The cybersecurity vendor released a statement Wednesday after a threat actor claimed to have stolen data from a well-known security company.

Zscaler released a statement Wednesday saying it “can confirm there is no impact or compromise” to its customer or corporate systems, after a threat actor claimed to have stolen data from a major cybersecurity company.

The cybersecurity vendor said that its investigation found only that an “isolated test environment” — which did not contain customer data — had been exposed to the internet.

The threat actor, IntelBroker, claimed in a forum post that it would sell access to “one of the largest cyber security companies,” according to a screengrab shared on X. BleepingComputer reported that the threat actor elsewhere had identified Zscaler as the company in question.

Zscaler said in its initial statement Wednesday that it was investigating after a post was shared on X by a threat actor, claiming to “have potentially obtained unauthorized information from a cybersecurity company.”

In a later update to the statement Wednesday, Zscaler said it can dispel the rumors started by the threat actor.

“Zscaler can confirm there is no impact or compromise to its customer, production and corporate environments,” the company said in the statement.

“Our investigation discovered an isolated test environment on a single server (without any customer data) which was exposed to the internet,” Zscaler said. “The test environment was not hosted on Zscaler infrastructure and had no connectivity to Zscaler’s environments.”

The test environment “was taken offline for forensic analysis,” the company added.

In a wide-ranging interview with CRN at last week’s MongoDB.local NYC event, CEO Dev Ittycheria offered his views on why AI development is about to enter a more “transformative” phase, the thinking behind the company’s MongoDB AI Application Program to accelerate AI application development, and the role partners are playing in the AI wave.

MongoDB occupies a critical position in the AI wave now sweeping the IT industry. With MongoDB Atlas, the company’s next-generation cloud database and development platform, along with related products, its strategic alliances with all three cloud hyperscalers, and its extensive base of channel and technology partners, the New York-based company is well-positioned for what comes next in AI.

Last week at the company’s MongoDB.local NYC event, president and CEO Dev Ittycheria, in a keynote speech (pictured), said AI is at a “crucible moment” – defined as the inflection points in time when pivotal decisions are made that establish long-term trends and determine a technology’s trajectory.

“We’re at a time where every company is facing a crucible moment when it comes to AI. AI can completely reimagine how you run your business, how you engage with your customers, and how you become more nimble and efficient,” Ittychria said.

[Related: The Coolest Database System Companies Of The 2024 Big Data 100]

Ittycheria compared the current AI wave to previous tectonic shifts in the IT industry including the internet, the iPhone, and cloud computing. Each was marked by early (and sometimes failed) businesses and tech products followed by more transformative technologies. (The CEO even showed a graphic of a newspaper headline from 2000 asking whether the Internet was “just a passing fad.”)

Ittycheria said the real value of AI will be generated by the applications and services that are developed and run on platforms like MongoDB Atlas. “It’s a no-brainer that you’re going to see an explosion in the number of [AI-based] applications built this coming year.”

To that end, at the event, MongoDB launched its MAAP (MongoDB AI Application Program) initiative that provides a complete technology stack, services and other resources to help businesses develop and deploy at scale applications with advanced generative AI capabilities. MAAP, with MongoDB Atlas at its core, includes reference architectures and technology from a who’s who in the AI space including all three cloud platform giants, LLM (large language model) tech developers Cohere and Anthropic, and a number of AI development tool companies including Fireworks.ai, LlamaIndex and Credal.ai.

In addition, MongoDB unveiled a number of new MongoDB Atlas capabilities that make it easier for businesses and organizations to build, deploy and run modern applications – including those with generative AI capabilities.

Those unveilings included the general availability of MongoDB Atlas Stream Processing for developing applications that work with streaming “data in motion,” the public preview of MongoDB Atlas Edge Server for deploying and operating distributed applications in the cloud and at the edge, and the general availability of MongoDB Atlas Search Nodes on AWS and Google Cloud and in preview mode for Microsoft Azure.

MongoDB, meanwhile, has enjoyed robust growth. For its fiscal 2024 (ended Jan. 31, 2024) MongoDB reported total revenue of $1.68 billion, up 27 percent year over year, highlighted by 34-percent growth in MongoDB Atlas revenue.

