Virtual Desktop Strategies, Virtual Server Management
businesswire | August 22, 2023
Softchoice, a software-focused IT solutions provider in Canada and North America, has announced the addition of Cloud Cost Optimization, powered by VMware Aria Cost, to its managed services portfolio. Part of VMware Cross-Cloud managed services, Cloud Cost Optimization helps customers realize cloud value faster with FinOps, an operational model that brings accountability and clarity to the variable spend model of the cloud.
VMware Cross-Cloud managed services is a set of prescriptive offerings for public, private, sovereign and hybrid clouds, cloud-native app delivery, designed to optimize cloud costs and help customers manage multi-cloud operational governance, all built on a common VMware foundation. The services enable customers to rely on expert, specialized managed services partners to drive cost efficiency and interoperability between clouds, data centers, and applications.
As a longstanding and reputable VMware partner, Softchoice offers customers faster time-to-value, flexibility to scale up or down as required, along with lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and greater security, each of which enables organizations to invest in cloud growth while reducing complexity and risk at every step.
“Modern apps are fueling the next wave of enterprise innovation and driving multi-cloud adoption. Yet, implementing multi-cloud can be complex and costly if not handled properly, with some 76% of multi-cloud organizations report needing to improve control over their cloud costs1,” said Abhay Kumar, VP for Hyperscalers and Technology Partners, VMware. “With their new Cloud Cost Optimization service, Softchoice can help our mutual customers in their aims to simplify financial management, streamline operations, and improve cross-organizational collaboration across their multi-cloud environment.”
Delivered as a managed subscription-based service, Softchoice’s Cloud Cost Optimization is designed to help customers maximize the value of every dollar spent in the cloud by adopting FinOps. In line with VMware’s aim to bring clarity to cloud chaos through a cloud-smart approach, Softchoice’s service helps organizations maximize the value from their multi-cloud estates and applications.
Chris Swadish, Hybrid Cloud Business Leader at Softchoice, said, “We are excited to offer our customers this Cross-Cloud managed service and support VMware’s vision of helping customers across the world become cloud-smart in their multi-cloud environments. As cloud adoption and innovation becomes a necessity, organizations need a better handle on their costs and risks. Cloud Cost Optimization helps customers both begin and correct their cloud journeys through a systematic, insight-led process designed to offer results at scale. Our work with The FinOps Foundation, technical proficiency, team of experts, and close partnership with VMware means that we can offer customers a more accelerated path to cloud efficiency, while aiming to reduce risk and helping them focus on innovation and growth across all cloud environments.”
Softchoice has earned the VMware Managed Services Specialization to attain the VMware Cross-Cloud Managed Service Provider badge and the company’s Cloud Cost Optimization service is a VMware Validated Service Offering (VSO). This provides public confirmation that partner solutions are functionally and architecturally complete. Additionally, Softchoice recently completed the VMware Managed Services Advanced Specialization Audit, showcasing how the company is able to support customers with advanced transformation requirements.
About Softchoice
Softchoice Corporation (TSX: SFTC) is a software-focused IT solutions provider that equips organizations to be agile and innovative, and for their people to be engaged, connected and creative at work. That means moving them to the cloud, helping them build the workplace of tomorrow, and enabling them to make smarter decisions about their technology portfolio.
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Virtual Desktop Tools, Cloud
Globenewswire | July 04, 2023
Anjuna Security Inc., a confidential computing software company, today announced that its flagship product, the Anjuna Confidential Computing Platform, now supports Microsoft Azure confidential virtual machines (VMs) powered by AMD EPYC™ processors with Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) security features. This added functionality represents a significant advancement in Anjuna’s support for Azure confidential computing (ACC) solutions and increases flexibility of choice for Microsoft customers.
“As a leader in off-chain computation, where trust and security are non-negotiable, we are very excited by Anjuna’s expanded support for the latest AMD SEV-SNP confidential computing technology on Microsoft Azure that provides powerful isolation, risk reduction, and simplicity for sensitive data and code, taking confidential computing ease of use, trust, and simplicity to next level,” said Mitch Gildenberg, Switchboard CTO.
