According to Google Cloud’s Nick Godfrey, generative AI capabilities appear to be giving defenders an edge over attackers.
The advent of new cybersecurity capabilities powered by generative AI appears to be giving defenders an edge over attackers, Google Cloud’s Nick Godfrey told CRN.
Although the situation may not last long, the current gains suggest that cybersecurity teams would be wise to double down on GenAI capabilities so they can get the most out of it, said senior director of the office of the CISO at Google Cloud and former global co-founder of GenAI. Godfrey said. -CISO at Goldman Sachs. [Related: 5 Emerging GenAI Security Threats In 2024]
According to Godfrey, GenAI has major implications for what is known as the “defender’s dilemma” – the notion that cyberdefense teams are expected to be 100 percent successful, while attackers are expected to succeed only once to have an impact. Does matter.
Thanks to newly available GenAI-powered capabilities for security, he said, “I think that right now, we have an opportunity to help solve the defender’s dilemma.”
Cybersecurity industry vendors have lauded GenAI’s ability to enable new functionality across many security tool categories, though the technology is perhaps making the biggest difference in the area of security operations.
For Google Cloud, for example, GenAI’s main focus is on using capabilities to help security operations analysts improve their decision making and automate more of routine tasks, according to Godfrey.
“Helping to accelerate security operations, reduce the scale and labor associated with them is a big driver for us,” he said.
Also, threat actors are believed to be making heavy use of GenAI tools to enhance their phishing and social engineering attacks as well as deepfake scams, but there is not much evidence that attackers are using more sophisticated technology. Have moved towards uses. ,
In contrast, “the use of AI by defenders is probably advancing at a faster pace,” Godfrey said.
The challenge for Google Cloud and all CISOs is, “How do we double this capacity?” He said. “How do we really understand where it can be used and how it can enhance and enhance the capability of existing teams while we still have that window?”
For IT consulting giant Accenture, No. 1 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2024, the opportunity is to seize Introduction A set of cybersecurity services with new capabilities powered by GenAI.
For example, Accenture said last week that it is deploying GenAI to enhance a number of services, including its managed detection and response (MDR) offering. Paolo Dal Sin, global head of Accenture Security, said the company’s security teams are leveraging an AI assistant that can better collect and analyze threat intelligence, ultimately significantly improving risk correlation.
Using these capabilities, he said, “there has been a material improvement in the effectiveness” of providing MDR to customers.
Ultimately, while concerns about the use of AI by attackers have been widespread, “we strongly believe that GenAI will help defenders more than attackers,” Del Sinn said. “And so we thought that as Accenture, we needed to invest in showing a different approach and looking at GenAI as an opportunity for security.”
For the week ending November 22, CRN will take a look at companies that have brought their ‘A’ game to the channel, including Viz, Google Cloud, Desktop, Nvidia, DXC and ServiceNow.
Week ending November 22
Topping this week’s Came to Win list is fast-growing cloud security provider Viz thanks to a strategic acquisition around cloud remediation technology.
This week’s list also includes Google Cloud to create a new AI agent partner program and security startup Desktop to launch its first channel program.
Nvidia is here to unveil its new four-GPU “superchip” for advanced AI computing. And IT services provider DXC and workflow automation company ServiceNow have teamed up to create a new center of excellence to accelerate the adoption of ServiceNow’s GenAI offerings.
Viz to acquire cloud remediation startup Daze for $450 million
Cloud and AI security provider Viz this week announced a deal to acquire channel-focused startup Daze to expand the vendor’s cloud and AI security platform with cloud remediation capabilities.
Calcalist reported its price tag Planned acquisition of Dazz At $450 million. CRN has contacted Viz and Daz for comment. A source familiar with the deal confirmed the figure crn,
Daze offers a cloud security platform that focuses on remediation, including capabilities such as application security state management and continuous threat and risk management.
In a post Thursday, Viz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport said Daze brings an “industry-leading remediation engine” that allows Viz to “help security teams correlate data from multiple sources and address application risks in a unified platform.” Will enable to empower to manage.
In July, Daze announced it had raised $50 million in funding, bringing the startup’s total funding since its launch in 2021 to $110 million.
This is the second acquisition in 2024 for fast-growing Viz deal to cloud detection and response provider Gem Security in April, and its third acquisition overall.
Google Cloud launches AI Agent Partner Program to boost GenAI sales, customer growth
Google Cloud makes this week’s list of five winning companies with its plans to take AI agent sales and customer adoption to new heights. Launching Google Cloud AI Agent Ecosystem Program Helping partners build and co-innovate AI agents through new technical and go-to-market resources.
“Through this program, we will provide incentives, product support and co-selling opportunities to help our service and ISV partners bring these solutions to market faster, reach more customers and grow their AI agent businesses.” are increasing,” said Kevin Ichchapurani, president of. Google Cloud’s global partner organization, in a blog post.
Additionally, the cloud giant launched a new AI Agent Space on Google Cloud Marketplace with the goal of enabling customers to more easily find and deploy partner-built AI agents.
Google Cloud plans for its new AI Agent Partner Program to accelerate the development and adoption of AI agents by supporting partners in three key areas: accelerated agent development, market success, and increased customer visibility.
Deskop Unveils First Channel Program to Improve Identity and Access Management with Partners
Staying on the topic of partner program launch, Deskop is Launching your first formal channel event Co-founder Rishi Bhargava asked for the help of solution and service providers to accelerate the development of its simplified platform for customer identity and access management (CIAM). crn,
Bhargava said the startup is taking a “partner-first” approach for its next phase of expansion and is hoping to surpass its current rate of 30 percent of revenue generated through partners.
“We’re starting to see signs where channel partners are already bringing us into bigger and bigger opportunities,” he said. “We are confident that this will lead to huge growth.”
Bhargava said Desktop is looking to expand with the recruitment of more solution and service provider partners, who will gain a formal process to engage with the company as part of the new channel program. Key benefits of the program include deal registration, incentives, pre-sales support and joint marketing programs.
Nvidia unveils 4-GPU GB200 NVL4 superchip
Nvidia debuted its biggest AI “chip” to date on this week’s list — the four-GPU Grace Blackwell GB200 NVL4 Superchip — which is another sign that the company is pursuing its AI computing ambitions. How to expand the traditional definition of semiconductor chips. Supercomputing announced in 2024 At the event on Monday, the new product is a step up from Nvidia’s recently launched Grace Blackwell GB200 superchip that was revealed in March.
The GB200 NVL4 superchip is designed for a “single server Blackwell solution” running a mix of high-performance computing and AI workloads, said Dion Harris, director of accelerated computing at Nvidia, in a briefing with reporters.
DXC, ServiceNow partner on new Center of Excellence, helping GenAI
Global technology services provider DXC this week unveiled a new Center of Excellence built with the help of ServiceNow to help drive AI adoption using ServiceNow’s GenAI technologies. new center of excellence The purpose is to demonstrate how the company’s customers can use ServiceNow’s AI capabilities in a practical way, said Howard Bovill, DXC’s executive vice president of consulting and engineering services. This includes working with Now Assist, a generative AI-powered service within the Now platform.