In a wide-ranging interview with CRN at the MongoDB.local NYC event, Ittycheria offered his views on why AI development is about to enter a more “transformative” phase, the thinking behind the company’s MongoDB AI Application Program to accelerate AI application development, and the role partners are playing in the AI wave. His answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

In your keynote speech you said that AI is at a “crucible moment” right now. How so?

I think it’s a pending crucible moment, how people essentially prepare and leverage [AI] for the future. The point I was trying to say is it hasn’t completely transformed my life – not yet. The analogy I’d use is like 1998 and 2000. The internet had not completely transformed my life just yet, but it was soon going to do so. I started to help businesses leveraging the internet, my personal life was affected by the internet. Even today, if internet access goes out, all hell breaks loose.

So why do you think the crucible moment is still pending? We’re not at an AI crucible moment just yet?

I think, to me, it’s back to [the fact] there’s lots of investments being made at the infrastructure layer of AI, building out compute, training models, putting in all the foundational elements for AI. But the first generation of AI apps that we’re seeing, these chatbot tools that do research, summarize information and generate content. They serve some utility, but they are not truly transformative.

One point I was making was that also happened when the first set of apps for the iPhone came out. They were nice utilities. But then when you saw how those apps ultimately affected every [person] in their lives and how they lived, how they worked, how they collaborated, that was delivered through the apps. And so the point I was making is that I think today we just have some interesting, nice [AI] utilities to serve some function or purpose. But they’re not transformative, as they will be in the future.

As you said in your keynote, as happened with the internet in early days, is there a danger of overstating or overestimating the impact of AI, either right now or in the future?

Every morning I wake up to something new in AI. Some new company gets funding, some new company is rolling out a new service or capability, or [there is] some new worry about safety, the negative implications of AI – there’s always something coming out. There’s a lot of interest around AI. But I do think, like with any tech adoption that has happened to us, it’s very easy to over-extrapolate in the short term, but underestimate in the long term.

I think the point of my keynote was to show that what happened in 2000, some people considered the internet a fad because in March of 2000 the bubble burst and they said, ‘This is just a lot of hype.’ And it was at that exact moment that the seeds were being planted for a new generation of apps and services that transformed my life.

So the first wave of AI applications that you just mentioned, what would be the easy ones? What would be an example of that?

We see a lot of customers rolling out chat bots for support services. It’s a relatively easy app because you have your own corporate data. We’re rolling out support agents. We have the corporate data, best practices, common errors that customers make, common misconfigurations, common questions. And it’s quite beneficial because instead of, you know, requiring a human to respond, you can very quickly get some bots to respond back with accurate information and that helps both the customer and helps us. It helps the customer get the answer quickly and helps us because we don’t have to expend a lot of resources and cost to do so.

So those are what I call almost no-brainer kind of apps that people are using. And you see some people using that for internal use, like we have an internal chatbot for our sales and marketing teams if they want to find information about a product and want to find information about how to handle, potentially, a question that a customer has or how to potentially put a proposal together. We have all these things, there’s all this institutional knowledge in our platform company that we can quickly bring to the fingertips of our people. I’m not saying it’s not of value, but it’s not exactly transformative. It’s just a way to become more efficient.

So what is your vision of how AI applications will evolve? What will the next wave of applications look like?

I’m starting to see signs – I’ll give you a good example. We have an automotive company [customer] who, obviously, as you can imagine, get calls from their customers when something’s not working, their car’s not working properly. What they have done is, they have recorded what the engine sounds like and to correlate engine sounds to the root-cause issue.

Now what they can do [using AI applications] is, when you’re driving one of their cars and you’re having a problem, they’ll ask if you can record the sound of the engine of your car and send that sound file to them. And that file will be used to diagnose – with a high probability of [accuracy] – what the problem is. So if you’re thinking that your car may have a funny noise, it could be, using simple analysis, that your brakes need to be replaced because they squeak or your carburetor needs to be repaired or replaced.

So that’s an interesting way, a whole new modality, to essentially troubleshoot. I don’t require the customer to come to my shop, leave the car for a couple days. Now they say, ‘We know what the problem is. We’re going to order the part for you. Show up tomorrow, the day after, and you’ll be in and out very, very quickly.’ That’s an example of something that’s a little bit more transformative than a chatbot.

There’s no question customers are feeling overwhelmed. And I would say a combination of overwhelmed and fearful. They’re overwhelmed because the rate and pace in innovation in AI is so high, it’s almost like there’s a new announcement every week. Meta came out with Meta Llama 3 [April 18] – their benchmarks apparently are as good as OpenAI. ChatGPT: some people are saying maybe I shouldn’t bet on open source. A couple weeks earlier Mistral

came out with a very low-cost model that was as good as ChatGPT 4. Before that Anthropic came out with a new model. So the rate and pace of change in AI is very, very high. People are feeling overwhelmed, which means they get paralyzed.

But on the other side of the coin, they’re fearful. They’re fearful because if I don’t do anything, don’t act and try to take advantage of new technology, there are risks that my competition will do so and potentially not just marginalize me but potentially disrupt me. That’s the tension that customers are feeling.

And that’s the whole purpose behind our MAAP program. With the MongoDB Application Program they come out with a validated set of reference architectures for a bunch of use cases, built-in integrations that can get started right away, and technical expertise to get you up and running as fast as possible.

But to your point, we’re not locking people into any one ecosystem. We work with any cloud, any LLM, any orchestration tool, any fine-tuning model. The point is, the only way to overcome this is you’ve got to start somewhere. You can’t just sit on the sidelines [and] do nothing. But you also don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. So our point is, get started, try some projects, learn. And through that experience you’ll find out what’s important to you and what’s most impactful for you. And you’ll gain confidence – or maybe lose confidence, based on the technologies you’re using – and decide, ‘Okay, I want to change this component, maybe this orchestration layer I was using just doesn’t fit me, I’m going to try something else.’ But it allows them to learn without taking an exorbitant amount of risk.

Talk a little bit more about how the MAAP initiative addresses these issues. How will providing all these components in one environment help people get past the fear and the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Well, one thing is, people need databases. So it’s not like your database technology is going to change. You can feel pretty comfortable betting on MongoDB. If they feel like, “Hey, I’ve started with OpenAI, but I’d rather use [Meta AI] Llama.” It’s very easy with APIs to all the large language models. And so that becomes relatively easy to point your API from one foundational model to another if you’re using a certain set of orchestration layers, tools like llamaindex or LangChain. It’s not that difficult. We have integrations with all those tools so that you can decide which one fits the way you want to work.

And then there’s fine tuning tools, and so on and so forth. You can still use Fireworks for AI integration and model hosting capabilities. So depending on what your model is – some customers want to do everything in house, they want to use open source and they may run the models in house. Some customers want to start in the cloud. You can start with Amazon, you can start with Azure. But if you find [that] most of your data is in AWS, maybe you stay on AWS, we give you that flexibility to do so. We’re the only one that partners with all three [cloud hyperscalers].

We’ve written quite a bit about MongoDB’s strategic relationships with the three hyperscalers: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and how MongoDB works with them even though some of them have competing products. What’s their role here?

We’re very popular in all three clouds. There’s tons of MongoDB usage in all three clouds. [The hyperscalers] are doing it to ensure that their own customers are using MongoDB to get access to all the Mongo DB capabilities. And it’s not just from an integration point of view. It’s from the go-to-market – we’re in all the co-sell programs they have, we’re on the first-party consoles. We’re the only ISV featured in all their startup programs. So startups, whether they’re building on AWS, Google [Cloud] or Azure, can leverage MongoDB. Those are examples of the fact that we really try and make it easy for our customers. No matter where they are, they have the freedom to run their workloads anywhere.

What kind of opportunities does the MAAP initiative create for MongoDB’s partner base beyond the specific launch partners, including systems integrators (SIs) and ISVs?

Boutique SIs are part of the program. And the reason we started there is because we want to start with partners who really know MongoDB and really know some of the integrations we’ve built. In terms of people, Accenture and other large SIs have lots of resources, but not all of them are trained on MongoDB. You can expect us to expand to the larger SIs. But we wanted to start out of the gate with people who could really hit the ground running.

I do expect the partnerships to expand over time [and] you will see us adding more partners to the program. There’ll be regional partners by geo[ography], there’ll be industry-specific partners by vertical industry. And there’ll be domain-specific partners with particular use cases or technology.

The key takeaway I would want to leave with you is that partnerships are a core element of this. We know we can’t do it all on our own.

