Virtual Desktop Tools, Server Virtualization
businesswire | July 19, 2023
Spectro Cloud announces new Palette VerteX Edition and new Spectro Cloud Government practice to meet the growing need for powerful management and security for Kubernetes (K8s) in the public sector.
Kubernetes adoption is growing across the public sector, from federal and defense to state and local government. Public sector organizations are looking to K8s and the open-source, cloud-native ecosystem around it to help drive IT agility in pursuit of their mission. But IT and platform engineering teams are often held back from embracing their choice of K8s by limited resources and restrictions around security and compliance frameworks.
To get the most from Kubernetes, they need the flexibility and simplicity to manage the full lifecycle of multiple Kubernetes distributions deployed in diverse environments, from cloud to edge, including air-gapped locations. And they need this without sacrificing security.
Today Spectro Cloud announces a new edition of its award-winning Palette Kubernetes management platform to meet the needs of these government and public sector organizations, and other industries where security and compliance are paramount.
“We developed Palette VerteX with extensive input from government agencies and customers, along with our public sector team’s decades of experience in delivering secure IT to government,” said Dave Cope, CRO of Spectro Cloud. “Palette VerteX builds on the firm foundation of our Palette enterprise platform to address the specific security requirements of public sector environments, including both military and civilian agencies.”
Palette: trusted K8s management from data center to edge
The award-winning Palette platform is already enabling thousands of platform engineers and DevOps professionals to deploy and manage their full-stack Kubernetes clusters in production, at scale.
They have the power to choose all the components of their clusters and manage clusters consistently across edge, bare metal, data center and cloud. Palette’s deep automation of day 2 activities like patching and monitoring helps stretched teams focus on innovation and removes roadblocks to scale, whatever their mission.
Palette already provides a unique combination of power and simplicity that has attracted enterprise customers in demanding and regulated industries, such as T-Mobile and GE HealthCare, which deal with sensitive data and mission-critical infrastructure at scale.
From the start, Palette was engineered with robust security features including security scans, powerful RBAC, auditing and logging, and tamperproof edge device images. The Palette management platform can be deployed on-premises and even in air-gapped environments.
New VerteX edition adds security capabilities
Now the new Palette VerteX edition extends Palette’s security features further.
VerteX supports the environments and technology platforms essential to government workloads, including deploying Kubernetes clusters in AWS GovCloud, and supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu LTS and Ubuntu Pro as the managed OS layer. Support for Azure Government Cloud is coming later this year.
Furthermore, Spectro Cloud announces that Palette VerteX brings full FIPS 140-2 cryptographic features to both the Palette platform and the Kubernetes clusters it deploys and manages, whether in traditional compute environments or at the edge. FIPS 140-2 is a key security baseline for many public and private sector organizations.
"Palette VerteX is designed from the ground up with security in mind that permeates every aspect it touches, giving government IT, platform engineering, and security teams the confidence they need to deploy and manage any Kubernetes environment at scale,” said Matthew Appler, CEO, Corsec Security, Inc.
Mission-ready support you can rely on
Spectro Cloud is a US-headquartered company, with engineers located across the country, from California to Florida. Many are veterans or have spent their careers supporting defense and government IT organizations. As such Spectro Cloud is proud to offer a premium support tier, delivered exclusively by highly qualified US citizens on US soil, for agencies and departments that need it.
The non-disruptive answer to budget shortfalls
Together, the new features in the VerteX edition make Palette a compelling alternative to incumbent K8s management tooling, especially with its competitive and transparent usage-based pricing model. Palette presents a clear solution for organizations struggling with team resources and budgets. A recent study by analysts ESG found that Palette could cut operating hours and costs for a typical multi-cluster deployment by 90%.
But adopting Palette doesn’t mean ‘rip and replace’ for customers already tied into multi-year agreements with other vendors. One of Palette’s greatest differentiators is its broad support for different Kubernetes distributions and environments, including its ability to monitor and manage clusters built on Rancher RKE2 and Red Hat OpenShift.
Government organizations can leverage their existing investments while charting a course for modern Kubernetes, with openness as a core design principle in Palette VerteX.
“The Palette VerteX announcement comes at a pivotal time in the public sector where managing Kubernetes across organizations using multiple cluster types, across multiple cloud and on-prem environments is very much a challenging reality,” said Josh Slattery, Vice President of Technology Sales at Vertosoft, the leading technology distributor focused on the public sector. “It’s great to see Spectro Cloud launch a truly mission-ready Kubernetes management solution for government straight out of the gate, and we are excited to see the impact it will have on our public sector customers.”
Today’s announcement is the first step on Spectro Cloud’s government roadmap. Furthermore, Spectro Cloud is already working to make Palette the first multi-environment SaaS Kubernetes management platform to become FedRAMP Moderate certified.
“Palette was built to be secure and mission-ready from the start, and over the past year we’ve seen a lot of interest from public sector organizations of all kinds,” said Kyle Goodwin, VP of Public Sector at Spectro Cloud. “Today, with the announcement of these important enhancements, Palette VerteX provides a genuine best-in-class experience for demanding agencies and departments looking to simplify, secure and scale their Kubernetes infrastructure. Our message to government is this: Spectro Cloud is here, and we’re ready to accelerate your mission.”
About Spectro Cloud
Spectro Cloud uniquely enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes in production, at scale. Its Palette enterprise Kubernetes management platform gives platform engineering and DevOps teams effortless control of the full Kubernetes lifecycle even across multiple clouds, data centers, bare metal and edge environments. Ops teams are empowered to support their developers with curated Kubernetes stacks and tools based on their specific needs, with granular governance and enterprise-grade security.
