cloud technology 20 Sep 2023
Real-time Visibility and Cloud-native Detection Among Missing Links for Cloud Defense
MixMode, the leader in delivering generative AI cybersecurity solutions for real-time threat detection and response at scale, today released its annual State of Cloud Security report along with the availability of MixMode Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) for AWS in the AWS Marketplace. The report provides sobering statistics on the gaps enterprises face in securing multi-cloud and hybrid environments and provides insight into how Generative AI can deliver real-time threat detection to help close the cloud security gap.
The MixMode survey with Cybersecurity Insiders reveals that most organizations must adopt multi-cloud strategies with adequate visibility, controls, and data security capabilities tailored to cloud platforms. Key findings include:
- 75% are extremely or very concerned about cloud security.
- 40% have hybrid cloud environments, while 38% have multi-cloud - increasing complexity.
- 70% still rely on traditional security tools rather than cloud-native controls.
- 77% use at least 3-point products to manage cloud security, indicating a need for unified cloud security.
"The report signals a troubling disconnect between accelerated cloud adoption and the readiness of security technologies to protect these environments," said John Keister, MixMode CEO. "Legacy tools are fundamentally limited in securing cloud workloads and data at scale. Companies need cloud-native real-time threat detection to ensure their environments are secure."
MixMode Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) for AWS, now available on the AWS Marketplace, provides unified visibility and cloud-native real-time threat detection across cloud and hybrid environments and network infrastructures. MixMode CDR for AWS enables:
"MixMode CDR gives customers the cloud-native security capabilities needed to match the complexity of their cloud environments," Keister continued. "Together with the State of Cloud Security report findings, we aim to drive awareness around the future of cloud security and deliver our advanced cybersecurity platform via the AWS Marketplace to meet the rising demand for scalable cloud detection and response."
MixMode's State of Cloud Security 2023 report and CDR solution for AWS equip companies to securely advance cloud adoption. Click to download the report.
technology 20 Sep 2023
A breakthrough self-service platform enabling retailers and advertisers to launch dynamic product ads for commerce media in three easy steps.
Jivox, the personalized dynamic creative technology leader, today introduced Jivox IQ DaVinci, a new product for commerce media set to spark a renaissance in the commerce media market. Giant Eagle's newly formed retail media platform, Leap Media Group (Leap), is among a select group using IQ DaVinci to launch new or scale existing offerings. With a fully automated, self-service platform, Jivox empowers the media teams of CPG brands to activate and optimize ad campaigns with speed and ease. Specifically, IQ DaVinci's predefined creative and campaign templates with built-in decisioning logic and integration with first-party product data require only three simple steps to launch a commerce media campaign, instantly removing the need for creative or data skills that have been a major hurdle for advertisers looking to invest in commerce media.
In 2022, commerce media worldwide skyrocketed to $114 billion according to Statista, citing a GroupM report. Commerce marketing has evolved from just product listing and search ads to today's powerful, data-driven dynamic product ads. Jivox DCO and automation technology has been a key success driver for these dynamic product ads through the delivery of significantly higher media performance. Jivox allows retailers to rapidly scale the adoption of their commerce media networks by enabling brand media teams to activate self-service campaigns in three simple steps, eliminating the expensive margin-destroying manual processes being used today.
"Commerce media has the potential of becoming the third largest media format after search and social media. And, Jivox IQ DaVinci is one of the most exciting products we have launched. It is a game changer for retailers and brands looking to scale their commerce media programs," said Diaz Nesamoney, Founder & CEO of Jivox. "We are thrilled to have Giant Eagle as a partner, working side by side in an automation journey to scale personalized experiences for brands and their consumers."
Leap allows brands to leverage the unique and impactful insights garnered through one of the industry's richest loyalty programs to reach consumers during key decision-making moments. After more than 30 years of delivering world-class loyalty for the business and value for its customers, Giant Eagle's loyalty platform remains an innovative and dynamic tool for the company and now external partners can tap into that value.
