Get the most out of CIO Influence’s comprehensive daily IT news roundups to stay ahead in the information technology sector. Get current news in the IT sector about key domains such as cloud computing, data management, cybersecurity, and information security. Our curated updates include IT breaking news, tech partnerships, innovative IT solutions, and evolving security policies, keeping you informed on current industry happenings.
#1 Five-Year Cloud Technology Agreement Between FWD Group and AWS
FWD Group Holdings Limited has announced a five-year agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud technology services as part of its cloud-first strategy. The extended collaboration with AWS will provide FWD with improved agility, scalability, and resilience as FWD progressively moves away from operating its own on-site data centers.
As FWD Group’s strategic cloud provider, AWS will continue to host core business applications, ranging from finance to customer and insurance agent interfaces. With the data, of 2023, 97 percent of FWD Group’s applications were migrated to the cloud – up from 27 percent as of 31 December 2020 – with 93 percent of applications targeted for retirement decommissioned.
#2 Nutanix and Dell Technologies Partners to Boost Digital Transformation Journey
Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, and Dell Technologies announced the expansion of their partnership to accelerate customers’ digital transformation journeys fueled by infrastructure modernization and modern application development. Through this collaboration, joint customers can leverage Dell and Nutanix hybrid multicloud solutions to improve IT operations, resiliency and flexibility.
What will Nutanix and Dell offer Customers?
- Simplified private and hybrid multicloud deployments with the combination of Dell’s leading server and storage offerings and the simplicity of Nutanix software.
- Integrated turnkey hyper-converged appliance combining Nutanix Cloud Platform and Dell servers to meet requirements from various applications.
- Flexibility and choice of ecosystem is now more critical than ever. To support this, Nutanix Cloud Platform for Dell PowerFlex will combine the benefits of the Nutanix Cloud Platform, powered by AHV hypervisor, for computing.
What is Included in the Expanded Collaboration?
- Two new joint solutions are engineering, go-to-market, support, and services.
- Dell customers will benefit from expanded access to the simplicity of the Nutanix Cloud Platform.
- Dell sales teams and partners worldwide to distribute Nutanix software.
#3 AMD Instinct™ MI300X accelerators for Microsoft Customers and Developers
AMD exhibited at Microsoft Build 2024 its latest end-to-end compute and software capabilities for Microsoft customers and developers. By using AMD solutions such as AMD Instinct™ MI300X accelerators, ROCm™ open software, Ryzen™ AI processors and software, and Alveo™ MA35D media accelerators, Microsoft can provide a powerful suite of tools for AI-based deployments across numerous markets. The new Microsoft Azure ND MI300X virtual machines (VMs) are generally available, giving customers such as Hugging Face access to impressive performance and efficiency for their most demanding AI workloads.
About AMD AI Innovation
- Previously announced in preview in November 2023, the Azure ND MI300x v5 VM series is now available for AI workloads in the Canada Central region. These VMs provide exceptional HBM capacity and memory bandwidth, allowing larger models to fit in GPU memory or use fewer GPUs, thereby saving power, cost, and time.
- These VMs, powered by ROCm™ software, are also used for Azure AI Production workloads, including the Azure OpenAI Service, offering access to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models.
- One of the first customers to use these VMs is Hugging Face. Within a month, they ported their models to the ND MI300X VMs, achieving impressive performance and price/performance. ND MI300X VM customers can easily use Hugging Face models to develop and deploy NLP applications.
Microsoft has selected the AMD Alveo™ MA35D media accelerator to power its vast live-streaming video workloads, including Microsoft Teams, SharePoint video, etc. Using the Alveo MA35D accelerator in servers powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ processors, Microsoft is getting:
- Ability to consolidate servers and cloud Infrastructure
- Impressive Performance
- Future-Ready AV1 Technology
#4 Microsoft and G42 Announced Digital Investment of $1 Billion for Sustainable Data Center Infrastructure
Microsoft and G42 have announced a comprehensive package of digital investments in Kenya as part of an initiative with the Republic of Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy.
In collaboration with Microsoft and other stakeholders, G42 will arrange an initial investment of $1 billion for the various components outlined in the comprehensive package. One of Kenya’s investment priorities is a state-of-the-art green data center built by G42 and its partners to run Microsoft Azure in a new East Africa Cloud Region.
The Digital Investment Initiative Includes:
(1) Local-language AI model development and research
(2) An East Africa Innovation Lab coupled with broad AI digital skills training
(3) International and local connectivity investments
(4) Collaboration with the government of Kenya to support safe and secure cloud services across East Africa.
What does the Agreement offer?
1. Sustainable data center infrastructure and new East Africa cloud region—As part of the agreement, G42, in collaboration with local partners, will design and build a state-of-the-art data center campus in Olkaria, Kenya. The campus will be run entirely on renewable geothermal energy and designed with state-of-the-art water conservation technology.
2. Development of Swahili/English AI models and launch of AI societal services – To support national economic growth and development and support Kenya’s unique cultural and linguistic needs, G42 has begun work through its data infrastructure in the United States to train an open-source large language AI model in Swahili and English.
3. East Africa Innovation Lab and Skilling Support – Microsoft and G42 will launch and operate an East African Innovation Lab in Nairobi to help Kenyan and other East African startups, entrepreneurs, companies, and organizations develop and implement cloud and AI services.
4. Internet connectivity—Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy will continue to expand its work with Microsoft and G42 to broaden internet connectivity.
5. Digital safety, privacy and security – Microsoft and G42 will work with the government of Kenya. They will design and operate the new East Africa cloud region as part of a “trusted data zone” based on global standards to protect digital safety, privacy and security.