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Virtual Desktop Tools, Server Hypervisors
Business Wire | August 31, 2023
Meter, Inc., a leader in Network as a Service (NaaS) for businesses, today announced DNS Security, built in partnership with Cloudflare, the security, performance, and reliability company. Meter DNS Security is now widely available for all Meter Network customers, expanding Meter’s existing NaaS offering and saving teams both time and money, while also improving overall network performance and security, powered by Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform.
“With the number of devices on a network expected to triple by 2030, modern businesses and organizations demand enterprise network controls to ensure safety and peak performance for business critical functions,” said Anil Varanasi, CEO and co-founder of Meter. “Meter DNS Security is the latest example of how we’re continuing to offer our customers enterprise level networks end-to-end. Through our partnership with Cloudflare, we’re enhancing our capabilities to meet the needs of IT professionals at industrial warehouses, educational institutions, security firms, and more.”
Meter DNS Security eliminates the hassle of having multiple vendors, by providing content filtering at several layers to all customers within the Meter Dashboard in partnership with one of the best providers in the world.
“We’re proud to have Meter leveraging Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform in a new way, offering our DNS filtering feature natively built into their Meter Dashboard,” said John Graham-Cumming, CTO, Cloudflare. “By building on Cloudflare's platform, Meter enables customers to manage their team’s operations at scale, as well as effectively enforce global corporate policies across diverse corporate spaces, such as offices, schools, and warehouses.”
In addition to the ease and scalability of Meter DNS Security, users are ensuring security through enhanced compliance by blocking access to known malicious websites and bad actors. The integration and partnership with Cloudflare provides customers with faster DNS response times, while optimizing network performance by limiting access to high-bandwidth websites and services. Real world examples of this process include, but are not limited to:
Ensuring a safe browsing environment at schools by filtering out age inappropriate content
Optimizing network performance for warehouses by filtering high bandwidth activities like video streaming
Maintaining high security and compliance standards by filtering malicious or illegal content
“Tishman Speyer has successfully partnered with Meter to streamline the networking and Wi-Fi experience for our customers,” said Simon Okunev, Managing Director and Chief Information Officer, Tishman Speyer. “The addition of Meter’s DNS Security feature, powered by Cloudflare, will further benefit our customers by providing an additional layer of security.”
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was awarded by Reuters Events for Global Responsible Business in 2020, named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2021, and ranked among Newsweek's Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022.
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Server Virtualization, Virtual Server Infrastructure
globenewswire | June 27, 2023
Impero Software, a leading provider of online student safety, classroom management and secure remote access software, today announced during ISTELive 2023 that it has incorporated AI and machine learning into its newly debuted “Impero Wellbeing” student safety software, dramatically elevating its capabilities of safeguarding learners.
When installed on student devices, Impero Wellbeing actively and automatically monitors for harmful keywords – such as those having to do with self-harm, bullying, violence, drugs, weapons, pornography or radicalization. If the software detects a student typing potentially dangerous keywords, it then records the incident by snapping a series of screenshots and flagging them in real-time for teacher and administrator review. The AI component is able to sort through the potentially thousands of flags and intelligently cut through false positives to give teachers immediate visibility to any concerning student behavior.
“The launch of machine learning for Impero Wellbeing is taking our goal of ensuring the safety of every learner to the next level,” said Justin Reilly, CEO of Impero Software. “Even the most intricate, nuanced filtering solution can have potentially thousands of false positives. We recently had a great example - perhaps a student is typing to their friend that they’re excited to go to the theater and see the new ‘Suicide Squad’ movie. That’s obviously a very different situation than looking up information on suicide. Our AI-powered solution is able to achieve a dramatic reduction in these false positives that would take up valuable staff time and alert teachers to only the truly dangerous phrases and searches – saving precious time that can make all the difference for a student in crisis.”
In addition to this active online monitoring, Impero Wellbeing can be paired with Impero Safeguard, a digital toolbox allowing teachers to record observed, “offline” events. If a student comes in without a jacket during a harsh winter or has visible bruises, teachers can log these concerns into a student profile for further investigation. Impero Wellbeing & Safeguard are unique in that they combine the “offline” and “online” flags into a single holistic view that gives teachers and school staff a full picture of a student’s physical and mental wellbeing.
“It’s impossible to overstate how much of a difference having this technology at their back makes for teachers in today’s classrooms,” said Impero’s Product Engagement Manager Channing Anderson, who has previous experience as a teacher and school IT director. “Teachers today are being asked to fight against a mental health crisis while half their students are only visible through a screen. They can’t always see what’s happening, and these software solutions are transformative in catching red flags and taking proactive action well before any real danger presents itself.”
Other key features of Impero Wellbeing include:
Granular permission levels for school staff to protect confidential student information.
A constantly reviewed database of over 7,000 concerning keywords and phrases covering mental health, sexual exploitation, criminal exploitation and more.
Integration with Impero Safeguard, enabling the online captures to be included in student-specific chronologies. These chronologies can be securely shared, making it easier than ever to support referrals and aid specialist intervention.
Intuitive reporting that paints a picture of individual student behavior, as well as trends across a class, year group and whole school - giving you valuable context to plan appropriate intervention tactics.
Full GDPR compliance with a firm commitment to student data privacy and security.
Full compatibility with Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and ChromeOS.
About Impero Software
Impero is a global leader in digital solutions for safe and efficient studying and working environments, keeping students on-task and safe, and providing secure and efficient platforms for employees working remote.
In 2022, Impero acquired ContentKeeper, considered one of K-12's best web filtering solutions. Today we work directly with technical teams, schools, MATs, and Fortune 500 companies in more than 90 countries.
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