We wanted to come out of the gate – what customers really appreciate is a perspective and a point of view. What they don’t want is, ‘I can do anything you want. Tell me what you want.’ That’s not very helpful. ‘Give me a starting point, give me a place where I can start and get going.’ And as they get more experience and all that they’ll start outperforming their own point of view. We’re trying to help them.

And when we talk to customers, we’re not cloud dependent or partial to any one cloud. We’re not partial to any one LLM. And so customers feel like, ‘Okay, I can trust your feedback because it’s not like you have one set of tricks you’re trying to sell me.’ My point is, it’s not like we have a finite set of solutions and every answer is our own solution. That gives us more credibility with our customers.

In addition to MAAP, there were a series of announcements at the MongoDB event including the general availability of MongoDB Atlas Stream Processing, the general availability of MongoDB Atlas Vector Search integrated with Amazon Bedrock, and collaboration with Google Cloud to optimize Gemini Code Assist for building applications on MongoDB. How do partners benefit from these expanded capabilities and what kind of opportunities do they create for partners?

So what partners can do – because we have a lot of people who are building applications on top of MongoDB – is that now they can have a much more simplified architecture to do things like event-based applications with stream processing. It’s all designed around dealing with live data and data in motion. That’s happening. And you have to react to those events and figure out how you respond to events. And so we make it easy for partners to build these event-driven applications, which to me is the modern app of the future. You can’t have a static app that can’t deal with new data. For our partners, it just enables them to have a much more simplified architecture because the stream processing and the OLTP engine of MongoDB is all essentially one platform, so it’s much easier and much more liberating to build on MongoDB than to have to use a bunch of bespoke technologies.

The same with Edge Server. We’ve talked about how to run in the cloud, all the processes on the cloud. But as you know, if you have customers now, like a retail customer who has stores in a particular geography, a country or region, they need to do local processing. Bringing intelligence down to the edge is an important element, you can’t run everything in the cloud. Over time you’re going to start even running models on your devices – Apple is already making some noises about how that’s going to happen soon. So you need to be able to process and deal with models that could be in devices. Or it could be on edge servers, say, in a store, it could be in a hospital where you need very quick access. There’s a whole host of new use cases that are going to emerge.

In your keynote you mentioned MongoDB’s investments in a half-dozen “boutique” systems integrators including PeerIslands, Pureinsights and Gravity 9. They are obviously a key part of MAAP. Do you foresee additional investments like this?

One of our board members is a gentleman named Frank D’Souza who was co-founder and CEO of Cognizant [Technology Solutions]. And as you know, Cognizant became a very, very large systems integrator. What he shared with us – it was his advice that we ultimately acted on – was that the challenge the largest SIs have is that they’re so large [and] they’re also so distributed, [that] just because you get one team to understand and apply MongoDB for one or two accounts does not mean the rest of the organization has the capability or the wherewithal to do so.

So his point was, invest in SIs who become experts and know how to build applications on top of MongoDB. And then ultimately, once they get to a reasonable size scale, you know, someone like an Accenture or an Infosys or TCS may come in and acquire that company. Accenture buys a new company, like, almost every week. That’s the way that they inculcate new technologies into their organizations because it’s too hard to do so organically.

And so that’s part of our strategy if we want to inculcate a bunch of systems integrators who have become deep experts in MongoDB, whether it’s just building new applications on MongoDB or migrating legacy applications onto MongoDB. And we see huge demand for that.

And by the way, we’ve already done a lot of business with Accenture and TCS and Infosys and Cognizant and Capgemini and all that. In fact, I have a call with one of the top leaders of Accenture tomorrow. We don’t want to be in the systems integration business. This is more of a way to help build up a competency that one of the large SIs may find very attractive. And there’s analogues: Salesforce does this themselves. They had a tough time getting large SIs to focus on Salesforce technology. As their business grew, they invested in these boutique SIs that ultimately were acquired by the larger SIs.

I know MongoDB has been quite bullish on its financials given its 27-percent revenue growth in fiscal 2024. How is this year looking? Are you seeing any impact of the uncertain economy? And is this AI wave immune to the economy?

