The Cerebras CS-1 computes deep learning AI problems by being bigger, bigger, and bigger than any other chip

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Deep learning is all the rage these days in enterprise circles, and it isn’t hard to understand why. Whether it is optimizing ad spend, finding new drugs to cure cancer, or just offering better, more intelligent products to customers, machine learning — and particularly deep learning models — have the potential to massively improve a range of products and applications.

The key word though is ‘potential.’ While we have heard oodles of words sprayed across enterprise conferences the last few years about deep learning, there remain huge roadblocks to making these techniques widely available. Deep learning models are highly networked, with dense graphs of nodes that don’t “fit” well with the traditional ways computers process information. Plus, holding all of the information required for a deep learning model can take petabytes of storage and racks upon racks of processors in order to be usable.

There are lots of approaches underway right now to solve this next-generation compute problem, and Cerebras has to be among the most interesting.

As we talked about in August with the announcement of the company’s “Wafer Scale Engine” — the world’s largest silicon chip according to the company — Cerebras’ theory is that the way forward for deep learning is to essentially just get the entire machine learning model to fit on one massive chip. And so the company aimed to go big — really big.

The five technical challenges Cerebras overcame in building the first trillion-transistor chip

Today, the company announced the launch of its end-user compute product, the Cerebras CS-1, and also announced its first customer of Argonne National Laboratory.

The CS-1 is a “complete solution” product designed to be added to a data center to handle AI workflows. It includes the Wafer Scale Engine (or WSE, i.e. the actual processing core) plus all the cooling, networking, storage, and other equipment required to operate and integrate the processor into the data center. It’s 26.25 inches tall (15 rack units), and includes 400,000 processing cores, 18 gigabytes of on-chip memory, 9 petabytes per second of on-die memory bandwidth, 12 gigabit ethernet connections to move data in and out of the CS-1 system, and sucks just 20 kilowatts of power.

A cross-section look at the CS-1. Photo via Cerebras

Cerebras claims that the CS-1 delivers the performance of more than 1,000 leading GPUs combined — a claim that TechCrunch hasn’t verified, although we are intently waiting for industry-standard benchmarks in the coming months when testers get their hands on these units.

In addition to the hardware itself, Cerebras also announced the release of a comprehensive software platform that allows developers to use popular ML libraries like TensorFlow and PyTorch to integrate their AI workflows with the CS-1 system.

In designing the system, CEO and co-founder Andrew Feldman said that “We’ve talked to more than 100 customers over the past year and a bit,“ in order to determine the needs for a new AI system and the software layer that should go on top of it. “What we’ve learned over the years is that you want to meet the software community where they are rather than asking them to move to you.”

I asked Feldman why the company was rebuilding so much of the hardware to power their system, rather than using already existing components. “If you were to build a Ferrari engine and put it in a Toyota, you cannot make a race car,” Feldman analogized. “Putting fast chips in Dell or [other] servers does not make fast compute. What it does is it moves the bottleneck.” Feldman explained that the CS-1 was meant to take the underlying WSE chip and give it the infrastructure required to allow it to perform to its full capability.

A diagram of the Cerebras CS-1 cooling system. Photo via Cerebras.

That infrastructure includes a high-performance water cooling system to keep this massive chip and platform operating at the right temperatures. I asked Feldman why Cerebras chose water, given that water cooling has traditionally been complicated in the data center. He said, “We looked at other technologies — freon. We looked at immersive solutions, we looked at phase-change solutions. And what we found was that water is extraordinary at moving heat.”

A side view of the CS-1 with its water and air cooling systems visible. Photo via Cerebras.

Why then make such a massive chip, which as we discussed back in August, has huge engineering requirements to operate compared to smaller chips that have better yield from wafers. Feldman said that “ it massively reduces communication time by using locality.”

In computer science, locality is placing data and compute in the right places within, let’s say a cloud, that minimizes delays and processing friction. By having a chip that can theoretically host an entire ML model on it, there’s no need for data to flow through multiple storage clusters or ethernet cables — everything that the chip needs to work with is available almost immediately.

According to a statement from Cerebras and Argonne National Laboratory, Cerebras is helping to power research in “cancer, traumatic brain injury and many other areas important to society today” at the lab. Feldman said that “It was very satisfying that right away customers were using this for things that are important and not for 17-year-old girls to find each other on Instagram or some shit like that.”

(Of course, one hopes that cancer research pays as well as influencer marketing when it comes to the value of deep learning models).

Cerebras itself has grown rapidly, reaching 181 engineers today according to the company. Feldman says that the company is hands down on customer sales and additional product development.

