“Will These New Google Meet Features Be Enough To Crush Zoom? - Forbes” plus 3 more |
- Will These New Google Meet Features Be Enough To Crush Zoom? - Forbes
- VMware Advances Intrinsic Security Strategy at Connect 2020 Announcing Intent to Acquire Octarine to Expand Workload Security Solution into Kubernetes and Creation of Next-Gen SOC Alliance - Business Wire
- Google Updates Cloud Spanner with New Features: Backup on Demand, Local Emulator, and More - InfoQ.com
- The Rise of Multicloud Provides Challenges for IT Operations, Networking - Data Center Frontier
| Will These New Google Meet Features Be Enough To Crush Zoom? - Forbes Posted: 13 May 2020 06:32 AM PDT  Google Meet is adding new features to take the fight to rival Zoom GoogleAnyone with a Google account should from today be able to use the Google Meet videoconferencing service, but the company is already promising a raft of new features. The question is whether any of them will be good enough to halt the runaway success that rival Zoom has enjoyed during the Coronavirus pandemic? Google Meet has been offered to Google's paying customers for some time, but the company announced last month it was also making it free for consumers to use during the current crisis. Meet will be the eventual replacement for Google Hangouts, the company's previous consumer videoconferencing effort, although - somewhat confusingly - the two services are currently running side by side. Google claims Meet offers many advantages over Hangouts, including superior video and audio quality that uses 30% less internet bandwidth than its predecessor, largely thanks to the use of the VP9 codec that is also used by YouTube. Beating the background noiseGoogle is also working on a selection of new features for Meet which it hopes will give the service the edge over Zoom, which has emerged from nowhere to become the videoconferencing solution of choice for many during the pandemic. One key feature Google is currently testing with its own staff is background noise cancellation. Serge Lachapelle, Director of Product Management at G Suite, demonstrated the feature to me this morning during a briefing held on Google Meet.  Google Meet can filter out background noise GettyLachapelle scrunched a bag of sweets right in front of the microphone that made it difficult to hear what he was saying, before switching on the noise cancellation, upon which the noise dropped to a gentle background rustle, leaving his voice perfectly clear. The noise cancellation is performed on Google's cloud servers, rather than on the local device, meaning that it can be applied on any device, including smartphones and tablets. "There's a lot of talk about de-noising now that everyone is at home and the dogs are barking, the kids are fighting and the vacuum cleaners are going," said Lachapelle. "I had a colleague chasing their Roomba [the robot vacuum cleaner] the other day on a customer call." The noise cancellation feature will be rolled out in the coming weeks to Google's Enterprise customers, although there's no detail of when it might arrive for free users. Presenter featuresGoogle is also making it easier to avoid sensitive documents appearing in the background when a presenter is screen sharing with a new feature - rolling out today - that allows presenters to share a single browser tab. Google says this is the best way to share high-quality video with audio content in meetings, which might also please the thousands of amateur lockdown quizmasters out there. The tab-sharing feature only works in Google Chrome. Meet also promises to bring meeting participants out of the shadows, using "AI" to boost the brightness of people's faces if they are in a dimly lit room or sitting with a bright light source such as a window behind them. Google does admit it's playing catch-up with Zoom on other popular features, most notably the options to blur your background or add a custom wallpaper. Lachapelle said the company was working on both and wanted to implement them "across the board", meaning both desktop and mobile users would have the features. Better security?If Zoom does have a weak spot, it's security, with the company recently forced to backtrack on claims it offered end-to-end encryption and call in security consultants to fix basic flaws. "We built Meet on top of WebRTC, which is an open-source platform that's been specified and standardized at the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is a large group of experts around the world that take a look at the fundamentals of the internet," said Lachapelle. "The fundamentals of what Meet builds on top of is open to a lot more inspection from the whole world than what a closed piece of software can offer." Furthermore, Meet has the added security of Google's existing account system, which offers facilities such as two-factor authentication, Lachapelle added. But perhaps the single biggest advantage Meet offers Zoom's free tier currently is that meetings don't cut off after 40 minutes. Google Meet allows free account holder meetings to run for up to 24 hours with up to 100 participants - surely long enough for any remote quiz to reach a conclusion...  |
| Posted: 13 May 2020 05:00 AM PDT PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), a leading innovator in enterprise software, made two key announcements during Connect 2020, the company's annual cybersecurity user and partner conference (hosted virtually by VMware Carbon Black):