I can’t comment too much on the [fiscal 2025 first quarter] quarter because that would be non-public information. A year ago we started seeing signs of the economy slowing down – that’s when the Fed [U.S. Federal Reserve] was raising rates [and] interest rates were spiking. And what we said was, you know, organizations are kind of in a conundrum, they have to figure out how to do more with less, but they also have to invest in AI to really figure out how they can leverage this new technology for a competitive advantage.

And so I think customers are very interested in becoming more confident on AI and figuring out how, you know – the questions they ask are where to get started. ‘What use-cases should I focus on and what tech stack I should use?’ That being said, they’re being very prudent because there’s got to be a compelling return on investment for them.

The message from customers — that they expect security products to work well together — is increasingly being acted upon around the industry, top vendor and solution provider executives told CRN this week.

Cybersecurity vendors are putting more emphasis on meeting the needs of customers through integrating effectively with products from other vendors, reflecting a noteworthy change in attitude around much of the industry, top vendor and solution provider executives told CRN this week.

While the security industry still has much further to go, the signs of the beginnings of this shift were everywhere during the RSA Conference in San Francisco, executives said.

[Related: 10 Cybersecurity Companies Making Moves At RSAC 2024]

The concept of alliances between security vendors is certainly not new. But according to top executives such as Proofpoint CEO Sumit Dhawan, the motives for integrating are different now than in the past, with a greater focus by vendors on responding to the customer demand for unified platforms.

Previously, “as players in the cyber [industry], we typically have worked in an arm’s length approach and done very selective integration for convenience,” Dhawan said in an interview with CRN.

However, major cybersecurity vendors “are now doing integrations for the purpose of delivering the best customer value — which is different than doing integrations for convenience, for adding capabilities into your product,” he said. “That’s a shift in the industry that I’m seeing.”

The arguably long-overdue development comes in response to a convergence of many of the big trends in the cybersecurity world: Customer and partner struggles over tool sprawl and complexity, the shortage of talent needed for managing tools and the urgent needs from multiple directions to bolster security.

As a result, an increasing number of vendors are seeing that the demand for consolidating tools into a unified platform can also be answered by closely integrating with others in the industry, according to Sanjay Beri, co-founder and CEO at Netskope.

“I think there’s a pragmatic middle ground of realizing that nobody should have just one platform for security and networking. Instead, let’s have a few [platforms], and we integrate,” Beri told CRN. “I think it’s a bigger theme.”

When it comes to vendor integrations, tool fatigue and the need for rationalization of security products among customers “is really driving that further,” said Bill Young, managing partner at Optiv, No. 24 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500.

“That means that now we don’t want to have a bunch of disparate little tools running around. We need to have things that are working together,” Young said. “So I feel like the narrative — ‘How do I fix the tool sprawl from the industry?’ — has become a question of, ‘How do I make [tools] more valuable by integrating with the rest of the ecosystem?’”

Ultimately, “that’s why I think we’re seeing a lot more of that integration conversation,” he said. “It’s that, ‘If I don’t play nice with the other tools, then I’m just an island — a tool that’s going to get dropped.’”

While many vendors on the packed show floor at RSAC 2024 touted integrations rolled out recently, the week of the show itself also saw an array of new alliances announced.

The general availability launch of CrowdStrike’s Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, for instance, saw integrations unveiled with dozens of vendors including Netskope, Zscaler, Proofpoint, ExtraHop, Trellix and Palo Alto Networks.

Data engine provider Cribl unveiled a pair of integrations, with Microsoft and Wiz, which CEO Clint Sharp said reflects the massive demand from customers for different tools to link up together.

“What we’re seeing in the marketplace is, enterprises want the best of everything across all the categories of security,” Sharp told CRN.

Just ahead of RSAC 2024, meanwhile, Orca Security and Aqua Security announced a new partnership and integration, in spite of the prior rivalry between the cloud security vendors in a number of areas.

Currently in the cybersecurity industry, “there’s good co-opetition,” said Securonix CEO Nayaki Nayyar.

“Yes, we want to compete for sure,” she said. “But there’s also integration and partnerships that are becoming much, much closer.”

Customers Have ‘Been Pretty Clear’

At Trellix, which supports more than 500 integrations with other vendors, CEO Bryan Palma said that customers have shown again and again that “they don’t want a bunch of siloed, proprietary systems.”

