Top IT, Cloud, Cybersecurity News Updates: Weekly Highlights

Welcome to the weekly highlights edition by CIO Influence. It covers top cloud, cybersecurity, data management, AI and IT news weekly updates. In this roundup, we bring you the latest developments from the tech giants during the week. These updates offer valuable insights into the evolving digital landscape, from cybersecurity measures to technological innovations.

#1 Reliance Cyber and Google Cloud Security Unite to Transform Cybersecurity for UK Businesses

Reliance Cyber, a leading Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP), has been chosen as one of only four MSSPs to partner with Google Cloud Security (GCS). This collaboration aims to enhance cybersecurity for businesses throughout the UK and Ireland by making it more effective and less complicated.
Importance of the Partnership:

1. Challenges Addressed: Businesses face escalating cyberattacks, numerous security alerts, rising cybersecurity costs, and a shortage of skilled professionals. This partnership addresses these issues by providing improved security postures through insightful, data-driven analytics, which underpin Reliance Cyber’s XDR service.
2. Relevance in Changing Times: As businesses navigate economic, social, and technological changes, including COVID-19 impacts, hybrid and remote work, AI advancements, and budget pressures, this partnership offers enhanced cybersecurity without high costs or complexity.

#2 Google Cloud AI Researchers Unveil LANISTR Multimodal Learning Framework

LANISTR is a new framework that Google Cloud AI researchers introduced, enabling multimodal learning by ingesting unstructured and structured data. It is designed to address challenges with structured and unstructured data within a framework.
Handling multimodal data, which includes language, images, and structured data, is vital in machine learning. The main challenge is dealing with missing data types in large, unlabeled datasets like tables and time series. Traditional methods often struggle with absent data, resulting in poor model performance.
News Highlights:

• The multimodal data method includes various fusion techniques combining data at the feature or decision levels.
• LANISTR framework employs unimodal masking in which parts of data within each modality are made during training.
• The framework is based on innovative similarity-based multimodal-making objectives.
• LANISTR is effective in encountering data distributions that are not seen during training.

#3 Check Point Issues Advisory on VPN Security Threats Amid Rising Attacks

Check Point Software Technologies recently issued an advisory on an ongoing campaign by threat actors targeting Remote Access VPN devices to breach enterprise networks. This highlights the increasing exploitation of remote-access VPN environments by malicious groups as entry points into corporate infrastructures.
Check Point’s Remote Access VPN, integrated into all its network firewalls, provides secure access to corporate networks via VPN clients or web-based SSL VPN portals. However, attackers have targeted security gateways with outdated local accounts relying solely on password authentication, which is insecure without certificate authentication.
Recommendations from Check Point:

• Inspect systems for local accounts and identify those relying solely on password authentication.
• Disable unused local accounts.
• Enhance authentication methods by adding certificate authentication.
• Deploy the Security Gateway hotfix to block local accounts from authenticating with just a password.

#4 DataStax Unveils Astra Vectorize with OpenAI and Microsoft Azure Integration

DataStax has unveiled Astra Vectorize, a new feature designed to perform embedding generations on the server side. The launch of Astra Vectorize introduces enhanced integrations with OpenAI and Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, aimed at streamlining and expediting embedding generation for developers. These integrations empower organizations to compare various embedding models, significantly reducing development time effortlessly.

Astra Vectorize, an extension of the Astra Data API, enables users to submit raw, unstructured data—such as text or images—as part of insert, update, or vector search operations. Astra DB automatically generates vector embeddings for this data, enhancing the developer experience by abstracting the complexity of embedding models from application code. This allows users to concentrate on the business logic of their applications rather than the intricacies of integrating with external systems.

#5 Telefónica and Google Cloud Extended Partnership for Cloud Offerings

Telefónica and Google Cloud have announced the extension and expansion of their partnership, aiming to deliver top-notch cloud solutions to the market and facilitate businesses in speeding up their digital transformations. This renewed agreement encompasses an increase in the range of Google Cloud services provided by Telefónica Tech for the B2B sector, Telefónica’s adoption of cloud services for its own operations, and a deeper collaboration in key innovation areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI).

Internally, Telefónica is leveraging Google Cloud’s technologies through its “Go to Cloud” initiative to propel its digital transformation. This effort has led to notable improvements in operational systems, including faster application deployment and optimized infrastructure. The mutual benefits derived from the strategic collaboration between Telefónica and Google Cloud over the past few years have prompted Telefónica to extend the partnership for an additional three years. Moreover, the two entities are exploring further cooperation avenues, including utilizing AI and data services, hosting network functions using Google Cloud solutions under a telco cloud framework, and enhancing Telefónica’s network operations through automation.

