Opening Day for Major League Baseball is a big deal whether you’re a fan or not. The TV news in every market within sniffing distance of a team runs stories of happy fans in short sleeves eating hot dogs and drinking $12 beers. This year, Detroit fans sat in 31 degree weather in a snowstorm, sipping hot chocolate. And watching their team’s first home run of the year, even though it’s hard to tell the ball from the snowflakes.
Microsoft news. The Global Partner Solutions group at Microsoft promotes Rodney Clark (pictured) to the position of corporate vice president of global channel sales and channel chief, as current channel chief Gavriella Schuster announces her intention leave the company after seven years running Microsoft’s One Commercial Partner program. Most recently, Clark led the IoT and Mixed Reality Sales businesses.
Keeping busy developing custom Microsoft Teams solutions recently? Check out Microsoft’s advanced specialization in custom solutions for Microsoft Teams, to help the 85% of companies accelerating digitization of employee interaction and collaboration, and 67% using AI to improve workflows. Partners must achieve a minimum of 1,000 Microsoft Teams active usage growth and have four people with Microsoft 365 Certified: Developer Associate MS-600 credentials.
Cisco news. Hello to Cisco Plus, the new as-a-service strategy to provide more flexible buying and use models to customers. The embedded network-as-a-service model adds end-to-end visibility, secure onramps to applications, and more.
Speaking of networks, want to know what’s happening on yours? Check out the new integrations linking Cisco’s ThousandEyes and AppDynamics tools with its widely deployed switching family. DNA Advantage and Premier customers will able to run the ThousandEyes agent natively on their Catalyst 9300/9400 switches too.
Don’t worry, NetOps and SecOps folks, Cisco has a new SASE offering to help simplify security and networking. Secure Access Service Edge features include data loss prevention, remote browser isolation, cloud malware detection, and one or four other goodies.
Other product news. Lenovo enhanced its hyperconverged infrastructure platform. Hello to what the company says is the only 4U 8-socket SAP HANA Certified hyperconverged platform available with VMware vSAN, as well as a new suite of edge-to-cloud advisory and implementation services.
Epiq legal services and corporate customers can now take advantage of modernized disaster recovery and data protection with Zerto. Epiq clients who use software from Zerto too can protect petabytes without a sweat.
Spring brings lots of new things, including a new user interface and enhanced AI for Agiloft’s contract lifecycle management tools. New UI, search, Microsoft 365 apps, AI toolkit, and enhanced Adobe Sign integration.
Akamai announced Akamai Vaccine Edge for Salesforce Vaccine Cloud, aimed at government agencies and healthcare organizations.
Non-product vendor news. BitTitan welcomes Khan Klatt (pictured) as the new director of engineering.
Paessler promoted Peter Campisi to regional manager, channel sales, North America.
The red carpet’s out over at NetFortris as Sean Donohoe joins as national channel manager.
Sherweb acquired Global Mentoring Solutions for its white-labeled MSP support, help desk, and NOC services. Terms were not disclosed.
Edge cloud services player Zadara rolled out its multifaceted zPartner Program. Three tiers, sales support and training, co-op marketing, technical support, and so on.
Customers are moving to the cloud, so the new Fortanix Partners First program shows resellers how to grow their biz while pursuing that transition. Leverages Fortanix Data Security Manager, which works across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform.
As cars got smarter, they got targeted. Panasonic and McAfee have teamed to build a Vehicle Security Operation Center to commercialize vehicle security monitoring services.
ExtraHop’s Overwatch Managed Network Detection and Response powered by ExtraHop Reveal(x) 360 will be distributed through SYNNEX.
To help simplify hybrid cloud deployment and management, Gigamon tightened integration with FireEye.
IBM and Red Hat teamed with Celonis on a global strategic partnership to help clients digitally transform operations. IBM Global Business Services will lead the way.
IQ Wired will sell Pidj.co’s messaging and marketing platform through its network of independent technology sales agents.
Commercial real estate took a major hit with the pandemic, so adding more intelligent monitoring and management of systems with the team-up of Intelligent Buildings and Tempered Networks makes sense.
Optiv Security unveiled its Enterprise Internet of Things Lab to help security teams locate and mitigate issues.
You can now run the Cloudera Data Platform on Google Cloud Platform.
This week’s stats ticker:
Kaseya’s 2021 MSP Benchmark Survey, conducted last December, asked 1,000 owners and techs at MSPs in 50 countries what they’ve learned from the previous year. No surprise, COVID-19 made a mess of things, with 77% of MSPs reporting their clients were hit by cyberattacks. 65% increased their revenues by delivering more cybersecurity services despite the pandemic-caused global economic recession. The need for compliance services grew as states continue adding data privacy laws. 70% of MSP clients struggled to keep up with compliance demand. More consistent data backup needs remain an issue (c’mon, biz owners, we’ve been telling you this for three decades). Backup of cloud data from Office 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce was provided by about half of MSPs in 2019, but now it’s up to 70%. MSPs want more integrated tools for remote support too.
The second annual Cyber Protection Week survey from Acronis found that 80% of companies now run as many as 10 solutions simultaneously for data protection and cybersecurity. 68% of IT users have no idea if their data’s been modified without their knowledge, including 20% of IT pros. 43% don’t know if their protection works against zero-day exploits because their tools don’t make that info easy to find. Worse, 10% of IT pros don’t know if they’re subject to data privacy regulations. Oops. If they don’t know they’re liable, they can’t ensure data privacy measures are in place. 83% of users spent more time on their own devices, yet only half of them took extra security steps, and a third put off patches for at least a week after notification.
WatchGuard’s Internet Security Report for Q4 2020 contains a surprise or two. The hot new threat vector apparently is fileless malware attacks, which were up 888% on a year over year basis. Also on the rise, though not nearly as much were cryptominer malware detections (up more than 25% over 2019) and malware delivered via HTTPS (up 41%). On the other hand, malware volumes overall were down for the fourth consecutive quarter, and unique ransomware variants (as opposed to attacks) fell to 2,152 from 4,131 in 2019 and the all-time-high of 5,489 in 2018. Keep an eye on this possible trend too: a virus that directly targets IoT devices and consumer-grade network devices like routers made WatchGuard’s top 10 malware detections list for the first time in Q4. This being the age of work-from-home computing, though, we’re guessing this won’t be the last time.
Altaro Software did a survey last month of 370 MSPs about their Office 365 business. No surprise, biz is up, with 70% reporting an increase in sales when their clients started working remotely, including 55% who saw more implementation work. Two-thirds felt Microsoft 365 helped clients transition smoothly from office-based to remote working through tools like Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint. Adoption of third-party tools for managing those systems increased as well, because 85% of MSPs use at least one.
Leave the gun. Make the cannoli. The urge to cook and video yourself doing same during the pandemic lockdown has grown ever more urgent. What’s a social media-oriented mafioso to do? Start a cooking blog!
That was the plan for Marc Feren Cloude Biart, age 53, an alleged member of a crime family hiding in the Dominican Republic. Though careful to keep his face out of his videos, he left his body tattoos on display. Yep, police IDed Biart’s tattoos on his YouTube cooking vlog and nabbed him. He’d been on the run since 2014.