Intent to Acquire Octarine to Bring Intrinsic Security to Containers & Kubernetes Protecting workloads is critical to the security of applications and data inside every organization. The unique properties of the cloud (speed, agility, scale) mean that developers are increasingly using Kubernetes and containers to modernize applications and changing the nature of workloads that need to be secured. As with any major technology adoption, attackers are not far behind, looking to take advantage of new risk areas. Building Octarine's innovative Kubernetes security platform into the VMware security portfolio presents a major opportunity for VMware to further mitigate risks in several ways:
Following the acquisition's close, the Octarine technology will be embedded into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud, providing new support of security features for containerized applications running in Kubernetes and enable security capabilities as part of the fabric of the existing IT and DevOps ecosystems. This innovation will further reduce the need for additional sensors in the stack. Octarine capabilities will also integrate and leverage the VMware Tanzu platform, including current investments in Service Mesh and Open Policy Agent. "Acquiring Octarine will enable us to further expand VMware's intrinsic security strategy to containers and Kubernetes environments by embedding the Octarine technology into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud," said Patrick Morley, general manager and senior vice president, Security Business Unit, VMware. "This, combined with native integrations with Tanzu, vSphere, NSX and VMware Cloud Foundation, will create what we believe is a unique and compelling solution for intrinsically securing workloads. And, with the addition of our AppDefense capabilities merged into the platform, we can fundamentally transform how workloads are better secured." VMware's intrinsic security strategy is centered on enriching context from across the security portfolio and leveraging the VMware fabric for native telemetry and control at the endpoint, workload, network, user access point, and application. This innovation enables a true XDR solution that works out of the box with existing VMware solutions – reducing all the bolt-on sensors and appliances that plague security. For more information on Octarine, click here. VMware Launches Next-Gen SOC Alliance In an effort to empower modern SOC teams with the capabilities and context they need to greatly improve both their efficiency and efficacy, VMware has launched a Next-Gen SOC Alliance. The alliance features Splunk, IBM Security, Google Cloud's Chronicle, Exabeam, and Sumo Logic integrations with the VMware Carbon Black Cloud to deliver key XDR capabilities and context into SIEM technologies that power the modern-day SOC. Equally important, the combined solutions will be able to take advantage of VMware's Intrinsic Security framework and enable SOC teams to:
Other key benefits from the Next-Gen SOC Alliance include:
"The Next-Gen SOC Alliance brings a critical mass of XDR context and capabilities to SOCs in a fully intrinsic way – one that can uniquely leverage the VMware fabric," said Tom Barsi, Vice President of Alliances for VMware Carbon Black. "In partnership with the industry's leading SIEM/SOAR players, we're setting a strong vision for the modern SOC and delivering unprecedented visibility and remediation capabilities across endpoints, networks, workloads, and containers." "Splunk's Security Operations Suite acts as the backbone for some of the most advanced SOCs in the world," said Haiyan Song, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Security Markets, Splunk. "As the security industry continues to embrace data at the center of their security strategy, it's more important than ever to combine the power of Splunk's industry-leading SIEM and SOAR solutions with XDR to fight back against increasingly sophisticated cyber actors. We are pleased to bring Splunk Enterprise Security and Splunk Phantom to this alliance with VMware Carbon Black and look forward to helping our mutual customers around the world solve their toughest security challenges with data." About VMware VMware software powers the world's complex digital infrastructure. The company's cloud, app modernization, networking, security, and digital workspace offerings help customers deliver any application on any cloud across any device. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to being a force for good, from its breakthrough technology innovations to its global impact. For more information, please visit https://www.vmware.com/company.html. Additional Resources Forward-Looking Statements This release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding VMware's intention to acquire Octarine, the expected benefits of the acquisition and the expected complementary nature and strategic advantages of combined offerings and opportunities after close. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) the ability of the parties to satisfy closing conditions to the acquisition on a timely basis or at all; (ii) market conditions, regulatory requirements and other corporate considerations that could affect the timing and closing conditions to the acquisition; (iii) the ability to successfully integrate acquired companies and assets into VMware; (iv) VMware's customers' ability to transition to new products, platforms, services, solutions and computing strategies in such areas as containerization, modern applications, intrinsic security and networking, cloud, digital workspaces, virtualization and the software defined data center, and the uncertainty of their acceptance of emerging technology; (v) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures, industry consolidation, entry of new competitors into the virtualization software and cloud, end user and mobile computing, and security industries, as well as new product and marketing initiatives by VMware's competitors; (vi) VMware's ability to enter into and maintain strategically effective partnerships; (vii) rapid technological changes in the virtualization software and cloud, end user, security and mobile computing industries; (viii) other business effects, including those related to industry, market, economic, political, regulatory and global health conditions, such as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic; (ix) VMware's ability to protect its proprietary technology; (x) VMware's ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (xi) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (xii) changes in VMware's financial condition; and (xiii) VMware's relationship with Dell Technologies and Dell's ability to control matters requiring stockholder approval. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this blog, are based on current expectations and are subject to uncertainties and changes in condition, significance, value and effect as well as other risks detailed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including VMware's most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K that we may file from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. VMware assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release. VMware, Carbon Black, Tanzu, vSphere, NSX and VMware Cloud Foundation are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions.  |
| Posted: 01 May 2020 12:00 AM PDT In a recent blog post, Google announced a slew of new features for Cloud Spanner. The public cloud provider released the service with new updates including the managed backup-restore feature, foreign key support, query optimizer versioning feature, a C++ client library, and a local emulator. Cloud Spanner is a globally distributed, scalable, multi-version database service on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Since its inception, Google keeps evolving the database service since its beta with updates such as updates to its data manipulating (DML) SQL language, and new regions, and multi-region configurations. Now, it further enhances Cloud Spanner with another set of updates. The most important new feature is the managed backup-restore, which is now generally available and provides protection against user or application errors that result in logical data corruption. With the managed backup-restore users can take a consistent, on-demand backup of databases in their regional or multi-regional configurations and restore those backups onto the same or different instance with the same instance configuration. Furthermore, these restores are optimized to reduce the time to first-byte access to the data in a backup – which means users can get access to terabytes of data being restored from a backup within minutes after failure according to the blog post. Users can get access to the managed backup-restore via client libraries, gcloud, and cloud console, and use the feature to back up and restore their databases, regardless of size.
Next to the introduction of the managed backup-restore capability, Google also added new features to add more reliability, flexibility, and ease of use when developing applications with Spanner. These new generally available features are:
Lastly, another update is the new local emulator feature, which is currently in beta and useful for local testing purposes. The emulator can run in an offline environment and emulates the Spanner API (both REST and gRPC) and SQL layer. Sneha Shah, software engineer at Google, stated in a Medium blog post on the Cloud Spanner local emulator:
For more details about the pricing of Cloud Spanner, see the pricing page.  |
| The Rise of Multicloud Provides Challenges for IT Operations, Networking - Data Center Frontier Posted: 13 May 2020 08:30 AM PDT  Enterprise customers are weighing the best options for taking advantage of cloud computing models. (Photo: Rich Miller) Monolithic, single-cloud and hybrid approaches are beginning to be replaced by multicloud strategies. A new report from Cisco has found that they are becoming much more common, with 29% of IT leaders believing they will have networking capabilities across on-premise, hybrid and multicloud environments within the next two years. Other recent reports concur. According to the 2020 State of the Cloud report, 93% of enterprises now use a multicloud strategy, and new research from IDC has shown that they are driving massive adoption of software-defined WAN (SD-WAN). A multicloud strategy can provide serious benefits for businesses, but is much harder to manage than single-cloud or hybrid strategies. Here's how IT managers can work to address the challenges of multicloud management and networking at their workplace. The Rise of the MulticloudThe multicloud is a broad term used to describe networks that distribute their use of cloud resources across multiple platforms. A business in need of multicloud management may have several apps running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) communicating with an on-premise network via hybrid connectivity. It may also be interacting with other cloud platforms, like Microsoft's Azure or Google's Cloud Platform. The strategy has a few different benefits. It effectively allows businesses to distribute their workload, potentially improving up-time. If one web service goes down, you'll have redundant resources available to handle some of that workload. A multicloud strategy also allows businesses to take advantage of the strengths of different cloud platforms. As an example, AWS offers serverless computing, Google Cloud has a strong reputation for AI and machine learning functionality, and