SOFTWARE SECURITY
Meriplex | July 18, 2022
Meriplex, a nationwide leader in managed cybersecurity and IT solutions, is pleased to announce the asset acquisition of Louisiana-based managed service provider, Verma Systems.
For over 31 years, Verma Systems has been a leading and trusted IT and consulting partner for businesses in Baton Rouge and across Louisiana. They provide personalized solutions to their clients allowing them to leverage IT and technology to enhance business efficiency.
"Verma Systems is an excellent addition to the Meriplex organization. "With their talented team and longstanding reputation in the Louisiana market, we will be able to provide more innovative technology and service offerings to their clients and work towards our goal of being the number one MSP/MSSP in the nation."
David Henley, CEO of Meriplex
"For me, it has always been about the customer and our employees," said Mitch Verma, President of Verma Systems. "Joining forces with Meriplex means we have more resources at our fingertips including additional IT experts, new product lines, and the capability to offer more well-rounded technical solutions. I know the people behind Meriplex, and we share the same core values and work ethic. With their expertise, size and seasoned approach, I am confident we can provide more for our clients and our employees."
As a fast-growing managed services provider, Meriplex focuses on strategically acquiring businesses in leading markets in order to establish a regional presence and acquire talent to support their increasing large organic and inorganic growth. If you are interested in learning more about our M&A process, please reach out to us here.
About Meriplex
Meriplex is a managed cybersecurity, IT, and SD-WAN solutions provider that enables transformation by combining secure, innovative technology with advanced expertise. As a trusted partner, we deliver business-driven solutions that provide the scalability and support needed to power growth for organizations.
About Verma Systems
Established in 1991, Verma Systems is a Baton Rouge IT services company specializing in business technology tailored towards the SMB market. With our highly talented and experienced team, we know how to meet business needs by incorporating the right technology solutions to help your company be successful. Our mission is focused on hard work, smart work, and superior customer service.
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DATA SECURITY
Veza | July 20, 2022
Veza, the data security platform built on the power of authorization, announces today that the company has entered a partnership with Google Cloud, including product integration that enables Google Cloud customers to harness the capabilities of Veza’s data security platform across their multi-cloud ecosystem.
Veza, which recently launched in April 2022 after two years of building in stealth, makes it easy to understand, manage, and control who can and should take what action on what data. With this new integration, Google Cloud customers can now directly access the capabilities of Veza’s authorization-based data security platform integrated with Google Cloud Policy Analyzer to identify, manage, and control external identities and service accounts to Google Cloud services (Looker, BigQuery, and more). This partnership furthers the relationship between Google and Veza, which began in 2021 when GV led the Series B investment in Veza and GV Partner Karim Faris joined Veza Board of Directors.
“The cloud is quickly becoming the primary footprint for organizations. By prioritizing and investing in security, Google Cloud has earned a differentiated position in the market,” said Tarun Thakur, Co-founder and CEO, Veza. “The initial product integration between Veza and Google Cloud, publicly demonstrated at the Google Cloud Security Summit in May this year, is a powerful example of how intelligence from Veza’s Authorization Graph can bolster the data security of Google Cloud customers. It shows how identity-to-data relationship insights from the Veza platform can be pulled directly into the Google Cloud Policy Analyzer, allowing customers to secure both Google Cloud data (Looker, BigQuery, Google Storage Buckets, etc.) to which multi-cloud identities (AD, Azure AD, Okta, etc.) have permissions and multi-cloud data (AWS, Snowflake, etc.) that is being accessed by Google Cloud identities.”
“Securing cloud environments and data from cybercrime and threats is a key priority of organizations across the globe. “With Veza’s platform now available alongside Google Cloud’s secure and global infrastructure, customers will be able to quickly deploy the solutions they need to better understand, control, and securely take action on their data across their multi-cloud environments.”
Sunil Potti, General Manager and Vice President, Cloud Security, Google Cloud
Veza’s data security platform aggregates identity information from humans, service accounts, and cloud IAM entities, and authorization data from apps and data systems, giving organizations a centralized, SaaS-based control plane to visualize, manage, and control data access controls through Veza’s Authorization Graph. Veza integrates with cloud identity providers, SaaS and custom apps, and data systems, and translates system-specific entitlements and permissions into a common, human-understandable business language, visualized in the platform as effective permissions. The platform brings a novel approach to data security by enabling organizations to address key data security use cases across access reviews and certifications for SaaS apps and data systems, privileged access management to data and apps, data lake security and governance, management of cloud entitlements, and much more. It delivers prioritized insights, provides access workflows, and actionable recommendations for remediation of over-privileged accounts, enabling security and IT teams to correct anomalies and right-size their organization’s permissions to protect against ransomware and other data breaches.
As organizations continue to adapt to the evolving demands of hybrid remote and in-office work, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments — those with multiple providers of disparate data, app, compute, and infrastructure systems — are becoming the norm. According to the Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report, 89% of companies surveyed are multi-cloud, with only 2% operating in single private clouds and 9% in single public clouds. This trend is leading to a distributed web of data, relationships, and access points that are changing and difficult to track and secure.
Veza and Google Cloud already have a number of joint customers deployed across the industries of SaaS software, marketing technology, and media, including Vox Media.
“To support Vox Media’s growth and increasing M&A activity without compromising security, we need to ensure that across all of our brands, the right users have access only to the data they need access to, and that we have full visibility over what they can do with that data,” says Ateeb Ahmad, Senior Director, IT Infrastructure, Vox Media. With Veza and Google Cloud working together, we’ve been able to seamlessly manage access controls over our data for our largest merger to date, and tightly scope identity-to-data permissions even as our footprint with Google Cloud and other technologies grows.”
“The greatest gifts of the multi-cloud and the generational architectural shift of the modern data systems are also its greatest risks: securing data, scalability, flexibility, and seamless collaboration,” says Thakur. “When organizations enable workers to reach from one cloud to another to leverage data across their entire multi-cloud ecosystem, they foster growth, enable more intelligence, and promote agility. However, such apps and data systems are also more porous and are at increased risk of cybercrime and ransomware. We purpose-built Veza’s Core Authorization Platform for the multi-cloud so that organizations can implement strong access governance policies - Veza continuously evaluates these policies and enables both automated workflows for access reviews, automated access removal for toxic and stale combinations, and facilitates access grant and request for any app, data, and service.”
About Veza
Veza is the data security platform built on the power of authorization. Our platform is purpose-built for hybrid multi-cloud environments to help you use and share your data safely. Veza makes it easy to understand, manage, and control who can and should take what action on what data. We organize authorization metadata across identity providers, data systems, cloud service providers, and SaaS applications — all to address the toughest data security challenges of the modern era. Founded in 2020, the company is funded by top-tier investors including Accel, Bain Capital, Ballistic Ventures, Blackstone, GV, Norwest Venture Partners, and True Ventures
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SOFTWARE SECURITY
Palo Alto Networks | August 05, 2022
The need for managed detection and response (MDR) is soaring as attack surfaces grow, cloud usage skyrockets and the cybersecurity skills gap widens. Palo Alto Networks, the global cybersecurity leader, today introduced Unit 42 Managed Detection and Response (Unit 42 MDR) to address this need with a new service that can offer continuous 24/7 threat detection, investigation and response. This offering brings together Palo Alto Networks acclaimed Cortex XDR with Unit 42's industry-leading threat intelligence, which includes insights from incident response cases. Because Unit 42 MDR is built on Cortex XDR, it is optimized to not just prioritize alerts but also to massively reduce the number of alerts customers receive. This helps customers detect more suspicious activity than they would have otherwise.
"As cyberattacks continue to rise, many organizations are being asked to handle advanced threats with limited resources and without the right expertise. This will not lead to good results. "Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 brings a unique combination of innovative cybersecurity technologies and a world-class threat intelligence team which allows us to provide customers with rapid detection and response to critical cyberthreats."
Wendi Whitmore, senior vice president, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42
The new Unit 42 MDR service offers customers cybersecurity experts to help identify and respond to security alerts and potential threats in real time, enabling businesses to focus security operations (SecOps) personnel on other organizational security priorities. The service provides organizations with monitoring, threat hunting and response/remediation capabilities, including:
Continuous Monitoring & Response: Security experts monitor alerts, events and indicators 24x7x365. The Unit 42 MDR team uses a mix of proprietary processes, infrastructure and enrichment to accelerate detection, response and threat hunting to help quickly stop malicious activity most likely to impact your organization.
Proactive Threat Hunting: World-class threat hunters search environments for complex attacks using deep knowledge of XDR data sources and the latest threat intelligence from Palo Alto Networks. This helps organizations stay ahead of emerging attack campaigns, malware and vulnerabilities.
Security Posture Optimization: Experts provide periodic health checks of an organization's posture and detailed recommendations on policy changes to help facilitate addressing risks before they become issues.
"Cyberattacks are emerging and evolving faster than ever," said Tom Osteen, CIO, Enloe Medical Center. "Intervening and addressing threats at the earliest stage is crucial. With Unit 42 MDR we have confidence that we can quickly identify and stop malicious activity to help keep our organization safe and secure."
In a recent report, IDC said, "It is not a surprise to state that organizations continue to struggle with persistent security talent shortages and the rising costs to retain these scarce security resources. Security teams with already limited resources are overwhelmed by the heavy workload and responsibility." The report also stated, "Organizations are analyzing their current risks and accelerating their security services investments to ease pressure on their teams and strengthen their overall security posture to meet the growing cyberthreats."*
About Cortex XDR
Cortex XDR® is the world's first detection and response solution that natively integrates network, endpoint and cloud data to stop sophisticated attacks. It is designed to stop attacks with the power of AI and comprehensive data.
XDR is critical to effective security. The latest Palo Alto Networks 2022 Unit 42 Incident Response Report highlights that when a breach occurs, 44% of the cases involved a business that did not have or did not fully deploy an endpoint detection and response or XDR security solution.
About Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks is the world's cybersecurity leader. We innovate to outpace cyberthreats, so organizations can embrace technology with confidence. We provide next-gen cybersecurity to thousands of customers globally, across all sectors. Our best-in-class cybersecurity platforms and services are backed by industry-leading threat intelligence and strengthened by state-of-the-art automation. Whether deploying our products to enable the Zero Trust Enterprise, responding to a security incident, or partnering to deliver better security outcomes through a world-class partner ecosystem, we're committed to helping ensure each day is safer than the one before. It's what makes us the cybersecurity partner of choice.
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