“I think we’re long beyond where that’s appropriate,” he told CRN. “We should be listening to customers. They’ve been pretty clear about that.”

Netskope’s Beri said it’s apparent that even the industry’s prime example of a vendor that offers security capabilities in nearly every category, Microsoft, is now “more open to integrating” than in the past.

“Many of these [vendors] realize that, ‘You know what? The world wants us to play well with everybody for the betterment of the customer,’” he said.

For Proofpoint, Dhawan said the “mindset shift” in the cybersecurity industry has been evident as his company has worked with some of the other biggest players to enable their tools to integrate effectively amongst each other.

“When we are reciprocating with CrowdStrike, with Palo Alto [Networks], with Okta and others in the industry, we’re seeing the same degree of interest from them to do that,” he said. “I truly believe it is [a major shift]. I think it’s something that the security industry has to, and is starting to, learn.”

For the week ending May 10, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Wiz, Apple, ISSQUARED, ServiceNow, Microsoft, and the more than 50 IT vendors that signed the CISA Secure by Design pledge.

The Week Ending May 10

Topping this week’s Came to Win is cloud security startup Wiz, which pulled in an impressive $1 billion in new funding this week – venture capital the company will use to fuel its already rapid growth.

Also making this week’s list is Apple for debuting new iPad tablets that the company says provide AI capabilities that outperform the coming wave of AI PCs from other vendors. Managed service provider ISSQUARED is here thanks to a savvy acquisition that expands its geographic reach and its Microsoft Azure expertise. And ServiceNow and Microsoft make the list for integrating their GenAI platforms – an industry first.

And a host of IT companies – including many leading cybersecurity tech developers – win kudos for signing the Secure by Design pledge, put together by the federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), committing themselves to building enhanced security into their products in line with CISA’s Secure by Design principles.

Wiz Lands $1B In Funding, $12B Valuation Amid Surging Cloud Security Growth

Wiz, the fast-growing cloud security provider that has already attracted an impressive amount of funding, this week said it had raised an additional $1 billion in financing from high-powered Silicon Valley venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock and Sequoia Capital.

The new funding pushes the company’s total financing since its 2020 launch to $1.9 billion and boosts its valuation to $12 billion. That’s up from $10 billion following the company’s early 2023 funding round – which had already stood as the highest among cybersecurity unicorns.

Wiz has been generating surging growth throughout its four-year history — initially thanks to its cloud security posture management (CSPM) offering that rapidly delivers improved cloud visibility and security. The company surpassed $350 million in annual recurring revenue last year and has expanded its technology to become a broad Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) provider spanning security for cloud, code, data and AI.

The additional funding comes after top company executives told CRN earlier this year that Wiz is pursuing an intensified push with channel partners for its next stage of growth.

Apple Calls AI PC Rivals Laggards With M4-Based iPad Pro Reveal

Apple used the unveiling of its new, M4-powered iPad Pro tablets as an opportunity to claim that it’s far ahead of Windows-based AI PC vendors, thanks to a new version of its Neural Engine the company says is “more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC today.”

The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant revealed the next generation of its iPad Pro tablets, which will feature a smaller, 11-inch version in addition to the standard 13-inch model. The company also revealed a new iPad Air, which will include a new 13-inch model on top of the standard 11-inch size and use the company’s M2 chip that debuted in 2022.

Apple said the new iPad Pros will be its first devices to use the company’s new M4 system-on-chip, the successor to the M3 that debuted in Mac computers last fall. For the first time in the iPad’s history, the premium tablet designs are also getting OLED screens, thanks to a new display technology that combines two OLED panels to increase brightness and color vibrancy.

The Neural Engine, a key component of the M4, is Apple’s version of the neural processing unit (NPU) that accelerates AI workloads. Apple executives made a point to say that Apple’s custom processor designs have used NPUs far longer than chip vendors.

“Now while the chip industry is just starting to add NPUs to some of their processors, we’ve been including our industry-leading Neural Engine in our chip for years,” said Tim Millet, Apple vice president of platform architecture.

ISSQUARED Acquires Fellow MSP CCT, Gains Microsoft Azure Talent

IT and cybersecurity MSP ISSQUARED this week said it had acquired CCT Technologies, a California bay area-based MSP, as a way to both expand its geographic presence and gain experienced Microsoft Azure talent.

