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Author: Veronica Haggar

  • Casepoint Unveils Latest Iteration of AI and Advanced Analytics Technology, CaseAssist

    AI-Powered Analytics Helps Organizations Expedite Review and Investigations.

    Tysons, VA, June 16, 2021 — Casepoint, a leader in cloud-based legal technology solutions, today announced that its built-in AI and advanced analytics technology, called CaseAssist, has been significantly upgraded to give users more insight and control over the analytics process with enhanced visualization capabilities and configuration templates. The enhancements to CaseAssist come at a pivotal moment for analytics in the legal profession. A recent LexisNexis study finds that 70% of law firms are now using analytics for both and the practice of law and the business of law, 98% indicate legal analytics have improved their firm’s performance, and 92% plan to increase their use of analytics over the next 12 months.

    The predictions generated by Casepoint’s CaseAssist technology in eDiscovery, investigations, and other document-intensive review projects eliminate the need for users to review documents that are nearly certain to be non-relevant, saving thousands of dollars in review time. Through CaseAssist Active Learning (CAL), users can choose to train a single or multiple models with no sample set requirement and CaseAssist will ensure relevant documents are prioritized for review. Whether your use case involves seeding an algorithm with known relevant exemplars or starting from a complete blank slate, CaseAssist will quickly separate the wheat from the chaff.

    Casepoint’s Dynamic Batch Review workflow seamlessly integrates with CaseAssist to make the transition from prioritization to linear review with ease. Casepoint’s patented AI technology provides users with faster predictions of relevance with extremely high levels of accuracy and quickly identifies connections between people, documents, dates, and terms. Casepoint accelerates time to insight by up to 83%. As an example, a plaintiffs firm used advanced analytics to cull data down for a case involving a group of commercial airlines.

    “At Casepoint, we do not see AI as ‘nice to have’ – rather, it’s a core part of our technology,” said Vishal Rajpara, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Casepoint. “Increasingly, both law firms and legal departments recognize that using analytics can increase competitiveness, efficiency, and knowledge across a broad range of activities, including case strategy, early case assessment, litigate-or-settle decisions, and much more. We take a human-centered design approach in development with the intention of making advanced eDiscovery solutions accessible to users of all technological abilities. It’s all part of our commitment to continuous innovation so we can respond quickly to our customers’ rapidly evolving business requirements and use cases.”

    Casepoint’s advanced analytics provide powerful data visualizations, communication analysis, graphing, concept searching, topic clustering, email threading, and near similarity/near dupe detection. In addition to guiding the user through the oftentimes complex workflow of advanced analytics, Casepoint’s CaseAssist Active Learning utilizes active learning based on the user’s input to continuously predict and rank unreviewed documents. CaseAssist Active Learning supports full verification, precision, recall, and F-measure reporting. With CaseAssist’s multi-classifier classification feature, users can train the system to identify multiple tags within the same training set. CaseAssist is commonly used in intelligence mining, early data analytics, investigative analytics, review prioritization, and coding validation. CaseAssist also includes chat-guided workflows with natural language interaction and enables users to quickly find key documents by answering simple questions.

    CaseAssist constantly learns from the decisions and behavior of its users, translating that information into actionable insights and recommendations. Casepoint’s patented AI technology helps litigators improve how they perform mission-critical tasks such as:

    • Better understanding the data involved in legal matters and using that insight to drive a smarter eDiscovery process from the get-go.
    • Enhancing the document review management process and supporting legal teams to make the best use of review resources.
    • Empowering stakeholders to make quick strategic decisions about legal matters – saving money and delivering better business results.

    “CaseAssist has achieved widespread adoption at our firm, and there are good reasons for that: It’s fast, it’s easy, and the attorneys know it’s there, so they don’t hesitate to ask for it or use it themselves,” said Dana Wesley Sarti, Litigation Support Manager at Robbins Russell. “While DIY timeline analysis and DIY sender/recipient analysis are probably the most popular features for our teams, we also use Casepoint analytics to do things like spot gaps by date or file type in loaded content, determine data volumes by individual custodian, identify odd file types, and identify sender and recipient domains to bulk-identify documents that are unlikely to be relevant for first or early review. Because CaseAssist’s is so simple to learn, more of our attorneys are using it on their own. Also, the use cases are virtually unlimited, which is why adoption continues to increase across the firm.”

    For more information, visit Casepoint AI and Advanced Analytics

    About Casepoint
    Trusted by leading corporations, government agencies, law firms, and legal service providers Casepoint empowers organizations to maximize efficiency and reduce risk with its innovative legal discovery platform. Casepoint’s robust, cloud-based highly-scalable and secure legal discovery platform was designed to easily manage increasingly complex litigation, investigation, and compliance needs, featuring cloud collections, data processing, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, review, and production – all in an easy-to-use web interface. Casepoint platform represents the next generation of legal technology that will enable your organization to gain increased productivity, efficiency, and business results. For more information, go to www.casepoint.com.