With the Center of Excellence, DXC can leverage all the knowledge it has built with customers around the world by bringing it all into one place, Bovill said.
Another benefit of the Center of Excellence is training opportunities for DXC personnel. ServiceNow has invested its own resources in the DXC center, including providing its own experts to help train DXC staff.
Bovill said the Center of Excellence builds on DXC’s more than 15-year partnership with ServiceNow. Erica Volini, ServiceNow’s senior vice president of global partnerships and channels, said: crn When it comes to GenAI, DXC is one of their company’s most aggressive partners.
As the data security startup announced more funding and a $3 billion valuation, CEO Yotam Segev tells CRN that Cyera plans to continue consolidating more data and AI security tools onto its platform, ultimately providing customers with a ‘unified view of risk.’
Cyera plans to deploy its new $300 million round — the data security startup’s second fundraise of that amount this year — to continue expanding its data and AI security capabilities with the aim of becoming the most comprehensive platform in a red-hot market, Cyera Co-Founder and CEO Yotam Segev told CRN.
The three-year-old company announced the Series D round of funding Wednesday, which brings the startup’s valuation to $3 billion. That’s up from its $1.4 billion valuation achieved in April, when New York-based Cyera raised its prior $300 million round. [Related: 10 Cloud, Data And Identity Security Startups To Watch In 2024]
In an interview with CRN, Segev said that the company’s data security posture management (DSPM) offering has seen massive demand from customers and partners amid the widespread enterprise push to adopt generative AI.
Cyera’s tool specializes in rapidly providing visibility into the status of an organization’s data and identity access — something that has seen surging interest as a means to enable usage of GenAI applications such as Microsoft 365 Copilot.
This need for securing data against exposure in a GenAI world has proven highly complex, however, in part because data is held in so many different places and the access to that data is often misconfigured.
Cyera’s DSPM technology aims to simplify matters with an agentless approach and through its ability to work across cloud environments, SaaS, data lakes and on-premises environments. The result is a “unified view of risk,” which enterprises have always wanted but have never been able to achieve, Segev said.
Cyera has not been content to stick with its core area of DSPM, though, and has recently expanded into its second major category with a move into data loss prevention (DLP). In October, the company acquired Trail Security for $162 million, which Segev said has brought a unique AI-powered approach to DLP onto the Cyera platform.
When combined with Cyera’s DSPM capabilities, customers now “can actually go and build a data security program” that is truly effective, he said.
“Suddenly, you’re able to actually make DLP work — because you know what you’re trying to protect, and because you know what the crown jewels are and where they reside,” Segev said.
With the help of the new funding, Cyera plans to continue enhancing its DSPM tool as well as adding further capabilities within the DLP sphere, he said.
From there, the company expects to continue introducing new functionality — including in areas such as privacy as well as in governance, risk and compliance (GRC) — so that it can cover as many data security needs as possible for customers, according to Segev.
The ultimate aim is “to consolidate the space and bring simplicity to a space that’s very siloed and complex,” he said.
And Cyera is planning to keep moving fast — to the point that “a year from now, I’d like to see enterprises that are running their data security program on Cyera, from DSPM to DLP to AI security to governance, risk and compliance, to privacy operations, to identity data access governance,” Segev said. “I want to see enterprises, big enterprises, that are running their program end-to-end on Cyera.”
During the interview with CRN, Segev also discussed Cyera’s channel strategy for 2025. Current partners of Cyera include GuidePoint Security, World Wide Technology and Trace3.
The new funding was led by Accel and Sapphire Ventures, while other participating investors in the round were Sequoia, Redpoint, Georgian and Coatue. Cyera has now raised a total of $760 million since it was launched in 2021.
What follows is an edited portion of CRN’s interview with Segev. What has 2024 been about for Cyera?
We’ve had a very, very good year. The promise of AI changing, transforming and upgrading the enterprise has been a huge catalyst for us. Because when you think about AI, it fundamentally runs on two things — it runs on GPUs and it runs on data. And I think the lack of visibility, the lack of control, the lack of management of data in the enterprise, has really been exposed through this AI transformation.
To give an example that everybody can relate to — you work in a big enterprise, maybe you have access to data you’re not supposed to have access to in SharePoint or Office 365. That’s been a long-standing problem, but how would you ever get to it? How would you find it? And suddenly with [Microsoft] Copilot, you can query Copilot, “Who’s got HR violations in that company, and exactly what are they?” And if you have access to that information, you’re going to get an answer in five seconds with the exact details you wanted to find out. So the game has changed on data security. What is your biggest differentiator from competitors when it comes to providing visibility into data?
Technologically, there’s two things that we’ve done that are unique and powerful in the market. The first one is the AI-powered classification. So essentially, it’s being able to learn the customers’ unique data types and contextualize those data types. Because it doesn’t end with, “what is the data?” There’s another set of questions you want to ask that, if the AI can answer them for you, you’re in a much better place and you can take much more action. Whose data is it? Is it synthetic data or is it real data? Does it belong to a European citizen or a German citizen or a Canadian citizen? And the AI can do much of that for us.
The second is the agentless, cloud-native connectors, which allow us to connect once to the underlying cloud provider — and from that single point of integration, unlock all of the different databases, buckets and warehouses that you have inside. Whereas in the past, you had to connect one by one over the network. That was extremely complex. A network-based approach that’s not agentless and not cloud-native just isn’t able to access the data in the different accounts. You have to be able to connect over the API into the accounts. Otherwise, it’s just not going to work. So this is a huge differentiator in the market. So when an organization is thinking about all the things they need to do to keep their cloud secure, Cyera would be a piece of that?
I think that’s right — especially when you tie it into identity, like we have. [Before] the move to the cloud, from a consumption model perspective, [organizations] used to own all the layers of the stack. Then we gave the infrastructure away, and we gave the network away. We gave away more and more layers of the stack. And at the edge of it, we ended up with SaaS. And what do we control in SaaS? What data we put in it, and what access we grant to that data. And those layers are consistent across the entire shared responsibility model with the cloud providers — data and access to data. And that’s where Cyera is adding a ton of value to customers. We have customers today that have us connected to over 10 different environments — so their AWS, GCP, Azure, Snowflake, MongoDB, Databricks and their Office 365 and some Google Drive they got through acquisition. And some on-prem databases and fileshares that are left from the olden days. And Box and Salesforce. And so if you get a unified view of risk, and you’re able to build workflows across all of these systems, the impact of that is outstanding.
I remember when we started, I spoke with the head of security operations for Wells Fargo. He told me, “Yotam, you know what I hate about these SaaS security vendors? They show me the risk in Salesforce, and they show me the risk in Office 365, and they show me the risk in Atlassian. What do they think — that I have a security person for Salesforce and I have a security person for Office 365? Just show me the top 10 risks across all of my environment. And show me how to solve them.” And that’s exactly what Cyera is doing. When you look at cloud security, of course, you have the infrastructure and vulnerability aspect. But then you have the data and access aspect — what data lives where and who has access to it. And that’s such a big part of protecting these new ecosystems. How is the Trail acquisition and your introduction of DLP expanding the opportunity for Cyera?
