When Cisco bought AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion just before the IPO, the company sent a clear signal it wanted to move beyond its pure network hardware roots into the software monitoring side of the equation. Yesterday afternoon the company announced it intends to buy another monitoring company, this time snagging internet monitoring solution ThousandEyes.
Cisco would not comment on the price when asked by TechCrunch, but published reports from CNBC and others pegged the deal at around $1 billion. If that’s accurate, it means the company has paid around $4.7 billion for a pair of monitoring solutions companies.
Cisco’s Todd Nightingale, writing in a blog post announcing the deal said that the kind of data that ThousandEyes provides around internet user experience is more important than ever as internet connections have come under tremendous pressure with huge numbers of employees working from home.
ThousandEyes keeps watch on those connections and should fit in well with other Cisco monitoring technologies. “With thousands of agents deployed throughout the internet, ThousandEyes’ platform has an unprecedented understanding of the internet and grows more intelligent with every deployment, Nightingale wrote.
He added, “Cisco will incorporate ThousandEyes’ capabilities in our AppDynamics application intelligence portfolio to enhance visibility across the enterprise, internet and the cloud.”
As for ThousandEyes, co-founder and CEO Mohit Lad told a typical acquisition story. It was about growing faster inside the big corporation than it could on its own. “We decided to become part of Cisco because we saw the potential to do much more, much faster, and truly create a legacy for ThousandEyes,” Lad wrote.
It’s interesting to note that yesterday’s move, and the company’s larger acquisition strategy over the last decade is part of a broader move to software and services as a complement to its core networking hardware business.
Just yesterday, Synergy Research released its network switch and router revenue report and it wasn’t great. As companies have hunkered down during the pandemic, they have been buying much less network hardware, dropping the Q1 numbers to seven year low. That translated into a $1 billion less in overall revenue in this category, according to Synergy.
While Cisco owns the vast majority of the market, it obviously wants to keep moving into software services as a hedge against this shifting market. This deal simply builds on that approach.
ThousandEyes was founded in 2010 and raised over $110 million on a post valuation of $670 million as of February 2019, according to Pitchbook Data.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) warned that the Sandworm team is exploiting a vulnerability that affects Exim Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) software. In a cybersecurity advisory published on May 28, the NSA revealed that the Sandworm team has been exploiting the Exim MTA security flaw since August 2019. The vulnerability (CVE-2019-10149) first appeared in […]… Read More
The post Sandworm Team Exploiting Vulnerability in Exim Mail Transfer Agent appeared first on The State of Security.
Security researchers witnessed the deployment of PonyFinal ransomware at the end of extended human-operated attack campaigns. In a series of tweets, Microsoft Security Intelligence revealed it had observed human-operated campaigns laying in wait for the right moment to deploy PonyFinal ransomware as their final payload. In their operations, the attackers used brute force attacks against […]… Read More
The post PonyFinal Ransomware Delivered by Extended Human-Operated Attacks appeared first on The State of Security.
We may be in the thick of a pandemic with all of the economic fallout that comes from that, but certain aspects of technology don’t change no matter the external factors. Storage is one of them. In fact, we are generating more digital stuff than ever, and Wasabi, a Boston-based startup that has figured out a way to drive down the cost of cloud storage is benefiting from that.
Today it announced a $30 million debt financing round led led by Forestay Capital, the technology innovation arm of Waypoint Capital with help from previous investors. As with the previous round, Wasabi is going with home office investors, rather than traditional venture capital firms. Today’s round brings the total raised to $110 million, according to the company.
Founder and CEO David Friend says the company needs the funds to keep up with the rapid growth. “We’ve got about 15,000 customers today, hundreds of petabytes of storage, 2500 channel partners, 250 technology partners — so we’ve been busy,” he said.
He says that revenue continues to grow in spite of the impact of COVID-19 on other parts of the economy. “Revenue grew 5x last year. It’ll probably grow 3.5x this year. We haven’t seen any real slowdown from the Coronavirus. Quarter over quarter growth will be in excess of 40% — this quarter over Q1 — so it’s just continuing on a torrid pace,” he said.
He said the money will be used mostly to continue to expand its growing infrastructure requirements. The more they store, the more data centers they need and that takes money. He is going the debt route because his products are backed by a tangible asset, the infrastructure used to store all the data in the Wasabi system. And it turns out that debt financing is a lot cheaper in terms of payback than equity terms.
“Our biggest need is to build more infrastructure, because we are constantly buying equipment. We have to pay for it even before it fills up with customer data, so we’re raising another debt round now,” Friend said. He added, “Part of what we’re doing is just strengthening our balance sheet to give us access to more inexpensive debt to finance the building of the infrastructure.”