  • Research Commissioned by Prosimo Finds Multi-Cloud Backbone Improves Application Experience Globally But Increases Complexity

    Learn How Esteemed IT Leaders Are Overcoming The Rise Of Multi-Cloud Networking And Security Challenges Using A Cloud-First Approach In The Fireside Chat

    Key Findings:

    • Enterprises agree that outstanding application experience is key for business success

    • 64% find they are unable to offer the same level of experience to everyone, while nearly half (47%) report it is impossible to keep up with the diversity of the application and user landscape

    • For user-to-app connectivity, multi-cloud reduces latency across 45% more paths than single cloud alone, while improving performance by up to 55% for each path when compared to network-centric forms of connectivity like VPN and SD-WAN

    • App diversity impacts performance – the variance can be 15-80% across applications, even when the same application is accessed from different regions

    • Multi-cloud introduces new challenges, most importantly complexity and security

    Santa Clara, CA, June 16, 2021 — Prosimo, the Application Experience Infrastructure company, today announced its first State of Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Report based on a survey conducted by Sapio Research of more than 400 IT leaders at US-based organizations with more than 1000 employees. The report offers a comprehensive picture for enterprises transitioning to the cloud and multi-cloud so that they understand the challenges and are empowered to make informed decisions about Cloud Networking and Security. The results show that while multi-cloud transit can dramatically improve network latency, the move to multi-cloud also introduces significant complexity and security challenges.

    Join us on Thurs, June 17th as esteemed IT leaders from NielsenIQ, OwnBackup and Flexport share key learnings in overcoming challenges with Multi-cloud architectures with innovative data-driven strategies. Click here to register: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/18951/491147

    The report is the first to measure and compare application performance and network latency across major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure from nearly 500 Points of Presence (PoPs). The report looks at single cloud performance, multi-cloud and direct Internet connectivity. Multi-cloud is the clear performance winner: for user-to-app connectivity, multi-cloud was shown to reduce network latency across 45% more paths than single cloud alone, while improving performance by up to 55% per path, compared to network-centric connectivity like VPN and SD-WAN.

    Other key findings from the 2021 Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Report include:

    • Enterprises agree that outstanding application experience is key for business success

    While 93% of organizations agree that application experience is important for the overall success of the business, roughly two-thirds (64%) find they are unable to offer the same level of experience to everyone, while nearly half (47%) report it is impossible to keep up with the diversity of the application and user landscape.

    • The growing diversity of applications adds complexity 

    Different types of applications experience significant variations in performance, even when connecting over the same routes, within the same CSP. Our report found that the variance can be 15-80% across applications. Furthermore, modern applications have vastly different architecture and security requirements that impact performance, making it difficult for enterprises to monitor.

    • Security and complexity remain critical challenges

    Enterprises are more concerned than ever about the growing threat surface caused by cloud transformation and the decentralization of users, applications and data across the globe. To address this problem, many enterprise security teams have turned to VPNs or inserting security vendor SaaS services to enforce user and application security policies. However, inserting mid-mile SaaS infrastructure can significantly slow performance — adding 28x the latency, compared to a solution that eliminates mid-mile SaaS infrastructure and brings security closer to end users.

    • Variance among routes and CSP make it difficult to select optimal transit route 

    The variance across key routes between CSPs can vary greatly, adding additional complexity. For example, the report finds that the latency from Singapore to the UK had a variance of 50MS+ between the three CSP; and latency from Hong Kong to Australia had a variance of 20MS.  Moreover, this underscores the dynamic nature of cloud networks; the number of users, data volumes, connectivity options, routes and other factors can impact overall performance at any given time.

    • To realize the promise of multi-cloud, enterprises need to simplify their infrastructure, while gaining visibility and control

    While 94% of organizations are currently using tools to measure application experience, the report finds that enterprises lack comprehensive tools that allow them to measure user-to-app and app-to-app performance, across key routes, cloud providers and application types.

    Click here to read the full State of Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Report

    “Despite key challenges, multi-cloud remains a highly attractive strategy to enterprises who must deliver fast, secure and consistent application experiences across the globe,” said co-founder and CEO Ramesh Prabagaran. “Given the complexities involved, the organizations that succeed will develop a balanced approach — one that manages cost, security and performance. As a result, multi-cloud networking alone will not be enough; enterprises will require a strategy that combines multi-cloud networking, security, application performance and observability in one integrated stack.”

    This report comes on the heels of the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Networking Software, which states that, “a market is emerging to address ‘inside the cloud’ and multi-cloud networking challenges, as there are notable gaps from existing vendors. I&O leaders should look to cloud networking software products to address functionality gaps and improve operations within cloud and multi-cloud environments.”

    Prosimo is recognized as a Representative Vendor in Cloud Network Software in the Gartner Market Guide for its Application eXperience Infrastructure (AXI) platform. Prosimo AXI delivers cloud networking, secure access application performance and observability in a vertically integrated stack that provides a single, end-to-end view of the application and the users who are accessing it. Moreover, AXI provides data on application performance as well as infrastructure insights needed to make recommendations about dynamically expanding or shrinking cloud points of presence and dynamically applying security frameworks according to customers’ needs. In addition to enabling enterprises to take advantage of the rich insights that the collapsed stack provides, AXI’s deep infrastructure-focused monitoring ensures that the infrastructure being used to serve applications remains cost effective.

    Resources

    Connect with Prosimo

    About Prosimo

    Prosimo is a venture-backed company set to disrupt enterprise infrastructure. The company’s new, re-imagined architecture provides users in multiple industries with fast and secure experiences for all enterprise applications across a range of environments – quickly, easily, and within a company’s administrative control. Powered by data insights and machine learning models, the Prosimo Application eXperience Infrastructure platform (AXI) is easy to use and enables a multi-cloud infrastructure strategy to deliver apps that are fast, secure, and cost-optimized. The founders and team have extensive experience solving complex problems within IT infrastructure. Prosimo is backed by General Catalyst and WRVI Capital. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. For more information, visit https://www.prosimo.io.

