing a multi-cloud model and are looking for ways to assemble, deploy, shift and manage workloads across their hybrid cloud environment.  The partnership with Netmagic will bring together the capabilities for delivering cloud infrastructure, consumption and resource management to customers in India. We are excited to support their journey and are confident that SimpliInsight Services powered by VMware CloudHealth will utilize our platform to deliver a fully automated cloud management experience.”

VMware’s global network of more than 4,000 VMware Cloud Providers leverage VMware’s consistent cloud infrastructure to offer a wide array of services, provide geographic and industry specialization, and help customers meet complex regulatory requirements. Cloud Providers operating under the VMware Cloud Provider Program deliver individually tailored cloud solutions and services in more than 120 countries.

Beauty of the Omnipresent Cloud During the Pandemic Globally

By Nilesh Jain, Vice President, Southeast Asia and India, Trend Micro

The fog has lifted to reveal photos of cities around the world with clearer skies – an unexpected silver lining in this pandemic. The next time you look skyward, may I suggest that you take a closer look at the clouds dotting the sky too?

We often miss not only the beauty of the atmosphere’s omnipresent cloud but also cloud interfaces integrated all around our homes, offices and public spaces.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries across the world opted to go under a ‘lockdown’ to ‘flatten the curve’ of infection. These lockdowns meant confining the citizens to their homes and shutting down businesses. While it has definitely slowed down economic activity, certain kinds of businesses have experienced tremendous growth. Take Netflix, for example. Owing to social distancing and stay-at-home orders, it is but obvious that people are keeping themselves entertained through multimedia streaming apps. For the first quarter of 2020, new Netflix subscriptions reached 15.8 million surpassing the earlier prediction of 8.8 million.

This brings us to the question of how Netflix could cope with such a massive surge in usage. The answer is the public cloud. Apart from the almost instant scalability it brings, the cloud-based business model used by companies such as Netflix allows them to not just scale when required, but also handle shifts in traffic patterns—all the while remaining reliable to their customers.

It is clear that the pandemic will accelerate cloud adoption. The opting for a cloud environment, once viewed as an option, will now witness greater urgency, due to the many benefits it brings. According to the annual State of the Cloud Survey, 30% of large enterprises expect their cloud usage to significantly increase as a result of the present crisis. Furthermore, among SMBs and enterprises, a net 47% of organizations plan for increased cloud usage because of the changes that the pandemic has brought on. However, this increasing reliance on the public cloud comes with several underlying challenges, the biggest of which is misconfigurations.

Misconfigurations—the biggest challenge in cloud environments

It is vital to remember that moving to the cloud does not mean all risks are eliminated. While some risk factors are reduced, others are introduced. Cloud environments face security vulnerabilities on several counts, from the failure to maintain proper security hygiene to system vulnerabilities at the end-user level. In fact, according to research conducted by Crowd Research Partners, nine out of ten cybersecurity experts are highly concerned when it comes to cloud security.

Biggest among these threats are misconfigurations, which to put it in the simplest of terms are the mistakes of the IT teams as they set up the organization’s cloud infrastructure. According to a study conducted by Trend Micro, it was found that on an average 165 million misconfigurations take place on the cloud every day. The same study also pointed that four out of ten—40%—of cloud related incidents can be traced back to misconfiguration in the cloud environment.

It is necessary to understand why misconfiguration is such a big threat. Let’s take an example we are all familiar with—an iPhone. Before starting to use a new phone, the security settings on the phone needs to be configured, to be changed from the default setting. Setting up privacy measures such as passcodes, fingerprint analysis, whether one wants to upload a picture of oneself to their Apple account, etc., has to be set up. Similarly, when an organization migrate their workloads to a cloud platform, security needs to be configured. Nevertheless, inadvertent misconfigurations are common. For instance, an application team configuring a workload whose prime concern would be application connectivity, may unintentionally misconfigure the connectivity, thereby overlooking network security.

Another reason for the rise in cloud misconfigurations can be attributed to the lack of visibility and rapid public cloud adoption. Without adequate visibility, security teams are unable to secure cloud environments. Furthermore, as the percentage of adoption grows, the volume of activity proportionally increases, leading to additional misconfigurations such as a lack of awareness of cloud security and policies, lapse in supervision, lack or insufficient control and negligent internal activities. Add to this the number of services being provided by public cloud providers and it is easy to understand why misconfigurations occur. AWS, for example, between the years 2007 and 2017, have added 100 services to their portfolio, which roughly works out to around 10 services each year. This number spiked in the last two years alone, with their portfolio of services adding over 75 offerings.

On top of configuration visibility issues, container which has emerged as a solution for complicated micro service based cloud native applications (through the flexibility it provides) causes security teams to have very less visibility. This can be primarily attributed to the shared responsibility shift in DevOps, which then results in forgotten systems and undeleted logs which can turn out to be a hidden vulnerability.

Underlying all these challenges is the fact that the pace of technology adoption is much faster than the adoption of security technology. For instance, by the time an enterprise adopts the use of containers, serverless technology emerges as another level of abstraction on top of containers—making it all the more difficult for security teams to keep up.

Steps to avoid misconfiguration

The number of security breaches steadily increasing due to misconfiguration makes it all the more important for enterprises to take the right steps to prevent these. The need of the hour is for security teams to deploy a single security tool that offers the equal amount of visibility and security for both on-premise applications and new generation container and serverless based micro services applications. The next best practice would be for organizations to deploy custom design tools which can perform an auto-audit of any misconfiguration, thereby matching the best practices guidelines offered by vendors and provide solutions on the go. Finally, it’s always best to partner with professional security consultants, who can help design security cloud architectures that will match future needs. Additionally, simple measures such as integrating security in DevOps from the very beginning and employing least privilege controls which restricts access to only those who need it will also go a long way in protecting cloud infrastructures.

Enterprises are equally responsible for their assets on the cloud

Most public cloud providers operate with a shared responsibility model. While the onus is on them to protect the infrastructure, it is up to enterprises to be responsible for securing their applications, data, operating systems, access management, and firewalls. Preventing misconfigurations then becomes the vital first step in ensuring security for assets on the cloud.