"First-party data-driven media is so important to the future of high-performing digital advertising in a privacy-first world. Yet, many retailers today find it difficult to scale up this revenue stream due to the challenges posed by building personalized creative with products and offers relevant to individual consumers," said Joell Robinson, Giant Eagle Senior Director, Leap Media & Sales. "Jivox IQ DaVinci is helping Giant Eagle scale our retail media network offering in three ways: A self-service activation portal for advertisers that allows personalized dynamic creative campaigns to launch quickly and easily; sophisticated feed management that enables advertisers to add product assets, offers, and pricing to ads dynamically in real-time; and AI-Driven optimization algorithms that use first-party data to deliver performance."
artificial intelligence 19 Sep 2023
ibex (NASDAQ: IBEX), a leading global provider of business process outsourcing (BPO) and customer engagement technology solutions, today announced a partnership with Genesys®, a global cloud leader in AI-powered experience orchestration, to offer next-generation omnichannel customer experience (CX) and contact center solutions.
This collaboration will enable both companies to enhance and expand their CX and contact center offerings. ibex’s award-winning Wave X technology platform will integrate with Genesys Cloud CX®, an all-in-one, composable contact center as a service and employee experience solution, to deliver expanded services and capabilities to enterprise clients.
As a modern, API-first experience orchestration platform, Genesys Cloud CX enables organizations to coordinate every interaction and touchpoint through a full suite of omnichannel options, built-in employee experience, turnkey AI and end-to-end journey optimization.
“We are delighted to partner with Genesys to offer the most comprehensive range of next-generation CX solutions to our growing roster of blue chip and digital-first clients,” said Jim Ferrato, Chief Information Officer, ibex. “Leveraging Genesys Cloud CX as part of our enterprise services will allow ibex to drive greater automation, which will improve our employee experience and create unified interfaces for all channels and solutions. It will also offer enhanced flexibility and customization options to tailor solutions to meet specific enterprise needs.”
Wave X is ibex’s AI-enabled technology platform designed to improve the employee experience for agents, contact center performance, and CX outcomes. Wave X delivers a complete CX performance solution set, designed for the contact center, by the contact center experts.
“Combining the revolutionary experience orchestration capabilities of Genesys Cloud CX with ibex’s cutting-edge AI-enabled Wave X platform will allow organizations to deliver effortless, connected experiences for customers and employees,” said Brian Bischoff, SVP and General Manager, Genesys Cloud CX. “We are looking forward to partnering with ibex to enable businesses everywhere to scale empathy and drive trust and loyalty.”
Later today, Genesys and ibex will host a webinar focused on the impact of the cloud contact center on EX and CX performance. Join experts Michael Thigpen, Jawad Abid, Jeff Wise, Chris Becker, and Vince Montelione today at 2 pm ET for a deep-dive on the topic with key takeaways for taking the next key step on your CX journey.
artificial intelligence 19 Sep 2023
Aporia, the leading Observability platform for AI products, today announced a partnership with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, designed to enhance performance by providing AI models and data observability in the cloud. Integrating Aporia's ML observability platform with the Data Cloud not only promotes the efficiency and effectiveness of data science, but also helps to expand the adoption of responsible AI.
Aporia’s observability platform now seamlessly integrates with Snowflake, enabling users to monitor their data and production machine learning (ML) models at scale. The integration extends to features within Snowflake such as Snowpark, the runtimes and libraries that make deployment and processing of non-SQL code in Snowflake simpler, faster, and more secure. Together, joint customers can monitor billions of predictions to uncover insights from production data and improve their ML models' performance. In addition, Aporia’s privacy-first mode ensures that no sensitive data leaves a user’s Snowflake environment. Aporia supports all AI/ML use cases and every model type including Tabular, NLP, LLM, and Computer Vision within the Snowflake platform.
In sensitive domains, gaining insight into the reasons behind specific predictions made by AI projects and the ML models driving them is critical. However, the lack of explainability can hinder the identification of biases, the assurance of fairness, and establishing trust in models. Aporia’s integration with Snowflake addresses these concerns by enabling users to monitor ML models within minutes. It facilitates near real-time detection for issues like AI hallucinations, drift, bias, data integrity issues, model decay, and performance degradation.
Aporia's platform centralizes model management, equipping teams with the tools to effectively monitor each of their models and quickly investigate any production alerts. Teams are also able to utilize customizable dashboards and metrics to gain a clear view of their model's health. Additionally, Aporia facilitates prompt resolution of production issues and AI hallucinations through collaborative analysis and provides diverse analytics for a more nuanced understanding. The company offers an all-in-one root cause analysis tool that provides data scientists, ML engineers, and analysts with a seamless and easy to navigate digital environment for real-time data analysis, root cause investigation, and deep insights within a unified monitoring platform.
“As we continue to enable organizations to champion responsible AI and unlock its full potential with unparalleled insights, enhanced performance and monitoring capabilities, we are thrilled to announce our partnership with Snowflake,” said Liran Hason, CEO of Aporia. “By combining Aporia's advanced AI observability into Snowflake's secure, scalable infrastructure, we are not only addressing the crucial need for model observability to the Data Cloud, but also helping data-driven organizations accelerate their impact on data science, achieve new heights in performance, and drive overall business success.”
“We are thrilled to partner with Aporia to bolster the capabilities of the Snowflake Data Cloud and provide joint customers with advanced AI observability,” said Torsten Grabs, Senior Director, Product Management, Snowflake. “By equipping users with powerful tools to fully leverage their efforts and promote responsible AI usage, we are collectively advancing data science, leading to increased effectiveness, efficiency, and trustworthiness.”
reports 19 Sep 2023
Foundry, the media, data, and martech division of IDG, Inc., today released its 2023 Cloud Computing Survey. In its 10th year, the research was conducted to measure cloud computing trends among technology decision-makers, including adoption plans, spending, business drivers, challenges, and top cloud growth areas, such as AI.
“While cloud adoption continues at a steady pace, the frenzied acceleration due to the pandemic period is easing,” said Stacey Raap, Marketing & Research Manager, Foundry. “This latest Cloud Computing Survey finds that there is significant budget to be spent on cloud computing initiatives, however migration is calming down after organizations raced to the cloud over the past three years.”
Objectives driving cloud spending
According to Foundry’s report – which surveyed ITDMs in North America, EMEA, and APAC – more than half (52%) of organizations’ current IT environment is in the cloud. This is expected to increase to 63% over the next 18 months. When asked what is driving cloud investments today, respondents said enabling disaster recovery and business continuity (40%), replacing on-premise legacy technology (40%), lower total cost of ownership (34%), improving employee productivity (32%), and greater flexibility to react to changing market conditions (32%).
In order to achieve these objectives, tech buyers anticipate that their cloud spending will grow. Currently, 31% of an organization’s overall IT budget is allocated to cloud computing, and 66% expect their cloud spending to increase over the next 12 months. This increases to 70% for enterprise organizations (1,000+ employees) and is 62% for SMBs (<1,000 employees). Only 6% expect their spending to decrease while 28% think that it will remain the same.
“While cloud capabilities are used throughout all organizational departments, our research tells us that a large portion of spending decisions are controlled by IT,” added Raap. “It’s important to listen to the challenges these teams face when it comes to advancing their cloud computing adoption and help provide them with the assistance they need to move forward, such as cost management and security expertise.”
Challenges stalling cloud adoption
Almost two-thirds (65%) of IT decision-makers agree that their organization is defaulting to cloud-based services when upgrading or purchasing new technical capabilities. However, there are a handful of obstacles getting in the way. The top five challenges to cloud adoption are: controlling cloud costs (35%), data privacy and security challenges (31%), lack of cloud security skills/expertise (24%), integrating cloud resources with on-premises systems (23%), governance/compliance (23%), and a lack of cloud management skills/expertise (23%). Specifically addressing managing cloud costs, organizations are setting up budgets and alerts, implementing cost optimization strategies such as shutting off unused resources, and leveraging automation to monitor and allocate resources based on demand. It’s important to stay on top of these hurdles as 70% of ITDMs say their organization has brought certain cloud applications or services back to an on-premises model.
AI and cloud computing
As AI grows in popularity due to its ability to automate complex tasks, technology vendors are adding AI capabilities to their existing and new tools. The majority (53%) of ITDMs plan to use or adopt AI/machine learning cloud capabilities over the next 12 months, but they need assistance from their current providers in order to know what their options are. Only 44% of ITDMs say they understand their cloud provider’s roadmap for integrating AI tools into their platforms – this increases to 57% for enterprises and is only 37% for SMBs. If cloud providers want to keep their customers from switching vendors due to AI cloud capabilities, they need to ensure their plan is clear.
About the 2023 Cloud Computing Study
Foundry’s 2023 Cloud Computing Survey is the 10th year of this research and was conducted to measure cloud computing trends among technology decision-makers including: adoption plans, spending, business drivers, challenges, and top cloud growth areas, such as AI. The study was fielded throughout August 2023 and is based on the responses of 893 global IT decision-makers that are involved in the purchase process for cloud computing and their organization has, or plans to have, at least one application, or a portion of their infrastructure, in the cloud.
advertising 19 Sep 2023
DoubleVerify, a leading software platform for digital media measurement, data and analytics, today announced the expansion of its brand safety and suitability solution to enable advertisers to monitor and avoid MFA (“Made For Advertising”) sites. As part of this innovation, DV has advanced a clear definition of MFA, empowering advertisers to identify and address MFA-driven challenges effectively.