  • Litmus Launches Integrated Insights Report

    New feature provides marketers with holistic email campaign insights to optimize campaign results.

    Boston, MA and San Mateo, CA, June 16, 2021 — Litmus, a leader in email marketing, today announces Litmus Integrated Insights Report. The new email analytics feature provides a single, holistic view of email campaign performance and engagement. Through direct email service provider (ESP) integrations, Litmus combines core email metrics, such as open rate, with Litmus engagement data to provide valuable context and actionable insights that can’t be uncovered when data is siloed inside the ESP. The solution is PII compliant, protecting consumer privacy as Litmus has taken steps to anonymize its analytics offering by blocking personally identifiable information (PII), removing IP addresses, and making geo-tracking optional.

    According to Litmus’ report, 2020 State of Email, personalized emails generate a median ROI of 122%, and, furthermore, 60% of marketers say amping up personalization is a priority. Email analytics and personalized experiences aren’t only important to marketers but to consumers, as well: 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences. Now, with the Litmus Integrated Insights Report, marketers can increase and fully invest in personalized experiences. This feature helps inform data-driven strategy and tactics across all marketing channels, not just email, while also optimizing email design and development processes and improving campaign results — without investing significant time in manual data pulls or analysis.

    “At Litmus, we strive to constantly optimize the email creation process for our customers, elevating all three email pillars — pre-send, post-send, and performance — to bring an updated approach to marketing personalization,” said Erik Nierenberg, CEO of Litmus. “The new Litmus Integrated Insights Report allows marketers to more easily personalize experiences and deliver creative touch points while raising awareness and increasing engagement — all while increasing ROI and validating an email-first marketing strategy.”

    In addition to additional analytics transparency, email marketers can easily share a weekly digest from the Litmus Integrated Insights Report with other marketing stakeholders. This is accomplished without any development resources, expensive business intelligence tools, or additional user licenses. By enhancing the post-perform email pillar, Litmus makes it easier to share what’s resonating with recipients generating first-party engagement insights that are applicable to other channels, improving overall marketing performance.

    “Understanding subscriber behavior is critical to our email program effectiveness. The new Litmus Integrated Insights Report revolutionizes our ability to gain these insights, giving us a holistic view of email performance and engagement in a single environment,” said Brandon Lawson at Ferguson Enterprises. “Not only do we save time not having to deal with siloed data, it’s also easy to share findings with other marketing stakeholders who can leverage the information in their channels.”

    The Litmus Integrated Insights Report is an enterprise-only feature requiring a connection to the user’s ESP, via ESP Syncing. It’s available at no additional cost for any Litmus enterprise customer using one or more of the following ESPs: Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Oracle Eloqua.

    This announcement follows the release of tickets for Litmus Live 2021, the premier conference for all marketers, from CMOs, VPs, and directors to email marketers, strategists, copywriters, designers, and developers. For more information on Litmus and Litmus’ new features, please visit litmus.com.

    About Litmus

    Litmus provides the leading email optimization and collaboration solution for marketers. From Pre-Send campaign development and testing to Post-Send insights for future content optimization, Litmus improves marketing performance and strategy, delivering increased subscriber engagement. With offices in Boston, San Mateo, and London and backed by Spectrum Equity, Litmus is used by major global brands across every industry, including 80% of the Fortune 100, the top 10 retailers, 9 of the top 10 ecommerce brands and U.S. banks, and 23 of the top 25 U.S. advertising agencies. Learn more about Litmus at litmus.com, subscribe to the Litmus blog, or follow us on social media – Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.

  • Auth0 Releases State of Secure Identity Report, Highlighting the Most Pervasive Threats to Digital Identities

    Inaugural report reveals insidious trends and provides mitigation strategies for security professionals.

    Bellevue WA, June 16, 2021— Auth0, the modern identity platform, today announced the launch of its inaugural security report: The State of Secure Identity. This detailed report highlights key areas of concern for security professionals responsible for managing digital identities, including the exponential rise of credential stuffing attacks (automated attempts to compromise a large number of user accounts with stolen credentials), fraudulent registrations, and the widespread use of breached credentials.

    Recent headlines and high-profile cyber attacks give today’s security professionals a wide swath of serious threats to worry about. The primary goal of cybercriminal activity is to access critical resources, systems, and personal data, yet systems that can be put into place to minimize the risk of attack — like identity management — often get deprioritized. Lack of budget, resourcing, or attention on managing digital identities give threat actors a prime opportunity to take advantage of these discrepancies and surreptitiously execute their attacks.

    Research into Auth0’s global customers over the past year found these key facts and figures:

    • In the first 90 days of 2021, credential stuffing accounted for 16.5% of attempted login traffic on its platform, with a peak of over 40% near the end of March — all of which Auth0 detected and prevented.
    • Travel & leisure and retail are the top two industries most affected by credential stuffing attacks.
    • The number of fraudulent registrations vary by industry vertical, but roughly 15% of all attempts to register a new account can be attributed to bots.
    • In the first 90 days of 2021, the Auth0 platform detected breached passwords at an average of more than 26,600 per day, with a minimum of just under 7,300 and a high on Feb. 9, 2021 exceeding 182,000.

