Quorum Cyber, founded to help organizations defend themselves in an increasingly hostile digital landscape, today announced the company strengthened its North American team by appointing Paul Vasquez as Vice President of Alliances & Partnerships.

Vasquez brings over 20 years of business development and partnerships experience to expand the company's North American cyber security market share. With a wealth of expertise helping technology companies develop their partnerships with Microsoft, his previous roles include Senior Director for Strategic Alliances and Channels at Epiq, where he built their Microsoft partnership from the ground up—winning several Microsoft partner awards. In addition, Vasquez served as Director of Business Development at CloudBees and Pentaho as well as Director of Strategic Alliances at Attivio and Pitney Bowes.

“I’m delighted that Paul has agreed to join our North American division, where he will improve revenue and accelerate growth in this market,” said Scott Abney, Quorum Cyber’s Chief Revenue Officer. “He has an outstanding track record as a valued partner in the Microsoft partner ecosystem stretching back two decades and will strengthen Quorum Cyber’s brand and reputation as a world-class Microsoft Security partner serving customers internationally.”

In addition, Vasquez will focus on net new revenue growth and customer acquisition, relationship building, improving operational efficiencies, and developing Quorum Cyber into one of Microsoft’s top Security partners, operating globally.

“I’m excited to join a high-performing team with huge ambitions in the North American market. I look forward to building and leveraging our partnership with Microsoft to further the company’s position as a leading, trusted MDR/XDR partner,” said Vasquez.

Organizations can now benefit from the breadth and depth of CXone in alignment with EU security, data protection and compliance requirements

NICE today announced that the full power of CXone is available as an EU Sovereign Cloud Platform. CXone is the industry leading CX cloud platform with unmatched scalability, reliability and with the most complete set of CX applications. Organizations from any vertical across the EU can now choose CXone as their platform of choice while adhering to regulatory and compliance requirements. NICE has partnered with in-region world-class data center and cloud providers to address the needs of the EU market and adhere to regulatory and compliance requirements and BSI C5.

As part of this effort, NICE has invested heavily in the EU market by standing up local Network Operations Centers (NOCs), support, and development resources. This ensures that all data in and out of its CXone platform remains solely within the EU, allowing the prevention of data from being shared outside of the region. Customers have unprecedented control and oversight of their data and can confidently adopt CXone EU Sovereign Cloud as their CX platform of choice.

Barry Cooper, President, CX Division, NICE, said, “We are pleased to announce CXone as an EU Sovereign cloud platform allowing organizations to further accelerate their cloud adoption and take another big step in their journey to deliver next gen digital CX while maintaining compliance amid the most stringent of regulations.”

Sprinklr NYSE: CXM, the unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern enterprises, today announced that the company will join the small-cap Russell 2000® and broad-market Russell 3000® Index at the conclusion of the 2023 Russell indexes annual reconstitution, effective after the U.S. market opens on June 26, 2023.

Ragy Thomas, Founder and CEO of Sprinklr, said, “We are excited to be included in the prestigious Russell 2000® and Russell 3000® Indexes, which we anticipate will enhance our exposure within the investment community. This is a significant milestone for Sprinklr and further highlights the commitment to our vision of becoming the world’s most loved enterprise software company innovating for our customers, succeeding with our partners, and delivering shareholder value.”

The annual Russell indexes reconstitution captures the 4,000 largest U.S. stocks as of April 28, ranking them by total market capitalization. Membership in the US all-cap Russell 3000® Index, which remains in place for one year, means automatic inclusion in the large-cap Russell 1000® Index or small-cap Russell 2000® Index as well as the appropriate growth and value style indexes. FTSE Russell determines membership for its Russell indexes primarily by objective, market-capitalization rankings and style attributes.

Russell indexes are widely used by investment managers and institutional investors for index funds and as benchmarks for active investment strategies. Approximately $12.1 trillion in assets are benchmarked against Russell's US indexes. Russell indexes are part of FTSE Russell, a leading global index provider.

Survey finds 75% of consumers ready to shift to competitors after a successful ransomware attack, while half are reluctant to share personal information due to fears of such attacks.

According to new data released today from Object First, the object storage backup appliance company delivering ransomware-proof out-of-the-box immutability, 40% of consumers are skeptical of organizations' ability to protect their data adequately. Consequently, 75% of consumers would switch to another company after a ransomware attack. Furthermore, consumers are requesting increased protection from vendors that hold their data, with 55% favoring companies with comprehensive data protection measures such as reliable backup and recovery, password protection, and identity and access management strategies.

