Microsoft is making Pluton for Security, Celona Partners with Aruba to Expand CBRS and the launch of MacOS Big Sur. We’ll discuss these topics and much more on this week’s Rundown.
Fresh off their latest purchase, Cisco is diving back into the container market for a new acquisition. They are picking up Banzai Cloud, a Hungarian platform based on Kubernetes. The acquisition is for the teams and the assets of the company and is expected to close by the end of January 2021. Banzai Cloud had a single funding round of $2.5 million and terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Cato Networks Raises $130 Million
Cato Networks announced a new funding round this week. Their Series E raised $130 million on the back of messaging around Secure Access Services Edge, also known as SASE. Cato has really jumped on the Work From Home model caused by the pandemic and is looking to expand beyond their 650 customers. This round is just seven months after their $77 million Series D.
Aruba released a notice this week that firmware updates were needed to save storage. The Aruba 6300 and 6400 switch families use SSD storage for config files, databases, and other critical system data. The notice said that earlier versions of the software write to the SSD at an accelerated and unintended pace, which will cause SSD degradation. Since SSDs will fail after a certain number of writes, the problem will eventually cause your switch to die with no recovery possible. The latest patch fixes this problem and allows the SSD to live a little longer.
Sysdig Introduces Low-Touch Zero Trust Network Security for Kubernetes
Sysdig is bringing heavyweight networking security to lightweight containers. The company announced this week that it will be incorporating the zero-trust model into their container runtime security platform to help segment workloads and I/O. The visibility offered by Sysdig ensures you can provide admission control and communications control for any container and see what is talking to what.
Microsoft Making Pluton for Security
Microsoft is getting into the security game when it comes to chips. They’ve announced a new product called Pluton, which is a joint venture between the software maker and CPU vendors Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Pluton is a hardware root-of-trust, which can prevent tampering with the hardware a low level of the system. This would prevent hardware exploits from implants or from firmware hacks. Microsoft’s deal will see Pluton included on future releases from the three makers and allow a very tight integration with their Windows operating system. Pluton isn’t new, but is instead based on technology used to prevent piracy on the Xbox One. Pluton has been running in Azure Sphere, focused on IoT security.
Celona Partners with Aruba to Expand CBRS
This week saw some news from Mobility Field Day favorite Celona. The company, which is pioneering CBRS private LTE networking equipment for the enterprise, is fresh from their Series B funding round of $30 million. They’ve announced a partnership with Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, to sell their CBRS gear through Aruba channels and partners. Given the dominance that Aruba has in the wireless access point market, this is undoubtedly a great move for Celona as well as Aruba for being able to offer this hot new technology.
The launch of MacOS Big Sur wasn’t without issue. The biggest concern came when apps started launching slowly after the upgrade. Through investigation and trial and error, users found that disabling network access temporary fixed the issue. The culprit turned out to be the Online Certificate Status Protocol, known as OSCP. It checks for expired PKI certificates and was down during the launch. The failure was the wait time for the server to not answer. Further investigations found that MacOS Big Sur’s Gatekeeper service, designed to verify application integrity, sends information about ALL apps on your system to Apple. The Cupertino company has since come out with more information about the service, including fixes designed to keep it more safe and secure.
The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on YouTube every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for the show each week.
