The general session is always a favourite of mine at VMware Explore because it gives such great insight into what the vision of VMware is, what the focus is for the organisation and of course, there is always some great announcements thrown in for good measure.
Check out the video below to hear my thoughts and what my key take aways were from the session this year.
Check out my Tech Snapshots that highlight some of the key statistics and messages from the session.
In today's cloud age, with data fragmenting and IT resources becoming increasingly strained, cyber threats are a growing concern for all organisations. While traditional data protection measures remain vital, they often feel reactive rather than proactive. Commvault, however, is shifting this narrative, developing a dynamic, proactive defence against cyber threats.
What impresses me about Commvault's strategy, particularly compared to other vendors, is their blend of data protection and security. By merging these two key aspects, Commvault's platform evolves from a 'last resort' recovery solution to an active shield against potential cyber threats.
This approach was discussed during Commvault's recent online event, "Accelerating Cyber Defence and Response with Next Generation Data Protection". CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, outlined several thought-provoking points that underline Commvault's proactive and integrated approach to cyber defence:
The dual implications of AI, arming both defenders and adversaries with advanced tools.
The complexity and vulnerabilities of using various tools to protect cloud data.
The blurring of boundaries between data protection and security necessitates a unified approach.
Commvault are taking security capabilities used in production directly into their protection platform.
The vital importance of swift recovery, helping organisations minimise downtime and enhance resilience.
Commvault's CTO, David Ngo, then unveiled the latest advancements, each contributing to the company's innovative protection and security solution:
Commvault Cloud Command: A unified dashboard for managing all Commvault services, with integrated visibility into the health, risk levels, security, and recovery.
Commvault Risk Analysis: A machine learning-powered tool that works as a cyber sentinel, securing sensitive data to prevent cyber exposure.
Commvault Threat Scan: A digital detective of sorts, inspecting backup content to quarantine suspicious datasets and ensuring clean recoveries.
Commvault Auto Recovery: This tool tests your recovery readiness and offers forensic analysis to pinpoint clean recovery points.
Commvault Threatwise Advisor: This new feature enables intelligent assessment of backed-up workloads, recommending where sensors should be configured to ensure key data is protected.
One of the event's highlights was an insightful panel discussion hosted by Steve Preston, Commvault's VP for Security. The panel comprised Moriah Hara and Dr. Ed Amoroso from TAG Cyber LLC, Commvault's own CISO, Javier Dominguez, and Yabing Wang, CIO at Just Works. This diverse group touched on a broad range of topics, such as:
The critical role of the CISO in organisations: With the rising complexity of digital threats, the importance of having a strategic leader guiding an organisation's cyber defence can't be overstated.
The AI threat: Imagine a video or voice message that sounds exactly like your CEO but isn't! The panel discussed the dangers of AI-manipulated communication and its implications.
The changing face of risk in the age of COVID-19: The pandemic and the resultant shift to remote working have drastically changed our perception of risk and risk acceptance.
For those aiming to stay ahead of the curve in our evolving digital landscape, Commvault's unique approach provides a compelling solution. By prioritising proactive data protection and security, Commvault demonstrates adaptability and foresight in the face of the rapidly changing cyber threat environment.
This week saw Juniper present an update on its vision, strategy and latest innovations at the company’s virtual global summit for analysts, influencers and the media. Leading up to this event, I have been lucky enough to meet a number of Juniper execs to understand first-hand its strategy, vision, and latest product offerings.
Juniper has a laser focus on experience-first networking. This is much more than a marketing spin on its products and this was clear throughout the summit and across the company’s product innovations. Experience-first networking for Juniper is all about simple operations for network admins and a superior end-user experience for IT users. Anyone who knows me will know that I'm a simple soul, and while I love enterprise technology, I firmly believe it doesn't need to be complicated. So this messaging and focus both sit well with me.
Often when you hear terms like experience-first networking, you will think it is just about marketing spin on top of the same old products. It is clear with Juniper that it goes much deeper than this. It appears to all start with the 2019 acquisition of Mist Systems and particularly the AI offerings surrounding the Marvis technology. If you haven't seen Marvis in action, head over to Tech Field Day to learn more. During the summit there was a short demonstration of the Marvis technology in action, initially showing troubleshooting of a wired network where the root cause had been diagnosed as a faulty network cable. Secondly and most impressively to me, the technology was able to troubleshoot and pinpoint an end-user's issue with Microsoft Teams. These kinds of quick and straightforward troubleshooting abilities make a real difference to both the end-users and the IT teams, allowing them to focus more time on innovation and moving forward, rather than tackling business as usual issues.
The image below was discussed during the summit. It depicts logged support tickets over time and how they were resolved. The green portion shows the tickets resolved (and logged) without human intervention, and the red portion indicates tickets with human intervention. As you can see, with AI technology built into the systems and more nodes being added to improve intelligence, tickets are being resolved before IT even needs to intervene.
Juniper discussed that, moving forward, networking was about much more than speeds and feeds alone. Of course, speeds and feeds are still important, but now it's about delivering real business value - and for Juniper Networks as a software company, this is all about the experience.
Building on the experience-first networking approach and maintaining its leadership within its products, Juniper Networks announced three new offerings during the summit:
Juniper Support Insights
Allows you to connect any Junos OS device securely to the cloud to offer AI-led insights to help operations proactively support the network.
Two new Wi-Fi 6E AI-powered Access Points
Leveraging the Mist AI technologies, these Wi-Fi 6E access points offer the latest Wi-Fi standards and are combined with technologies such as BLE, other location-based services and much more.
IoT Assurance
With more and more IoT devices being added to corporate networks, it can often be a challenge to manage the lifecycles of these devices. Whilst some IoT devices will support 802.1X for onboarding, many more devices do not. IoT Assurance allows operations to manage this full lifecycle across all IoT devices using Private Pre-Shared Key (PPSK) technology.
I have expanded on these announcements in this blog post, but these products further help operations deliver a better experience to end-users, with better uptime, quick resolution to issues, better performance and in-built security.
I have been really impressed to hear and understand Juniper's vision, and importantly, how it plans to achieve it. Juniper has been on a journey to modernise its business, and the focus on software and innovation around AI results is a real differentiator that will matter to customers.
Personally, moving forward, I look forward to learning more about Marvis and seeing it in action for myself.
Here are two of my Doodles from the event. Please click them to see them in more detail.
Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Juniper to create content following the Juniper Networks Analyst, Influencer and Media Global Summit 2021. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Juniper Networks.