It has certainly been a busy time for startups in the next-generation artificial intelligence workflow space. Graphcore just announced this weekend that it was being installed in Microsoft’s Azure cloud, while I covered the funding of NUVIA, a startup led by the former lead chip designers from Apple who hope to apply their mobile backgrounds to solve the extreme power requirements these AI chips force on data centers.

AI chip startup Graphcore closes $200M Series D, adds BMW and Microsoft as strategic investors

Expect ever more announcements and activity in this space as deep learning continues to find new adherents in the enterprise.

Three of Apple and Google’s former star chip designers launch NUVIA with $53M in series A funding

Eden office management platform raises $25 million Series B

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Eden, the workplace management platform that connects office managers with service providers, today announced the close of a $25 million Series B round led by Reshape. Participants in the round also include Fifth Wall Ventures, Mitsui Fudosan, RXR Realty, Thor Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Alate Partners, Quiet Capital, S28 Capital, Canvas Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Upshift Partners, Impala Ventures, ENIAC Ventures, and Crystal Towers, among others.

Eden was founded by Joe Du Bey and Kyle Wilkinson back in 2015 and launched out of Y Combinator as an on-demand tech repair and support service, sending IT specialists to consumers’ homes to help set up a printer or repair a cracked phone screen. Within the first year, Eden had pivoted its business entirely to the enterprise, helping B2B clients with their IT issues at much cheaper cost than employing an IT specialist full time.

By 2017, Eden had expanded well beyond IT support into other office management categories, like inventory management around supplies, cleaning, handiwork and more. Indeed, revenue shifted dramatically from Eden’s W2 wizards toward third-party vendors and service providers, with around 75 percent coming from third parties.

Today, 100 percent of Eden’s revenue comes from connecting offices with third-party providers. The company is live in 25 markets, including a few international cities like Berlin and London. Eden now has more than 2,000 service providers on the platform.

The next phase of the company, according to Du Bey, is to focus on the full spectrum of property management, zooming out to landlords and property managers.

“The broader vision we have is that everyone in the workplace will use Eden to have a better day at work, from the landlord of the building to the software engineer to the office manager, who is our primary client,” said Du Bey. “One thing we’ve learned is that there is a meaningful part of the world you can serve by working directly with the business or the office or facilities manager. But it might be the majority of our category where you really need to build a relationship with the landlord and the property manager to really be successful.”

To that end, Eden is currently in beta with software aimed at landlords and property managers that could facilitate registered guests and check-ins, as well as building-related maintenance and service issues.

Eden has raised just over $40 million in funding since inception.

SocialRank sells biz to Trufan, pivots to a mobile LinkedIn

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What do you do when your startup idea doesn’t prove big enough? Run it as a scrawny but profitable lifestyle business? Or sell it to a competitor and take another swing at the fences? Social audience analytics startup SocialRank chose the latter and is going for glory.

Today, SocialRank announced it’s sold its business, brand, assets, and customers to influencer marketing campaign composer and distributor Trufan which will run it as a standalone product. But SocialRank’s team isn’t joining up. Instead, the full six-person staff is sticking together to work on a mobile-first professional social network called Upstream aiming to nip at LinkedIn.

SocialRank co-founder and CEO Alex Taub

Started in 2014 amidst a flurry of marketing analytics tools, SocialRank had raised $2.1 million from Rainfall Ventures and others before hitting profitability in 2017. But as the business plateaued, the team saw potential to use data science about people’s identity to get them better jobs.

“A few months ago we decided to start building a new product (what has become Upstream). And when we came to the conclusion to go all-in on Upstream, we knew we couldn’t run two businesses at the same time” SocialRank co-founder and CEO Alex Taub tells me. “We decided then to run a bit of a process. We ended up with a few offers but ultimately felt like Trufan was the best one to continue the business into the future.”

The move lets SocialRank avoid stranding its existing customers like the NFL, Netflix, and Samsung that rely on its audience segmentation software. Instead, they’ll continue to be supported by Trufan where Taub and fellow co-founder Michael Schonfeld will become advisors.

“While we built a sustainable business, we essentially knew that if we wanted to go real big, we would need to go to the drawing board” Taub explains.

SocialRank

Two-year-old Trufan has raised $1.8 million Canadian from Round13 Capital, local Toronto startup Clearbanc’s founders, and several NBA players. Trufan helps brands like Western Union and Kay Jewellers design marketing initiatives that engage their customer communities through social media. It’s raising an extra $400,000 USD in venture debt from Round13 to finance the acquisition, which should make Trufan cash-flow positive by the end of the year.