ISSQUARED, which was on the 2024 CRN MSP 500, acquired CCT as part of its plan to extend the company’s geographic reach, ISSQUARED founder and CEO Bala Ramaiah told CRN. In addition to an expanded geographical presence, CCT also brings ISSQUARED increased Microsoft Azure expertise, Ramaiah said.

The CEO said ISSQUARED has two more acquisition deals in the pipeline for later this summer. The company made two previous acquisitions in 2018 and 2019.

ServiceNow, Microsoft To Integrate Their Now Assist, Copilot GenAI Platforms

Microsoft and ServiceNow this week unveiled plans for what they are calling the industry’s first integration of two different generative AI platforms.

The move will allow the ServiceNow Now Assist and Microsoft Copilot to seamlessly interact, passing data and information between them and handing off other tasks in ServiceNow and compatible Microsoft 365 applications to each other.

Now Assist is ServiceNow’s technology for adding AI and generative AI into every workflow on the company’s flagship Now Platform workflow automation system. Merging the intelligence of Now Assist with Microsoft Copilot creates a more holistic, connected experience that allows users to get the help they need, regardless of which platform they’re working in, said Dorit Zilbershot, ServiceNow vice president of product management, AI and innovation, speaking at this week’s ServiceNow Knowledge 2024 conference in Las Vegas.

ServiceNow channel partners told CRN that the Now Assist and Copilot integration will provide an intuitive way to handle workflow management and make it easier for solution providers and their customers to leverage all the functionality and data available on the Now platform.

Dozens Of Companies Sign Secure By Design Pledge

More than 50 IT vendors, including many in the cybersecurity industry, win a round of applause this week for signing the Secure by Design pledge put together by the federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The pledge signifies that an enterprise software developer will commit to building enhanced security into their products, in line with CISA’s Secure by Design principles.

Among the initial signatories – including many in the cybersecurity industry – were AWS, BlackBerry, Cisco Systems, Claroty, Cloudflare, ESET, Forescout, Fortinet, Gigamon, GitHub, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huntress, IBM, Ivanti, Lenovo, Microsoft, NetApp, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, Proofpoint, Qualys, Rapid7, SecureWorks, SentinelOne, Sophos, Tenable, Trellix, Veracode and Zscaler.

On Friday, the nonprofit group Health-ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center) issued an alert about the group, saying that Russia-linked Black Basta has ‘recently accelerated attacks against the healthcare sector.’

A cyberattack that affected clinical operations at St. Louis-based Ascension health system was perpetrated by Russia-linked ransomware group Black Basta, according to a report.

CNN, citing four sources, reported Friday that the group was responsible for the data breach at Ascension Wednesday.

On Friday, the nonprofit group Health-ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center) issued an alert about the group, saying that Black Basta has “recently accelerated attacks against the healthcare sector.”

CRN has reached out to both Ascension and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which has been aware of the group and issued its own alert in March 2023.

[RELATED STORY: Ascension Cyberattack: Electronic Health Records System Not Working, Some Elective Procedures ‘Temporarily Paused’]

HHS said that Black Basta was initially spotted in early 2022, known for its double extortion attack. The group not only executes ransomware but also exfiltrates sensitive data, operating a cybercrime marketplace to publicly release it should a victim fail to pay a ransom.

“The level of sophistication by its proficient ransomware operators, and reluctance to recruit or advertise on Dark Web forums, supports why many suspect the nascent Black Basta may even be a rebrand of the Russian-speaking RaaS threat group Conti, or also linked to other Russian-speaking cyber threat groups,” the alert from HHS said.

According to one report from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic and cybersecurity risk-focused Corvus Insurance, Black Basta in less than two years has won itself more than $100 million via ransomware schemes from 329 organizations. Previous victims of its attacks include Dish Network, the American Dental Association, business process services firm Capita and tech firm ABB.

On Thursday, Ascension said that its electronic health records system was “currently unavailable” and that it was pausing some non-emergency elective procedures at its hospitals “out of an abundance of caution.”

Ascension, a nonprofit and Catholic health system with 140 hospitals in the U.S., said Wednesday that it initially detected “unusual activity on select technology network systems.” In an update Thursday, Ascension referred to the data breach as a “cybersecurity incident” and said that it was working “around the clock with internal and external advisors to investigate, contain, and restore our systems following a thorough validation and screening process.” The nonprofit had already said that it was using Mandiant to assist in the investigation and remediation process.

