The ITAM Roundup: 10/22/23
Here's some useful articles and news from around the web in the land of IT Asset management.
Broadcom Acquires VMware: House of Brick to Support VMware Customers... (House of Brick)
Tell me if this sounds familiar: innovative tech company achieves widespread success but eventually stagnates. To revitalize growth, they resort to acquisitions or mergers, and the aftermath often entails workforce reductions or increased product pricing. This article highlights the recent acquisition of VMware by Broadcom and the anticipated shift from perpetual licenses to subscription models, which is likely to result in significant price hikes for customers. House of Brick is offering help in navigating this new headwind.
...We are starting to hear from customers that the eventual move from perpetual licenses to subscriptions will require significantly more for the same products they are using today. Many House of Brick customers are sharing with us details from price quotes for new VMware purchases and renewal fees that are at least double from what they previously paid.
Feel-good story of the week: 2 ransomware gangs meet their demise (Ars Technica)
Nearly every month we hear of ransomware and exploits, but we don't always hear the good news - ransomware groups being stopped.
The first group, calling itself Trigona, saw the content on its dark web victim naming-and-shaming site pulled down and replaced with a banner proclaiming: “Trigona is gone! The servers of Trigona ransomware gang has been infiltrated and wiped out.” An outfit calling itself Ukrainian Cyber Alliance took credit and included the tagline: “disrupting Russian criminal enterprises (both public and private) since 2014.”
Microsoft announces Security Copilot early access program (Bleeping Computer)
This week, Microsoft dropped its security based companion the original co-pilot: "Security Copilot". It's an embedded service in Microsoft 365 Defender, and is open for enrollment in an early access phase.
"Security Copilot is already helping our preview customers save up to 40 percent of their time on core security operations tasks with capabilities such as writing complex queries based only on natural language questions and summarizing security incidents," Jakkal said.
How to Integrate New Data During Acquisition (Rocket Software via Spiceworks)
During acquisitions, the influx of data presents challenges for IT teams aiming to maintain agility and informed decision-making. Phil Buckellew, president of infrastructure modernization at Rocket Software, advocates for a hybrid cloud strategy, combining the reliability of on-premises mainframes with the accessibility of cloud platforms.
Over 50% of companies aim to incorporate AI technologies in 2023, which means data synchronization is the difference between skyrocketing the success of your business operations and decision-making or driving your newly merged organization into the ground.
Microsoft Fabric - Everything You Need to Know (LicenseEQ)
No, Microsoft isn't selling sewing supplies. Fabric is their new all-in-one analytics data platform, designed to democratize the usage of things like 'data lakes' and complex data pipelines. As always with Microsoft, there's complexity to licensing this new service via "capacity units". Check out the article for insights.
Purchasing Fabric through Azure is probably going to be the most popular option... Each SKU provides a different amount of computing power, measured by its Capacity Unit (CU) value.
The latest high-severity Citrix vulnerability under attack isn’t easy to fix (Ars Technica)
This exploit (CVE-2023-4966) resides in the NetScaler Application Delivery Controller and NetScaler Gateway. While Citrix has released a patch for this vulnerability, just patching it isn't enough according to this article.
Mandiant warned that patching the vulnerability wasn’t sufficient to lock down affected networks because any sessions hijacked before the security update would persist afterward.