Why isn’t the SocialRank team going along for the ride? Taub said LinkedIn was leaving too much opportunity on the table. While it’s good for putting resumes online and searching for people, “All the social stuff are sort of bolt-ons that came after Facebook and Twitter arrived. People forget but LinkedIn is the oldest active social network out there”, Taub tells me, meaning it’s a bit outdated.

Trufan’s team

Rather than attack head-on, the newly forged Upstream plans to pick the Microsoft-owned professional network apart with better approaches to certain features. “I love the idea of ‘the unbundling of LinkedIn’, ala what’s been happening with Craigslist for the past few years” says Taub. “The first foundational piece we are building is a social professional network around giving and getting help. We’ll also be focused on the unbundling of the groups aspect of LinkedIn.”

Taub concludes that entrepreneurs can shackle themselves to impossible goals if they take too much venture capital for the wrong business. As we’ve seen with SoftBank, investors demand huge returns that can require pursuing risky and unsustainable expansion strategies.

“We realized that SocialRank had potential to be a few hundred million dollar in revenue business but venture growth wasn’t exactly the model for it” Taub says. “You need the potential of billions in revenue and a steep growth curve.” A professional network for the smartphone age has that kind of addressable market. And the team might feel better getting out of bed each day knowing they’re unlocking career paths for people instead of just getting them to click ads.

Salesforce, AWS expand partnership to bring Amazon Connect to Service Cloud

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Salesforce and AWS announced an expansion of their on-going partnership that actually goes back to a $400 million 2016 infrastructure services agreement, and expanded last year to include data integration between the two companies. This year, Salesforce announced it will be offering AWS telephony and call transcription services with Amazon Connect as part of its Service Cloud call center solution.

“We have a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services, which will allow customers to purchase Amazon Connect from us, and then it will be pre-integrated and out of the box to provide a full transcription of the call, and of course that’s alongside of an actual call recording of the call,” Patrick Beyries, VP of product management for Service Cloud. explained.

It’s worth noting that the company will be partnering with other telephony vendors as well, so that customers can choose the Amazon solution or another from Cisco, Avaya or Genesys, Beyries said.

These telephony partnerships fill in a gap in the Service Cloud call center offering, and give Salesforce direct access to the call itself. The telephony vendors will handle call transcription and hand that off to Salesforce, which can then use its intelligence layer called Einstein to “read” the transcript and offer the CSR next best actions in real time, something the company has been able to do with interactions from chat and other channels, but couldn’t do with voice.

“As this conversation evolves, the consumer is explaining what their problem is, and Einstein is [monitoring] that conversation. As the conversation gets to a critical mass, Einstein begins to understand what the content is about and suggests a specific solution to the agent,” Beyries said.

Salesforce will begin piloting this new Service Cloud capability in the spring with general availability expected next summer.

Only last week, Salesforce announced a major partnership with Microsoft to move Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Azure. These announcements show Salesforce will continue to use multiple cloud partners when it makes sense for the business. Today, it’s Amazon’s turn.

Salesforce, AWS expand partnership with secure data sharing between platforms

Clumio raises $135M Series C for its backup as a service platform

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Clumio, a 100-people startup that offers a SaaS-like service for enterprise backup, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series C round, led by existing investor Sutter Hill Ventures and new investor Altimeter Captial. The announcement comes shortly after the company’s disclosure in August that it had quietly raised a total of $51 million in Series A and B rounds in 2017 and 2018. The company says it plans to use this new funding to “accelerate its vision to deliver a globally consolidated data protection service in and for the public cloud.”

Given the amount of money invested in the company, chances are Clumio is getting close to a $1 billion valuation, but the company is not disclosing its valuation at this point.

The overall mission of Clumio is to build a platform on public clouds that gives enterprises a single data protection service that can handle backups of their data in on-premises, cloud and SaaS applications. When it came out of stealth, the company’s focus was on VMware on premises. Since then, the team has expanded this to include VMware running on public clouds.

“When somebody moves to the cloud, they don’t want to be in the business of managing software or infrastructure and all that, because the whole reason to move to the cloud was essentially to get away from the mundane,” explained Clumio CEO and co-founder Poojan Kumar.

The next step in this process, as the company also announced today, is to make it easier for enterprises to protect the cloud-native applications they are building now. The company today launched this service for AWS and will likely expand it to other clouds like Microsoft Azure, soon.