The health system said in its latest update that it did not have a timeline for restoring its system.

‘It’s probably one of the biggest announcements that we’ve ever made, or ever will make, because for the first time, Dell now has a cloud storage product to sell. This is hugely important to them because their customers sometimes say, ‘Hey, Dell guys, I don’t really want to buy any more on-prem storage from you guys. I want to do my storage in the cloud.’ And then the customer moves to Amazon and Dell gets nothing,’ said Wasabi CEO and Co-founder David Friend.

Cloud storage provider Wasabi, which touts its ability to provide cloud-based data storage at a fraction of the cost of that of Amazon Web Services, Thursday unveiled a new strategic agreement to provide Dell with its first cloud storage offering.

Wasabi has been working on building its Dell partnership for over two years, which included a meeting between Wasabi CEO David Friend and Dell CEO Michael Dell, Friend told CRN.

“It’s probably one of the biggest announcements that we’ve ever made, or ever will make, because for the first time, Dell now has a cloud storage product to sell,” Friend said. “This is hugely important to them because their customers sometimes say, ‘Hey, Dell guys, I don’t really want to buy any more on-prem storage from you guys. I want to do my storage in the cloud.’ And then the customer moves to Amazon and Dell gets nothing.”

[Related: Storage 100: The Digital Bridge Between The Cloud And On-Premises Worlds]

As Dell moves to start selling cloud storage with help from Wasabi, it has put in place an unusual sales compensation program, Friend said.

“Dell’s sales team gets 100 percent comp for selling Wasabi, which puts us in a small group of only a handful of Dell partners for whom sales the Dell sales team make can actually retire quota and bring full compensation for selling a product that isn’t manufactured by Dell,” he said.

With the relationship, over 60,000 worldwide customers of Dell’s Data Domain data protection technology can now add the Wasabi cloud as a built-in extension to those devices, Friend said.

“This idea of a hybrid of local storage and cloud storage has been something which I’ve been advocating for a long, long time,” he said. “If you’re backing up your servers, let’s say, and you have an outage and need to restore, you need that local copy because every second counts when you’re down, especially if you’re running a transaction system. … But if you’ve got a failure, you restore that most recent copy off that local device, and then if you need to find older backup, those are in the cloud.”

Data Domain comes with cloud tiering which automatically replicates data to the cloud as needed, and now that cloud can be the Wasabi cloud, Friend said.

“You never have to worry about your Data Domain device filling up and stop working because as it gets close to being filled up, it pushes the oldest stuff up to the cloud automatically,” he said. This is an architecture that I’ve been promoting really since the beginning of Wasabi, and finally Dell has implemented it and now we’re bringing it to market.”

The new relationship also means that Dell’s worldwide channel partners can all now sell Wasabi, either with a Wasabi purchase order or on a Dell PO to take advantage of potential Dell rebates, Friend said.

This is also a great way for partners to bring cloud storage to enterprise customers who perhaps were hesitant to buy from a smaller company like Wasabi despite the company already bringing in annual revenue of about $100 million, Friend said.

“But they’re very comfortable buying from Dell,” he said. “If they have a relationship with the Dell salesperson or partner, they can just buy Wasabi from Dell. … t’s a big deal. And we now have an employee living at Dell whose job is to start training the Dell salesforce.”

Solution providers currently working with Wasabi cloud storage should not feel any adverse impact from the company’s new Dell relationship, Friend said. Wasabi currently gets most of its revenue via relationships with a wide range of channel-focused storage and data protection technology vendors such as Commvault, Veeam, Rubrik and Arcserve, he said.

“A company like Veeam Software sells exclusively through the channel,” he said. “So a channel partner might sell Veeam’s data protection technology with Wasabi storage. And that’s the way the model works. We have a few OEM partners who actually embed Wasabi storage in their product, but the data protection vendors are just selling the backup. They’re not selling cloud storage. So customers are happy when the channel partner marries them up with Wasabi because the total solution is more competitive because of our much lower price than, say, Amazon. But if the channel partner wants to sell Veeam Software plus Wasabi through the Dell channel, that would not bother us.”