The challenge for a company like Wasabi, which is looking to capture a large chunk of the growing cloud storage market is the infrastructure piece. It needs to keep building more to meet increasing demand, while keeping costs down, which remains its primary value proposition with customers.
The money will help the company expand into new markets as many countries have data sovereignty laws that require data to be stored in-country. That requires more money and that’s the thinking behind this round.
The company launched in 2015. It previously raised $68 million in 2018.
Kubernetes innately supports scalability. Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) is one such Kubernetes-provided resource that scales deployments, replica sets, replication controllers, and more. Autoscaling not only increases an application’s reliability by improving its availability and fault tolerance but also helps in …
In this Cloud Guidepost series, we’ll introduce you to members of our Worldwide Customer Success Management team. They’ll share their background, their experience as a Customer Success Manager or Customer Success Engineer at Citrix, and key lessons they’ve learned as …
4月7日に緊急事態宣言が発令され、多くの企業がテレワークを導入し、多数の従業員が在宅勤務を開始しました。これまで企業は地震などの自然災害を想定したBCP（事業継続）計画は準備してきたものの、従業員や協力会社の方々がそもそもオフィスに出社できない状況への準備は不十分であったことが明らかになりました。その結果、迅速なテレワークの導入が求められ、容易に導入できるテクノロジーとしてVPN（会社のPCにVPNクライアントをインストールし、それを自宅に持ち帰って利用する）を選択するケースも散見されました。これは企業のセキュリティ担当チームからは決して承認されないはずだった方法ですが、企業は緊急策としてこの方法を選択しました。
従来のVPNが長期のテレワークには不十分な理由
現在のフルタイムでテレワークを行っている現状においては、企業の要求は従来と同じレベルのセキュリティに加え、従業員がオフィスと同等の生産性を発揮することへと移り変わっています。しかし、従来のVPNではセキュリティを犠牲にすることなく、これまでと同等のユーザーエクスペリエンスを提供することは不可能であり、生産性、リスクのレベル、および企業の収益性が損なわれています。
テレワークの長期化に伴い、従業員が行う業務の利便性（エクスペリエンス）、セキュリティ、および生産性を中心に、企業はより戦略的に事業継続計画を見直さざるを得なくなるでしょう 。
VPNの問題点とは？
VPNの安全性は高いという印象から、テレワークを一時的なBCP(事業継続)計画として捉えている企業は多いと思います。しかし、攻撃の高度化により誰も何も信頼しない「ゼロトラストセキュリティ」の重要性が高まるなか、テレワークにおける業務アプリケーションやデータの利用の仕方にも、新しい考え方と手法が必要になっています。
長期的にVPNをテレワークのソリューションとして利用するにあたり様々な問題が顕在化してきています。
このように、常にすべてのアプリケーションがVPN経由で適切に機能するであろう想定を前提にすることはできず、更にスプリットトンネル（一部の企業内通信のみVPNを経由させる方式）を利用しない場合には特に重大な問題となります。
Citrix Workspace はVPNを包含し、より優れた手段を提供する
Citrix Workspaceは、安全性だけでなくユーザーエクスペリエンスを強化することで、生産性にも貢献するリモートワークの環境を提供します。
Over the last few weeks, most organisations have had to transition to enable their employees to work remotely. The key focus has been on business continuity during this trying time. Unfortunately, business continuity isn’t so easy. Keeping the day-to-day operations of the business running has been one of the hardest IT challenges that most organisations […]… Read More
The post Business Continuity Requires Infrastructure Continuity in Times of Remote Working appeared first on The State of Security.
The full impact of COVID-19 on higher education is still unknown. One thing is for certain: The fallout from this pandemic will have a lasting impact on the way teaching is delivered and will also require significant changes to the …
A new ransomware family called “[F]Unicorn” masqueraded as a COVID-19 contact tracing app in order to target Italian users. On May 25, the the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) from the Agency for Digital Italy (AgID) revealed in an advisory that it had received a sample of [F]Unicorn from security researcher JamesWT_MHT. The sample analyzed […]… Read More
The post [F]Unicorn Ransomware Masquerading as COVID-19 Contact Tracing App appeared first on The State of Security.
Once an attacker has established access and pivoted around to the point of gathering the necessary data, they will work on exfiltration of that data. Not all malware will reach this stage. Ransomware, for example, usually has no interest in exfiltrating data. As with the Collection tactic, there’s little guidance on how to mitigate an […]… Read More
The post The MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Exfiltration appeared first on The State of Security.
According to the U.S. Census, the number of nonemployer small businesses increased to 26,485,532 in 2018, up 3% from 2017.
Nonemployers are businesses that have an owner but don't have paid traditional full or part-time employees (W2 employees).