DV developed its proprietary MFA analysis process based on a unique blend of human and artificial intelligence-based auditing. With this release, DV’s solution can be enabled directly by a customer in their brand safety and suitability profile for measurement and monitoring, and in DV Authentic Brand Suitability for pre-bid avoidance.
"DV continues to lead with customer driven innovation that helps advertisers tackle the rapidly evolving challenges in digital advertising that impact media quality and performance" stated Mark Zagorski, CEO of DoubleVerify. "With the rise of AI tools that can rapidly spawn MFA sites, DV's own AI tech is crucial in empowering global brands to identify, measure and avoid problematic MFA content in real time and ultimately drive better marketing outcomes.”
In June, amid concerns over AI tools accelerating the production of inappropriate online content, the ANA published a report stating that MFA websites account for one-fifth (21%) of all programmatic ad impressions and attract 15% of total advertising spend. In its own independent analysis, DV found that some MFA sites generate hundreds of millions of impressions per month.
Lacking a uniform definition of MFA, misunderstandings about the categorization abound. Some mistakenly view MFA content as exclusively bot-driven with entirely fraudulent traffic. While this does represent a portion of MFA traffic, these types of sites are typically identified as fraudulent and thus excluded as part of standard fraud controls. Most MFA traffic, however, comes from legitimate human users, often from paid channels like social media and content recommendation engines.
DV formally defines MFA sites as those whose sole purpose is to deliver advertisements. These sites can be identified by analyzing several factors across their ad monetization activities, ad traffic sources and approach to content creation. More specifically, these sites exhibit the following characteristics:
DV employs an approach that allows for the deepest and most nuanced level of analysis, preventing miscategorization and false positives. For example, a website may feature a significant number of ads, while still registering high rates of direct and search-enabled traffic. In this instance, the publisher would not meet DV’s definition of an MFA website.
"The term 'Made for Advertising' has created significant confusion within the industry," said Jack Smith, CPO at DoubleVerify. "As an industry-leading measurement and verification provider, we believe it's crucial to lead by example and offer clarity. Our goal is to safeguard advertiser investments and support high-quality publishers who are seeking to monetize legitimate content."
Historically, DV has provided clients with the ability to address MFA sites upon request. With this release, DV's offering will be available in beta to all advertisers, starting on September 20, 2023, and will be evolving and advancing the solution over subsequent development cycles.
artificial intelligence 19 Sep 2023
Granica, the world’s first AI efficiency platform, today announced Chronicle, a new generative AI-powered SaaS offering that provides visibility and analytics into how data is accessed in cloud object stores. Chronicle is part of Granica’s AI efficiency platform, the company’s enterprise solution bringing novel, fundamental research in data-centric AI to the commercial market. Granica Chronicle provides rich analytics and observability for data with a deep focus on access. Chronicle also speeds time to value for new customers of Granica Crunch, the platform’s data reduction service, and Granica Screen, the data privacy service.
“Granica is showing impressive momentum, being recognized as a Gartner® Cool Vendor™ two months after launching out of stealth and already introducing a new AI-powered product on their platform,” said Vanessa Larco, Partner, NEA. “Enterprise challenges around data security and compliance continue to grow as do pressures to control and reduce cloud costs, and Granica is in a strong position to help organizations tackle both.”
Cloud object stores — such as Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage — represent the largest surface area for breach risk given these repositories are optimized to store large volumes of file and object data for AI/ML training and big data analytics. With this surface area continuing to rapidly expand at petabyte scale, lack of visibility makes it hard for teams to optimize application environments for cost, ensure compliance, enable chargebacks, improve performance and more.
“Historically, the options for free visibility tools are either too simplistic or overly complex to solve cloud storage access issues businesses face day to day,” said Rahul Ponnala, CEO and co-founder of Granica. “These datasets are also typically siloed off, making it hard for teams to see the full picture around how their data is being accessed. Granica Chronicle delivers the sweet spot customers are looking for: a user-friendly analytics environment bringing data visibility across disparate silos together in one, cohesive place.”