When I look at Cyera’s purpose in the industry, we want to be the one-stop shop for data security. We want to be the household name for data security. DSPM is such an amazing core to this. Because DSPM provides you with what we never had before — which is a full, comprehensive, automatic inventory of all the data, and specifically all the sensitive data, across the enterprise. With that, you can actually go and build a data security program. And suddenly, you’re able to actually make DLP work — because you know what you’re trying to protect, and because you know what the crown jewels are and where they reside. And you can build policies to either keep them there or to prevent them from going places where they’re not supposed to go, or to monitor how they’re moving in the environment. That was the biggest challenge with DLP. We were always able to do DLP for the most simplistic data types, and even that with a pretty high false positive rate. But what about the complicated data types? How do we deal with them? Whether it’s documents of different sorts, intellectual property, PII. How can we really build policies around those types of data — where they can reside, where they can go, who’s allowed to access them? And that’s where the Trail acquisition has really enabled us to go from DSPM to what we’re calling a data security platform — and not just show you where the data is and help you remediate it at rest, but also track it in motion, detect any violations in motion, and be able to put the preventative controls in place to make sure that you’re not subject to these types of incidents. Is that opening some new doors for you?
Absolutely. Last week we had our first user conference, and the biggest piece of feedback that every practitioner was telling us is, “I can’t wait to go back to my CFO and tell him that it’s not just DSPM. It’s DSPM plus DLP.” It’s taking care of both of these problems in one unified platform.
This is just the beginning. This product portfolio is going to continue to grow. In conversations [with customers], the one thing you always hear is how many different use cases they need to deal with. And today, they have to stitch together 30-plus products in order to really build the program. That’s impossible to do. That has to be simplified, it has to be unified. And that’s where we’re leveraging the venture capital investment in order to consolidate the space and bring simplicity to a space that’s very siloed and complex. What are some of the other goals for the funding?
This funding is allowing us to really invest in the product — not just in DSPM, which is our core and we’re doubling down on, but also to go into DLP through this acquisition, and to go into the identity space and answer the questions around data access governance. [We’ll] continue to make moves into adjacent spaces where the customers are asking us to consolidate these use cases and these requirements into one platform. And to have the resources to actually do that is amazing. Are there other categories or tools that you’re interested in consolidating on the platform?
First of all, I think that in the DLP space, there’s a lot of depth. It’s not just one product or one solution. The Trail team is going to grow within Cyera to build multiple product lines in the DLP space. At the same time, we’re seeing a lot of requests from our customers to answer many of the other core data use cases — whether that’s the privacy requirements around their data, whether it’s GRC and compliance requirements around data, evidencing to auditors, compliance checks, compliance health. [These are] a lot of things that today are not part of what Cyera is putting out in the market, but that will quickly become [the case].
And of course, the biggest topic today is AI security. How do we protect an LLM that’s been built in the enterprise, and we want to put real data into it? And how do we control what happens to that data that the LLM spews out? What is your channel strategy for 2025?
We’re taking a focused approach with our key partners. We want to make sure that we’re fully enabling their teams and getting into the market together with a high-touch approach. That’s where we are for next year in this regard. And I think that as we continue to mature that program and mature those relationships, we’ll be able to open up to more partners and really widen our scope of interaction to the wider channel community.
The channel, the value-added resellers, are amazing at supporting these implementations, adding value on top of these implementations — and really making sure that the customers are not just getting a product, but getting a solution to the problem they set out to solve. And we’re very fortunate to be working with [our current] partners. Overall what do you see as the big theme for Cyera in 2025?
I think for us, DSPM is obviously very, very hot right now, and every enterprise is looking at a DSPM initiative. And that is the core of our business. That is where we’re spending the majority of our time and that’s where the majority of the development is.
Around that, the exciting avenues for us are obviously growing into the DLP space and challenging some of the incumbent vendors in that space with their offerings, and bringing to the table DLP that is AI-powered. And that is game-changing, and that’s exactly what Trail is about. We also have the ability to provide agentless DLP, which has a completely different time to value than the traditional DLP that the market is used to. Everybody wants DLP to be easier, and this is exactly that. This is the magic sauce that turns DLP into a very successful program quickly.
Around that, we have our identity focus and we have our AI security focus. Being able to answer the question — “who can access what data in the enterprise?” — it’s mind blowing. Practitioners have never seen a platform that is able to actually answer that question for them.
And on the AI security front, I think that every CISO is being challenged to support this huge transformation that’s happening. And the ability to really partner with the business, enable the business to move fast with AI, to run ahead — but to do it in a way that’s governed, secure, compliant — that’s also extremely meaningful to our customer base. And we’re very proud to be at the forefront of this challenge. Looking out a year from now, what is your hope for Cyera and what things will be like at that point?
A year from now, I’d like to see enterprises that are running their data security program on Cyera from DSPM to DLP to AI security to governance, risk and compliance, to privacy operations, to identity data access governance. I want to see enterprises, big enterprises, that are running their program end-to-end on Cyera. That would be very, very exciting for me.
Windows 365 Link, security exposure management and a new post-CrowdStrike faulty update initiative are among the big announcements.
Microsoft’s Windows 365 links devices. Security exposure management is becoming generally available. And a new initiative to make improvements after a faulty CrowdStrike update in July.
These are some of the biggest device and security news coming from Microsoft’s Ignite 2024 event.
Ignite runs through Friday, with in-person and online programming in Chicago. Microsoft had registered more than 200,000 people for the event and was expecting more than 14,000 to attend in person. [RELATED: Microsoft CEO: AI Provides ‘On-Ramp’ To Azure Data Services, Copilot Continues To Surge]
Microsoft Ignite 2024
Redmond, Wash. The based tech giant unveiled 80 new products and features in its product portfolio.
According to Microsoft, Windows 11 has seen a three-fold reduction in firmware attacks and almost three times fewer credential theft incidents compared to Windows 10.
During Ignite, Microsoft said that the controversial recall feature would be disabled by default for Copilot+ PCs. IT will enable this feature through new policies before employees opt in.
Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella shared his enthusiasm for the vendor’s devices and security portfolio during the vendor’s recent quarterly earnings call.
“It’s about hybrid AI where the rebirth of the PC as the edge of AI is going to be one of the most exciting things for developers,” Nadella said on Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC.
Nadella said customers have used Defender to find and secure more than 750,000 GenAI app instances. They have used Parview to audit over 1 billion Copilot interactions to ensure they meet compliance obligations.
Here’s everything you need to know in security and device news from Ignite 2024.
windows 365 link
In device news, Microsoft has previewed Windows 365 Link devices built for its Windows 365 cloud-based virtual machine service, with Link becoming generally available in April with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $349.