    “Securing customers’ identities is made more difficult by industry-wide failures to protect data. The prevalence of breached passwords and the availability of automated attack tools makes the humble password a protective measure from the past,” said Duncan Godfrey, VP of Security Engineering, Auth0. “The State of Secure Identity Report is designed to share our unique identity security insights and recommendations with the industry so that application builders and developers at any organization can take the steps they need to improve their overall security posture, and make things more secure for end users.”

    The most prevalent threats detailed in the report include Credential Stuffing (the most common threat observed by Auth0); Fraudulent Registrations; Multi-factor Authentication Bypass; Breached Password Usage; and other common identity attacks. The complete Auth0 State of Secure Identity Report, which includes additional key findings and recommendations on how organizations can improve their identity security posture, can be downloaded here. Auth0 will also be hosting an online meetup to examine these insights in greater detail on Thursday June 24 at 8:00 AM PDT.

    Auth0, recently acquired by Okta, provides a modern identity platform that helps organizations meet the security, privacy, and convenience needs of their users. Please visit the Auth0 identity OS to learn more.

    About Auth0

    Auth0’s modern approach to identity enables organizations to provide secure access to any application, for any user. The Auth0 platform is a highly customizable identity operating system that is as simple as development teams want and as flexible as they need. Safeguarding billions of login transactions each month, Auth0 delivers convenience, privacy, and security so customers can focus on innovation. For more information, visit https://auth0.com.

  • Vectra Launches Detect for AWS

    Vectra launches one of the first cloud-native unified real-time threat detection and response SaaS  solutions for global AWS environments  

    San Jose, CA, June 16, 2021 — Vectra AI, a leader in threat detection and response, today  announced the introduction of Vectra Detect for Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS). Detect for AWS is a  cloud-native SaaS solution that provides continuous, scalable agentless threat detection, prioritization,  investigation, and response to attacks targeting applications running on AWS, as well as users, compute,  and storage instances, including the use on AWS of the control plane itself. Detect for AWS works both  at runtime and holistically across all AWS regions and does not require packet mirroring. 

    The speed and agility at which today’s digital environment changes has led many IT teams to convert  their traditional on-premises infrastructure to cloud-native architectures, resulting in a rise in the use of  Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) applications. As the speed of cloud  adoption increases, so does the risk of introducing security issues within cloud environments.  

    “Security is job one at Sephora and that requires having security tools that can help my IT teams gain  deep visibility that goes beyond initial compromise and exfiltration detection, “ said John Byun, Senior  Architect of Information Security at Sephora. “To scale our cloud operations even more securely, there  needs to be deep visibility, with details, and context for compromised identities, privileged escalations,  and the lateral movement of threats between resources without managing additional agents.” 

    Vectra Detect for AWS enables organizations to:  

    • Reduce risk of cloud services being exploited with agentless runtime monitoring of applications,  users, roles, serverless compute, and storage that allows for rapid and scalable deployment of  applications.  
    • Rapidly detect threats against your systems and data on AWS using one of the first behavioral  AI that detects and prioritizes threats without relying on signatures, agents, or static policy while  protecting against attacks looking to exploit misconfigured services. 
    • Automate response to attacks on applications running on AWS using native capabilities in  AWS, or deep integrations with other security solutions allowing teams to mitigate threats  without relying on agents. 

    By observing and understanding attacker behavior, cloud accounts, roles, permissions, and  deployment configurations for cloud workloads (containers and serverless); Vectra’s behavioral  models see and stop attacks on AWS applications without disrupting operations. As a part of the  Vectra Cognito platform, it is the first and only solution that can track attacks and compromised  users and roles across every region in a single, holistic view. This allows organizations to  confidently migrate, develop, and deploy more AWS applications at scale, while reducing the  risk of introducing security issues. 

    “We are pleased that Vectra AI continues to collaborate with AWS and integrate their solutions to work  with AWS security services and AWS Marketplace,” said Dan Plastina, Vice President, External Security  Services, AWS. “Our customers want solutions that work together to deliver increased visibility and  improved security without significant increase to operations complexity.”

    “Over 70% of our customers who leverage AWS say they are using at least four AWS services and many,  more than twenty-one different services,” said Randy Schirman, Vectra VP, Partnerships. “With AWS  being such a critical component to every-day operations, it is essential that their applications are being  protected from lateral movements in the cloud and we believe there is no better solution to achieve this  than Detect for AWS.” 

    To learn more about Detect for AWS, read our companion blog.  

    Additionally, join our webinar with Andras Cser from Forrester to learn how to demystify cloud security,  on Wednesday, June 23 at 9:00 am PT | 12:00 om ET | 5:00 pm BST | 6:00 pm CET. 

    About Vectra 

    Vectra®is the leader in threat detection and response – from cloud and data center workloads to user  and IoT devices. Its Cognito® platform accelerates threat detection and investigation using AI to enrich  network metadata it collects and stores with the right context to detect, hunt and investigate known  and unknown threats in real time. Vectra offers four applications on the Cognito platform to address  high-priority use cases. Cognito Stream™sends security-enriched metadata to data lakes and SIEMs.  Cognito Recall™is a cloud-based application to store and investigate threats in enriched metadata.  Cognito Detect™ uses AI to reveal and prioritize hidden and unknown attackers at speed. And Cognito  Detect for Office365 and Azure AD™ finds and stops attacks in enterprise SaaS applications and the  Microsoft 365 ecosystem. For more information, visit vectra.ai.

  • Next.js 11 Accelerates Frontend Performance and Enables Instant Collaboration to Let Developers Build the Next Big Thing, Faster

    Cross-platform innovations highlighted by Vercel and Google to audience of more than 50,000 attendees.

