Today’s topics include BlackBerry updating its IoT-focused enterprise mobility suite, SAP and Google’s partnership to ensure cloud data is secure, Microsoft’s partnership with the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and Elastic Beam’s new API behavioral security platform.
BlackBerry’s 6-month-old enterprise mobility suite is getting an update. The new features will allow users to securely access business data on unmanaged Windows or iOS laptops, and let companies apply user policies to Microsoft Office 365 applications. The enhancements were announced on June 20.
Using the new features, IT managers will now be able to manage and apply protection policies for a variety of Office 365 mobile apps such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint using BlackBerry Unified Endpoint Management. The new capabilities will also allow users to safely work with business data using personal or bring-your-own-laptop devices using Windows 10 or Apple MacOS computers.
The company told eWEEK that the updates came at the request of BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Suite users.
Earlier this year, Google and SAP announced a partnership focused on ensuring that the latter’s large portfolio of enterprise software technologies run optimally on Google’s cloud platforms. In keeping with this effort, the two companies are working to get SAP’s HANA in-memory database technology certified on the Google Cloud Platform.
The pair will also work to more tightly integrate Google’s G Suite productivity applications and machine-learning technologies with SAP’s products.
This week, the two companies also announced a data custodianship effort. With SAP acting as a custodian for enterprise data in Google Cloud, businesses will have extra assurance over how Google handles their sensitive data. The custodian model will help enterprises with specific requirements for handling sensitive data in the cloud verify compliance with those standards.
Microsoft is partnering with the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University on a dual-certificate program based on the Microsoft Professional Degree data science program. The partnership is designed to help students prepare for the data-driven workplaces of the future.
The MPD Data Science Degree program was introduced nearly a year ago to narrow the data analytics skills gap. Data scientist is one of the most in-demand jobs of 2017, according to human resources consulting firm Robert Half. To fill these jobs, schools will need to produce skilled workers—something Microsoft hopes to help with by expanding access to MPD’s data analytics curriculum.
Students in the certificate program will learn how to leverage the tools and technologies associated with the Microsoft Azure platform in a business setting. The program will also help them build an understanding of open-source technologies used in cloud-based analytics such as Apache Hadoop, R and Apache Spark.
Bernard Harguindeguy and his partners saw API security as an overlooked facet of the modern software development landscape, and so in 2014 they founded Elastic Beam. Now Elastic Beam is officially emerging from stealth mode to assist organizations with managing and securing API data.
Elastic Beam’s core product, called API Behavioral Security, understands API transactions and can differentiate what is normal and what is potentially an attack, according to Harguindeguy. Elastic Beam distinguishes between normal transactions and attacks using a combination of internally developed machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies.
The company will help organizations monitor API access and provide security and detection capabilities for the core back-end systems that are providing the API gateways.