According to Microsoft, interested organizations in the US, UK, New Zealand, Japan, Germany, Canada, and Australia can apply for the preview program.
According to Microsoft, users can place Link on their desk, boot it up in seconds and perform local processing for Teams meetings, Webex by Cisco, and other high-fidelity experiences.
The Link supports dual 4K monitors, four USB ports, an audio port, an Ethernet port, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3.
The device has no local data, apps, or non-administrator users. Corporate data is safe in the Microsoft cloud. Security default policies are on by default. Users cannot turn off security features.
Users can leverage Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Authenticator app, or USB security key for passwordless login.
Microsoft Intune users can manage devices linked with other PCs. Links are configured in minutes and updated automatically when turned on for the first time. They are factory-reset in minutes for reusability.
better windows search
Starting next year, Windows Insider Program members with Snapdragon-powered CoPilot+ PCs will have the ability to take advantage of their Neural Processing Units (NPUs) for better search with File Explorer, Windows Search, and Settings.
Users can find documents, photos, and other files without having to search for file names or exact file contents. They can describe content with synonyms, even text that may appear in an image. This feature will work even without internet connection.
Enhanced search will be coming to Windows 365 cloud PCs in the spring.
Microsoft Security Exposure Management goes to general availability
Microsoft has made its security exposure management experience generally available to practitioners assessing cyber threats.
Exposure management integrates disparate data silos for better attack surface visibility, assessing attack paths to assets and across devices, identities, apps, data, on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. Provides context-based recommendations to improve security posture.
According to Microsoft, the tool has attack path analysis capabilities with modeling and blast radius estimation, as well as integrated insights that bring in currency data from other vendors.
Microsoft Purview Update
Microsoft updated its Purview data governance and compliance platform to include the general availability of Customer Lockbox, which provides data protection for Windows 365 with users in the approval workflow process, and Data Security Posture Management, as well as AI Provides DSPM for.
According to Microsoft, DSPM for AI should help IT administrators and data stewards find risks and prevent data oversharing, data leakage, and other incidents. The tool works on Copilot, custom apps built on Copilot Studio, and third-party apps like ChatGPT Enterprise by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
The new Purview preview includes data loss prevention (DLP) for Microsoft 365 Copilot – aimed at ensuring that the content of sensitive documents is not abstracted by AI – and Azure Microsoft Rights Management-defined sensitivity labels for administrators Ability to extend Office files and PDFs to SharePoint document libraries comfortably.
By the end of the year, Purview will have a preview of embedded Security CoPilot capabilities, including DSPMs with AI-powered data estate risk insights in natural language and suggested prompts to guide users through investigations.
Other Security CoPilot capabilities entering preview are DLP policy understanding, eDiscovery case summaries, and a CoPilot-powered knowledge center.
Features after the CrowdStrike incident
During Ignite 2024, Microsoft introduced its Windows Resiliency Initiative, which is based on learnings from the global outage caused by CrowdStrike. faulty update In July.
According to Microsoft, the initiative also focuses on allowing more apps and users to run without administrator privileges, stronger controls for which apps and drivers can run, and better identity protection.
Quick Machine Recovery is a feature that will come to the Windows Insider Program in early 2025 thanks to this initiative. With this feature, IT administrators can target Windows Update fixes to PCs, even when the machines cannot boot and do not have physical access to the PC.
There are ways to build security products outside of kernel mode, coming as a private preview to the security product ecosystem in July. According to Microsoft, antivirus and other security products will have the ability to run in user mode, just like apps. This will provide better resiliency to Windows in the event of a crash or error.
windows security updates
Microsoft said it is addressing long-standing complaints about Windows security — over-privileged users and applications, unverified apps and drivers, and insecure credentials and authentication.
The preview has Administrator Security, a tool that has standard user permissions security by default. If a system change requires administrator rights, users are asked to authorize the change using Windows Hello. Windows creates a temporary separate administrator token that is destroyed after the task is completed.
According to Microsoft, the new AI capabilities for Smart App Control and App Control for Business attempt to make the tool easier to deploy. A signed and reputable policy template should allow millions of verified apps to run, regardless of deployment location.
And the Personal Data Encryption (PDE) layer now generally available for Windows Enterprise should add more security to personal user files on laptops that are now readable only with Windows Hello sign in. PDE also integrates with OneDrive and SharePoint and is manageable with Intune.
Windows CoPilot Runtime, Windows Subsystem for Linux
Microsoft has added new AI APIs and improved frameworks and tools to the Windows Copilot Runtime to help developers scale AI across devices.
APIs for image description, image super resolution, object erasure, and optical character recognition are coming in January.
According to Microsoft, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has added integration with Intune, which is now generally available, and Entra ID, which is now in private preview.
In the coming months, Microsoft will preview a new distribution architecture for WSL to better manage and optimize it with enterprise security policies.
A new preview of Hotpack for Windows gives users a way to download updates in the background and have the installation take effect without restarting the device.
The preview coming before 2026 for Windows Autopatch AI integration with Copilot in Intune means IT administrators can only access data within their permissions and Windows users can prepare for feature updates, ready devices, and other uses. Can get payload details between cases.
A now generally available configuration refresh feature is available to enforce mobile device management (MDM) security policies by returning a PC to a preferred configuration, avoiding configuration drift when users change the system registry. Refresh also works offline with device self-management locally.
Mixed Reality, Windows in the Modern Environment
Microsoft has a preview coming in December for Windows 11 in Meta Quest headsets, which allows users to take advantage of Windows for virtual meetings and high-resolution monitors.
Windows 11 Mixed Reality Access will debut with the Quest 3 and Quest 3S headsets.
The preview available now allows a shared mode for provisioning Windows 365 Frontline. This mode is for users who need brief access to ad-hoc tasks in a non-personalized Windows desktop environment. User data is deleted upon signoff.
Another preview is for Windows Apps Mobile Application Management (MAM) support for iOS and Android to define device security criteria and customized access.
Azure Chips, Infrastructure
At Ignite, Microsoft introduced its Azure Integrated Hardware Security Module (HSM) in-house cloud security chip.
Next year, Microsoft will begin installing HSM in every new server in its data centers for confidential and general-purpose workloads.
The vendor also showcased its first in-house data processing unit silicon, the Azure Boost DPU. According to Microsoft, the purpose of a DPU is to work on storage, networking, acceleration, and more. Future DPU-equipped servers should run cloud storage workloads at three times less power and four times the performance of existing servers.
A liquid cooling heat exchanger unit rack by Microsoft should support large-scale AI systems on Azure, including Microsoft’s Azure Maia. Microsoft can reinstall the unit in Azure data centers.
Microsoft and Meta have collaborated on a differentiated power rack design with 400-volt DC power for 35 percent more AI accelerators per server rack. The vendors are open-sourcing the specifications through the Open Compute Project.
Microsoft launches preview of Nvidia Blackwell GB200-powered Azure AI system. Azure ND GB200 V6 is the new AI-optimized virtual machine series powered by Nvidia GB200 superchips.