#6 Patronus AI Secures $17 Million Series A Funding to Revolutionize Security

Patronus AI, an industry-first automated evaluation platform that detects large language model (LLM) mistakes, is raising a $17 million Series A funding round, bolstering its total funds to $20 million. Glenn Solomon at Notable Capital spearheaded the financing round, which also included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Datadog, Gokul Rajaram, Factorial Capital, and various software and AI executives. Co-founded by machine learning experts Anand Kannappan and Rebecca Qian from Meta, Patronus AI introduces the industry’s inaugural automated evaluation and security platform.

This innovative platform leverages proprietary AI technology; Patronus AI empowers enterprise development teams to evaluate model performance, generate adversarial test cases, benchmark models, and more. By automating and scaling manual and expensive model evaluation methods prevalent in today’s enterprises, Patronus AI enables organizations to deploy LLMs with confidence while mitigating the risk of model failures and misaligned outputs.

#7 Lenovo’s Strategic Collaboration with Alat: Boosting Transformation and Expansion

Lenovo Group Limited has entered a Strategic Collaboration Framework Agreement and a Bond Subscription Agreement with Alat, a Public Investment Fund (PIF) subsidiary, to drive its global transformation and expansion efforts. The collaboration aims to accelerate Lenovo’s growth momentum, enhance its global presence, and increase its manufacturing footprint in the MEA region, aligning with both companies’ strategic visions.

Key Highlights:

1. The collaboration signifies Lenovo’s commitment to its existing strategy, operational excellence, and sustainability. It aims to establish a regional MEA headquarters in Riyadh, KSA, and a new PC and server manufacturing facility to cater to the region’s growing demands.
2. Lenovo plans to issue US$2 billion in zero coupon convertible bonds to Alat, providing greater financial flexibility to implement its strategy and transition into a solutions and services-led business.
3. The partnership with Alat enables Lenovo to capitalize on the strong growth momentum in the MEA region, tapping into the region’s IT and Business Services market, which is expected to reach close to US$38 billion by 2027.
4. Lenovo will contribute to Saudi Arabia’s clean energy goals by establishing a manufacturing hub in the Kingdom, aligning with its own net-zero targets and supporting KSA’s sustainable initiatives.
5. Alat’s focus on advanced technology manufacturing complements Lenovo’s vision of innovation and growth. The collaboration reflects mutual confidence in each other’s market leadership and future growth potential.

#8 Oracle offers Enterprise Cloud Services  with Two Public Cloud Regions in Morocco

Oracle has announced plans to open two Oracle Cloud Regions in Morocco. The cloud region will offer enterprise cloud services to local and regional organizations across Africa. The regions will allow Oracle customers and partners to migrate mission-critical workloads from their data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) while helping them comply with local regulations. This decision will provide customers and partners access to a wide range of cloud services to modernize their applications and innovate with AI, data, and analytics.

News Highlights: 

• Mr. Mohcine Jazouli, Minister Delegate to the Head of Government in charge of Investment, Convergence, and Evaluation of Public Policies, has signed an MoU to establish the two Oracle Cloud Regions in Morocco.
• Oracle’s public cloud in Morocco will accelerate the digital transformation throughout the region.
• The new public cloud regions will offer enterprise-grade cloud capabilities to help organizations quickly deliver solutions, build resilience, and explore new markets to help accelerate growth.
• It positions Morocco prominently on the international digital stage, showcasing our capabilities and readiness to lead in the global digital economy.

#9 Informatica and Microsoft Expands Integration to Simplify AI Data Management on Azure

Informatica has announced three new native integrations with Microsoft during Informatica World in Las Vegas. These integrations will streamline the process for Azure and Microsoft Fabric customers to discover, manage, and deploy AI-powered data management services within Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC) platform, enabling the creation of trusted data for generative AI.

News Highlights: 

• IDMC as an Azure Native ISV Service offers Azure customers a native experience to discover and deploy IDMC within the Azure Management Console.
• Informatica Data Quality as a Microsoft Fabric Native Application enables Fabric customers to utilize AI-powered data profiling and data quality services directly within OneLake.
•  This collaboration delivers IDMC services to Microsoft customers, such as integration, quality, profiling, and marketplace.
•  Integrated within IDMC, Informatica’s CDAM solution offers universal, automated governance guardrails that protect sensitive, private, and confidential data with controls targeting specific rows, columns, and cells in structured data tables.

#10 Luminary Cloud Strengthens Realtime Engineering Platform with Latest Features

Luminary Cloud, a leader in cloud-native computer-aided engineering software, has announced new in-demand services, digital simulation, and R&D features. After launching out of stealth, the company now offers Lumi Mesh Adaption and Conjugate heat transfer (CHT) simulation. In addition to the announcement, Luminary has achieved International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) compliance, which is required for companies in contract with the US government.

New features of Luminary Cloud:

1. Lumi AI Copilot Advancements
2. Inclusion of Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT)
3. ITAR Compliance Achievement

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