Kathy Gibson reports – Pinnacle has launched its Pinnacle Cloud, offering a range of services that partners can offer their end user customers.
Tim Humphreys-Davies, CEO of Pinnacle, explains that the distributor may appear to be late to market with a cloud offering, but has taken the time to do it properly.
“We took our time, learnt some lessons brought in the right people and did a lot of research. So today we have a very solid offering that can take away the headache from our partners.
“We have put together an offering that we think you will find compelling.”
At launch the Pinnacle Cloud offers services from Nutanix, Hycu, Guardicore, Xcitium, Metallic and Morpheus.
Nutanix
Pinnacle Cloud is based on Nutanix Cloud Platform.
Philip de Waal, SE manager at Nutanix, points out that in current business environment, companies have to do more with less, so they need to simplify the environment to get the experience they want.
“Businesses today are operating in a digital economy,” he says. “And this is driven by three imperatives: revenue growth; customer experience; and the user experience.
“This is why Nutanix built its foundational cloud platform. And, because Pinnacle has built its cloud on this foundation, it is able to quickly grow and add more services.”
The Nutanix Cloud Platform offers enhanced business continuity that unifies primary and secondary backup, protects applications and data; and replicate and recover anywhere.
It is secure by design, built with security in mind, with prevention, detection and response enabled.
Importantly, the Nutanix Cloud Platform is designed to build and run modern apps that need advanced data services. It offer an ecosystem of partners, advanced data services, built-in files and objects, self-service database automation, and an automated infrastructure.
“And Nutanix is recognised as the market leader by most of the research companies,” De Waal says.
He adds that there are several good reasons why Pinnacle partnered with Nutanix. “It is all about the speed at which Pinnacle can get services out; it is simple, resilient, seamless and portable.
Hycu
Hycu offers purpose-built backup and recovery that supports VMware, Nutanix, AWS, Azure and Google, as well as applications like Microsoft 365, Kubernetes and SAP HANA.
It is backup as a service that is supplied fully as software, with no agents or proxies.
It also offers 24/7 free support to its partners.
Customers choose Hycu because it is purpose-built as a multi-cloud solution built from the ground up. It is a modernised solution, software-based with intelligent simplicity.
Hycu is provided 100% as a service that dynamically scales to the users’ needs, and they pay just for what they use.
It is cloud-native, built for the cloud so it is inherently cost-efficient.
Guardicore
Guardicore, part of Akamai, delivers easy-to-use zero trust network segmentation to security practitioners.
It aims to minimise the effects of high-impact breaches, quickly shutting down adversarial lateral movement.
The software-based platform covers bare metal, virtual machines and containers, protecting endpoints, data centres, and the cloud.
Xcitium
There is a paradox in the cybersecurity world, says Douglas Bailey, executive vice-president of Xcitium. “We keep doing the same things, maybe faster and with different names, but we are not making any real progress.”
The paradox is that a threat cannot be detected. We can only detect that a threat has occurred by looking for known-bad indicators, he explains.
“As an industry we do this about 95% to 98% well – which is not good enough for cyber security, where we really want to get to 100%.”
The goal is to move to protection instead of detection, Bailey says – because detection means the malware is already in your network.
He points to the discrepancy between dwell time – the time from which an attack lands on an end point and when it is detected – and the time it takes to execute an attack.
IBM Security recently found that the average time to detect a breach is 212 days; while the time it takes a ransomware attack to be successful is just three days.
“That is the paradox, and it’s why detection doesn’t work. We cannot keep chasing our tails.”
This is why more than half of the organisations in the world have suffered a ransomware attack in the last year.
Xcitium seeks to stop this cycle by taking a new perspective on detection and protection.
What it does is proactively virtualise the threats – and in the last four years it can boast a 100% success rate.
“We apply zero-trust to isolate ransomware and unknown threats,” Bailey says.
“We know that when an attacks lands it attempts to do one of a few things. So when something unknown takes that first step we put a virtual container in its way, which activates the process of infecting the system. By keeping it in the container it protects the system from become infected.”
For Xcitium, zero-trust means trust nothing, to allow zero threats, Bailey adds.
Metallic
Metallic is a Commvault offering that provides managed backup for virtual, cloud and on-premise workloads.
Data management software specialist Gerhard Fourie describes Metallic as the ultimate insurance policy: keeping your data backed up with the ability to recover it.
Today, 70% of CIOs have a cloud-first strategy; 87% of enterprises use a hybrid cloud approach to their strategy; and 45% of organisations across the globe are expected to opt for managed services with the next 18 months.
Metallic is a purpose-built application that is fully managed, Fourie explains.
He adds that customers opt for cloud services because they want to reduce costs, they aim to increase business value; and they want access to additional services an enablers that they don’t have the resources to create themselves.
CIOs are battling with a number of issues in a rapidly-evolving data landscape: hybrid cloud data sprawl, rising cybercrime, compliance demands, and constrained resources.
Fourie points out that the partner landscape is shifting to the SaaS model: 75% of MSPs are moving to SaaS for all the managed services they sell; 50% of partners say that the business risk of not providing cloud—based managed service as a key driver behind their decision to offer them; and 44% of MS employees will be dedicated to cloud-delivered service within 24 months.
Why should partners embrace a managed DPaaS model? Fourie says Metallic offers broad coverage; leadership in the technology arena; profitability and a quick time to value; and simplification.
“Metallic DPaaS gives you future-proof data backup and recovery, as a simple, cloud-native solution.” Fourie concludes. “And it is a business enabler; a new model to help partners to earn money.”
Morpheus
Morpheus is a hybrid multi-cloud management platform
It lets customers manage all public and private clouds, as well as development and operations services on-premise or in the cloud, explains Andrew Green, chief nerd herder at Morpheus.
“In fact it is more like an orchestration and automation framework.”
It is also quick to deploy, with customers able to start deriving value within about one hour.
And there is no lock-in, so customers will never get painted into a technological corner because of its agnostic approach.
It acts as a secure system of record, Green adds.
More than 100 native integrations ensure there is rapid time to value, right out of the box. “And it doesn’t take away people’s jobs – rather it makes their jobs easier.”
Morpheus was named as a lad in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for cloud management platforms.
Indeed, Green believes there are very few competitors to Morpheus, which enables integration into VM and container technologies while giving the customer unlimited freedom of choice.