As organizations intensify their digital transformation initiatives, data volume expands exponentially while ransomware attacks dominate the cyberthreat landscape. To understand the implications of ransomware attacks on consumer data, Object First conducted a comprehensive survey of 1,000 consumers. The survey emphasized the evolving concerns and demands for robust backup, protection, and recovery strategies. The results underscore the necessity of a preemptive, effective backup and recovery plan to circumvent intricate, time-consuming, and costly recovery processes that could undermine vendor trust and jeopardize long-term business growth.

“Given the indispensable role of data in today’s world, it is no wonder consumers are seeking greater protection as organizations generate and consume more data than ever. With the escalating ransomware threat, data protection must be a core concern for every business. While preventing a ransomware attack is the ideal scenario, it is not always feasible,” said David Bennett, CEO of Object First. “Consumers take data protection seriously, and organizations must prioritize safeguarding consumer data against modern threats. This can be achieved by ingraining immutable data resilience as core to cyber security strategy.”

The report also presents several notable findings:

• Consumer concerns on the rise: 81% of consumers report feeling “very scared or worried” about their data being held by organizations lacking robust resilience against ransomware. After an attack, 1 in 3 consumers demand evidence of resilient backup and recovery strategies, and 30% lose all confidence in the company’s data protection plan.
• Accountability expectations are escalating: 75% of consumers are ready to shift to a competitor should a company suffer a ransomware attack. Moreover, a second ransomware attack causes 61% of consumers to reassess their negative perception of data protection and recovery practices.
• Ransomware attacks impact generations differently: While 37% of Gen Z prefers an apology from companies experiencing a ransomware attack, ranking 12% higher than monetary compensation, Baby Boomers are less forgiving. 74% of them agree their trust in the vendor is irreparably damaged after suffering more than one ransomware attack, compared to only 34% of Gen Z.

Object First's research illuminates an alarming rise in consumer apprehension regarding companies’ capability to safeguard their data against ransomware attacks. New research from Veeam’s Ransomware Trends Report 2023 underscores this, indicating that 93% of ransomware attacks target backup repositories to coerce ransom payments. This makes it imperative for organizations to reassess their data protection strategies to ensure foolproof ransomware protection. Immutable on-premises backup storage can provide vendors with secure, unalterable, and ransom-proof data, restoring consumer confidence and preserving brand reputation.

Combined Platform Gives Enterprises the Power to Fully Enable Data-Driven Decision Making and Ensure AI Implementations Deliver Real Business Value

AtScale, the leading provider of semantic layer solutions for modern business intelligence and data science teams, today announced a referral partnership with Dataiku, the platform for Everyday AI, to help speed enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) adoption and empower companies to easily create business value from their organization’s data.

According to IDC, worldwide spending on AI-centric systems will surpass $300B by 2026 with a 26.5% 5-year CAGR. However, the same study concluded that only 25% of AI initiatives – and only 36% of AI models – had been deployed in production. Their research also indicated that 50% of businesses are planning to use AI in their business functions over the next 12 months.

“The continued investment in AI, combined with the complexity of model deployment highlights just how critical it is for organizations to take an active approach to driving value from AI,” said Gaurav Rao, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Machine Learning and AI at AtScale. “AI isn’t just something you can just turn on and instantly see business results from. Enterprises need to surround their AI with tools that make it easier to access and use data – and then apply those insights back into the organization. The lack of understanding and integration is one of the biggest reasons AI deployments are not successful.”

By combining Dataiku’s single data and AI platform with AtScale’s universal semantic layer and AI-Link, organizations will be able to improve data science productivity with business-vetted features for AI model training and feature management. Additionally, the integrated capabilities enable business analysts to seamlessly incorporate AI insights directly into common business intelligence tools such as Tableau, PowerBI, and Excel, on their cloud warehouse of choice, including Snowflake, Databricks, and Google BigQuery.

Key Benefits of AtScale’s integration with Dataiku include:

• Production-Ready, Enterprise Grade Feature Store: The productivity of data analytics is improved through the use of an integrated feature store. Important features include:
  • Simplified and automated feature creation through a no-code/low-code interface helps to simplify the creation and use of complex dimensions, metrics, and hierarchies.
  • Advanced feature management, including feature serving and sharing, helps make data easily consumable across Dataiku projects, pipelines, and use cases.
• Advanced Time-Series Modeling: Dataiku’s autoML capabilities are combined with a semantic layer understanding of complex time hierarchies, making business forecasting easier and more efficient.
• Best-In-Class MLOps: The integrated solution gives enterprises the ability to publish insights generated in Dataiku ML pipelines directly to business users, in their business intelligence tools of choice. This gives business analysts the ability to conduct advanced predictive and prescriptive analyses more efficiently.
• Query Push Down: AtScale + Dataiku enables a governed and performant query to push down across an enterprise’s AI and BI workloads, ranging from data preparation to MLOps, across the most popular cloud warehouse partners. This helps speed the process and decision-making time for users.

“There is a palpable momentum across all industries in integrating AI, especially Generative AI, into their operations,” said Abhijit Madhugiri, VP of Global Technology Alliances at Dataiku. “In today’s dynamic business environment, the need to adapt existing processes and equip teams to leverage this advanced technology is not just a strategy, but a necessity for staying competitive. Our collaboration with AtScale aims to simplify this transformation, providing a clear pathway for enterprises to harness the potential of AI, drive lasting business impact, and avoid the risk of being left behind.

The full capabilities of the Immuta Data Security Platform are now more tightly integrated with Databricks

Immuta, a data security leader, today announced key enhancements to its industry-leading Data Security Platform for Databricks that enable data teams to leverage Immuta's full platform capabilities, unlocking value from data, reducing costs, and speeding up innovation while maintaining strong data security posture. These updates include a new native integration with Databricks Unity Catalog that connects customers with Immuta’s latest platform capabilities providing localized Sensitive Data Discovery, enhanced security and access control for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, and enhanced Data Security Posture Management.

“We continue to work closely with Databricks to ensure that our technology platforms integrate seamlessly with every product release. With this update, Immuta provides a native, seamless integration with Unity Catalog’s latest release, helping Databricks to simplify and scale data security in the cloud,” said Steve Touw, CTO, Immuta. “As an industry, it’s time we tackle the next frontier for the cloud: data security. We are thrilled to be accomplishing this with Databricks in our latest integration update and enhancements as we continue our track record of innovation.”

Simplified Cloud Data Security Through New Integration with Databricks Unity Catalog

As organizations continue to migrate more data to the cloud, securing and protecting it becomes more complex and hinders data migration initiatives. Through this new integration with Databricks, Immuta abstracts and orchestrates the complexities of managing data security so that joint customers can focus on getting value from their data faster. Immuta leverages and expands on new features added to Databricks Unity Catalog, such as row filtering and column masking capabilities to provide data discovery, security and access control, and comprehensive data monitoring.

“Unity Catalog aims to provide unified search and governance for customers’ data, analytics, and AI initiatives, and Immuta’s data security platform continues to play a key role in meeting users’ compliance and privacy needs,” said Roger Murff, VP of Technology Partners at Databricks. “Now, joint customers can leverage the latest Unity Catalog features through an even more simplified process of securing and governing data and AI assets across multiple clouds.”

To learn more about Immuta’s new integration with Databricks Unity Catalog and the benefits it provides joint customers, read Immuta CTO, Steve Touw’s blog post here.

Easily Identify Sensitive Data with Localized Sensitive Data Discovery

As modern data stacks become more complex and data volumes grow, data teams need more efficient ways to identify and manage sensitive data. With Immuta’s new localized Sensitive Data Discovery, all sensitive data processing remains within Databricks so that it is easy to conform to data localization and data security requirements.

Key capabilities available to Databricks customers include:

• Providing auto-tagging capabilities across a lakehouse environment
• Applying 60+ prebuilt identifiers and easily define data
• Ability to build your own classifiers with acceptable confidence levels
• Exploring how tags are applied across a data lakehouse

Enhanced Security for AI Workloads on the Databricks Lakehouse

The push toward building machine learning (ML) models and AI applications continues to accelerate, yet there remains a clear gap in addressing (and automating) data security and governance with regard to AI workloads on the modern data lakehouse.

By leveraging Immuta on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, organizations can enhance access controls, monitor security, and maintain compliance to safeguard their AI workloads effectively. Immuta enhances the security of AI workloads through the following capabilities:

• Implementation of robust access controls and permissions to restrict unauthorized access to the data. Immuta also provides privacy measures such as data masking to ensure that only authorized users with appropriate privileges can access specific data.
• Continuous monitoring of the security posture of the lakehouse platform. Dedicated security tools help detect anomalies, data leaks, and data exfiltration attempts, allowing for proactive threat identification and response.
• Understanding and complying with relevant regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific standards. Immuta facilitates proper data handling and privacy practices, ensuring that AI workloads align with compliance requirements.

