Cloud Remains the Top Technology Tool During Pandemic

Not surprisingly, the cloud remains the top technology tool to which entities are turning as they enable remote work during the ongoing pandemic. This puts the impetus on channel partners to help clients manage those deployments to avoid cost overages and security breaches. This roundup looks at two companies addressing those areas.

Aptum’s Hybrid Cloud Manager Launches at Critical Time

COVID-19 lockdowns and other restrictions continue to spur organizations worldwide to support largely unplanned employee work-from-home initiatives via the cloud. And even while cloud vendors were strategizing product launches prior to coronavirus, their new platforms are helping enterprises, vis à vis their channel partners, manage those unexpected deployments.

Take Canada-based Aptum Technologies’ Hybrid Cloud Manager as one recent example. Around the globe, amid COVID-19, hybrid cloud implementations stand out as a go-to option because so many firms must maintain some on-premises control of their data. Meantime, they are using the public cloud, as well. Aptum’s new Hybrid Cloud Manager, then, comes at an advantageous time.

The platform enables enterprises, through their partners or directly, to assess, monitor, optimize, provision and govern their private and public cloud environments through one interface. This encompasses both infrastructure- and platform-as a service resources. Hybrid Cloud Manager capabilities allow for full cost control, real-time visibility into resources and configurations and, overall, simplified management, Aptum said.

Charles Lippe, director of channels for Aptum, called the new product “a great opportunity” for managed service providers and system integrators to differentiate themselves. Partners can offer Hybrid Cloud Manager to “help customers who are planning a migration to cloud and those who want to improve managing their spend and automate tasks,” Lippe told Channel Futures. Further, he said, Hybrid Cloud Manager “is provided at no additional cost to customers with an Azure subscription with Aptum.”

And at a time when cost control may prove more imperative than ever, Aptum says Hybrid Cloud Manager gives IT and other business leaders the information they need to oversee and optimize their public and private clouds on the fly.

Aptum’s Jeremy Pease

“Organizations are struggling to get visibility into the performance of their cloud-based infrastructure and applications,” Jeremy Pease, COO of Aptum, said in a prepared statement. “Aptum Hybrid Cloud Manager not only provides deep visibility into IaaS-based environments but also addresses PaaS resources.”

All this, he added, provides “a holistic view of every cloud asset, simplifying day-to-day operational cloud complexities. This platform addresses some of the biggest challenges in cloud management such as workload migration, cost and performance optimization, compliance and DevOps automation.”

Aptum has made Hybrid Cloud Manager available immediately to its global customers. The company’s partner program offers two tiers – one for referrals and one for resellers.

Sudden Cloud Deployments Exposing Security Vulnerabilities, Concerns

Almost 90% (84%) of cloud engineers harbor concerns about new security vulnerabilities stemming from sudden cloud adoption amid COVID-19.

That’s according to some of the findings in Fugue Inc.’s State of the Cloud Security report conducted with the help of Propeller Insights. Fugue is a software developer focused on cloud infrastructure security and compliance, and an Amazon Web Services partner.

Fugue’s Phillip Merrick

“What our survey reveals is that cloud misconfiguration not only remains the No. 1 cause of data breaches in the cloud, the rapid global shift to 100% distributed teams is creating new risks for organizations and opportunities for malicious actors,” said Phillip Merrick, CEO of Fugue, in a press release. “Knowing your cloud infrastructure is secure at all times is already a major challenge for even the most sophisticated cloud customers, and the current crisis is compounding the problem.”

In fact, because cloud misconfiguration exploits can be so hard to detect with traditional security analysis tools, Fugue found that 84% of IT professionals fear their organizations already have suffered a major cloud breach they have yet to discover. Almost one-third (28%) said they already know about a critical cloud data breach.

More than half (52%) of survey respondents cited lack of awareness of cloud security and policies as the top cause of cloud misconfiguration. Another 49% attributed the problem to a lack of adequate controls and oversight; 43% said the issue lies with too many cloud APIs and interfaces to adequately govern. Finally, 32% of respondents said negligent insider behavior creates cloud misconfiguration. These results point directly to ways channel partners can help their enterprise clients better protect their cloud environments, especially amid last-minute, COVID-19-fueled deployments.

Fugue and Propeller surveyed 300 IT, cloud and security professionals.