CLOUD, VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS
Businesswire | May 17, 2023
ThinkData Works Inc., a leading data catalog provider, is introducing new platform improvements that support data virtualization from more than 40 data sources. This enhancement increases the number of data source integrations available on the ThinkData Works Catalog Platform, including native support for Snowflake, BigQuery, and other cloud warehouses, as well as Oracle, SQL Servers, mongoDB and streaming data sources like Kafka and Kinesis. By supporting integration with these data sources, ThinkData Works enables out-of-the-box data fabric capabilities for organizations with hybrid cloud environments.
According to recent research by Google, the majority of organizations deploy applications on multiple on-premises and cloud solutions, clearly indicating that hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud is a reality for modern business. ThinkData Works' new capabilities harmonize these environments through virtualization technology, allowing customers to deploy a data catalog that enables governance across an entire decentralized data ecosystem without requiring data asset migration. This approach ensures compliance and governance are maintained while creating visibility and streamlined data access across organizations without the need for custom connections to data sources.
With an increasing number of companies repatriating data from cloud to on-premises, this feature addresses concerns around ballooning cloud costs and complex migrations. Teams can easily connect to data in a standard way no matter where it resides, even facilitating data migration to or from the cloud.
"The idea that companies are migrating their data to a single cloud warehouse is a myth," said Bryan Smith, Co-founder and CEO of ThinkData Works. "These days it's much more likely that an average organization will have data stored in a number of different places, both cloud and on-premises, and they need a good way to manage, access, and report on this data quickly. We're excited to launch these new capabilities to our users, who know first hand how diverse a data environment can be."
“Non-Invasive Data Governance is based on the idea that organizations can achieve appropriate levels of governance without a major lift-and-shift of their data," says Robert S. Seiner, President and Principal of KIK Consulting & Educational Services and the author of two books on Non-Invasive Data Governance. "By supporting data virtualization from essential data sources, ThinkData Works is helping companies with hybrid cloud environments put non-invasive data governance rules into practice."
Prospective customers can experience the power of the ThinkData Works data catalog platform first-hand through a new Free Trial offering, now available for a limited time.
About ThinkData Works
ThinkData Works unlocks the value of data to grow your business. Connect seamlessly to any source, drive critical insights, and deliver data while retaining visibility and control. Founded in 2014, ThinkData Works offers flexible data connections, an intuitive catalog interface, and secure tools to deliver data where it needs to be — inside or outside your organization. Purpose-built to handle the complexities of data variety, their unified cloud platform cuts overhead, fuels innovation, and drives revenue growth.
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VIRTUAL DESKTOP TOOLS, VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTS, VPN
PR Newswire | June 02, 2023
Channel leader CYTRACOM announces a significant update to its ControlOne platform, enabling MSPs to prevent managed clients from evading security requirements and create a passwordless experience for end-users. Managed users are now always on the virtual corporate network, secured by unified global security policies, with an experience that is transparent to end users.
"With the new capabilities of the ControlOne agent, we are demonstrating our continued commitment to driving innovation within the network security market for managed services providers," says CYTRACOM Co-founder and CEO Zane Conkle. "Working closely with MSPs, we are removing the complexity of connecting and securing users without compromising performance and security. The ControlOne platform enables MSPs to meet the challenges of today's distributed workforce and alleviate the increasing pressure from regulatory and compliance entities, all while driving increased profit for our partners."
Game-changing features
With the latest release of ControlOne, CYTRACOM is removing the end user from the process of joining or connecting to corporate network infrastructures. "To achieve this objective, we are uniquely leveraging identity management, initially with Microsoft Azure AD and other third-party identity providers coming soon. With this update, the ControlOne agent can now be silently deployed by MSPs through RMM platforms. Unlike VPN software and other security solutions, no interaction with the end user is necessary during setup," says Eric Romano, Head of ControlOne Development, CYTRACOM.
Once deployed, end users are always on the corporate network regardless of location and are protected by firewall and security policies directly managed by the MSP. This also enables MSPs to prevent users from disconnecting from the network, essentially closing a major security gap that exists in most solutions available in the market today.
CYTRACOM's new ControlOne agent also enables a passwordless experience for users. "No longer do they have to complete set-up procedures or connect and disconnect from the network," continues Romano "ControlOne is always on and enables users to work without having to learn specific processes based on their location like they were forced to do with legacy VPN solutions."
