Winning four NBA titles in eight years should put the Golden State Warriors in the same conversation as the great Laker and Celtic teams of yore. Don’t count on the gray-haired guys at the sports bar agreeing with you, however. Sports lets cranky old guys argue with younger guys while avoiding touchy subjects like music and hair length.
News from Mr. Softee. Microsoft Defender for individuals, the new security app for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, is now generally available. Yes, you’ve heard that name before, so consider it a rebranding.
An extension of Microsoft Viva, the Microsoft Viva Sales (pictured doing its thing) folds a new seller experience into any CRM system by adding customer engagement data from Microsoft 365 and Teams. Works with Outlook, Teams, or Office applications.
Security news. Optiv expanded its Managed XDR, making it easier to safeguard data, applications, and systems in a public or multi-cloud environment in near real time. Works with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Partners of MSSP Arctic Wolf can now offer incident response services directly from the vendor’s Tetra Defense team. MDR customers get priority access and referrals can get you partner-of-record status with new accounts.
What’s a critical endpoint you rarely consider a potential security exploit? Your electric car, so Trend Micro announced VicOne, a dedicated security option for the electric and connected car of the future.
Devolutions has a three-tiered IT security model for the modern MSP. Basic connection management at tier three, with database protection as well as tier two, and privileged access management to boot at tier one.
Proofpoint integrated its CASB solution with the Okta Identity Cloud to detect and remediate any suspicious Okta logins.
Revved up tools with a new name, the Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response Expert automatically sandboxes suspicious files and detects same on individual endpoints. To help with that and more, Kaspersky opened three more Transparency Centers in Japan, Singapore, and the U.S.
TD SYNNEX added Alert Logic by HelpSystems to its portfolio.
Forescout added an MSP partner program to its Envision Channel Program to support customers with enhanced technical and professional services capabilities.
Other product news. Check out the new snazzy user interface (pictured) for the Domotz network monitoring software for MSPs and integrators.
The Zomentum Grow sales acceleration app now integrates with QuickBooks Online for U.S.-based partners. Reduce data entry, improve invoice accuracy, and generate colorful charts for your manager.
For those clients who soak up all the Wi-Fi bandwidth and start whining for more, check out the new Zyxel family of 6E Boost access points with extended range in the 6 GHZ bend and more goodies like the BandFlex radio design that operates in 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands.
Marketing 360 launched a new mobile app that lets clients manage, communicate, and accept payments from customers on smartphones, including with Google Pay and Apple Pay.
Yamaha’s ADECIA Tabletop Solution includes a Microsoft Teams-compliant RM-TT microphone so good you can understand that guy who mumbles all the time.
Brother expanded its family of INKvestment Tank All-In-One printers with three new models, all with up to one year of ink in the box with easy-to-change cartridges.
Non-product vendor news. Canalys Chief Analyst Jay McBain (pictured) is now also a strategic advisoe for Gradient MSP.
The red carpet leading to the door at Vade is for Brian Fravel, who joins as vice president of marketing.
Partner Gem Awards, the new incentive program from disti TBI, allows qualifying resellers the chance to use exclusive resources to grow their business.
Oh yeah, TBI also has a new employee packet ready for Peter Trinh, who has joined the engineering team of solution architects.
Pax8 proved it provides cybersecurity risk management by completing the SOC 2 Type 1 examination.
This week’s stats ticker:
The Netwrix 2022 Cloud Security Report is only half bad news: just over 53% of organizations suffered a cyberattack on their cloud infrastructure within the last 12 months. Almost three quarters (73%) of those were phishing attacks, the most common type of attack. Average detection times are slowing since 2020 when 76% of respondents spotted that type of attack within minutes or hours, but only 47% found incursions that quickly in 2022. Ransomware detection within minutes or hours slipped as well, from 86% in 2020 to 74% in 2022. Almost half of companies increased their cloud security budget in 2022 but point tools from different vendors often leave security gaps. Unfortunately, breaches keep getting more expensive, with 28% reporting unplanned expenses to fix security gaps in 2020, but that number jumped to 49% by 2022. The usual suspects of lack of IT staff, lack of cloud expertise, and lack of budget got the blame.
JumpCloud’s Q2 2022 SME IT Trends Report, “IT Evolution: How IT Is Securing the Next Stage of Small and Medium-Sized (SME) Workplace Models,” found that SMEs now consider security risks their top concern compared to remote/hybrid work that bothered them earlier. Tool choice overwhelms many respondents, with 43.7% of IT employees reporting they need six or more tools to get their job done, while 74.6% would prefer a single tool. Political and financial uncertainty add more complexity for SME IT teams working to secure their users and data in less-than-ideal circumstances. Management needs to address the issue of replacing a sprawling tech stack that introduces risk gaps with a platform approach.
The 2022 State of Upskilling Report from Pluralsight found that 48% of tech workers are so frustrated with their lack of upskilling resources that they considered changing jobs. 75% factor their employer’s willingness to provide resources to improve their tech skills into their plans to stay or leave. Of course, cybersecurity is the area with the largest skills gap among respondents, replacing cloud computing as their top area of focus for IT staff and their organizations in 2022. 43% rank cybersecurity as their top concern while 39% still say cloud computing.
Finger Lickin’ Pepsi. It’s like Japan is a completely separate country from America or something, because they approach food and drink differently than we do. For instance, you know about the guidance to pair white wine with fish and red wine with beef, right?
Well, while America and Japan agree that fried chicken is amazing and we should eat it at least five times per week (non-scientific polling result), our Japanese friends ignore the “which wine goes with chicken” question and pair the fried kind not with wine at all but with Pepsi Zero Specialized for Karaage, a Japanese-style of frying chicken.
Just to be sure you know when to drink it, the bottle full of clear Pepsi Zero Karaage Senyo includes a photo of fried chicken on the label. Take that, Colonel Sanders.
Photo: Suntory