Microsoft Azure works well with hardware running on Microsoft's widely deployed business software. It's theoretically possible to distribute your business workloads across these cloud services to take advantage of the unique strengths and features of each. Challenges of Multicloud Management and NetworksDespite available tools, multicloud management is still often a mess for many businesses. In any multicloud situation, a company is managing multiple applications and transferring data across different platforms with various infrastructure and compatibilities — creating major room for conflict. With a multicloud strategy, businesses are often trying to achieve portability across platforms while taking advantage of the unique features they offer. They use certain cloud services for specific workloads, based on the strengths and weaknesses of each one. However, if you want to keep management consistent across clouds, it gets harder to take advantage of those unique features. A multicloud strategy can also create significant networking challenges. With a single-cloud approach, you may only need to manage the connection between the on-site network and one cloud platform. With a multicloud system, you're coordinating connections between multiple platforms and your on-site network, and potentially between the cloud platforms themselves. There are serious advantages to a multicloud strategy. However, the ways these systems are managed often create more challenges than the approach solves. All-in-one management solutions exist, and IBM's is probably the most popular. Most major cloud services, aware of the pivot toward a multicloud strategy, offer features designed to help IT workers with multicloud management. Free Resource from Data Center Frontier White Paper Library 5 Reasons to Directly Connect Your Hybrid Cloud SolutionThe relationship between enterprises and the cloud is constantly changing. What does not change is the need to measure the value technology investments bring to the business. Cloud interconnect provides several advantages to connecting over the public Internet, broken down to five key indicators: Security, performance, reduced costs, reliability and ease of doing business. Email me the new report from CoreSite that further explores these five key indicators and the modern hybrid cloud strategy.We always respect your privacy and we never sell or rent our list to third parties. By downloading this White Paper you are agreeing to our terms of service. You can opt out at any time. Get this PDF emailed to you.It's likely that just one solution won't be enough for your team to manage its multicloud implementation. They may need a combination of tools and strategies to successfully handle a multicloud approach. Solutions for Managing the MulticloudTo start, you need to make sure your IT approach is centralized, as with a managed IT service. There's enough room for conflict in any multicloud plan, and you don't want to make the problem worse with a disorganized approach to managing IT operations. Next, you'll need to select the right tools and solutions for managing your business's multicloud strategy. Tools like cloud service brokers (CSBs) and cloud management platforms (CMPs) offer a layer of abstraction that can help you manage differences in architecture. Select a CSB or CMP based on the features your business needs the most. Many of these tools will include some combination of service monitoring, provisioning and analytics features designed to help your team orchestrate management of apps across cloud services. However, not all tools will include the same features or integrate well with your current tech, like pre-existing cloud security architecture. Containerization can also help you handle some of these conflicts. Tech columnist Matt Asay recommends Kubernetes-based tools, like Red Hat Open Shift, as a possible way to cut through some of this chaos. Because this approach takes the minimum from each of these platforms, you will be able to avoid most of the headaches of managing workload across several cloud platforms. While you won't be able to benefit from some of the advanced features cloud services offer with this approach, you will be able to distribute your workload across cloud services. If there's a hiccup in AWS, you can keep your services running by shifting some of that work to another service. With any approach, you will want to extensively test your approach before you go live. Simulate workloads, perform security testing and generally see how the management tools you've selected hold up under pressure. By the end of this, you'll have a good idea of whether or not these tools fit your needs or if another combination may be a better option. How IT Staff Can Handle a Multicloud StrategyMulticloud strategies are quickly becoming much more popular and are likely to become commonplace in the future. These strategies can offer significant benefits for businesses — like improved service reliability and access to unique cloud platform features. However, they also create serious challenges for the IT departments that need to manage the implementation and networking of these approaches. Differences in cloud infrastructure can make coordinating services across different platforms challenging — or, without the right tools, almost impossible. IT staff at businesses that want to move to a multicloud approach should be aware of the options they have when it comes to multicloud solutions — including CSBs, CMPs and containerization software. They should also be prepared for extensive testing of potential multicloud management tools. The effort will be well worth it.  |
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