#5 The City of Carmel Mordenizes its Wired and Wireless Networking with HPE Aruba Networking
The City of Carmel, Indiana, promotes quality of life by modernizing its wired and wireless networking infrastructure with a Wi-Fi 6E-enabled HPE Aruba Networking solution.
The end-to-end wired and wireless deployment improves public and staff mobility in support of the city’s thriving arts scene, numerous seasonal festivals, and other public amenities that contribute to livability and has attracted more than 130 corporate headquarters to the area. In addition, the AI-powered intelligence within the solution is generating municipal operations savings of up to 50 percent.
How HPE is helping with Modernizing Networking Infrastructure
- HPE Aruba Networking Central supports and automates CX Switching wired infrastructure for the city’s network.
- HPE Aruba Networking User Experience Insight (UXI) proactively uncovers service degradations by testing end-to-end user device to network to application connectivity before they impact experiences.
- HPE Aruba Networking ClearPass, with its built-in zero-trust and secure access service edge (SASE) cybersecurity, will help the city secure its new unified network.
- HPE Aruba Networking ClearPass Device Insight for AI-powered intelligent device discovery and profiling.
#6 Red Hat and Nutanix Expands Partnership to build enterprise-ready Innovation with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat and Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, announced an expanded collaboration to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an element of Nutanix Cloud Platform.
Through this expanded collaboration, Nutanix AOS will build on the enterprise-ready innovation Red Hat delivers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for traditional operating system capabilities. This enables Nutanix to focus on the novel intellectual property delivered by Nutanix AOS, providing a more consistent cloud operating model for running applications and data across hybrid multicloud endpoints.
Benefits:
- Direct access to enterprise-grade Linux experts specifically dedicated to the needs of a flexible, scalable Linux operating system.
- Enhanced stability for hybrid cloud infrastructure to help organizations more consistently manage and scale cloud-native workloads from on-premises data centers to multiple public clouds.
- Access to trusted, security-optimized Linux to support greater resilience, with backing from Red Hat’s product security and security incident response teams to generate faster responses to potential security vulnerabilities.
#7 VMware Avi Load Balancer Enhances Automation and Visibility for Hybrid Clouds
VMware Avi Load Balancer is the first-ever software-defined load balancer (LB) for hybrid clouds. The LB delivers a distributed architecture with built-in automation and deep application visibility. Avi load’s innovations have enabled IT teams to deliver load balancing at the speed of applications while ensuring elasticity (scale-out and scale-up) and a consistent operating model across hybrid multi-cloud environments.
It also includes VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), traditional data centers, and native public clouds for virtualized, Kubernetes and bare metal workloads.
Avi Load Balancer is transforming across –
- VCF Private Cloud Applications
- Kubernetes Applications
- Mobile and 5G Applications
- Legacy LB to Avi Conversion Tool
#8 New Commerce Cloud Features by Salesforce to Boost Customer Experience
Salesforce has unveiled three new Commerce Cloud innovations to help businesses build commerce sites that boost revenue while delivering personalized customer experiences. The new innovations and improved development will help merchants address growing customer expectations for a seamless, integrated experience across all channels.
With 32% of customers stating they will abandon a brand after one poor experience, the importance of acquiring and retaining digital commerce customers is at an all-time high. As such, many business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies are looking for ways to deliver more consistent, connected, and data-driven ecommerce experiences to chronic retail challenges like shopping cart abandonment and shrinking customer loyalty.
New Features Include:
1. Salesforce Checkout: A unified, one-click checkout platform connected to customer data and built on the Einstein 1 Platform to provide shoppers with more consistent, cross-channel experiences throughout their buying journeys.
2. Headless commerce capabilities for B2B: Developers can implement headless commerce with out-of-the-box APIs in the Commerce Cloud that help merchants create engaging B2B sites that rival traditional consumer shopping experiences.
3. Composable Commerce Enhancements for B2C: Developers can combine or create templated, composable, and customizable headless approaches to B2C ecommerce site development with new powerful Salesforce APIs and out-of-the-box personalization functionality.
#9 Huawei and China Unicom Successfully Test Revolutionary Microwave Backhaul Solution
Huawei and the Baotou Branch of China Unicom Inner Mongolia have successfully completed the first commercial test of the pioneering MAGICS LH long-haul microwave solution in Baotou, Inner Mongolia.
Using ultra-wideband technology, this microwave solution allows a single antenna to cover five frequency bands, including L6 GHz, U6 GHz, 7 GHz, 8 GHz, and 11 GHz. The frequency bands are covered, making it the widest range of microwave frequency bands ever recorded by a commercial product. The solution can reduce microwave backhaul hardware costs by more than 70% with a link capacity of up to 10 Gbps. The test spanned a distance of 36 km.
#10 Humana Group and Google Cloud Join Forces to Improve IT Security in the Healthcare Sector
Humana Group, one of the Nordic region’s largest care companies, and Google Cloud have announced their collaboration. This partnership will increase IT security in the healthcare space, improving control over data management and simplifying collaboration for Humana employees in its Nordic organization. Transitioning to Google Cloud Workspace will help Humana create more secure data management and easy access to key systems.
What does Google Workspace Provide to Improve Security in Care
- One-click access to collaboration tools such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs, Drive, Chat, Meet, and more.
- It is relied on by over three billion users and over 10 million customers.
- Tools like Drive and Docs will make it easy for staff to share and edit files in real-time safely
- Gmail will provide a more secure and reliable email service for care providers.
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