Brandt Ball, Founder of Standard I.T. Security adds, "CYTRACOM's ControlOne agent changes the game for us as it enforces always-on security and dramatically cuts deployment costs and effort. We are no longer reliant on the customer to do the right thing or comply with directions which saves us time and money and dramatically improves the experience for the customer. The ControlOne agent integration with Azure AD takes decision-making out of the hands of the customer and ensures they are always connected, always secure, and able to just work. It truly is a win-win."
Cyber insurance ready
The combination of the new silent deployment and passwordless experience of the CYTRACOM ControlOne agent, along with its ability to eliminate VPNs and firewalls, ensures MSPs innovate and achieve compliance with industry regulations and mandates set forth by cyber insurance providers and other regulatory bodies.
"In today's hybrid work environments, we know everyone isn't working inside an office building, but with CYTRACOM's ControlOne platform, MSPs can securely connect and protect users as if they were inside the perimeter of their corporate network at all times," says CYTRACOM COO John Tippett. "ControlOne enables MSPs to regain control over their customers' networks. By eliminating the end user from the equation, MSPs can achieve secure networks and enforce compliance, eliminating vulnerabilities introduced by legacy VPN and on-premises firewalls."
About CYTRACOM
CYTRACOM delivers infrastructure software purpose-built to empower managed service providers (MSPs) with cloud solutions that connect and secure both traditional and hybrid workforces. Our secure access service edge (SASE) solution provides identity-based network security and connectivity within a single platform that enables businesses to deploy zero-trust networks, enforce compliance and eliminate traditional firewalls and VPNs. Our unified communications suite (UCaaS) uniquely aligns with the operating needs of MSPs and enables their customers to experience seamless communication and collaboration regardless of physical location. Together, these solutions deliver a communications, security and networking platform that is exclusively available to CYTRACOM channel partners.
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VIRTUAL DESKTOP TOOLS, SERVER VIRTUALIZATION
prnewswire | June 09, 2023
Ascend.io, the leader in data pipeline automation, today announced that it has deepened the integration of its Data Pipeline Automation platform with Databricks, the data and AI company, to further enable transparency, collaboration, and productivity.
With this integration, joint customers can now take full advantage of Databricks as a cloud data compute platform in Ascend's new second-generation remote data plane architecture, which allows users to leverage Ascend's DataAwareTM control plane within their Databricks lakehouse. In addition, Ascend has released a new free, full-featured developer tier for Databricks so that Ascend customers can take advantage of the latest Databricks capabilities.
Ascend's Data Pipeline Automation Platform is a single platform with intelligence to detect and propagate change across a company's ecosystem—ensuring data accuracy and eliminating wasteful spend on data reprocessing. Pipelines powered by Ascend seamlessly ingest, transform, orchestrate, and share data for the business, across the entire end-to-end journey.
The integration of Databricks' powerful data and analytics capabilities with Ascend's platform increases accessibility, ease of use, and transparency while making it easier to scale support and collaboration across more data teams and business units.
"We're already seeing many customers that are dramatically accelerating their time to value with Databricks by leveraging Ascend's data pipeline automation," said Sean Knapp, Founder and CEO of Ascend.io. "We're excited to bring these advanced Databricks capabilities to more of our customers to increase engineering velocity, deliver quality data, guarantee data lineage, and troubleshoot faster."
Through Ascend's existing partnership with Databricks, developers are able to build intelligent data pipelines within minutes on their data lakehouse architecture, harnessing the most recent Databricks services and endpoints.
"Data-driven organizations are looking for ways to scale their data pipelines as they make a data lakehouse available across their organization," said Roger Muff, VP ISV Partnerships at Databricks. "With Ascend monitoring changes and propagating them across the system, we see faster and more reliable updates. With the use of the Databricks platform for the underlying compute, it centralizes the management and makes it even more scalable."
Ascend's Databricks partnership milestone follows the company's release of Ascend for Data Mesh as well as the launch of Ascend Free Ingest. Together, these business and product updates signal Ascend's commitment to addressing the critical cost, complexity and security challenges associated with ingesting data to leading data infrastructure companies in the space.
About Ascend.io
Ascend is the leader in Data Pipeline Automation for building the world's most intelligent data pipelines. It's a single platform that detects and propagates change across your ecosystem, ensures data accuracy and quantifies the cost of your data products.
Customers can automate up to 90% of repetitive data engineering and reduce infrastructure costs with one place for end-to-end observability and automated lineage tracing. The Ascend intelligent control plane enables customers to automatically detect, manage and propagate change, maintain data integrity, and prevent errors. Customers can also accurately cost data products with metadata-driven insights into team and solution resources used across their landscape. Ascend partners at every step of the data journey with product innovation and expert support that frees customers to focus on achieving goals.
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