Azure confidential VMs, powered by AMD SEV-SNP, provide a robust platform to securely migrate and run enterprise applications to the cloud with data-in-use protection. While running in confidential VMs, applications can be isolated from other VMs, the hypervisor, and cloud infrastructure operators. Additionally, Anjuna's solution provides further isolation and safeguards for threats originating from the guest OS, misconfigurations, and other applications running in the same VM and the VM administrator. With more organizations processing more sensitive data in the cloud for generative AI, financial systems, and high-value transactions processing, however, security must extend to cover all these additional threats.
Anjuna Confidential Computing Platform enhances Azure confidential VMs, strengthening data protection and improving operational efficiency at scale. Anjuna automates the end-to-end deployment process and further protects applications in hardened Anjuna Confidential Containers that cannot be accessed by the other applications or the VM administrator. Moreover, Anjuna seamlessly and without code changes integrates attestation-aware key management capabilities via the Anjuna Policy Manager, ensuring that secrets are exclusively distributed to trusted applications.
“At Anjuna, we believe Confidential Computing should be ubiquitous, easy to use, and above all, secure without trade-offs. For too long, enterprises have had to choose between ease of use and security. In today’s digital economy, this is no longer acceptable,” said Ayal Yogev, CEO and co-founder of Anjuna Security. “Microsoft Azure is a leading innovator in confidential computing and we are excited to be among the first Confidential Computing software providers to support both their Intel SGX and AMD SEV-SNP powered infrastructure. We are committed to keep working closely with Microsoft to unlock the full potential of Azure Confidential Computing services.”
“We are committed to making Microsoft Azure a trusted cloud platform offering a broad portfolio of Confidential Computing solutions to customers,” said Vikas Bhatia, Head of Product, Azure confidential computing at Microsoft. “The combination of Azure confidential VMs powered by AMD SEV-SNP and the Anjuna Confidential Computing Platform unlocks value to customers, ensuring high levels of data protection and privacy with streamlined operations and ease of use.”
About Anjuna Security
Anjuna allows applications to run in any cloud with complete data security and privacy. Anjuna isolates workloads in a protected environment that intrinsically secures data in every state. Anjuna empowers enterprises to directly control application-level trust policies, ensuring that only trusted code can access sensitive data. Anjuna works with enterprises around the globe in industries such as financial services, government, and blockchain. To learn more about Anjuna’s platform and impact, visit Anjuna.io.
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Virtual Desktop Tools, Server Hypervisors
businesswire | July 10, 2023
Opvizor, the leader for independent operational insight and monitoring solutions, has launched a GenAI-based cloud monitoring platform, named Opvizor/Cloud. The new version supports VMware vSphere, Google Cloud, AWS, Azure infrastructure including operating systems along with databases, storage, and network. Opvizor/Cloud, provides users with a single pane of glass to monitor performance, compliance and bottlenecks of their virtualized and multi-cloud environments.
With Opvizor/Cloud, administrators can gain operational insight and with this new understanding optimize their infrastructure and applications, and reduce operational overhead.
With hundreds of customers around the world including Motorola, Porsche, DZ Bank, the State of New Jersey, the Canton of Schaffhausen (Switzerland), and many others, Opvizor has become an industry standard for operational insight and monitoring of virtualized/cloud environments.
The new GenAI capability will use insight and knowledge learned from all existing Opvizor/Cloud customers, as well as public sources to recognize trends, exceptions and faults within the customers' environment. This new GenAI facility supports operation specialists in increasing their understanding of their own environment and make decisions quicker.
"The launch of Opvizor/Cloud provides our customers with a powerful, scalable, and flexible monitoring solution, without the need to provide in-house resources," said Dennis Zimmer, founder and chief technology officer, Opvizor. "Our hosted solution not only reduces the need for investment in physical hardware and associated maintenance costs, but also allows businesses to adapt easily to their changing IT needs. Additionally, new features and early previews are available instantly without the need to redeploy or install patches."
About Opvizor
Opvizor has been a leader in operational insight and performance monitoring for over 10 years, serving hundreds of customers on all continents. Opvizor specializes in performance monitoring, operational insight, log analysis, wasted resource detection, resource forecasting, root/cause analysis, and change configuration management for platforms such as VMware vSphere, VMware Tanzu, VMware Horizon, VMware vSAN, Microsoft Hyper-V, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Huawei, HPE, NVIDIA, Cisco, Brocade, NetApp, Dell, RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL.
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