Cisco acquired Valtix: What is Valitx?

Valtix is a cloud-native network security company that provides next-generation firewall and web application firewall (WAF) solutions for businesses looking to protect their cloud-based infrastructure. The company was founded in 2018 by seasoned technology executives who recognized the need for a modern approach to network security in the cloud.

Valtix’s cloud-based approach to network security is designed to be both scalable and flexible, allowing businesses to secure their cloud-based infrastructure without having to worry about the complexities of managing hardware or software. By leveraging cloud-native security technologies, Valtix enables businesses to deploy security policies that can be enforced consistently across their entire infrastructure, regardless of the cloud provider or network topology.

One of the key benefits of Valtix’s approach to network security is its ability to provide real-time threat detection and response capabilities. Using advanced machine learning algorithms, Valtix can analyze network traffic in real-time, identifying potential threats and responding quickly to mitigate any risks. This helps businesses stay ahead of the constantly evolving threat landscape and ensure their infrastructure remains secure.

In addition to its advanced threat detection and response capabilities, Valtix also provides businesses with granular control over their network security policies. This allows businesses to tailor their security policies to their specific needs, ensuring that their infrastructure is protected in the most effective way possible. With Valtix, businesses can easily manage their security policies from a centralized dashboard, making it easy to enforce policies consistently across their entire infrastructure.

Valtix’s cloud-based approach also makes it easy for businesses to scale their network security as their needs evolve. Whether they need to protect a small cloud environment or a large, complex infrastructure, Valtix can provide the necessary security solutions to meet their needs. This flexibility allows businesses to focus on growing their business, rather than worrying about managing their network security.

Finally, Valtix’s cloud-native approach to network security is designed to be highly automated, which helps businesses reduce the burden of managing their network security. By automating many of the routine tasks associated with network security, Valtix enables businesses to free up their IT resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.

In conclusion, Valtix is a cloud-native network security company, recently acquired by Cisco that provides businesses with advanced threat detection and response capabilities, granular control over their security policies, and the flexibility to scale their security solutions as their needs evolve. With its cloud-based approach and automated processes, Valtix helps businesses stay ahead of the constantly evolving threat landscape while reducing the burden of managing their network security.

https://valtix.com/blog/ciscos-intent-to-acquire-our-journey-and-why-it-matters/

Mike

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Apronomics: March, 2023

Apronomics, is a play on the word ‘macroeconomics’ which seeks to provide a general perspective in three specific domains. Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3. This is monthly and sometimes twice a month TL;DR “too long; didn’t read” digital glance that serves as a quick consumption style for those looking for hot topics in Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3.

CLOUD

  • Google: Announces the general availability of Dataplex data lineage — a fully managed Dataplex capability that helps you understand how data is sourced and transformed within the organization. (Link)
  • Google: Opens access to Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. Bard is powered by a research large language model (LLM), specifically a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA. (Link)
  • Azure: Announce that GPT-4 is available in preview in Azure OpenAI Service. AI models—including GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and DALL•E 2. (Link)

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

  • Cisco: Announce its intent to acquire Lightspin Technologies Ltd. a privately-held cloud security software company. Lightspin’s lightweight agentless solution quickly scans your AWS, Azure, and GCP environments and Kubernetes clusters covering virtual machines, containers, and serverless. (Link)
  • SAP: SAP and DataRobot announced a joint partnership to enable customers to train ML models on their data residing in SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. As a result, enterprises can now get powerful insights and predictive analytics from their business data. (Link)
  • OpenAI: Released GPT-4, a newer natural language processing (NLP) model that can render both images and text and produce text outputs. GPT-4 still suffers from similar limitations as earlier GPT models. Most notable is that it “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors. (Link)

WEB3

  • Web3 Games Collective: The members of W3GC include Yield Guild Games (YGG), Game7, Magic Eden, and Fenix Games formed the Web3 Games Collective to leverage their expertise in creating a wave of breakout blockchain games. (Link)
  • Chainlink: A web3 services platform, is launching a self-service, serverless platform to help developers connect their decentralized applications (dApps) to any Web 2.0 API, like an AWS or Meta service. (Link)
  • Bitcoin NFTs: Bitcoin supports on-chain (native) support for NFTs, known as ordinal NFTs. Ordinals use an arbitrary but logical ordering system called ordinal theory to give each individual Bitcoin satoshi a unique number. (Link)

Mike

Apronomics: January, 2023

Apronomics, is a play on the word ‘macroeconomics’ which seeks to provide a general perspective in three specific domains. Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3. This is monthly and sometimes twice a month TL;DR “too long; didn’t read” digital glance that serves as a quick consumption style for those looking for hot topics in Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3.

CLOUD

  • AWS: Expected to reach 100B in 2023, despite economic uncertainty. AWS will announce its fourth-quarter earnings on Feb 2, 2023. A breakdown of AWS 12mo earnings in 2021, Q1:18.44B, Q2:19.74, Q3:20.54, Q4:17.78. (Link)
  • Azure: Multiyear, Multibillion dollar partnership with OpenAI, best known for ChatGPT, to accelerate AI breakthroughs. As the exclusive cloud provider powering OpenAI, Azure will look to commercialize OpenAI and offer the technology in its native Azure services. (Link)
  • Snowflake: Acquires Myst, a time series forecasting company. Myst offers an AI platform that helps index a sequence of data points over a period of time. This allows historical data to forecast future behaviors. (Link)

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

  • Meta: Confirms that it is acquiring Luxexcel, a smart eyewear company. Meta will likely leverage the company’s technology to produce AR glasses. This acquisition aligns with Meta’s corporate strategy when it comes to AR and VR advancements. (Link)
  • Amazon: Sidewalk, Amazon’s long-range, low-bandwidth IoT mesh network has four new device manufacture partners to bring smart devices to offer developers. (Link)
  • Microsoft: Acquires Fungible, a company that offers scale-out capabilities for data center infrastructure with low processing power also known as low-power data processing units (DPU). (Link)

WEB3

  • Ava Labs: Has partnered with AWS to support its Web3 node operations. Ava Labs makes it simple to deploy high-performance solutions for Web3. (Link)
  • Polygon: $MATIC Completes a hard fork upgrade to minimize gas fees. Although gas fees will continue to increase during peak demand, they will be aligned with Ethereums gas dynamics. (Link)
  • U.S. Gov: The U.S. government seeks to set a basis for legislative and regulatory control of cryptocurrencies. One way the U.S. government considers jurisdiction over cryptocurrencies is through the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not the SEC. (Link)

Mike

What’s the difference between GCP and AWS Regions?

To understand the global infrastructure of a cloud provider, consider a coffee shop. If an event such as a flood, or power outage impacts one coffee shop location, customers can still get their coffee by visiting a different location only a few blocks away.

A cloud provider’s global infrastructure provides high availability that consisting of several components: Region, Zone, and Edge locations. 

A Region represents independent geographic areas that hosts cloud services. Each Region is isolated from each other unless you allow traffic out of that Region. Thinking back to our coffee shop analogy, all the coffee shops in the Northeast could be considered Northeast Region Coffee. If all Northeast coffee shops went out of business, it wouldn’t affect any Coffee shops located in the Northwest. And a Region consists of Zones. 

A Zone is where cloud resources are deployed generally consisting of two or three independent data centers located tens of miles apart from each other but close enough to have low latency or in our case coffee shops. Let’s say there are three coffee shops in town, one of the coffee shops loses power, however the other two coffee scops can still service customers in town. Zones provide high availability to cloud services and applications in the cloud.

An Edge location is part of the cloud provider’s network also known as Point-of-Presence that places cloud services closer to the user improving the user’s experience and convenience. 

Choosing where your applications are located affects qualities like user experience, availability, durability, and latency. 

Comparing Regions and Zones in Google Cloud and AWS

Google and AWS both use Regions to provide Cloud services to customers. 

One difference is that Google will have at least three Zones in each Region, whereas AWS uses Availability Zones to provide high availability. Every region will have at least two availability zones in an AWS Region.

Google Cloud infrastructure is based in five major geographic locations: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Google Cloud currently supports 106 Zones in 35 regions

AWS Cloud infrastructure functions in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia

The AWS Cloud spans 96 Availability Zones within 30 Regions.

The Google and AWS networks have many of the same attributes with some slight differences! Regardless of which cloud provider you use selecting a region should include four key factors.

  1. Compliance
  2. Proximity to your customers
  3. Available Services within a Region
  4. Pricing

Mike

“Global Locations – Regions & Zones  |  Google Cloud.” Google, Google, https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/. 

Indeglia, Shaun. “GCP Networking- Regions and Zones.” Medium, Google Cloud – Community, 11 Nov. 2022, https://medium.com/google-cloud/gcp-region-and-zones-4eb4bf1f99ab. 

“Select Geographic Zones and Regions  |  Architecture Framework  |  Google Cloud.” Google, Google, https://cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/system-design/geographic-zones-regions. 

“Whitepapers.” Amazon, Earthpledge Foundation, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/global-infrastructure.html. 