Enhanced Data Security Posture Management with Immuta Detect

Today’s data teams struggle with over-provisioning access, detecting insider threats, and assessing impact in a quantifiable manner. Immuta Detect provides timely insights into risky user data access behavior, enabling data security posture management and risk remediation above policy thresholds. The offering is now available to Databricks customers, allowing data security and data platform teams to:

• Easily identify and understand what the data is, classify the identified data’s level of sensitivity, and track sensitive data
• Effectively monitor and measure data security risk based on access activity and data classification
• Detect data residency and privacy risks

Enables businesses to easily deploy AI chatbots that are specifically trained on enterprise data to provide accurate and engaging interactions

Botco.ai, today announced the launch of the GenAI Chat Cloud, a suite of generative AI products to enable enterprises to transform their sales, marketing and customer relationship initiatives through the latest advances in Generative AI. Botco.ai’s GenAI Chat Cloud relies on proprietary, fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) to sort, analyze and contextualize information from enterprise data and applications—including websites, CRM, EMR, CMS and other proprietary data sources—in order to provide fast, accurate answers to user questions in a conversational manner.

While the introduction of generative AI has been a boon for enterprises seeking to save time and resources, serious questions persist around the accuracy, privacy and security of most Generative AI solutions on the market today. However, the Botco.ai GenAI Chat Cloud is trained specifically on an enterprise’s proprietary data and comes with SOC2 compliance, robust data governance capabilities, HIPAA validation, and more, ensuring that all responses are 100 percent accurate and come with none of the hallucinations that plague traditional AI chatbots.

“Generative AI is a proven game changer as enterprises seek new ways of engaging with customers, prospects and other stakeholders,” said Rebecca Clyde, CEO of Botco.ai. “But the solutions on the market today are limited in what they can do for an enterprise because they aren’t trained on the data and information that matters most—the enterprise’s own content. Our GenAI Chat Cloud makes it easy for any business to query its own documents and deliver timely, accurate responses to just about any question a prospect or customer might have.”

The Botco.ai GenAI Chat Cloud offers a no-code platform that can be built and deployed rapidly. Product modules that comprise the Botco.ai GenAI chat cloud include:

• InstaStack: Quickly and easily query documents from across an entire enterprise—including CRM, CMS, Analytics and more—using Botco.ai’s generative language models, which analyze the enterprise’s content to extract meaning and context. The fine-tuned models of the Botco.ai GenAI Chat Cloud are able to refresh by interacting with changing data sources to reflect the most current information.
• InstaChat: Automatically produce question and answer pairs from uploaded documents. This is suitable for smaller chatbots that can be deployed rapidly when the underlying information does not change frequently.
• InstaGraph: Query structured data to gain real-time insights into customer behaviors by examining what questions they’re asking, how they’re asking those questions, and how campaigns are performing.

Botco.ai’s GenAI Chat Cloud leverages fine-tuned LLMs to understand specific questions in a target industry or function and generate fast, accurate responses in natural language. Combined with the Botco.ai platform and its workflow, authoring, training and analytical modules, it enables enterprises to create personalized and engaging experiences that increase revenue and compress enterprise workflow. To date, customers in healthcare, wellness, government and other verticals have experienced an average of 6X return on investment.

Braze, a leading comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers interactions between consumers and the brands they love, today announced that the company will join the broad-market Russell 3000 Index at the conclusion of the 2023 Russell indexes annual reconstitution effective after the U.S. market opens on June 26.

The annual Russell indexes reconstitution captures the 4,000 largest U.S. stocks as of April 28, ranking them by total market capitalization. Membership in the U.S. all-cap Russell 3000® Index, which remains in place for one year, means automatic inclusion in the large-cap Russell 1000® Index or small-cap Russell 2000® Index, as well as the appropriate growth and value style indexes. FTSE Russell determines membership for its Russell indexes primarily by objective, market-capitalization rankings and style attributes.

“We are excited to be included in the internationally recognized Russell 3000 Index,” said Isabelle Winkles, Chief Financial Officer for Braze. “Our inclusion in the Russell 3000 Index will help increase awareness for Braze internationally as we continue to help the world's best brands create brilliant customer engagement strategies that delight consumers and drive business outcomes.”

Russell indexes are widely used by investment managers and institutional investors for index funds and as benchmarks for active investment strategies. Approximately $12.1 trillion in assets are benchmarked against Russell’s US indexes. Russell indexes are part of FTSE Russell, a leading global index provider.