AI infrastructure solution accelerates customers’ path to GPT and LLMs while keeping organizations in control of their data

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, today announced the Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box^™ solution for customers looking to jump-start their artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) innovation, while maintaining control over their data. The new offering, available today, is a full-stack software-defined AI-ready platform, along with services to help organizations size and configure hardware and software infrastructure suitable to deploy a curated set of large language models (LLMs) using the leading open source AI and MLOps frameworks on the Nutanix Cloud Platform^™. It allows customers to easily procure AI-ready infrastructure to fine-tune and run generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), including LLMs at the edge or in their datacenter.

Many enterprises are grappling with how to quickly, efficiently and securely take advantage of the power of generative AI and AI/ML applications, especially for use cases that cannot be run in the public cloud because of data sovereignty, governance and privacy concerns. New use cases emerge every day as organizations look to leverage generative AI to improve customer service, developer productivity, operational efficiency and more. From automated transcription of internal documents, to high-speed search of multimedia contents, and automated analysis, many organizations see the opportunity with AI but are struggling with growing concerns regarding intellectual property leakage, compliance and privacy. Additionally, organizations looking to build an AI-ready stack often struggle with how to best support ML administrators and data scientists, while the prospect of large AI investment costs has enterprises stalled in their AI and ML strategy.

“As customers look to design and deploy generative AI solutions, they find themselves struggling with balancing the deep expertise required to install, configure, and run these workloads with concerns around their data security and protecting company IP – all while controlling costs,” said Greg Macatee, Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC. “With GPT-in-a-Box, Nutanix offers customers a turnkey, easy-to-use solution for their AI use cases, offering enterprises struggling with generative AI adoption an easier on-ramp to deployment.”

The Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution delivers ready-to-use customer-controlled AI infrastructure for the edge or the core data center and allows customers to run and fine-tune AI and GPT models while maintaining control over their data. Nutanix provides a full complement of security and data protection offerings ideal for AI data protection.

“Helping customers tackle the biggest challenges they face in IT is at the core of what we do, from managing increasing multicloud complexity, to data protection challenges, and now adoption of generative AI solutions while keeping control over data privacy and compliance,” said Thomas Cornely, SVP, Product Management at Nutanix. “Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box is an opinionated AI-ready stack that aims to solve the key challenges with generative AI adoption and help jump-start AI innovation.”

This new solution includes:

• The Industry-leading Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure^™ platform, with the Nutanix Files Storage^™ and Objects Storage^™ solutions, the Nutanix AHV^® hypervisor and Kubernetes, along with NVIDIA GPU acceleration, which can be sized for large to small scale.
• Nutanix services to help customers size their cluster and deploy an opinionated stack with the leading open source deep learning and MLOps frameworks, inference server, and a curated set of large language models such as Llama2, Falcon and MPT.
• Ability for data scientists and ML administrators to immediately consume these models with their choice of applications, enhanced terminal UI, or standard CLI.
• The platform can also be leveraged to run other GPT models, as well as fine tune these models leveraging internal data, hosted on included Nutanix Files or Objects Storage services.

“Leveraging AI to more efficiently and effectively help our customers is a top priority for us but, as a regulated financial services organisation, maintaining full control over our data is necessary," said Jon Cosson, CISO at JM Finn. "The Nutanix Cloud Platform delivers the performance, flexibility and security required to safely deploy AI workloads."

The Nutanix GPT-In-a-Box solution builds on the full stack scalability, performance, resilience and ease of use that the Nutanix Cloud Platform is known for. Nutanix’s expertise with scalable infrastructure across public cloud, datacenter and edge use cases delivers the ideal environment to fine-tune and run AI applications while maintaining control over the data. In fact, in a recent survey, 78% of Nutanix customers indicated they were likely to run their AI/ML workloads on the Nutanix Cloud Platform.

Nutanix’s expertise and involvement in the open source AI community provide customers with a strong foundation on which to build their AI strategy. Key contributions include: participation in the MLCommons (AI standards) advisory board; co-founding and technical leadership in defining the ML Storage Benchmarks and Medicine Benchmarks; serving as a co-chair of the Kubeflow (MLOps) Training and AutoML working groups at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution is available to customers today. Customers looking to get started can find more information here.