Apronomics: December, 2022

Apronomics, is a play on the word ‘macroeconomics’ which seeks to provide a general perspective in three specific domains. Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3. This is monthly and sometimes twice a month TL;DR “too long; didn’t read” digital glance that serves as a quick consumption style for those looking for hot topics in Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3.

CLOUD

  • AWS: Secured a $723,878,930 five-year fixed-prices agreement with the Department of Navy (DoN). This agreement provides DoN access to AWS’s Commercial Cloud environment, AWS Profession Services, and AWS training and certifications courses (Link)
  • AWS: AWS re:Invent 2022 delivered to a different audience. With possible recession fear looming, AWS aimed their success stories and use cases at the C-suit hoping the executives would invest their traditional computing dollars in AWS. Operations could be exponentially cheaper however, AWS needs to tell the customer how to do it not just talk about it (Link)
  • Oracle: “triple-digit” bookings growth in IaaS and will invest $2.4 Billion quarterly to meet future growth. Oracle had acquired Cerner to focus on the healthcare sector which helped contribute to their growth alongside their Fusion Cloud and NetSuite businesses (Link)

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

  • HPE: Hewlett Packard Enterprise express interest to buy Nutanix. Nutanix offers customers a software-defined hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) which competes with the HPE solution, SimpliVity (Link)
  • PAN: Palo Alto Networks recently announced its intent to acquire Cider Security for $195M. Cider’s App Sec Platform “InCider” secures a customer’s code from source to deployment offering risk identity and vulnerability across a company’s code, IAC, and supply-chain. PAN may be looking to expand Ciders offering as part of Prisma Cloud (Link)
  • Cisco: Cisco announces three security enchantments for AWS Security LakeAWS Verified Access and AWS Control Tower

WEB3

  • Fleek: A Web3 developer platform has raised $25 Million in Series A funding. Funds will allow Fleek to focus on building out edge networks, bringing content closer to the user via their decentralized content delivery network (CDN) (Link)
  • Yuga Labs: A blockchain technology company responsible for the Board Ape Yacht Club and Otherside will appoint Activision Blizzard President and COO Daniel Alegre as new CEO beginning the first half of 2023 (Link)
  • Solidity and Clarity: As the demand for Web3 picks up developers are shifting their development stack to include new languages like Solidity and Clarity. Both are used to bring smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps) to blockchain. Solidity is used for Ethereum while Clarity is used for Bitcoin (Link)

Mike

Apronomics: November, 2022

Apronomics, is a play on the word ‘macroeconomics’ which seeks to provide a general perspective in three specific domains. Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3. This is monthly and sometimes twice a month ‘Digital Glance’ (DG) which provides a practical yet quick consumption style for those looking for hot topics in Cloud, Digital Transformation, and Web3.

CLOUD

  • Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (Link)
  • AWS: AWS re:Invent – November 28 – December 2, 2022 (Link)
    • Emerald sponsors: Accenture, Cisco, Datadog, Deloitte, Intel, MongoDB, TrendMicro, VMware
  • Microsoft: Announced its ISV Success Program for Microsoft Partners which offers software providers the ability to sell their software via the Commercial Marketplace (Link)
    • “In 2021, marketplace transactions grew an estimated 70% to $4 billion, which is 3x faster growth than the public cloud at large”
    • Customers can purchase software solutions and retire every dollar against their cloud consumption commitment

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

  • Cisco: Plans to provide networking, cyber security, and general IT training to 25 million people over the next 10 years (Link)
  • Dynatrace: Announced its observability “Data Lakehouse”, (Grail) at Dynatrace Innovate
    • Grail is a causational (cause and effect relationship) data lakehouse with a massively parallel processing (MPP) analytics engine, leveraging Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) a new query language (Link)
  • Cato: Cato Network Reaches $100M ARR in just Five years (Link)
    • “Cato provides the world’s most robust single-vendor SASE platform”
    • Cato has become the fastest growing Enterprise Network Security Startup
  • VMware: Takes advantage of ‘cloud adjacency infrastructure’ by partnering with Equinix offering VMware Cloud on Equinix Metal, a new offer that will enable enterprises to use VMware’s software environment as a cloud service on Equinix’s bare-metal cloud (Link)

WEB3

  • Google: Announced its Cloud’s Blockchain Node Engine; a fully managed node-hosting service helping scale Web3 development. Google announced that is working with Solana ($SOL) to launch dedicated Solana nodes in the cloud as early as next year (Link)
  • FTX: Impure business practices lead to the collapse of the second-largest crypto exchange underscoring the importance of truly decentralized systems

Mike