The data comes from tax records and you can think of nonemployers as solopreneur businesses (some exceptions apply - see below). The data includes anyone reporting $1,000 or more in self-employment income, so it includes a lot of part-time businesses.
From 2010 to 2018 the number of nonemployer businesses has grown at an average annual rate of 2.53%. This is a bit more than 3 times the growth rate in traditional employment.
Nonemployers are businesses that have an owner but don't have paid traditional full or part-time employees (W2 employees). The data comes from tax records.
One of the more interesting nonemployer data sub-trends is that the number high earning nonemployers - those who report earning revenue of $100,000 or more per year - is one of the fastest growing segments.
Higher earners have been growing at an average annual rate of 3.7% between 2010 and 2018 and reached 3.1 million in 2018.
The Forbes article Growth Of Million-Dollar, One-Person Businesses Accelerates goes into detail on an even higher earning segment - those reporting revenue of $1 million plus. Key quote:
The number of nonemployer firms—those with no employees except the owners— that hit $1-$2.49 million in revenue in 2018 rose to 41,666 in 2018, according to just-released Census data, up from 39,494 in 2017 and up from 26,744 in 2011—a nearly 48% increase.
Nonemployer data gets less attention than other government data on self-employment.
This is because the dataset is messy and includes a hodgepodge of business entities - passive businesses, firms no longer in business, LLCs owned by major corporations, etc. - that aren't active solopreneur businesses.
But despite these issues, we find the nonemployer data to be a useful indicator of the overall size and growth of U.S. self-employment.
L’annonce des mesures de confinement en France en mars dernier a créé, pour de nombreuses entreprises et organisations, une urgence : celle de rendre le télétravail accessible au maximum de collaborateurs afin …
ビジネス継続の為のテレワークソリューションとして、VDIやアプリケーション仮想化がこれまで以上に注目を浴びています。市場には多くのVDIソリューションが氾濫していますが、失敗ないVDIテレワーク環境の導入において、以下の要素を掘り下げて検討することが重要です。
テレワークVDIソリューションの検討で、とりわけ重要なのはセキュティです。中でも認証セキュリティは非常に大切なポイントになります。このシリーズでは認証セキュリティについても解してゆきます。
これまでアプライアンス版のCitrix Gatwayに実装されていたワンタイムパスワード機能が、Citrix Cloudにも実装されました。このシンプルOTP機能を使えばワンタイムパスワードを使って仮想デスクトップやアプリケーションだけでなく。Workspaceが提供するWeb、SaaSアプリケーン、ファイル共有サービスなどあらゆるサービスにセキュアにアクセスすることができます。
まずはユーザーがワンタイムパスワードを使ってアクセスする様子をご覧ください。
モバイル用の認証トークン利用時
PC用のトークンジェネレーターの利用例
ワンタイムパスワード機能（以下OTP機能）を有効にするには、Citrix Cloudの管理コンソール上で２つの設定スイッチをONにするだけです。
認証トークンデバイスはトークンジェネレーターとも呼ばれています。。RFC6238 TOTP generator互換であれば基本的に何でも利用可能です。それらのほとんどは無償で提供されています。以下にはCitrixで検証済みの製品です。
RFC6238 TOTP generatorにについてはこちらをご覧ください。…
Big data is revolutionizing fleet management — specifically in the form of telematics. From engine diagnostics that track fuel efficiency and mileage to sensors that detect aggressive driving behavior and interior vehicle activity, this information is so valuable that we’re quickly approaching the point where connected technology will come standard in every vehicle. Telematics is […]… Read More
The post Protecting Fleet Data from Security Threats appeared first on The State of Security.
As the leader of a publicly traded corporation with 135,000 employees, Verizon Communications CEO Hans Vestberg has a unique perspective on the state of the world.
When he appears today on Extra Crunch Live, our virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members, we’ll ask him about this extraordinary moment in history and his plans for seeing the company through a black swan event that’s reshaping the global economy.
The discussion starts at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT/9 p.m. GMT. You can find the full details below.
Vestberg served as president and CEO at Ericsson for six years and joined Verizon as its CTO and president of Global Networks in 2017 before stepping into the CEO role a little more than a year later. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon).
We’ll talk to Vestberg about his tactics for managing a company at scale through a crisis and will check in on the company’s 5G rollout, a platform inflection point that should change the landscape for founders and entrepreneurs. Verizon recently acquired BlueJeans, which competes directly with Zoom and WebEx, so we’ll also ask Vestberg about the company’s forward-looking investment strategy.
Extra Crunch members are encouraged to ask their own questions during the Zoom call, so please come prepared. If you’re not already a member, sign up on the cheap right here.
You can also check out the full Extra Crunch Live schedule here.
See you soon!
