AT&T's NetBond Extends to IBM SoftLayer Cloud

IBM announced the extension of AT&T NetBond services to the SoftLayer cloud platform. AT&T Virtual Private Network (VPN) customers can use AT&T NetBond to connect their IT infrastructure to SoftLayer’s cloud services.


The companies cited the following customer benefits:

• · Simple: Seamlessly works with existing AT&T VPN through APIs, creating an automated experience. Customers don’t need to order or manage any other equipment or access lines.
• · Savings: Network elasticity that automatically flexes with the needs of the cloud service. Companies can save as much as 60 percent on networking costs.
• · Performance: Delivers as much as 50 percent lower latency and three times the availability when compared with the public Internet.
• · Security: Isolates traffic going directly to cloud platforms using the AT&T private global network, providing more protections from risks such as DDoS attacks.

“AT&T NetBond gives customers a broader range of options as they explore how to best leverage a hybrid cloud,” said Jim Comfort, general manager of IBM Cloud Services. “Customers can easily move workloads to and from SoftLayer as if it were part of their local area network. This added flexibility helps optimize workload performance while allowing customers to scale IT resources in a way that makes sense.”

“Businesses look to AT&T and IBM to deliver best in class solutions to meet their most demanding needs— especially when it comes to cloud,” said Jon Summers, senior vice president growth platforms, AT&T Business Solutions. “Together, we’re making the network as flexible as the cloud and giving enterprises confidence they can migrate their business systems to the cloud and still meet their security, scalability and performance requirements.”

The companies expect these capabilities to be available in first quarter of 2015.

http://www.att.com/netbond
http://www.softlayer.com/info/att-netbond
http://www.att.com
http://www.ibm.com/cloud

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Cisco Integrates ASA 5500 Firewall with Sourcefire

Cisco introduced what it is calling the first "threat-focused Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW)," providing the full contextual awareness and dynamic controls needed to automatically assess threats, correlate intelligence, and optimize defenses to protect all networks.

The new solution integrates the Cisco ASA 5500 Series firewall with application control, and the Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention Systems (NGIPS) and Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) from Sourcefire.  The idea is to provide an adaptive, threat-focused NGFW that delivers superior, multi-layered protection, extending its capabilities far beyond legacy NGFW solutions before, during and after an attack.

Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services top features include:

• Visibility-Driven – Delivering full contextual awareness of users, mobile devices, client-side apps, virtual machine‐to-machine communications, vulnerabilities, threats, URLs, and other important telemetry. Its enterprise-class management capabilities provide users with dashboards and drill-down reports of discovered hosts, suspect applications, threats, and Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) for comprehensive visibility.
  
• Threat-Focused – Incorporating leading NGIPS for comprehensive protection from known and advanced threats, as well as AMP to combat against zero-day and persistent attacks. Big data analytics, continuous analysis and Cisco Collective Security Intelligence (CSI) work together to provide detection, blocking, tracking, analysis, and remediation capabilities to protect against the full spectrum of attacks, known and unknown.
  
• Platform‐Based – Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services combines proven firewall functionality and application control, leading NGIPS capability, and advanced breach detection and remediation in a single device. The integration provides organizations with better protection, while also reducing operating costs and complexity. This new solution simplifies an organization’s security architecture and reduces its network footprint with fewer security devices to manage and deploy and ability to license subscriptions to extend functionality.

“Now more than ever, organizations need to be able to implement dynamic controls to manage the pace of change of their environments and address security incidents. Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services is a major step forward for the NGFW market, empowering customers to deepen their protection from the data center, through the network, to the endpoint with the agility to identify, understand, and stop advanced threats in real-time and retrospectively,” stated Christopher Young, senior vice president, security business group, Cisco.

http://www.cisco.com

In 2013, Cisco acquired Sourcefire for approximately $2.7 billion.

Sourcefire, which was based in Columbia, Maryland, was founded in 2001 by Martin Roesch, author of open source Snort, the world’s most widely deployed intrusion detection and prevention technology.  The company claims nearly 4 million downloads to date. Sourcefire's intrusion prevention solutions are based on Snort.

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Red Hat to Acquire FeedHenry for Enterprise Mobile App Platform

Red Hat agreed to acquire FeedHenry, a privately-held developer of an enterprise mobile application platform, for approximately EUR 63.5 million in cash.

FeedHenry, which is based in Waterford, Ireland, helps enterprises to accelerate mobile app backend integration via private clouds, public clouds, and on-premises systems with  connectors and plug-ins to common enterprise systems such as salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle, etc. The FeedHenry platform offers developers the flexibility to create native (Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry), hybrid, HTML5 or web apps. The platform supports a wide variety of popular toolkits including native SDKs, hybrid Apache Cordova, HTML5 and Titanium, as well as frameworks such as Xamarin, Sencha Touch, and other JavaScript frameworks.

FeedHenry was founded in 2010 as a spin out from the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group at the Waterford Institute of Technology.

Red Hat said FeedHenry expands its portfolio of application development, integration, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions by adding support for mobile application development in public and private environments.

“The mobile application platform is one of the fastest growing segments of the enterprise software market. As mobile devices have penetrated into every aspect of enterprise computing, enterprise software customers are looking for easier and more efficient ways for their developers to build mobile applications that extend and enhance traditional enterprise applications. FeedHenry will help us enable customers to take advantage of the capabilities of mobile with the security, scalability, and reliability of Red Hat enterprise software,” stated Craig Muzilla, senior vice president, Application Platform Business, Red Hat.

http://investors.redhat.com

http://www.feedhenry.com

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