More infrastructure news
Microsoft has made Azure Local cloud-controlled, hybrid infrastructure platform and Windows Server 2025 generally available.
Local extends Azure services across distributed locations for mission-critical workloads and cloud-native applications and AI. Runs containers, servers, and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) on Microsoft-accredited hardware from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Dell Technologies, and others for local custom latency, near-real-time data processing, and compliance.
Windows Server 2025 has a preview of hot-patching subscriptions for easier upgrades, improved security, and update installation with fewer restarts.
Microsoft also moved SQL Server 2025 to private preview. According to Microsoft, this database platform should simplify AI app development and RAG patterns.
The US Justice Department is reportedly looking for a judge to force Google to sell Google Chrome, the world’s most popular internet browser.
In a move that could hit $88 billion Google and its cloud business, Google Cloud, The US Justice Department is reportedly seeking to ask a judge to force Google to sell the world’s most popular internet browser: chrome,
“The DOJ is pursuing a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement to CRN.
“The government putting its thumb on the scale in this way will hurt consumers, developers, and American tech leadership exactly when it’s needed most,” Mulholland said.
Officials from the US Justice Department’s Antitrust Division will ask US District Judge Amit Mehta – who has Judgment given against Google In relation to monopoly in the past – to coerce Google will sell its Chrome browseraccording to a report By Bloomberg News. [Related: The 10 Coolest GenAI Products And AI Tools Of 2024]
What is the DOJ looking for?
DOJ is reportedly seeking to break up Google Android From Search and Google Play, but without obligating Google to sell Android.
Bloomberg said another requirement would force the Mountain View, California-based tech giant to share more information with advertisers.
The DOJ will also reportedly ask Judge Mehta to impose data licensing requirements.
Another recommendation from the DOJ is that Google provide more options to prevent websites from using their content. Google’s artificial intelligence The product, according to a Bloomberg report.
The government will also insist on banning exclusive Contracts with iPhone providers like Apple The report states that Chrome will have to be made its default web browser.
Chrome has more than 65 percent share of the global browser market
According to IT market research firm Statista, Google Chrome’s share of the global market for internet browsers by August 2024 was more than 65 percent, or nearly two-thirds.
Apple’s Safari browser ranks second among Internet browsers with about 18 percent share. Statista said no other browser controlled more than 5 percent of the overall market share worldwide.
Google Cloud has several key technologies inside Chrome, including its zero-trust security offering Chrome Enterprise Premium, as well as Chrome Enterprise Core, which allows businesses to configure and manage the Chrome browser across their organization.
Additionally, Google Cloud’s flagship AI offering, Gemini, It is becoming more important for Google Chrome’s search engine, while many users have access to it workplace Applications like Gmail and Google Docs through Chrome.
Google partner: ‘Government may be exaggerating’
One Google partner, who makes millions of dollars each year from Google sales, said he believed “the government is probably overstepping here.”
“Chrome is loved by our customers. It’s effective for a number of reasons, like its security features, which we believe have nothing to do with monopoly and more to do with their technology,” said a top Google partner executive. Said on condition of anonymity.
The executive said that if Google Chrome is sold from parent company Google, it would fundamentally change the operational structure of both Google and Google Cloud.
“So Google Chrome is directly tied to its advertising business, and obviously that’s important to the company. That money drives innovation and R&D across Google,” he said. “You remove Chrome from Google, it may start to break a little. …This will certainly have a broad impact on Google Cloud.”
The DOJ will ask District Judge Mehta to force the breakup because it represents the access point through which people use its search engine, Bloomberg News reports.
Bloomberg said the government has the option to decide whether Chrome sales are necessary at a later date if some other aspects of the measure create a more competitive market.
DOJ representatives did not respond for comment by press time.
For the week ending November 15, CRN will take a look at companies that have brought their ‘A’ game to the channel, including Presidio, Siqvi, CoreWave, SAS and Snik.
Week ending November 15
Topping this week’s Cam to Win list is solutions provider superstar Presidio following a strategic acquisition that will expand its expertise and service offerings in the ServiceNow region.
Data security startup Sequvi for adopting a 100 percent channel sales model, AI infrastructure services provider CoreWave for an impressive investment round, and data analytics giant SAS for its “synthetic data” technology acquisition also feature in the list to prepare its customers. Will help to do. Data for AI tasks.
And developer security provider Sync lists the acquisition of a company that focuses on security testing for APIs and web applications.
Presidio boosts ServiceNow business by acquiring majority stake in elite partner Contender Solutions
Presidio tops this week’s list of five companies for its acquisition of a majority stake in Contender Solutions, one of ServiceNow’s elite partners, which will boost Presidio’s ServiceNow business, particularly around software management services and implementation.
Presidio CEO Bob Cagnazzi (pictured above) said Acquisition of Claimant Solutions This comes as technology leaders are looking to enterprise management services to automate processes that drive business results and provide customers with more time to foster innovation.
“We are excited that Contender is now part of Presidio to seamlessly support our customers’ ServiceNow platform and drive the results that make their businesses successful,” Cagnazzi said in a statement announcing the deal.
The acquisition comes just a month after Presidio purchased Internetwork Engineering to bolster its networking, data center and cybersecurity sales. Purchasing Charlotte, NC-based Internetworks helped Presidio better position itself to serve customers in the U.S. Southeast region.
Contender Solutions, based in Tampa, Florida, is expected to further accelerate that geographic expansion.
Data security startup Sequvi shifts to all-channel model for growth push
Siqvi made the list this week for its shift to a 100 percent channel model for the delivery of its data security capabilities as the startup looks to accelerate its growth with the help of partners. Sequvi CEO Mike Seasholes (pictured) told CRN.,
Founded in 2019, Secuvy provides a set of AI-powered capabilities to secure data, including search, classification, and DSPM (Data Security State Management) – the latter of which became a fast-growing segment in the cybersecurity industry Is.
Importantly, Sequoys also offers the ability to link together different data sources — both structured and unstructured data — to create a true “data map,” Seasholes said.
Sequoys is looking to work with partners who are looking for a highly scalable and accurate data protection approach, Seasholes said. Some of the partners the startup is already working with include Shellman, Optiv, Wipro, Tevora, and ePlus.
And with an omni-channel commitment, partners can be assured that “we’re not going to compete with you,” Seasholes said. “We’re going to get there collaboratively.”
Pure Storage among investors in Cisco, Nvidia-backed startup CoreWeave
AI hyperscaler CoreWave was a big winner in the funding arena this week when the startup confirmed it closed a $650 million secondary share sale with Cisco Systems and Pure Storage among the big-name investors. investment Nvidia was the latest proof of CoreView’s rise as a top provider of GPU-based infrastructure and cloud computing services that customers rely on to run AI development tasks and AI workloads. CoreWeave wants to compete with cloud giants Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud in AI services.
Investors also included BlackRock, Coatue and Fidelity. CoreWeave was valued at $19 billion in May after a $1.1 billion Series C investment round. Overall, startups have raised a total of $14 billion.