The market for enterprise backup is only going to expand in the coming years. We’ve now reached a point, after all, where it’s not unheard of to talk about enterprises that run thousands of different applications. For them, Clumio wants to become the one-stop-shop for all things data protection — and its investors are obviously buying into the company’s vision and momentum.

“When there’s a foundational change, like the move to the cloud, which is as foundational a change, at least, as the move from mainframe to open systems in the 80s and 90s,” said Mike Speiser, Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures . “When there’s a change like that, you have to re-envision, you have to refactor and think of the world — the new world — in a new way and start from scratch. If you don’t, what’s gonna end up happening is people make decisions that are short term decisions that seem like they will work but end up being architectural dead ends. And those companies never ever end up winning. They just never end up winning and that’s the opportunity right now on this big transition across many markets, including the backup market for Clumio.”

Speiser also noted that SaaS allows for a dramatically larger market opportunity for companies like Clumio. “What SaaS is doing, is it’s not only allowing us to go after the traditional Silicon Valley, high end, direct selling, expensive markets that were previously buying high-end systems and data centers. But what we’re seeing — and we’re seeing this with Snowflake and […] we will see it with Clumio — is there’s an opportunity to go after a much broader market opportunity.”

Starting next year, Clumio will expand that market by adding support for data protection for a first SaaS app, with more to follow, as well as support for backup in more regions and clouds. Right now, the service’s public cloud tool focuses on AWS — and only in the United States. Next year, it plans to support international regions as well.

Kumar stressed that he wants to build Clumio for the long run, with an IPO as part of that roadmap. His investors probably wouldn’t mind that, either.

Clumio raises $51M to bring enterprise backup into the 21st century

Ransomware Bites 400 Veterinary Hospitals

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National Veterinary Associates (NVA), a California company that owns more than 700 animal care facilities around the globe, is still working to recover from a ransomware attack late last month that affected more than half of those properties, separating many veterinary practices from their patient records, payment systems and practice management software. NVA says it expects to have all facilities fully back up and running normally within the next week.

Agoura Hills, Calif.-based NVA bills itself as is the largest private owner of freestanding veterinary hospitals in the United States. The company’s Web site says it currently owns roughly 700 veterinary hospitals and animal boarding facilities in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

NVA said it discovered the ransomware outbreak on the morning of Sunday, Oct. 27, and soon after hired two outside security firms to investigate and remediate the attack. A source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that NVA was hit with Ryuk, a ransomware strain first spotted in August 2018 that targets mostly large organizations for a high-ransom return.

NVA declined to answer questions about the malware, or whether the NVA paid the ransom demand.

“It was ransomware, but we’ve been referring to it as a malware incident,” said Laura Koester, NVA’s chief marketing officer.

Koester said because every NVA hospital runs their IT operations as they see fit, not all were affected. More importantly, she said, all of the NVA’s hospitals have remained open and able to see clients (animals in need of care), and access to patient records has been fully restored to all affected hospitals.

“For a few days, some [pet owners] couldn’t do online bookings, and some hospitals had to look at different records for their patients,” Koester said. “But throughout this whole thing, if there was a sick animal, we saw them. No one closed their doors.”

The source close to the investigation painted a slight less rosy picture of the situation at NVA, and said the company’s response has been complicated by the effects of wildfires surrounding its headquarters in Los Angeles County: A year ago, a destructive wildfire in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties burned almost 100,00 acres, destroyed more than 1,600 structures, killed three people and prompted the evacuation of nearly 300,000 people — including all residents of Agoura Hills.

“The support center was scheduled to be closed on Friday Oct 25, 2019 due to poor air quality caused by wildfires to the north,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous. “Around 2 am PT [Oct. 27], the Ryuk virus was unleashed at NVA. Approximately 400 locations were infected. [Microsoft] Active Directory and Exchange servers were infected. Many of the infected locations immediately lost access to their Patient Information Management systems (PIMs). These locations were immediately unable to provide care.”

The source shared internal communications from different NVA executives to their hospitals about the extent of the remediation efforts and possible source of the compromise, which seemed to suggest that at least some NVA properties have been struggling to accommodate patients.

A missive from NVA’s Director of Operations Robert Hill on Oct. 30 acknowledged that “we continue to be faced with a monumental effort to restore IT service [to] nearly 400 of our hospitals.”

“This really hit home for me Saturday,” Hill wrote. “One of my best friends had to take his Yellow Lab into Conejo Valley for urgent care. Thankfully CV was able to provide care as their [systems] were up and running, but many of our hospitals are not in as good shape.”

