TECHNOLOGY

Normalyze CEO Amer Deeba Talks Data Security at Black Hat USA 2023

Published

6 months ago

October 29, 2023

Normalyze CEO Amer Deeba Talks Data Security at Black Hat USA 2023

In this new information age, data is king — but with this value attached to data by individuals, corporations, and governments comes unique challenges.

Normalyze CEO and Founder Amer Deeba is well aware of the complexities now faced in protecting privacy and managing massive amounts of information. Normalyze is a cybersecurity company that helps its clients manage data and keep it secure.

“Data is the biggest problem right now,” Amer Deeba told Trinity Chavez of NYSE TV in an interview during the Black Hat USA 2023 conference, which is internationally recognized for bringing together thought leaders in the cybersecurity space.

Securing data is the top priority for Normalyze. In a world of decentralized cloud computing, enterprises want to know where their sensitive data is located, how it’s classified, and any risks it may be exposed to.

Normalyze addresses this demand by helping its clients identify potential risks to their data. It does this through an industry-leading, artificial intelligence-driven, agentless data discovery and risk assessment platform. This entails a complete analysis of the client’s data and understanding how it’s used, where it’s stored, who has access to it, and its vulnerabilities.

The tool helps security teams be better prepared against cyberattacks and data leaks from vulnerabilities.

“We provide a full global inventory of sensitive data, where is it, who has access to it, and all the information we need to secure it. This is why we embarked on this innovation and we are very proudly showing it here at Black Hat,” shared Deeba.

Mission accomplished for Deeba who, through years of experience, has served in leadership roles including chief commercial officer, chief marketing officer, and vice president of corporate development and strategic alliances at a number of enterprises. “We come here to learn, to network, to connect with each other, to exchange ideas, and to expand our cybersecurity horizons,” said Deeba.

His company also set up a booth at the event presenting research presentations, customer engagement, conversations with chief information security officers and analysts, and product demos. Normalyze’s engagement at events like Black Hat is part of its broader commitment to collaborate with the community so it can better understand its needs and develop effective solutions.

Attendees were able to take advantage of free cloud data audits performed by Normalyze’s security experts. These audits included a thorough data examination, identifying sensitive information, complete with a full assessment of how risks could be mitigated, and any additional steps that were needed to ensure regulatory compliance.

The company also organized talks with security subject matter experts. Among the many speakers were Teza Mukkavilli, chief information security officer at ChargePoint; Damian Chung, business information security officer at Netskope; and Jade Graziano, cybersecurity engineer at Ginkgo. They shared their views on information security, the need for creating frameworks that prioritize data, how to implement best practices, and how to create harmony between business and engineering teams.

In addition to talks and a product demo, Normalyze also organized a hands-on training session led by Abhinav Singh, the head of security research at Normalyze. The training was aimed at defenders working to secure their data in Amazon Web Services and Azure. The training focused on issues such as incident response, threat detection, forensic analysis, and malware investigations of data located in cloud infrastructure.

“What you learn here, it’s mainly you get a lot of these kinds of ideas in terms of new innovation, new research points that you could also incorporate into your technology,” shared Deeba.

Ravi Ithal, chief technology officer and co-founder at Normalyze, also announced the expansion of the cloud data security platform. Normalyze’s clients will now be able to take advantage of data security posture management, which is the company’s new data-driven approach to cloud data security. The data security posture management method creates a modern path to help clients understand their data’s security posture. It locates sensitive info and informs you about people who have access to it and their security posture. By following the guidelines of data security posture management, Normalyze’s clients can now quickly secure their organization’s data.

Black Hat 2023 proved to be a very fruitful event for the team at Normalyze. It not only exposed them to the developments in the cybersecurity world, but also gave other organizations a chance to learn what was new in the trailblazing cybersecurity enterprise.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud