CDN Morning Briefing, July 16, 2020 – A one-on-one with Pure Storage’s Brent Allen

To keep up with the firehose of news and press releases, we’ve decided to deliver some extra news to you on the side. Some of it is an extension of our own reporting on the channel that didn’t make its way into a story, while others might be content we’ve bookmarked for later reading and thought of sharing with you. We’re doing a similar thing at IT World Canada check it out here. Missed last week’s CDN Morning Briefing? Read it here. Today’s CDN Morning Briefing is delivered by ITWC editorial director Alex Coop. 


What you need to know, right now

It’s what you need to know right now – ’nuff said.

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More details on that wild Twitter hack here from our ITWC Morning Briefing

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It’s the final day of ITWC’s Digital Transformation Week! Check out today’s agenda and register now if you haven’t already.

 


A one-on-one with Brent Allen, country manager for Canada, Pure Storage

An unfortunate misconception still lingers among Canadian businesses, says Brent Allen, country manager for Canada.

“A lot of people think that criminals just go after the big boys. The reality is we’re seeing attacks happen everywhere, including mid-sized commercial and smaller businesses. And those businesses have data that’s critical to them, too,” Allen told us in an interview recently. “The criminal element, in this case, rarely demands massive ransoms. It could just be as little as $15,000 or $20,000. You’ll find those smaller companies will pay it just to get the data back.”

The numbers appear to back Allen up. Almost a third of all data breaches in 2020 involved small businesses, according to a breach investigations report from Verizon. Being proactive about security isn’t a complete process until you involve storage, backup and recovery. More businesses are discovering that Allen says.

Pure Storage country manager for Canada, Brent Allen

However, as businesses pump out more data thanks to a bevy of connected devices and expand their reach into one – or several – cloud platforms, the need for flexible, scalable, automated and cost-efficient storage continues to grow. Pure Storage isn’t the only firm expanding product lines to answer the call. Hewlett Packard Enterprise recently added to Primera and Nimble Storage offerings, attaching support for NVMe and storage-class memory, and availability through its GreenLake as-a-service platform. Dell EMC has been touting PowerStore all-flash systems for mid-range companies and enterprises. They followed that up with PowerScale last month.

But Pure Storage is swinging back with Purity 6.0 for FlashArray, the latest version of its operating system. It enables the company’s FlashArray systems to support both file and block storage on the same system natively. Purity 6.0 also expands backup to cloud options with CloudSnap for Google Cloud Platform. FlashBlade remains a strong pitch for enterprises with big data or machine learning requirements.

“For those customers that actually get hit with a ransomware attack, they do have a fully protected copy of their backup data. And then through FlashBlade and the ability to do the rapid recovery and restore, it gives them the ultimate peace of mind that we can bring them back quickly without serious downtime,” Allen said.

Pure Storage is one of only a few storage vendors walking out of the first quarter of 2020 in okay shape. The top four external storage OEMs, Dell Technologies, NetApp, HPE and Hitachi, saw revenues fall anywhere from 8.2 per cent to 20 per cent, according to IDC.

 


In case you missed it

The recent news that we maybe didn’t get to yet, or it’s the news we’ve already reported on and feel is worth resurfacing.

Commvault announced a serious rework of its global Partner Advantage Program this week.

“As a partner-led company, we continuously seek ways to support our partners’ success through increased relevance and profitability,” said Mercer Rowe, Commvault’s vice-president of the global partner organization, in a July 14 press release. “With the updated approach to our Partner Advantage program, we are providing our partners increased incentives to drive profitability, and collaborative sales plays to close more deals, both underpinned by a strong product portfolio and broad partner ecosystem.”

Commvault says the new program is focused on simplification and ready-to-sell products, a stronger deal registration system, improved predictability and better rebates for partners.

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HP says it’s launching its new Amplify program Nov. 1 this year. The new program is meant to catch up with the times. That means introducing a program for an increasingly digital- and services-focused market. HP says it’s replacing all existing tiers and programs with a new two-tier system.

Those two core tracks are Synergy and Power. Synergy will be the foundational track of HP Amplify, the tech company says. Partners in this track will discover a minimum threshold of sales commitment, but still tightly aligned with the ecosystem. Meanwhile, partners in the Power track demonstrate deeper collaboration with HP and will see an increased return on their investment in the form of higher rewards, data insights, sales and tech resources, and marketing support. Not all partners, however, will qualify for the program.

“We recognize, however, that some partners may choose not to co-invest in future-readiness alongside HP, and they will be retired from the program or program track. As they are today, those partners can continue to source products and resources through distribution,” a July 15 press release read.

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Shlomo Bielak, Benchmark Corp’s chief technology officer recently accepted a spot on the prestigious Forbes Technology Council. The council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs, and technology executives.

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From Channel Daily News – Softchoice wins Microsoft’s Canadian Partner of the Year Award, Wipro, Architech, and RedBit also recognized [FULL STORY]

Microsoft says there were more than 3,300 nominations for this year’s Partner of the Year Awards from over 100 countries, and Softchoice took home the honour of Canadian Partner of the Year, while three other Canadian partners walked away with category awards.

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From Channel Daily News – Microsoft says it’s removing Fetch file feature from OneDrive [FULL STORY]

Microsoft quietly announced yesterday that it will be removing the file Fetch feature from OneDrive, its cloud storage solution, after July 31, 2020.

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From Channel Daily News – Commvault and Microsoft sign multi-year deal to deliver Metallic SaaS with Azure [FULL STORY]

Microsoft and Commvault recently announced a multi-year strategic partnership agreement to help customers get their hands on Commvault’s SaaS portfolio Metallic.

 

From Channel Daily News – HPE gets whimsical with Ezmeral software and expands GreenLake platform [FULL STORY]

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is following through on its promise to enhance its cloud platform GreenLake into a full-scale cloud services market, and at its virtual Discover event this week also unveiled a new hybrid cloud, pay-as-you-go option for deploying Kubernetes anywhere.



Reddit recap

The MSP subreddit community is growing rapidly. It’s also a chatty bunch. With more than 76,000 members as of today, it’s worth taking a look at what they have to say every once in a while. Here are the past week’s top posts. Click on the posts to view additional responses.

Outlook crashing immediately for multiple clients from r/msp

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Critical Microsoft CVE: CVE- 2020-1350 from r/msp

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Anyone Providing Microsoft Teams Voice? from r/msp

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Alex Coop
Alex Coophttp://www.itwc.ca
Former Editorial Director for IT World Canada and its sister publications.

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