In an update sent to NVA hospitals on Nov. 6, the company’s new head of technology Greg Hartmann said its security system successfully blocked the ransomware from infiltrating its systems — at least at first.

“Because of the scale of the attack, the virus eventually found three smaller points of entry through accounts that were unaffiliated with NVA, but unfortunately opened within our network,” Hartmann said. “Upon discovery of the incident, our technology team immediately implemented procedures to prevent the malware from spreading; however, many local systems were affected. Still, we have many hospitals whose systems are not recovered. The technology team continues to set up interim workstations at each affected hospital while they prepare to rebuild servers.”

The source told KrebsOnSecurity that NVA suffered a separate ransomware infestation earlier this summer that also involved Ryuk, and they expressed concern that the first incident may not have been fully remediated — potentially letting the attackers maintain a foothold within the organization.

“This is the second time this year Ryuk struck NVA,” the source said. “The first time, NVA was rather open to all facilities about what happened. This time, however, they are simply referring to it as a ‘system outage.’”

A set of talking points NVA distributed to staff on Oct. 27, the day some 400 veterinary hospitals were hit with the Ryuk ransomware.

Koester said some NVA facilities did get hit with a malware incident earlier this year, but that she did not believe ransomware was involved in that intrusion.

The Ryuk ransomware has made a name for itself going after businesses that supply services to other companies — particularly cloud-data firms — with the ransom demands set according to the victim’s perceived ability to pay. In February, payroll software provider Apex Human Capital Management chose to pay the ransom demand after a Ryuk infection severed payroll management services for hundreds of the company’s customers. And on Christmas Eve 2018, cloud hosting provider Dataresolution.net suffered a multi-week outage after a Ryuk attack.

According to a bulletin released by the FBI in May, cybercriminals had targeted over 100 U.S. and international businesses with Ryuk since August 2018. Security firm CrowdStrike estimated that attackers deploying Ryuk had netted over $3.7 million in bitcoin ransom payments between Aug. 2018 and January 2019.

Many people and organizations may be under the impression that ransomware attacks like Ryuk can appear at a moment’s notice merely from someone clicking a malicious link or opening a booby-trapped email attachment. While the latter appears to be the most common vector for ransomware infestations, an advisory released in September by the U.K’s National Cyber Security Centre suggests most Ryuk victims are compromised weeks or months before the ransomware is actually deployed inside the victim’s network.

“The Ryuk ransomware is often not observed until a period of time after the initial infection – ranging from days to months – which allows the actor time to carry out
reconnaissance inside an infected network, identifying and targeting critical network systems and therefore maximizing the impact of the attack,” reads the NCSC advisory, which includes tips on spotting signs of a Ryuk infection. “But it may also offer the potential to mitigate against a ransomware attack before it occurs, if the initial infection is detected and remedied.”

As for what changes NVA will be making to prevent yet another ransomware outbreak, an internal update on Nov. 7 from NVA’s chief information officer Joe Leggio said NVA was investing in software from Carbon Black, a cloud-based security solution that will be installed on all NVA property computers.

“Throughout my career, I have witnessed incredible advances in technology making our lives better,” Leggio wrote. “At nearly the same rate, the bad guys have been increasing the aggressiveness and sophistication of their attacks. As we rebuild, we are also thinking of the future. That is why we are investing in cybersecurity talent, new infrastructure, and better software.”

The Education Sector and the Increasing Threat from Cybercrime

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Last September, just when teachers, parents and children across the nation were looking forward to the beginning of the school year, parents in New York’s Orange County received an unwelcome announcement. The superintendent of Monroe-Woodbury school district had been forced to inform them that the school would remain closed as a result of a cyber attack that had disrupted the district’s computer systems.

Monroe-Woodbury is just one of the many schools and educational institutions in the United States and throughout the world whose operations have been disrupted by cyber criminals. Earlier, in the summer, Rockville and Mineola school districts were targeted with Ryuk ransomware. In all, over 500 attacks against US public schools have been reported in 2019 to date.

image of education and cybercrime

How Does Cybercrime Affect Education?

According to a recent report, the education sector was the most affected of all U.S. business sectors in 2018 and the first half of 2019. Threats range from nuisance adware to serious malware like trojans, backdoors and, of course, ransomware – a malicious file that encrypts system files and information on endpoints and servers. Schools hit by ransomware attacks are denied access to vital information until they pay a ransom in crypto currency (most often Bitcoin). 