    San Francisco, CA, June 15, 2021 — Vercel, a comprehensive platform for creating unsurpassed web user experiences and creator of Next.js, the leading React and JavaScript framework for frontend web development, today announced Next.js 11, accelerating frontend developers’ ability to build the next big thing through speed and collaboration. New innovations include significantly faster starts and changes, real-time feedback, instantaneous live collaboration and significant image optimization enhancements. In addition, the Aurora team in Google Chrome developed Conformance for Next.js, a system that provides carefully crafted solutions and rules to support optimal loading; Next.js script prioritization and font enhancement automations that reduce First and Largest Contentful Paint times. Together, these enhancements enable developers to improve Core Web Vitals scores, which are now being used by Google to influence search rankings. Developers can try these new capabilities by visiting nextjs.org/11.

    Next.js is the first hybrid framework to succeed at scale, and the only one to meet the needs of both static and dynamic websites and applications. Leveraging React as the fundamental unit of collaboration gives developers at companies including TikTok, Hulu, Ticketmaster, Staples and Marvel the flexibility to scale from one page to one billion pages.

    Since the first Next.js Conf in October 2020, Next.js open-source contributors have grown to more than 1,600, driving downloads on NPM from 4.1M to 6.2M. Traffic to all sites and apps on the Vercel edge network has doubled, weekly deploys have quadrupled and the number of homepages in the Alexa top 10,000 using Next.js have grown by 50%.

    “Whether you’re starting with a single static page or deploying a dynamic site with billions of pages, Next.js is the hybrid framework that meets you where you are and grows with you,” said Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. “We believe the fastest and most enjoyable end-user experience must go hand in hand with the fastest and most enjoyable developer experience.”

    New Innovations in Next.js 11 Include:

    • The Fastest Frontend Platform Ever — Next.js innovations improve startup time by up to 24% and reduce processing time for changes from edit to screen by 40%.
    • Next.js Live (Preview Release) — Combining a brand new dev server engine for Next.js with the Vercel platform enables teams to instantly share, chat, draw, and edit from anywhere in the world, with developers able to generate a URL in less than five seconds. With support for both static and dynamic Next.js applications, sharing and accessing a URL is always instantaneous, regardless of page numbers, because there’s no build process involved. Next.js will run entirely inside the web browser. Leveraging ServiceWorker, WebAssembly and ES Modules makes everything that’s possible when you run Next.js on a local machine possible in the context of a remote collaboration. Next.js Live works perfectly, even when offline, eliminating the need to run or operate remote virtual machines.
    • Real-time Feedback — Vercel enables developers to see the reaction to changes instantly. A priority in Next.js since day one, the new functionality builds on support for webpack HMR with zero configuration, and on the close partnership with Facebook, which led to the development of the Fast Refresh innovation in Next.js. Now developers can run the next dev command and their frontend project is ready to go. The browser reflects changes as soon as a file is saved. This not only works for styles, but thanks to Fast Refresh, all state is preserved even as changes are made.
    • Industry-first Image Enhancements — Next.js lets developers quickly swap the HTML image tag for the Next.js image component, optimizing images for each device viewport the image is delivered to. Lighthouse tests provide insights for improving loading performance out of the box in development when running Next Start, or when deploying to Vercel via its blazing fast edge network. Close community-driven integration with Cloudinary, Cloudflare, Akamai, and Imgix extend those benefits to the leading third-party content networks. New enhancements include support for the import keyword for the src, which can be used to refer to essential images that are part of a repository and automatically setting width and height parameters for local images, reducing cumulative layout shift, a core web vital. It also provides support for image placeholders on imported images, easing the transition from blank space to image, in addition to support for blurring for dynamic images.
    • Conformance for Next.js — This new system provides carefully crafted solutions and rules to support optimal loading. It frees developers from having to memorize complicated rules for loading performance via a compiler that enforces best practices to ensure predictable outcomes. This makes teams productive, and becomes essential as teams grow and features increase.
    • Next.js Script Component — This foundational optimization enables developers to set the loading priority of third-party scripts, significantly improving loading performance. Developers can now simply define the strategy property and Next.js will prioritize it. It enables three different loading strategies — before-interactive, for critical scripts such as security and authentication that need to be fetched and executed before the page is interactive; after-interactive, for scripts such as tag managers and analytics that can fetch and execute after the page is interactive; and lazy-onload, for scripts such as chat support widgets that can wait to load last during idle time.
    • Font Enhancement Automations — More than 80% of web pages are using custom web fonts as part of their branding, design, or to maintain cross-browser and device consistency. That customization exacts a performance toll. In April, Google introduced Font Optimization that includes Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit on Next.js, along with Font Optimization for Angular for Google Fonts. In Next.js, the CSS of custom fonts is now automatically inlined at build time. This eliminates the round trip to fetch font declarations, improving both First and Largest Contentful Paint times by as much as five seconds. A preconnect tag in Next.js, by default, establishes a connection with the underlying font files even faster.

    “At Google Chrome, we believe our collaboration with Next.js is an example of how to set predictable outcomes for loading performance,” said Houssein Djirdeh, developer advocate at Google. “We love working together with great frameworks to help developers make the web faster and we’re incredibly grateful for the maintainers and sponsors of the frameworks that enable the web to thrive. A special thanks to the Next.js team for testing with us and sharing the cost of many early attempts.”

    About Vercel

    Vercel is the leading advocate and enabler of frontend developer experience, having created the best platform to deploy any frontend website or application and Next.js, the most popular React framework. Vercel provides unsurpassed vertical integration, from developer experience to edge delivery, with the industry’s most advanced development tools paired with parallel compute in a serverless cloud environment providing a fully-managed, highly-automated experience for both developers and users. Companies including Carhartt, Github, Hulu, IBM, McDonald’s, Uber and Facebook deploy their frontends with the Vercel platform. Vercel (twitter @vercel) is headquartered in San Francisco.

  • Catchpoint SRE Study Reveals a Global Drop in Toil, Warns of Looming Scalability Ceiling, and Highlights the Need for New Operational Capabilities

    New York, NY, June 15, 2021 — Catchpoint, the leader in Digital Experience Management, conducted a study with VMware Tanzu and DevOps Institute of nearly 300 site reliability engineers (SREs). The SRE Report is one of the most data-backed studies of its kind and has played a critical role in defining the nature of what it means to be a SRE since it launched four years ago. This year’s report underscores the challenges of multi-cloud, calls out the underutilization of AIOps, and shows a systemic shift in core baselining data. The report concludes by offering an actionable path for SREs to consistently deliver customer value.

    Download the report here.

    “SREs deal with a very broad set of challenges that span across transformational and operational activities,” says Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. “This report arms them with the insights they need to help address these challenges – to balance the need for agility against the need for stability when building and operating massive, distributed, and reliable systems.”

    Levels of Toil Fall Around the World

    Toil is the work tied to a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, and devoid of enduring value. Google suggests that SREs should do no more than doing 50% ops work (including toil) and 50% dev work. This year, the SRE Report notes an average year-over-year drop in toil of 15%.

    “The reason this is such an impactful insight is that the drop in toil was across all geographies,” says Tony Ferrelli, Vice President of Technical Operations at Catchpoint. “If this drop in toil was because work felt more meaningful since COVID-19 led to SREs working-from-home, then will reported toil levels rise next year as people return to the office or a hybrid work environment?”

    The Accelerating Use of Multiple Providers Warns of a Looming Scalability Ceiling

    If the cloud is your new datacenter, then third-party services like DNS and CDN are your new racks and cabinets. When combining the rising use of multiple same-service platforms (e.g., multi-cloud) with the increase in the volume, velocity, and variety of monitoring data, there is little wonder why lack of visibility across the stack (53%) was the most cited cloud-app monitoring challenge or why SREs continually refine service level objectives (50%). The survey responses give rise to the critical question, how can companies most effectively scale SRE implementations?

    “Spanning the gaps between the interfaces and the data that each provider offers increases the difficulty for SRE teams to automate across those multiple providers. These integrations are rarely simple except for the most superficial aspects. Effectively mapping disparate data models together may be the next frontier for SRE in a multi-vendor environment,” says Kurt Andersen, SRE Architect, Blameless.

    The Shift Toward AIOps Is Slow

    AIOps has been widely touted to reduce laborious ops work and to intelligently sift through the ever-increasing volumes of data that organizations are continually presented with. However, the report shows that many SREs have never used AIOps and their rating of its received value evenly spanned the 1-9 value scale.

    According to J. Bobby Dorlus, Staff SRE at Twitter, “Most SREs working at this scale are already leveraging machine learning, especially when it comes to efficiencies around data centers (locations, cooling, and all the things that happen inside it) for networks and building out infrastructure … Evolving that into AIOps is the next logical step.”

    Observability Should Include Digital Experience Metrics and Business KPIs

    SREs that fail to deliver customer value run the risk of being stuck in an operational toil rut. Conversely, businesses that fail to recognize the importance of SRE activities risk losing talented employees and their competitive edge.

    The highest-ranked driver for successful SRE implementations was incident resolution (60%), while expanding the business was fifth lowest (33%). These findings show that SREs are still inwardly focusing on IT operations versus outwardly focusing on the business results that deliver customer value. To close this IT-to-business gap, SRE teams must expand observability boundaries to include digital experience metrics and business KPIs.

    “The balancing work of innovation while providing operational excellence has forced many IT teams to put heavy emphasis on improving reliability and stability of services and applications,” says Eveline Oehrlich, Chief Research and Content Officer at the DevOps Institute. “What SREs now need to do is make sure the value of these reliable services and applications are understood by the customer.”

    RECOMMENDATIONS

    • Businesses and SREs need to establish a baselining program around core SRE tenets and business level metrics to know whether things are getting better or worse.
    • Platform Operations teams should be implemented to achieve higher levels of scale and efficiency. Platform Ops should develop normalized capabilities for SREs across the organization to draw on (even though underlying platforms will have different interfaces) and treat those capabilities as a product to sell and market to other teams within the business.
    • To achieve the promise of AIOps, SREs and managers must break down AIOps into smaller components and incrementally develop from there, in addition to investing in training in AI and ML for SRE teams.
    • It is crucial to find ways to bridge the gap between SRE and business goals. Start conversations around capabilities, for instance, versus focusing on low-level monitoring metrics and high-level business outcomes.