Supporting Quotes:

• “Red Hat is helping organizations across various industries to accelerate business and mission-critical initiatives through the development and deployment of AI-enabled applications in the hybrid cloud. With this launch, joint customers can take advantage of Red Hat OpenShift AI along with the Nutanix AI-ready stack to jump-start innovation on a consistent, scalable open source foundation while maintaining control over their data.”
  - Sarwar Raza, Vice President, Cloud Services, Red Hat
• “Enterprises everywhere are looking to leverage the generative AI opportunity but many, especially in regulated industries, are concerned with potential IP and data security issues. TCS has a long track record of embracing technology innovations in a secured manner to satisfy customer demand and enable them to focus on business outcomes. Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box along with TCS Cognix, a future-ready service delivery platform, allows customers to realize the value of artificial intelligence and machine learning by providing service resiliency, business agility, and enhanced customer experience to organizations.”
  - Dinanath Kholkar, SVP and Global Head of Partner Ecosystems & Alliances at TCS
• “Taking advantage of the potential of generative AI is one of the most significant opportunities available to global enterprises today, and finding the right partner to guide this journey is crucial. Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box, along with consulting and solutions from Hexaware, can help jump-start this AI journey by addressing some of the key talent, security, compliance, deployment and scale challenges they’re facing today.”
  - Vinod Chandran, COO, Hexaware
• “Generative AI is top of mind for many enterprises, but most don't have the in house resources to fully take advantage of this opportunity. Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box, along with solutions from DKube, simplifies enterprise AI adoption with an AI-ready stack to jumpstart innovation.”
  - Prasad Vellanki, CEO, DKube

• “Generative AI, including Chat-GPT and LLMs, are revolutionizing the way enterprises operate but many require support to best take advantage of this opportunity. Lamini makes enterprise LLMs easier while Nutanix delivers AI-ready infrastructure to help organizations simplify operations and maintain control over their data significantly simplifying adoption of generative AI."
  - Greg Diamos, Co-Founder, Lamini and ML Commons

Report underscores that email is the most exploited threat vector, phishing remains borderless and attackers are increasingly impersonating trusted name brands

Cloudflare, Inc. , the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today released its inaugural 2023 Phishing Threats Report. The findings highlight that phishing remains the most dominant and fastest growing Internet crime, largely due to the ubiquity of email and the ceaseless issue of human error that is preyed upon by today’s threat actors.

While business email compromise (BEC) losses have topped $50 billion, corporate organizations are not the only victims that attackers are after. The real implications of phishing go beyond Fortune 500’s and global companies, extending to small and local organizations as well as the public sector. For instance, in this year’s report, Cloudflare observed more email threats targeting political organizations. In the three months leading up to the 2022 US midterm elections, Cloudflare’s email security service prevented around 150,000 phishing emails from making their way to campaign officials.

Regardless of an organization's size, industry or sector, the report revealed that threat actors who leverage phishing campaigns have two major objectives. First and foremost, the goal is to achieve authenticity and legitimacy in the eyes of the victim. Second, is to persuade victims to engage or click. These objectives are underscored by the key findings of the report, including:

• Malicious links were the #1 threat category, comprising 35.6% of detected threats
• Identity deception threats are on the rise — increasing YoY from 10.3% to 14.2% (39.6 million) of total detections
• Attackers posed as more than 1,000 different organizations in over 1 billion brand impersonation attempts. The majority of the time (51.7%), they impersonated one of 20 well-known brands
• The most impersonated brand happens to be one of the most trusted software companies: Microsoft. Other top companies impersonated included Google, Salesforce, Notion.so, and more
• One-third (30%) of detected threats featured newly registered domains — the #2 threat category
• Email authentication doesn’t stop threats. The vast majority (89%) of unwanted messages “passed” SPF, DKIM, or DMARC authentication checks

“Phishing is an epidemic that has permeated into the farthest corners of the Internet, preying on trust and victimizing everyone from CEOs to government officials to the everyday consumer,” said Matthew Prince, CEO at Cloudflare. “Email messages and malicious links are nefarious partners in crime when it comes to the most common form of Internet threats. Organizations of all sizes need a Zero Trust solution that encompasses email security - when this is neglected, they are leaving themselves exposed to the largest vector in today's threat landscape.”

Report Methodology: The report is a culmination of data intelligence and security trends gathered from the 112 billion threats that Cloudflare’s global network blocks daily. Cloudflare evaluated a sample of more than 279 million email threat indicators, 250 million malicious messages, over 1 billion instances of brand impersonation (note that it is possible for one email to have multiple instances of brand impersonations), and other data points gathered from approximately 13 billion emails processed between May 2022 to May 2023. Additionally, this report is informed by a Cloudflare-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting. Between January 2023 and February 2023, Forrester Consulting surveyed 316 security decision-makers across North America, EMEA, and APAC about the state of phishing.