Apart from the direct financial damage caused by this kind of attack (one Long Island school paid about $100,000 to release its systems in August, and Rockville Centre School District paid $ 88,000 that month), the inability to access computer systems paralyses the academic institution. The cost of the damage only accelerates the longer the school is unable to send emails, record working hours or allocate classrooms and study resources, including school computers and Internet access necessary for many learning activities.

Schools that refuse to pay can be incapacitated for extended periods of time – like Walcott County, Connecticut, which suffered a ransomware attack three months ago and was locked out of its affected devices until early September, when the ransom payment was finally approved by the county board.

The now-infamous Emotet malware has also been striking schools, with attackers using spearphishing to infect systems with the malware trojan. As many services are now entirely computerized, this can even affect infrastructure like heating and cooling, cafeteria services and security systems. The K-12 Cyber Incidents map provides a graphic overview of just how widespread the problem is.

image of k-12 cyber incidents map

It’s not only schools that are being targeted either. Higher education institutions are also vulnerable to cyber attacks. A number of US universities and colleges have suffered from ransomware attacks, information leaks, and email hacking in the past year. Unlike schools, universities and academic institutes are also being targeted by more sophisticated attackers interested in stealing the intellectual property (IP) and research data produced there.

In one such sophisticated attack, hackers exploited a weakness in the ERP system used by many US universities, Ellucian Banner. Approximately 62 universities were attacked and the threat actors gained access to student registration systems, financial data and personal information. Fortunately in this case, the breach was quickly identified by the US Department of Education, which limited the impact of the incident. 

The situation in other parts of the world is as bad. In Australia the head of the local intelligence agency was recruited to inform universities about cyber threats and ways of prevention. This was one of the initiatives put in place after an extremely sophisticated threat actor compromised ANU and persisted within the university’s network for months at a time. 

In the UK in April of this year penetration testing conducted by JISC, the government agency that provides many computerized services to UK academic bodies, tested the defenses of over 50 British universities. The results were unflattering: the pen testers scored 100% success rate, gaining access to every single system they tested. Defense systems were bypassed in as little as an hour in some cases, with the ethical hackers easily able to gain access to information such as research data, financial systems as well as staff and student personal information.

Why Are Schools, Colleges Targeted by Cyber Criminals?

It is no coincidence that schools are among the most attacked. Schools manage substantial sums of money, store personal information for students and teachers and connect with a large number of external bodies and providers and, of course, parents, who primarily communicate with the school via email. This means that the school has a very large attack surface. 

Coupled with enticing rewards is the fact that students make for easy victims of phishing scams. Students’ lack of experience combined with a tendency to use simple passwords across multiple services makes them prone to credential harvesting and password-spraying attacks. In one incident this past September, over 3000 Kent State student emails were hacked in this way. In addition, the awareness of parents, teachers and faculty regarding cyber risks is often much lower in education than in other sectors. 

Further exacerbating the security situation is that educational establishments typically have a limited number of staff dedicated to security. Unlike banks, schools typically do not have dedicated information security personnel who are engaged in 24/7 protection. 

How Can Schools Defend Against Cybercrime?

In the absence of the kind of dedicated resources typically found in other sectors such as SOC teams an in-house red teamers or penetration testers, the defense systems installed in educational organizations carry a greater burden and must deal effectively with threats. A solution that can autonomously detect and respond to attacks can help mitigate the lack of human resources so that only in the event of a particularly severe attack is the intervention of professionals required. 

In the case of ransomware, the source of the attack is most likely to be contained in an infected file sent via email. In such cases, the EDR protection system must identify the file as soon as it tries to install itself on the endpoint, disable it and delete it from this and all other endpoints across the organization. This will prevent the attack at the infection phase and prevent the loss of services in the educational institution. Similarly, a solution that can rollback a device to a healthful state, including decrypting encrypted files, should be high on the institution’s security shopping list. 

Perhaps Schools Are Also The Beginning of the Solution?

As we’ve seen, schools and academia are in the crosshairs of cyber criminals, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. But educational institutions can also offer some hope of future relief. Policy makers understand that cyber education should start at an early age, and that educating young people about cybersecurity could lead to them, one day, becoming cybersecurity professionals, so badly needed in the industry nowadays. 

Northport High School, for example, are leading the way in offering classes in topics such as network concepts, security concepts, identifying threats and cryptography. The school also offers the after-hours CyberPatriot program, which aims to inspire K-12 students towards careers in cybersecurity.

Similar programs across the US and UK could eventually improve individual’s resilience and have an adverse effect on the explosion of cybercrime. It would also generate young adults who are proficient in cybersecurity and will naturally be inclined to join the industry upon graduation. 