SAS enhances GenAI capabilities with synthetic data technology acquisition
Data analytics and AI software developer SAS took a significant step this week to boost its capabilities in the generative AI area. acquisition One of Hezi’s core software assets, a pioneer in “synthetic data” technology.
The company said the move will enhance SAS’s data and AI technology portfolio, providing customers with “critical and timely” synthetic data generation capabilities as they increase their use of AI.
“Our acquisition of Hazy’s IP represents an important step in our commitment to innovation in next-generation data management and AI,” SAS CEO Jim Goodnight said in a statement. “Hazy is a leader in bringing synthetic data to market as a viable enterprise product, and analysts rank it among the top software providers in its category.”
Synthetic data techniques are used to help overcome problems related to data availability, access, or quality. This is considered important for companies implementing AI systems, especially in industries with strict data privacy and governance regulations.
Snik expands API security testing with potential acquisition
Snik acquired a vendor this week that focuses on supply Security testing for API As well as web application security.
The integration of technology developed by the company will, potentially, enhance Snyk’s developer security software and enable greater support for AI-related development, Manoj Nair, Snyk’s chief innovation officer, told CRN.
“API testing is going to be extremely important to safely adopt AI-native application development and actually build AI apps,” Nair said.
Founded in 2016, Snyk offers what it describes as a “modern” approach to DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing), something that Snyk’s platform does not offer.
This is the 11th acquisition for Snyk since its founding in 2015. This follows the vendor’s January acquisition of Helios, which specializes in capturing security-relevant data from live applications.
‘It’s good to see that they are focusing on the needs of MSPs. Over the past few years, his focus has been on bigger trends. “It’s a return to basics in a good way,” says Dustin Bolander, founder, partner and CIO of Clear Guidance Partners.
Jeff Bishop, chief product officer at ConnectWise, said the company’s new Asio platform is poised to fulfill the vision of a full stack of products managed through a single pane of glass.
Bishop explained, “Our priority is to provide innovation, product stability, ease of use, and an open ecosystem, which are critical to our partnership with you and your continued success, and we know we can’t rely on just one approach. Can stay.” An audience during a presentation at the company’s annual show IT Nation 2024.
Dustin Bolander, founder, partner and CIO of Austin, Texas-based Clear Guidance Partners, a longtime ConnectWise partner, said that from what he’s seen so far, the Asio platform is a return to form for the company.
“It’s good to see them focusing on the need for MSPs,” Bolander said. “Over the past few years, their focus has been on bigger trends. “It’s a return to basics in a good way.” [RELATED: ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo Says Asio ‘Ready For Primetime’]
Asio is ConnectWise’s vision for a unified platform where MSPs can run all of their products and manage their customers’ digital assets from a single location. The technically ambitious project IT Nation began in 2021 and has been in development since then.
ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivello previously told CRN that pulling it across the finish line is a top priority for him and ConnectWise’s private equity owner, Thoma Bravo.
Rivello said Asio has received about $70 million in investment and ConnectWise is prepared to spend whatever it takes to make it successful.
“We just put the PSA on the platform and we’ve been rushing to get to it for quite some time now,” Rivello told the crowd of MSPs at IT Nation on Wednesday. He said 1,000 of the 3,000 MSPs using the platform are using the new embedded PSA. , which they said is still in early access as they’re testing it.
During his presentation, Bishop said the team is designing Asio Ease of use of MSP’s platform has been kept at the top.
“Asio is our purpose-built, enterprise-grade platform for the MSP community that centralizes your products, your data, provides a common user experience and eliminates a lot of the manual work you have to do today for on-boarding employees, customers, and Removes. Integrating disparate solutions,” Bishop said.
What’s new in Asio?
Bishop said that inside Asio, the product has a PSA, an RMM, ConnectWise Security 360 vulnerability management, data security, robotic process automation, dozens and hundreds of integrations and over 150 shared services that all those products are taking advantage of.
Bishop said there are thousands of users worldwide and that RMM is being used on 2.2 million endpoints. He also said that Asio is adopting an API-first mindset with development to keep the ecosystem open and scalable for partners.
But it’s about more than the products inside, Bishop said, as Asio improves the entire MSP user experience.
“Over the last four or five months, we have made a number of different improvements. We’ve created custom actions, web hooks for triggers, ability to add variables, time delays. We can incorporate bots as part of the workflow,” he told the audience. “Look, this is a huge change from last year, and I hope you get the opportunity to go out there and test it out.”
Why is this important for MSP?
In the solution provider industry, much of the code that makes up the operational software that MSPs use to run their business is dated. In many cases, it has been updated as needed, mixed with other products through acquisitions, and repeatedly exploited and patched.
What ConnectWise is trying to do with Asio is to bring all of its tools together into a platform built with modern code that delivers a better experience for MSPs – all the tools to run their business in one unified place. For – as well as remove the obstacles involved. Their old software.
Bishop said, “Asio is more than just a cute rapper who launches different product lines.” “This is a true integrated platform. It provides an experience where products and services are designed to use the same fundamental elements to allow our partners to scale and grow faster than they ever thought possible.
What does this mean for front-line engineers?
Bishop said Asio makes on-boarding and training materially simpler for new employees.
“You no longer have to map companies and sites and devices between all the different products in our portfolio,” he said.
Bishop said Asio removes the need to match a user’s security access rights across multiple different products.
“It’s extremely difficult for a lot of the MSPs I talk to do,” he said. “These products, along with our new centralized service, make it simple, so it’s just one place where You do it all.”
Bishop said Asio also serves as the center of hyperautomation, which he said is the kind of combination of AI and automation that ConnectWise is working on deploying across its entire product suite to help engineers interact with products. Can get help in doing.
“This is a next-generation AI solution that is integrated with almost every product in our portfolio, and it continues to grow and evolve as we allow access to it inside Asio,” Bishop said. ”
Bots and Digital Agents
Bishop explained how users can create and incorporate robotic process automation and bots into their workflow during a live demonstration.
“All you have to do is go in and name it, describe it, and then you go in and add your script to the system, and then you can save that bot to be used inside Sidekick later.” “It could be in a chatbot, in a PSA, or inside our workflow engine, whatever works for you and your business processes,” he said.
In looking for ways to improve MSP profitability, Bishop said ConnectWise has focused on finding ways to automate on-boarding and off-boarding employees and prospects, as MSPs benefit not only for themselves, but for their customers. Also manage it.
“We’ve started building our own out-of-the-box automation that will give MSPs a template that you can use for on-boarding, off-boarding, and a few other things that we’ll be rolling out the rest of this year. Issuing in. , A big area that we’re making sure we’re focused on is the on-board and off-board experience, because we know that takes up a lot of time for your different teams.
create and share it
Bishop said inside Asio, ConnectWise has its own drag-and-drop workflow design engine that has been simplified for users and now has advanced features, including the ability to create web hooks for triggers, add time delays and Includes ability to add variables. ,
Bishop said one of the priorities inside IT Nation is sharing best practices, so the Asio platform will allow MSPs to share their best creations with their team or with all ConnectWise users.