Certification helps board members and executives navigate the ethical and technological issues inherent in AI to steer their organizations toward sustainable, trustworthy practices

Diligent, a leading GRC SaaS company, today announced its AI Ethics & Board Oversight Certification for corporate directors and executives. The program will help leaders navigate the context and basics of artificial intelligence (AI), associated opportunities and risks, ethics and compliance frameworks and regulatory considerations, to enhance their oversight of AI.

"The promise and impact of AI is top of mind in the boardroom,” said Dottie Schindlinger, Executive Director of Diligent Institute. “Directors see the benefit of using AI to enhance efficiencies and gain insights, but risks can arise without the right tools and oversight. This certification will outline the risks and opportunities associated with AI against the background of today’s regulatory landscape, and help leaders identify governance models to consider the ethical and compliance implications of AI.”

The self-paced e-learning curriculum, developed in partnership with Volkov Law, includes four courses: Overview of Ethics & Compliance; Overview of Artificial Intelligence; Aligning AI with Ethics & Compliance and AI Governance & Oversight. The program features top experts across AI, ethics, compliance, and regulatory and legal industries, including renowned speakers:

• Meghan S Anzelc, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Three Arc Advisory
• Richard Barber, C-Suite Leader, Board Director and AI Governance Consultant
• Andrea Bonime-Blanc, CEO & Founder, GEC Risk Advisory
• Alexander Cotoia, Regulatory Compliance Manager, The Volkov Law Group
• Dan Hendrycks, Executive Director, Center for AI Safety
• Josh Klein, CEO, Indigometrics
• Dominique Shelton Leipzig, Partner, Cybersecurity & Data Privacy; Leader, Global Data Innovation, Mayer Brown
• Dr. Jodie Lobana, Managing Director, Lobana Consulting Group
• Myrna Soto, CEO & Founder, Apogee Executive Advisors
• Michael Volkov, CEO, The Volkov Law Group

“The Volkov Law Group is pleased to partner with Diligent Institute in creating a certificate program that brings the murky problem of AI and ethics into relief. This program is a must for board members interested in the overlap of ethics and compliance with concerns over the use of AI, which has the potential to transform the way organizations function,” said Michael Volkov, CEO of Volkov Law. “Of course, the use of AI means that boards need to develop a coherent strategy for dealing with AI issues in the workplace. The goal of this training is to precipitate meaningful discussion among stakeholders about issues like bias, accountability, reliability, and access, among other things.”

New Partnership Enables Jenne to Equip its Partners with Industry-Leading AI and CX-Focused Contact Center Solutions

LiveVox , a proven cloud CCaaS platform built to transform contact center performance, today announced a new partnership with Jenne, Inc., one of the nation’s leading cloud services brokers and value-added distributors of technology solutions. The partnership will provide Jenne’s vast array of value-added resellers throughout North America with immediate access to the LiveVox platform, enabling their clients to seamlessly transition away from inflexible on-premise contact center solutions and take advantage of robust capabilities, including AI and automation.

In order to accommodate the accelerating shift to the cloud, contact centers need partners capable of delivering best-in-class technology combined with expert support and implementation. This partnership will combine LiveVox’s proven cloud contact center solutions – designed to enhance agent performance and improve customer experience – with Jenne’s value-added pre- and post-sales support to deliver tangible results and ROI for the contact center industry.

“This partnership provides Jenne and its partners with a simple and substantive CCaaS solution – while helping LiveVox increase its North American distribution through Jenne’s impressive network,” said John DiLullo, CEO, LiveVox. “You simply can’t deliver the AI capabilities customers want using legacy, on premise contact center solutions. As an increasing number of organizations look to shift to the cloud, LiveVox and Jenne will provide them the capabilities, speed, flexibility, and support needed to maximize their performance.”

"LiveVox’s proven CCaaS platform simplifies the way contact center leaders create seamless customer journeys while increasing collaboration and efficiency to deliver a faster route to ROI,” said Michael Gottwalt, Vice President Cloud Solutions & Enablement, Jenne, Inc.  “We’re excited to partner with LiveVox to deliver game-changing solutions to the market as the shift to the cloud intensifies.”