Educational authorities are also becoming increasingly awaren of the need for greater funding to train educational staff in areas such as email security, USB device safety and phishing awareness. In Massachusetts, for example, $250,000 has been earmarked to provide cybersecurity awareness training to over 42,000 school employees in 94 municipalities. 

Conclusion

The importance of protecting our education system from cyber crime cannot be overstated. Not only do schools, colleges and universities provide vital services to our society and economy, they are rich treasure troves of sensitive data. From personal information like birth records, educational history, social security numbers and financial data to intellectual property and cutting-edge research, the data held by these organizations is among the most useful to cyber criminals and advanced threat actors. And yet, these storehouses of precious data are perhaps among the least well-defended and under-funded in terms of cybersecurity. As a result, it’s imperative that administrators and policy makers address these shortcomings as a matter of urgency.

If you’d like to see how SentinelOne can help secure your institution with an easy-to-use, automated security solution, contact us or request a free demo.

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Ohi raises $2.75M to power same-day delivery for brands that aren’t Amazon

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The world has gotten so much faster. Amazon has made two-day shipping the standard and same- or next-day shipping commonplace. And that doesn’t even include the collection of on-demand players that can get us everything from groceries to alcohol to services like concierge storage and in-home cleaning with the press of a button.

But the logistics around same- or next-day delivery are incredibly complicated, which usually means that only the biggest, most successful brands and platforms can pull it off.

Enter Ohi.

Ohi was founded last year by Ben Jones, with a mission to democratize e-commerce by offering Amazon-level speed to smaller brands. The company today announced the close of a $2.75 million seed round led by Flybridge Capital Partners .

Ohi partners with landlords to turn what would normally be leased as commercial retail property or office space into micro-warehouses within major cities. The company then offers those warehouses on flexible leases that can be as short as three months, which help D2C brands distribute their inventory and power same- or next-day delivery of their products. Ohi employs 1099 workers to handle pick and pack at warehouses, and partners with Postmates and Doordash for last-mile courier services.

Eventually, Ohi has plans to turn this into a full-fledged platform, paying landlords based on volume. For now, however, the startup is doing traditional leases with landlords, taking on more of a financial risk with the spaces, as it scales up the brand side of the platform.

Ohi charges brands a fixed monthly access fee to the platform, which starts at $750/month. More expensive tiers unlock premium intelligence features around matching inventory to warehouse location, as well as access to more spaces. At the transaction level, Ohi asks for a fee of $2.50 for pick and pack.

Jones says that delivery is actually a higher cost for brands than storage, and that same-day shipping can cost upwards of $50/package for a brand, with same-day pick and pack costing about $10/item. The hope is that Ohi can bring down the price of same-day and next-day delivery by using this Ohi network of commercial space, pick and pack and courier services to compete with Amazon.

Moreover, Ohi believes that the platform can go well beyond bringing down the price of same-day delivery. The company says its brands are also seeing a decrease in cart abandonment when customers see that same-day or next-day delivery option.

Plus, through the data it collects by handling fulfillment for brands, Ohi expects to be able to use its tech to predict demand based on geography and category, helping brands understand their own customers and customers shopping in their particular category.

“There is a lot of positive momentum behind what we’re doing,” said Jones. “Every brand we talk to knows this is the future.”

Jones came up with the idea for Ohi after suffering a serious back injury that left him for more than a year unable to get around easily or carry things. This forced him into a situation where e-commerce was his only option for just about everything. Many of the orders he placed offered three- to five-day shipping, leaving him waiting for what he needed.

He started to investigate how a service could democratize the convenience of same-day and next-day delivery for brands and their customers. And Ohi was born.

Ohi currently offers its service in Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York City, and is launching in Los Angeles this week.

“The greatest challenge we face is how to scale quickly without making mistakes,” said Jones. “It’s not quite as simple as a piece of software that has one-to-many distribution. We’re actually holding brands’ inventory and there’s a physical aspect to this business that makes it more complex. Making sure we can scale that efficiently without making mistakes is going to be one of the biggest challenges.”

Salesforce, Apple partnership begins to come to life

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Last year at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s enormous annual customer conference, Apple and Salesforce announced the beginnings of a partnership where the two organizations would work together to enhance Salesforce products running on Apple devices. Today, as this year’s Dreamforce conference begins, the companies announced the fruits of that labor with general availability of two new tools that were first announced at last year’s event.