    Resources

    SRE Report

    Connect with Catchpoint

    Twitter: @Catchpoint

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/catchpoint/

    About Catchpoint

    Catchpoint, the global leader in Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), empowers business and IT leaders to protect and advance the experience of their customers and employees. In a digital economy, enabled by cloud, SaaS and IoT, applications and users are everywhere. Catchpoint offers the largest and most geographically distributed monitoring network in the industry – it’s the only DEM platform that can scale and support today’s customer and employee location diversity and application distribution. It helps enterprises proactively detect, identify and validate user and application reachability, availability, performance and reliability, across an increasingly complex digital delivery chain. Industry leaders like Google, L’Oréal, Verizon, Oracle, LinkedIn, Honeywell, and Priceline trust Catchpoint’s out-of-the box monitoring platform, to proactively detect, repair, and optimize customer and employee experiences. Learn more at www.catchpoint.com.

  • Deloitte Acquires Digital Risk Protection Solution Provider Terbium Labs to Expand Threat Intelligence Offerings

    Baltimore, MD, June 15, 2021 — Deloitte announced today its acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Terbium Labs, a Baltimore-based digital risk protection company that helps organizations detect and remediate data exposure, theft, or misuse across the digital landscape. Terbium Labs’ services and solutions – including its digital risk protection platform that leverages artificial intelligence, machine learning and patented data fingerprinting technologies to identify illicit use of sensitive data online – will join Deloitte’s cyber practice  in its Detect & Respond offering suite.

    “Finding sensitive or proprietary data once it leaves an organization’s perimeter can be extremely challenging. Advanced cyber threat intelligence, paired with remediation of data risk exposure requires a balance of advanced technology, keen understanding of regulatory compliance and fine tuning with an organization’s business needs and risk profile,” said Kieran Norton, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory’s infrastructure solution leader and principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP.  “Adding Terbium Labs’ business to our portfolio will offer our clients one more way to continuously monitor for — and, when appropriate, minimize the impact of — data exposed on the open, deep, or dark web.”

    “Our industry-leading cyber practice is focused on providing our clients with new and innovative ways to transform their cyber risk postures as they endeavor to strengthen their trust equity, resilience and security,” added Deborah Golden, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory Cyber and Strategic Risk leader and principal, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “As regulations change and new capabilities become available, we’re strategically investing to offer advanced approaches to monitor digital assets privately and securely and to reduce time from event to remediation. These investments are powerful individually in bringing improved outcomes for our clients and transformational together by helping our clients become higher performing and more agile in the face of new threats and more efficient in their operations.” 

    Terbium Labs is Deloitte’s third cyber acquisition in 2021 — preceded by cyber threat hunting provider Root9B, LLC (R9B)  and cloud security posture management provider CloudQuest, demonstrating its commitment to aiding clients in managing emerging cybersecurity threats across a diverse digital ecosystem.

    As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte & Touche LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of our legal structure. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.

    About Deloitte
    Deloitte serves 79% of the Fortune Global 500 companies, including 92% of Technology, Media & Communications companies, 87% of Financial Services companies, and 87% of Consumer Business companies. In addition, Deloitte serves the most competitive countries as ranked by the World Economic Forum, the most effective governments according to the World Bank, and all the members of the G20.

    Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee (“DTTL”), its network of member firms, and their related entities. DTTL and each of its member firms are legally separate and independent entities. DTTL (also referred to as “Deloitte Global”) does not provide services to clients. Please see www.deloitte.com/about for a more detailed description of DTTL and its member firms.

    Deloitte provides audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk management, tax and related services to public and private clients spanning multiple industries. With a globally connected network of member firms in more than 150 countries, Deloitte brings world-class capabilities and high-quality service to clients, delivering the insights they need to address their most complex business challenges. Deloitte’s more than 210,000 professionals are committed to becoming the standard of excellence.

  • SmartBear Expands API Design Enabling Developers to Work in Popular Java IDE

    SwaggerHub plug-in for IntelliJ IDEA extends leading API lifecycle development platform to backend Java developers.
    Somerville, MA, June 15, 2021 — SmartBear, a leading provider of software development and quality tools, has released a new plug-in for SwaggerHub API design to support IntelliJ IDEA, the popular Java-based integrated developer environment (IDE). API developers familiar with IntelliJ IDEA now have ready access to the OpenAPI compliant SwaggerHub API design platform to create, organize, and document APIs. The new IntelliJ IDEA plug-in expands the growing list of options for API designers offered with SwaggerHub, including the Microsoft VS Code extension, the SwaggerHub Code Editor, SwaggerHub Visual Editor, and SwaggerHub CLI Tool.
    “Our goal is to meet API developers where they work with familiar tools that make them more productive across the entire API development lifecycle,” said Brian Downey, Senior Vice President, API Lifecycle at SmartBear. “With IntelliJ IDEA, we have added support for an IDE which extends popularity to more than 4 million Java developers.”
    IntelliJ IDEA, developed by JetBrains, is an IDE written in Java for developers largely focused on server-side development. It includes several features to maximize developer productivity, including intelligent coding assistance and ergonomic design. While IntelliJ IDEA is an IDE for Java, it also supports a large variety of other languages such as SQL, JPQL, HTML, and JavaScript, to name a few. JetBrains is a global software vendor specializing in the creation of intelligent, productivity-enhancing tools for software developers and teams.
    “In many ways, we share a common vision with SmartBear to make it easy for developers to take care of quality during all the stages of development,” said Brian Noll, Vice President of Sales and Partnerships, JetBrains Americas. “We recognize the value SwaggerHub delivers for enabling developer collaboration and API standardization and welcome their participation in our IntelliJ marketplace.”
    IntelliJ IDEA already embeds OpenAPI capabilities for developers who want to consume APIs into their applications. The SwaggerHub plug-in for IntelliJ IDEA targets API providers who are designing APIs and want to enable their developers with a collaboration platform to reinforce design consistency and quality.
    The new IntelliJ plug-in for SwaggerHub API Design by SmartBear enables API designers to view and edit their APIs and Domains directly from within the development environment. Key features include:
    View and Navigate definitions from your SwaggerHub Organizations
    Edit and Save API definitions via IntelliJ IDEA to SwaggerHub
    Create new APIs or Domains from scratch or using a template
    Delete API definitions by version or the entire definition
    Create new versions of your API definitions and set defaults
    Auto mocking allows for quick API definition testing
    Validate your APIs against the OpenAPI/Swagger specification
    Privacy makes API version public/private to change visibility
    To learn more about the new SwaggerHub plug-in for IntelliJ IDEA or download a copy, go to the JetBrains Marketplace.
    For more information on SwaggerHub, visit: https://swagger.io/tools/swaggerhub/.
    About SmartBear
    At SmartBear, we focus on your one priority that never changes: quality. We know delivering quality software over and over is complicated. So our tools are built to streamline your process while seamlessly working with the products you use – and will use. Whether it’s TestComplete, Swagger, Cucumber, ReadyAPI, Zephyr, Bugsnag, or one of our other tools, we span from test automation, API lifecycle, collaboration, performance testing, test management, and more. Whichever you need, they’re easy to try, easy to buy, and easy to integrate. We’re used by 15 million developers, testers, and operations engineers at over 24,000 organizations – including world-renowned innovators like Adobe, JetBlue, FedEx, and Microsoft. Wherever you’re going, we’ll help you get there. Learn more at smartbear.com, or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

  • Appen’s Annual State of AI Report Finds a Shift to Internal Efficiencies

    AI budgets up significantly and decisions moving from C-suite to technologists, away from “silver bullet” solutions to improvements to internal operations

    San Francisco, CA, June 15, 2021 — Appen Limited (ASX:APX), the leading provider of high-quality training data for organizations that build effective AI systems at scale, today released its seventh annual State of AI report. This year’s report reveals a significant year-over-year increase in AI budgets, ranging from $500,000 to $5 million per year, up 55% on last year. In 2021, AI decision makers are moving away from the AI “silver bullet” and towards the use of artificial intelligence to support internal processes, as they focus on better understanding their data, as well as efficiency gains.

    “Insights from this year’s State of AI report clearly indicate that companies are going all-in on AI,” said Appen CEO Mark Brayan. “When we first set out to understand the state of AI and machine learning seven years ago, organizations globally were eager to start AI projects but weren’t making meaningful progress. Today, in a time of transition during the pandemic, AI is considered core to survival, and we see this in the results of the survey – increased budgets, more technologists in charge, and increased reliance on external training data providers.”

    The report also found a shift in responsibility for AI projects from business decision makers to technical practitioners (technologists), motioning an increased focus on operationalizing AI projects. Technologists implementing and maintaining projects is a signal that AI is maturing within organizations and being delegated into management layers in the business.

    “This year’s State of AI report exemplifies how the maturing of AI projects, the desire for faster and greater ROI, and the increased reliance on third-party training data providers like Appen go hand in hand,” said Wilson Pang, CTO at Appen. “High-quality data is the foundation for success for every AI project, and no amount of tweaking of algorithms can negate the consequences of bad data. Companies that want to deliver better results faster understand that third-party training data is a must.”

    Key Takeaways from the 2021 State of AI Report

    • Impact of COVID-19: Enterprises of all sizes confirmed they accelerated their AI strategy as a result of COVID-19 in 2020 and will continue to do so in 2021. However, organizations that have an external data provider are twice as likely to significantly accelerate their AI initiatives than those that don’t.

    • A shift in decision-making responsibility: In 2021, a significantly higher percentage of technologists are responsible for making decisions for AI projects and putting them into practice. C-level executives are responsible for AI initiatives for only 39% of organizations, down from 71% last year, with companies delegating responsibility to VPs and Directors.

    • Budget increases: AI budgets of $500k to $5 million have increased by 55% year-over-year, with only 26% reporting budgets under $500K as companies have found that annual budgets of less than that prevents them from being perceived as a market Leader. Not surprisingly, annual AI budgets of $1 million or more leads to a higher probability of deployment than budgets under $1 million.

    • Focus on the data: An overwhelming majority of organizations have partnered with external training data providers to deploy and update AI projects at scale – a reflection of the fact that data acquisition, preparation and management are the top challenges AI practitioners face. Companies who use external data providers are 1.5 times more likely to say their company is ahead of others in AI deployment.

    • Key disconnects remain: The report finds that business leaders and technologists don’t yet agree in areas like ethics and interpretability. Technologists have a greater concern for ethics (41% versus business leaders’ 33%), while business leaders are more concerned with interpretability (47% versus technologists’ 38%).

    To learn more, download the full State of AI report.

    About Appen Limited
    Appen collects and labels images, text, speech, audio, and video used to build and continuously improve the world’s most innovative artificial intelligence systems. With expertise in more than 180 languages, a global crowd of over 1 million skilled contractors, and the industry’s most advanced AI-assisted data annotation platform, Appen solutions provide the quality, security, and speed required by leaders in technology, automotive, financial services, retail, manufacturing, and governments worldwide. Founded in 1996, Appen has customers and offices around the world.