“On top of all that, we’re also in the process of making sure you can start sharing what you’re building with the community, whether it’s digital workers, workflows or bots,” he said. “Our community concept now allows you to create these and share them with other MSPs that are part of your family, or with the entire IT Nation community.”
For the week ending November 8, CRN will take a look at companies that have brought their ‘A’ game to the channel, including Ingram Micro, CrowdStrike, Accenture, Cynomy and Nerdio.
Week ending November 8
Topping this week’s Cam to Win list is distributor Ingram Micro for its latest steps to help solution providers work with the distributor and expand their capabilities in cybersecurity and AI.
Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike for strategic acquisition in the SaaS security space and IT services giant Accenture for acquisition of consulting services firm Anaplan also feature in the list.
MSP-focused cybersecurity startup Cynomy has made a key executive appointment this week. And Nerdio is here to expand the capabilities of its management tools for Microsoft applications.
Ingram Micro launches Ultra, helping partners up their cybersecurity game
To help solution providers work with distributors and expand their capabilities in cybersecurity and AI, Ingram Micro outlined steps for distributors at this week’s Ingram Micro One conference to help them win. At the top of the list.
One was at the top of the list of announcements from the event Launch of Ingram Micro UltraA new platform that will utilize cutting-edge AI and a tailored rewards system that will transform distributor interactions with their channel partners and provide them with a highly personalized experience. Ultra is based on the Xvantage platform Ingram Micro launched two years ago.
Ingram Micro is also providing partners with new tools to help, expert guidance, and a list of verified cybersecurity vendors Enhance your cyber security practicesThe distributor is also providing training, special programs and strategic support to the partners which helps the partners Work with Microsoft Copilot,
“The future of business is about transforming relationships, not just transactions,” said the CEO of Ingram Micro. Paul Bay said during his keynote speech In front of approximately 2,500 solution providers at the event. He focused on how AI, automation and scalable solutions are adding value to solution providers while also giving them a competitive edge in the market.
Ingram Micro also Announced a multi-year strategic cooperation agreement With Amazon Web Services that will help drive business for AWS partners by leveraging the distributor’s resources and expertise.
CrowdStrike to promote Falcon platform with Adaptive Shield purchases
CrowdStrike made the list this week in a deal to acquire SaaS security startup Adaptive Shield to expand the capabilities of its Falcon platform.
CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas said in a blog post that Purchase of Israel-based Adaptive Shield SaaS and artificial intelligence in security are vital to the company’s future and “an essential part of our cloud security approach.”
“Our acquisition of Adaptive Shield takes us another step closer to providing our customers with the best possible protection against modern cyber attacks with the Falcon platform,” he said.
Adaptive Shield provides comprehensive SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) capabilities. Its technology provides full visibility and governance of human and non-human identities and their permissions, rights, activity levels, and public data across more than 150 SaaS applications to strengthen identity security posture.
Accenture boosts Anaplan capabilities with Elasticyx purchase
Staying on the theme of strategic acquisitions, Accenture this week acquired consulting company Elasticyx to expand its expertise and services around Anaplan corporate performance management software. with acquisition Accenture will bring its expertise to Anaplan’s financial planning, financial analysis, sales performance management and supply chain management capabilities.
Accenture has been an Anaplan partner for more than eight years and the IT services giant’s Anaplan practice already includes more than 700 Anaplan-certified professionals. Analytics, based in Irvine, California, has more than 60 Anaplan functional and technical professionals who will join Accenture Technology in North America.
“Given the potential to unlock business value and fuel total enterprise reinvention, the demand for connected enterprise planning is growing,” David Lakestein, senior managing director and head of Americas Technology at Accenture, said in a statement. “Elastic’s highly skilled talent, deep domain expertise and agile approach to implementation complements our broader digital capabilities and expands our ability to deliver integrated enterprise planning transformation for our clients that delivers better, faster insights and bottom line. provide value.”
Cynomy appoints security industry vet as CRO to drive growth of vCISO platform
On the personnel front, MSP-focused cybersecurity startup Cynomy joins this week’s list Hiring Ken MarxA veteran of the cybersecurity channel, as the company’s new Chief Revenue Officer.
In the role of CRO, Marks is now leading all go-to-market operations for Cynomy, which only operates a partner model and does not sell directly to customers. Sinomi’s channel leader, Roy Barnia, vice president of channel sales, now reports to Marks.
Cynomy has developed an automated vCISO platform designed to secure small and medium-sized enterprises, providing capabilities equivalent to a GRC (governance, risk and compliance) tool, as well as gap analysis and creates customized policies and develops prioritized remediation plans to ensure cyber security. Was addressed.
Marks, who was most recently at SentinelOne, told CRN that the move to Cynomy was driven by the opportunity to help protect smaller organizations as well as enable MSPs to grow their businesses. He described Cynomy’s platform as “purpose-built to help MSPs create a new revenue stream.”
“I now see tremendous opportunity for MSPs and MSSPs – not only to provide vCISO services to their customers, but [Cynomi] It also becomes the ‘tip of the spear,’” he said. “Then they can open up opportunities to help [customers] “They will be improved by selling other services and other products to help make up for any shortfalls those customers may have.”
Nerdio introduces new Microsoft Teams capabilities, pricing structure
Nerdio, developer of Microsoft cloud product management tools, is further expanding its capabilities across the Microsoft “Modern Work” portfolio by introducing a per-customer, per-tenant pricing structure to allow flat rates regardless of the number of users. Used to be.
The Chicago-based company is expanding beyond its specialties in Microsoft Azure and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) with new ways for MSPs to use Microsoft’s collaboration tool Temas, cloud storage service OneDrive, document manager SharePoint, and email product Nerdio Manager for Exchange Online. Provides.
“We’ll continue to focus heavily on desktop virtualization, which is our legacy, but we’re going to be just as great when it comes to allowing you to leverage the full power of Microsoft 365,” said Nerdio’s chief executive. said Joseph Landes, revenue officer and co-founder. “We’re building full capabilities to leverage a more in-depth set of Microsoft 365 tools.”
among new capabilities Nerdio has centralized management for settings, file storage, email, and compliance policies for Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange Online. According to the vendor, the goal is better collaboration and data management for solution providers leveraging these Microsoft products.
‘We have been talking about Asio for many years. We have been showing you glimpses of Asio. I’m here to tell you that we are at that turning point. I’m here to tell you it’s ready for prime time,’ Manny Rivello, CEO of ConnectWise, told IT Nation 2024.
ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivello said the long-promised Asio platform, which blends a stack of the company’s MSP products into a single pane of glass, is already being used by 3,000 partners and packaged inside it. Remote monitoring and management is being used on 2.2 million endpoints.
“I am here to tell you that we are at that tipping point. I’m here to tell you it’s ready for prime time,” he told the crowd at the company’s IT Nation 2024 conference on Wednesday. “We’ve hit that inflection point.”
It was Rivello’s first keynote as CEO of Tampa, Florida-based ConnectWise, which has 45,000 customers worldwide who use its ticketing system, remote monitoring and management tools or security products to deliver IT services. ConnectWise’s private equity owners Replaced CEO Jason Magee on September.
“We just put the PSA on the platform and we’ve been having early access to it for quite some time,” Rivello said. He said of the 3,000 people using the platform, 1,000 are using the new embedded PSA, which he said is still in its early stages. Get access as soon as they test it. [RELATED:New ConnectWise CEO Manny Rivelo On Delivery Of Asio As ‘The Top Priority’ And Why ‘Job Number One’ Is Listening To Partners]
He said the average MSP environment has become too complex and Asio solves this by combining all of ConnectWise’s products.
“You have 20 to 40 different technology stacks that you integrate as best you can, and you use human middleware – people – to do that integration. It’s ineffective, it’s expensive. What else? It’s becoming more complex,” Rivello said. “So we believe wholeheartedly, and we started working on this vision very early on, that a platform can transform this industry, give it the growth it deserves and the profitability it deserves “What he deserves, and there are better days ahead.”
The Asio platform debuted at the 2021 IT Nation event, Rivello told CRN earlier this year, and ConnectWise has since invested $70 million to bring it to market. When it’s ready, it will be the first package of its kind for MSPs on one platform, Rivello said. He said its release comes at an optimal time for MSPs serving a $600 billion market, 44 percent of which is focused on small and medium-sized businesses.
Rivello said the platform concept drives lower costs for MSPs by aligning software and users in one place to create efficiencies. He pointed to Microsoft, Salesforce and Amazon Web Services as platforms that are doing it right.
“If you build the right platform, you can also start to incorporate monetization strategies around security, data protection, and inventory on top of that, all integrated into a simple way for you to consume and distribute . It’s about creating a better, better experience, all the way to the end customer,” he said. security360
Security has been beefed up extensively Revenue Drivers at ConnectWise Since it acquired cybersecurity firm Perch, annual revenue in that category has been growing by double digits every year. Rivello said to think of Security360 as an attack surface management tool that takes data from the customer and gives them a security rating.
“We can take a lot of your information, your AV information, your email information, vulnerabilities and the list goes on, and start to surface it around a typical customer and actually give them a security index, or rating, to look at.” Are. The health of that organization,” he said.
He said Security360 normalizes the data to generate a score that highlights the risk exposure an MSP faces based on its customer base. This score shows MSPs where they can prioritize remediation efforts.
ConnectWise Security360 integrates with its PSA and RMM tools. It also supports Microsoft Defender Antivirus, Microsoft Defender for Business, Webroot Antivirus, Bitdefender GravityZone Endpoint Detection and Response, Acronis Security + EDR, SentinelOne Singularity Control, SentinelOne Singularity Complete, Infima Security, and Proofpoint Email Security.
Additional integrations are expected in the coming months. ConnectWise Backup360
Rivello said the offering is now generally available to partners. He said it allows MSPs to monitor their customers’ environments with a “360-degree” view to ensure backups are occurring as scheduled, whether it’s endpoint, cloud or SaaS backups.
He said it has integrations with Axient, Acronis, Veeam, Datto, Skykick Cloud Backup and more to be added.
“There’s an exciting opportunity there, too,” he said. “It’s a very simple set of products that you can deploy to your customers.”
Jim Kelly, a longtime Dell Technologies executive and general manager of Dell’s federal business, has jumped ship to lead Google’s public sector business.
Dell Technologies’ General Manager and Senior Vice President of Company’s Federal Business, Jim Kellyhas left the infrastructure giant to help lead Google’s public sector business.
“Today marks the beginning of my journey as the new Vice Chairman of the Federal google public domainKelly said in a LinkedIn post.
Kelly is a longtime Dell federal executive, having worked at the Round Rock, Texas-based company for nearly 24 years. For the past decade, he worked in top federal and sales roles at Dell, including vice president of Defense and Intelligence Sales.
In his latest role leading Dell Technologies’ billion-dollar North American federal sales business, Kelly was responsible for Dell’s full portfolio of client solutions, enterprise systems, software and services for U.S. federal customers globally. Kelly could not be reached for comment by press time. [Related: Google Public Sector Exec Says Program Enhancements Bring ‘Significant Opportunity; For Partners]
In an email to CRN, google cloud Said Kelly was responsible for supporting Dell’s federal customers And their missions, providing the technology and expertise needed to transform and protect their data.
“We are thrilled to have both the experience and great passion for delivering transformative technology in the public sector that Jim brings,” Brent Mitchell, vice president of go-to-market, public sector, Google Cloud, said on LinkedIn. “His perspective aligns incredibly well with our mission to provide cutting-edge solutions that address our customers’ most challenging missions.” Google Public Sector Recently Launched Advanced Partner Program
Google’s public sector division was launched in 2022 with the goal of providing cloud platforms and AI tools to help federal, state and local governments, intelligence agencies and academic institutions accelerate digital transformation initiatives.
This month, Troy Bertram—executive managing director of the Google Public Sector Partner Ecosystem—talked about Google’s revamp of the Google Public Sector Partner Program.
,[We want to] “For a partner to register an opportunity with us and get the differentiated support they need if they’re existing or if they’re trying to shape and work on an opportunity,” Bertram told CRN. Let’s make it easier.” “Most of the government’s IT projects are 80 percent services and 20 percent infrastructure.”
Bertram said Google “reacted and iterated on partner program requirements for government and education customers through the channel.”
“We had to take what works from the Google Partner Advantage program and give it a public sector shape,” he said. “To be sure, how the government wants to contract, wants to buy for services, wants to buy for infrastructure, wants to buy for technology, especially with AI and new companies that are building applications on top of our platform. “Launching.” Jim Kelly’s Dell, Microsoft and Symantec career
With nearly 30 years of experience, Kelly brings extensive market leadership and sales experience to the Google public sector team, thanks to his background working with federal clients on their technology strategies.
Google Cloud said Kelly’s understanding of federal enterprise and program strategies, credibility with federal decision makers, and extensive relationships with industry partners, allow him to help federal customers achieve their goals.
Prior to Dell, Kelly was Microsoft’s senior director for the company’s US military business for 18 months. He was responsible for overseeing product sales, strategy development, and sales of services to the US Army, one of Microsoft’s largest customers.
Before joining Microsoft in 2014, Kelly had a short six-month stint at cybersecurity firm Symantec, where he was responsible for sales and management of the US military and defense agencies’ business.
The bulk of Kelly’s career has been spent at Dell.
From 1999 to 2013, he worked at Dell in the federal sector, managing joint solutions sales organizations for the U.S. Army and Department of Defense. According to Google Cloud, Kelly managed the largest team at Dell and worked on all aspects of the business.
“Looking forward to the new challenges and opportunities ahead [at Google Cloud]Kelly said.