Whitney Walters, Author at Gigaom

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Security Policy-as-Code Solutions

Whitney Walters — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 13:52:20 +0000

In the ever-evolving landscape of information technology, the ability to effectively manage and enforce security policies has become paramount. Policy-as-code solutions have emerged as a critical tool for organizations seeking to mitigate risk, ensure compliance, and maintain operational best practices. By codifying and automating security policies, these tools enable businesses to keep pace with the rapid rate of change in development and deployment architectures, while freeing up valuable IT resources.

Policy-as-code solutions transform traditional, often neglected, security procedures into machine-readable code, integrating them seamlessly into DevOps toolchains. This approach empowers organizations to proactively enforce security policies throughout the entire software development lifecycle, from development and testing to deployment and production. The benefits are far-reaching, including improved security posture, reduced staff investment in manual policy enforcement, and streamlined compliance auditing.

This technology is particularly relevant for CTOs, CIOs, VPs of engineering, cloud architects, and other technology executives responsible for safeguarding their organization’s digital assets. Additionally, data scientists, engineers, and business leaders seeking to leverage data for strategic advantage can benefit from the insights and automation provided by policy-as-code solutions.

Business Imperative
The business imperative for adopting policy-as-code solutions is clear. In today’s interconnected world, security breaches can have devastating consequences, including financial losses, reputational damage, and regulatory fines. By automating security policy enforcement, organizations can proactively identify and remediate vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of costly incidents.

Furthermore, policy-as-code solutions help organizations achieve and maintain compliance with industry regulations and standards, such as HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS. Compliance not only mitigates legal and financial risks but also strengthens customer trust and brand reputation.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value to the business of deploying a security policy-as-code solution, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a security policy-as-code solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a security policy-as-code solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for security policy as code are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating Security Policy-as-Code Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for Security Policy as Code

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the security policy- as-code space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective security policy-as-code solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading security policy-as-code offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and nonfunctional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.

The post GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Security Policy-as-Code Solutions appeared first on Gigaom.

GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Object Storage

Whitney Walters — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 15:00:11 +0000

As the volume and variety of data continue to grow exponentially, organizations are facing unprecedented challenges in managing and storing their data efficiently. Amid this influx, object storage has emerged as a critical solution for unstructured data, which can include images, videos, and files.

Object storage is a cloud-based system that allows users to store and retrieve data of any size in the form of objects. Unlike traditional block-based storage systems, object storage is optimized for large-scale data repositories, making it ideal for big data, IoT, and cloud-native applications.

Applications today need to store data safely and access it from anywhere, from multiple applications and devices concurrently, while next-gen microservices-based applications often use object storage as their primary data repository. Moreover, high-performance computing applications—like big data analytics and AI—are also big consumers of object storage, and the new flash media types introduced in high-performance object storage systems strengthen the case for the use of object storage in high-performance, high-value workloads. Thus, the key characteristics of enterprise object stores have changed, with much more attention paid to performance, ease of deployment, security, federation capabilities, and multitenancy than in the past. In addition, edge use cases are becoming more prevalent. Tiny object storage installations at the edge, serving small Kubernetes clusters and IoT infrastructure, are surfacing.

As the technology continues to evolve, it will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of enterprise data management. This is especially true in the context of modern object storage platforms that offer additional capabilities for file data via support for NFS, SMB, and other file protocols. This evolution looks set to continue as organizations seek to build their data pipelines on unified storage platforms that simplify the overall management and governance of data at scale.

In today’s digital age, data is the lifeblood of business. Object storage is essential for organizations to unlock the true value of their data, drive innovation, and stay competitive. CxOs will want to leverage object storage to:

Enhance customer experiences through personalized analytics and recommendations.
Drive business innovation through data-driven insights and AI applications.
Ensure business continuity and compliance through robust and scalable data storage solutions.

Object storage has revolutionized the way enterprises store, manage, and retrieve their data. As the demands for data storage continue to grow, it has become an essential component of any modern IT infrastructure. Object storage matters to C-level executives and IT professionals alike. C-level executives will appreciate its strategic benefits—increased agility, reduced costs, and improved business resilience. IT professionals will appreciate the technical capabilities and innovations that make object storage a robust and scalable solution for their organizations.

This is our fifth year evaluating the object storage space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 18 of the top object storage solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading enterprise object storage offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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Unleash Your Unstructured Data: A Strategic Playbook

Whitney Walters — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 20:14:52 +0000

The vast and ever-expanding sea of unstructured data—filled with emails, documents, images, sensor data, and more—represents a potential goldmine for organizations. Too often, this immense dataset remains underutilized and poorly understood, trapped in data silos and becoming a liability rather than a strategic asset. However, a seismic shift is on the horizon, driven by the maturing field of unstructured data management (UDM). With its AI-powered capabilities, UDM offers the tools to finally turn this data deluge into a catalyst for innovation. Let’s delve into why UDM is a strategic imperative for every data-driven organization.