Granica Chronicle is designed to provide data at-rest and access visibility into cloud object storage platforms, via an AI-powered, natural language interface which makes exploration, visualization and collaboration incredibly simple. After entering simple prompts, users are presented with relevant visualizations in graphs and tables that answer key questions related to:
To get started, users export their server and storage access logs and other freely available storage-related datasets from their cloud provider. Chronicle ingests these datasets and readies them for prompt-based exploration via a SaaS console. Chronicle is also collaborative, enabling users to participate in a shared view of prompt-based results and history with other cross-functional Chronicle users in their organization. FinOps, security ops and application teams can collaborate and explore their data and application environment to find actionable insights, all without any knowledge of SQL. Under the covers, Chronicle itself leverages other Granica AI services to maximize efficiency.
Pete Sonsini, Venture Advisor, NEA, and Granica Board Member, observed, “Successful AI is efficient AI, and getting and staying efficient starts with data. Granica’s new AI-powered cloud data infrastructure analytics service helps organizations keep their data compliant and safe for AI use, cost-effectively. I believe their recognition as a Gartner® Cool Vendor™ is a testament to the impact they are making in the market, and this new product announcement puts them in an even stronger position.”
artificial intelligence 19 Sep 2023
Spectro Cloud today announced Palette EdgeAI to simplify how organizations deploy and manage AI workloads at scale across simple to complex edge locations, such as retail, healthcare, industrial automation, oil and gas, automotive/connected cars, and more.
Palette’s EdgeAI extends Spectro Cloud’s award-winning core Palette Edge Kubernetes management platform that addresses the unique challenges of deploying and managing edge environments at scale, specifically:
With a record number of organizations embracing the potential of running AI workloads at the edge, these challenges are exacerbated. Gartner1 suggests that “by 2027, deep learning will be included in over 65% of edge use cases, up from less than 10% in 2021”. Activities that are achievable in the data center or cloud, such as deploying daily updates to a large language model (LLM), are costly or even impossible across thousands of devices and locations. Furthermore, the exposed security posture of edge locations is problematic given that AI workloads often handle sensitive data and critical intellectual property.
“More and more of our customers are exploring AI at the edge as their primary mechanism to deliver modern, rich applications and transform the customer experience”, said Jim Melton, Head of Cloud Strategy & Programs, Digital Velocity, CDW. “The need to simplify deployment and provide comprehensive management for AI-optimized infrastructure at the edge is real and solutions such as Palette EdgeAI squarely addresses those challenges”.
The new Palette EdgeAI solution offers a rich suite of capabilities to address specific requirements throughout the lifecycle of edge infrastructure and AI software stacks.
It:
“The edge is the natural environment for AI inference workloads,” said Tenry Fu, CEO of Spectro Cloud. “Our mission is to simplify innovation for our customers and we have been working with organizations that are already disrupting their industries, reaping the benefits of AI at the edge”.
In the healthcare sector, RapidAI uses Palette Edge to deploy its AI applications into hospitals, giving clinicians deeper clinical context to quickly and accurately triage and diagnose conditions, such as strokes and embolisms, for better patient outcomes.
"At RapidAI our business is built on continuous AI innovation, helping clinicians right in the hospital," said Amit Phadnis, Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at RapidAI. "When it comes to deploying our applications securely and easily to the edge, we trust Spectro Cloud's Palette."
Palette’s EdgeAI will be generally available in Q4 2023 with rapid future capabilities throughout 2024.
Today Spectro Cloud also announced a new round of investment, led by Qualcomm Ventures. The investment will accelerate Spectro Cloud’s innovation in edge computing, AI and enterprise infrastructure management.
“Qualcomm is uniquely positioned within the edge ecosystem and with the adoption of AI, edge has become a necessity,” said Dev Singh, Vice President of Business Development, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “Across Industrial, Enterprise, Utilities and Retail, we are seeing a need to dynamically orchestrate AI workloads across edge and the cloud, simplify edge deployments and manage upgrades with no downtime to build the next-generation of resilient, high-performing applications.”
IT leaders are invited to learn more about Palette EdgeAI at a live webinar on Wednesday October 25th, 2023.
1. Emerging Tech: Aligning Benefits to Use Cases and Industry Sectors Is Key to Selling the Value of Edge AI, Eric Goodness, Gartner, Published 30 May 2023, ID G00778310
GARTNER is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
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