For starters, Apple has been working with Salesforce to redesign the Salesforce Mobile app to build in Apple iOS features into the app like being able to use Siri shortcuts to get work done faster, using your voice instead of typing, something that’s sometimes awkward to do on a mobile device.

Hey Siri example in Salesforce Mobile app.

Photo: Salesforce

For instance, you could say, “Hey Siri, next sales meeting,” and Siri can interact with Salesforce CRM to tell you who your meeting is with, the name of his or her company, when you last met and what the Einstein opportunity score is to help you predict how likely it is that you could make a sale today (or eventually).

In addition, the Mobile App takes advantage of Apple’s Handoff feature to reflect changes across devices immediately, and Apple’s Face ID for easy log on to the app.

Salesforce also announced a pilot of Einstein Voice on Salesforce Mobile, allowing reps to enter notes, add tasks and update the CRM database using voice. Einstein is Salesforce’s general artificial intelligence layer, and the voice feature uses natural language understanding to interpret what the rep asks.

The company reports that over 1000 companies participated in piloting the updated app, which constitutes the largest pilot in the history of the organization.

Salesforce also announced its new mobile development platform SDK, built specifically for iOS and iPadOS using the Swift language. The idea is to provide a tool to give Salesforce developers with the ability to build apps for iPad and iPhone, then package them up with a new tool called Swift UI and Package Manager.

Trailhead Go

Photo: Salesforce

Trailhead Go is the mobile version of the company’s online learning platform designed specifically for iPad and iPhone. It was built using the new Mobile SDK, and allows users to access the same courses they can on the web in a mobile context. The new mobile tool includes the ability to Handoff between devices along with support for picture-in-picture and split view for multi-tasking when it makes sense.

Salesforce Mobile and Trailhead Go are available starting today for free in the iOS App Store. The Salesforce Mobile SDK will be available later this year.

As this partnership continues to develop, both companies should benefit. Salesforce gets direct access to Apple features, and can work with Apple to implement them in an optimized way. Apple gets deeper access to the enterprise with help from Salesforce, one of the biggest enterprise software vendors around.

Salesforce partners with Apple to roll deeper into mobile enterprise markets

Bill McDermott takes reins as ServiceNow CEO sooner than expected with new CFO

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It was pretty unexpected when former SAP CEO Bill McDermott announced he was stepping down in October after a decade in the position. He indicated at that point he would stay until the end of the year to help with the transition to new leadership — then ServiceNow hired him to be its CEO just a few weeks later. Today, the company announced, McDermott has taken over his duties earlier than expected.

The company also announced it has filled its vacant CFO job, hiring Gina Mastantuono, who previously served in similar roles at Ingram Micro and Revlon, and has more than 20 years experience in finance.

It was a game of CEO musical chairs when ServiceNow announced on October 22 that former CEO John Donahoe was leaving to be CEO at Nike, and it would be bringing in McDermott to replace him.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says all of these changes had a cascading impact, and once Donahoe decided to leave early, everything else happened much faster than planned. “The original plan was to have a transition in January, however there was an urgency on Donahoe’s side to get the Nike thing wrapped up. One of the key reasons to do this early [from a business perspective] is to get the sales team and sales kickoff aligned for 2020. The other reason is providing the same smooth transition for SAP’s co-CEOs Jennifer Moran and Christian Klein,” Wang told TechCrunch.

It is a time of transition for ServiceNow, having to replace both a CFO and CEO, but they landed two experienced pros, who should help continue to guide the company into the future. The company has stated that it hopes to eventually achieve a $10 billion revenue goal under the new leadership team.

As I wrote in a piece analyzing his move to ServiceNow, McDermott seemed to fully embrace that challenge, even though he has a ways to go:

McDermott has his work cut out for him. The company’s 2018 revenue was $2.6 billion. Still, he fully embraced the $10 billion challenge. “Well let me answer that very simply, I completely stand by [the $10 billion goal], and I’m looking forward to achieving it,” he said with bravado during today’s call.

Mastantuono has a lot in common with McDermott, who also came from a much larger organization to help lead ServiceNow to the next level. At her previous position at Ingram Micro she led finance for a company with $50 billion in revenue and more than 200,000 customers.

Mastantuono sees a company with great potential as she takes over to guide the financial side of the organization. “ServiceNow is highly regarded by its customers and has tremendous momentum and opportunity to enable digital transformation and help make work, work better for people,” she said in a statement.

The new leadership duo has its work cut out for it, but it’s a company with lots of room for growth. It will now be up to McDermott and Mastantuono to lead it into that next phase.

Bill McDermott aims to grow ServiceNow like he did SAP