UDM: Transforming from Data Swamp to Powerhouse

UDM solutions offer a powerful set of features that fundamentally transform the way organizations interact with their unstructured data:

Breaking down data silos: Unstructured data management solutions empower you to treat data scattered across the enterprise as a single integrated source for streamlined analysis. This approach eliminates the need for costly and time-consuming data migration projects. This seamless integration is achieved through several key techniques: data virtualization creates a logical data layer for unified access; federated queries span multiple physical data stores; and robust APIs and connectors facilitate access to a wide variety of data sources.
Budget-friendly data management: UDM empowers strategic decision-making with regard to storage optimization, maximizing ROI, and aligning costs with business value. Central to this empowerment are FinOps practices such as cost visibility and granular tagging to track storage costs closely. Smart lifecycle management and data tiering automate data movement based on usage patterns. Finally, by carefully right-sizing cloud resources and leveraging reserved instances, UDM solutions actively optimize cloud-related costs.
Smart metadata magic: Adds rich context and structure, transforming unstructured data into a searchable, interpretable knowledge base.
Tagging tailored to you: Empowers stakeholders to categorize data based on their unique needs, leading to deeper insights.
Swift data retrieval: Pinpoints relevant data quickly, regardless of its location within your data estate.
Data governance made easy: Streamlines compliance processes with precise metadata and organization.

Real-World Success: UDM in Action

UDM is already driving transformation across numerous industries. Here’s just a glimpse of its impact:

Healthcare: Accelerating drug discovery and personalized treatment plans by analyzing vast repositories of unstructured patient data.
Customer experience: Boosting customer service, product development, and brand loyalty by leveraging sentiment analysis on social media and call transcripts.
Manufacturing: Slashing downtime and delivering cost savings by optimizing predictive maintenance with AI-powered analysis of IoT sensor data and images.
Media and entertainment: Managing vast libraries of video and audio content, enabling intelligent searches for rapid content repurposing, licensing, and distribution.

The C-Suite Call to Action: UDM as a Strategic Imperative

CTOs, CIOs, and Chief data officers are the organizational champions of UDM initiatives. Key considerations to consider:

Vendor selection and partnership: UDM solutions come in many flavors. Choosing the right partners is crucial for maximizing the return on investment and tailoring solutions to organizational needs.
Skills development for the unstructured data era: Successful UDM is about people as much as it is about platforms. Invest in building data literacy, upskill your teams in AI and analytics techniques, and foster a data-driven mindset across the organization to maximize the benefits of UDM.
Cloud as an enabler: Embrace the flexibility and scalability of cloud-native object storage and data lakes, especially for managing the exponential growth of unstructured data.
The ethics imperative: Proactively embrace AI governance to ensure transparency and minimize bias in AI models, safeguarding compliance and crucial customer trust.

The Future of UDM: Navigating the Landscape

Through my research on UDM, I’ve seen firsthand how the landscape is evolving. The integration of AI and ML is set to play a transformative role in unstructured data management. Increasingly sophisticated AI models will automate tasks, uncover deeper insights, and streamline workflows, optimizing the entire data management process. This AI-powered transformation will extend the boundaries of what’s possible with unstructured data.

As concerns around data sovereignty intensify, solutions offering agility, multicloud support, edge computing options, and on-premises deployment will become increasingly sought after. Organizations demand complete control over their data, and UDM solutions must adapt to provide the flexibility needed to meet strict requirements and adapt to changing regulations.

Security remains a paramount concern in the world of unstructured data. UDM solutions will evolve to incorporate even tighter security measures. Expect to see seamless integration with anomaly detection, automated data classification, and streamlined compliance tools that ensure this often sensitive data is meticulously protected.

The future of UDM is exciting and dynamic. As the field matures, we can expect further innovations that empower organizations to truly unlock the power of knowledge hidden within their unstructured data, driving transformation across countless industries.

Next Steps

To learn more, take a look at GigaOm’s UDM Key Criteria and Radar reports. These reports provide a comprehensive overview of the market, outline the criteria you’ll want to consider in a purchase decision, and evaluate how a number of vendors perform against those decision criteria.

If you’re not yet a GigaOm subscriber, you can access the research using a free trial.

The post Unleash Your Unstructured Data: A Strategic Playbook appeared first on Gigaom.

Whitney Walters, Author at Gigaom

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Security Policy-as-Code Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating Security Policy-as-Code Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Object Storage

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

Unleash Your Unstructured Data: A Strategic Playbook

UDM: Transforming from Data Swamp to Powerhouse

Real-World Success: UDM in Action

The C-Suite Call to Action: UDM as a Strategic Imperative

The Future of UDM: Navigating the Landscape

Next Steps

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption