Vilnius expects the move to drive up job creation to at least 2,000 new vacancies in the market in the next five years.

Lithuania hasapproved an exemption from corporate tax, currently at 15%, for companiesmaking large investments within its national territory.

The approvalof the amendment to the Law on Corporation Tax from the Ministry of the Economyand Innovation on an exemption from corporate tax will facilitate thedevelopment of local and foreign capital-based large investment projects at anational level, including in free economic zones.

The draft onthe law, which is being submitted to the Seimas (Lithuanias parliament) forconsideration, and a package of draft laws on investment known as the greencorridor (which has already been submitted to the Seimas) both propose aprecise definition of a large investment project.

According tothese laws, a large investment project constitutes a project in dataprocessing, internet server services and related activities, or manufacturing,where the value of investment in fixed assets is at least EUR 30 million andwhich will create at least 200 new jobs that are to be maintained for fiveyears.

The movecomes as the Baltic nation continues to push for further national and foreigninvestment across a range of sectors, including IT infrastructure.

For datacentres, the EUR 30 million figure is one that is usually easily reachable by operatorsand investors when building new facilities, especially large scale.

At Data Economys Finvest Summit 2020 in Zurich, Switzerland, Vice-Minister for Economy and Innovation Elijus Civilis told the audience of Lithuanias plans to attract large data centre and other IT infrastructure investments.

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The countryhas set up a data centre park close to the capital, Vilnius, where the sitecurrently offers 85MW of power with an additional 120MW of power available atcustom request.

The KruonisData Center Park is located next to the 900MW Kruonis Hydro Pumped StoragePower Plant and within the countrys Free Economic Zone.

MariusSkuodis, also Vice-Minister of Economy and Innovation, said: We hope thatthese amendments will enable the creation of around 2,000 new jobs in Lithuaniaover a period of five years, including in more remote regions of the country.

Our aim isto ensure the use of various means to attract large-scale, high-employment FDIprojects and to offer additional incentives for Lithuanian businesses that arewilling to expand.

Skuodis addedthat one of the main constraints that is preventing Lithuania from successfullycompeting with other countries in attracting and maintaining investment is alack of tax incentives for investors implementing large projects.

The corporate tax incentive and the green corridor package eliminate this shortcoming, and also mean that investors will benefit from faster procedures in a number of areas including territorial planning, construction, land-use planning, and migration, he said.

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Embotics, part of Snow Software, recognized for completeness of vision and ability to execute

Embotics, the hybrid cloud management company recently acquired by Snow Software, today announced that it has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms1 for the second year in a row.

"The cloud is being adopted faster than ever. However, the challenges around process transformation and workflow automation, as well as risks around cost management and governance have grown considerably as well," said Jay Litkey, Founder of Embotics and SVP, Cloud Management at Snow. "Our team has focused on delivering a product that is a fully integrated platform with a comprehensive suite of services to assist organizations with their cloud transformation. Speed of delivery, predictable cloud budgets and risk mitigation can be obstacles for even the largest organizations, and we have helped our customers not only visualize the challenges in their environments but to actually tackle them in real-time. When it comes to cloud, it is not enough to see a problem; you must be able to immediately act or even automate the solution. This is how you can truly accelerate service delivery, contain costs and mitigate security concerns."

This news comes on the heels of Snows acquisition of Embotics in December 2019. With the integration of Embotics and Snow, IT leaders are able to better understand, manage and optimize their entire technology ecosystems from cloud instances and SaaS applications to software and devices. Embotics provides cloud provisioning, automation, orchestration and governance capabilities, supporting both cloud brokered self-service consumption and cloud direct consumption for DevOps teams, leveraging native cloud resources and APIs.

"Cloud has become an integral part of the overall IT ecosystem and created new requirements for how organizations manage and drive the most value from their IT investments," said Sanjay Castelino, Chief Product Officer at Snow. "The acquisition of Embotics by Snow brings together two leaders to provide another layer of visibility and intelligence across the entire ecosystem, empowering organizations to overcome the complexities and maximize the potential of hybrid environments."

Gartner Peer Insights documents customer experience through verified ratings and peer reviews from enterprise professionals. Embotics reviews include the following:

"Quick deployment and ease of integration lead to a quick ROI Embotics provides superior support, simple integrations and by far has been the simplest to deploy." - Director, Data Center in the Finance Industry(read full review)

"We selected Embotics based on their excellent customer service and willingness to partner. The Embotics team have gone above and beyond throughout the negotiation and initial implementation, proactively anticipating our needs and responding quickly when required." - Chief Technology Officer in the Manufacturing Industry(read full review)

"Excellent Cloud Management Platform, has great features and makes automating existing infrastructure possible while also allowing for greenfield deployments as well. Plugs into any API and has a scripting engine that makes possible what many other tools fail at. Great reporting functions and excellent user portal Have found very few tasks that were not able to be automated by this tool." CI/CD Automation Engineer in the Manufacturing Industry(read full review)

"Fantastic lifecycle/automation solution with multi-cloud supportEmbotics vCommander provided immediate functionality once we plugged it into our environment. With it, we were able to automate the process of requesting or removing or changing resources on servers in our environment. This allows our infrastructure staff more time to work on other projects and initiatives while maintaining a consistent and standardized environment. A user is able to request a server, obtain the appropriate approvals and receive the resources needed in less than an hour with the submission of one webform. The Account, Support and Professional services teams have been terrific to work with and have provided exceptional value add to vCommander." System Administrator in the Finance Industry(read full review)

Story continues

For a complimentary copy of the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms, please visit: https://bit.ly/2uV1UeP

[1] Gartner, "Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms" by Dennis Smith, Sanjit Ganguli, Padraig Byrne. February 13, 2020

Gartner Disclaimers

Gartner Peer Insights reviews constitute the subjective opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and do not represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartners research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Snow Software

Snow Software is the global leader in technology intelligence solutions, ensuring the trillions spent on all forms of technology is optimized to drive maximum value. More than 4,000 organizations around the world rely on Snow's platform to provide complete visibility, optimize usage and spend and minimize regulatory risk. Headquartered in Stockholm, Snow has more local offices and regional support centers than any other software asset and cloud management provider, delivering unparalleled results to our customers and partners.

To find out more about Snow, please visit http://www.snowsoftware.com and follow on Twitter @snowsoftware.

To find out more about Embotics, please visit http://www.embotics.com and follow on Twitter @EmboticsCorp.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200218005795/en/

Contacts

Dan Gaffneyfama PR for Embotics(617) 986-5036Embotics@famapr.com

Julie NeumannSnow Software(615) 498-9650press@snowsoftware.com

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Snow Software-Embotics Named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms for Second Straight Year - Yahoo Finance

The cloud has long been cited as a means of achieving multiple business benefits including reduced IT costs, faster speed-to-market, better service levels and cloud as an enabler of the digital business.

Kirtan Sirta, Managing Director Technology: Accenture South Africa shares insight on how South African businesses can benefit from the cloud...

Kirtan Sirta, Managing Director Technology: Accenture South Africa

Well, the cloud is a metaphor for the internet. Simply put, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the internet instead of your computer's hard drive. These include servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence.

Businesses have come to understand the value cloud offers, with 77% of enterprises reporting that they have at least one application or a portion of their enterprise computing infrastructure in the cloud, while the worldwide whole cloud spending is predicted to reach $565bn by 2021.

Some advantages of cloud include lower cost and greater speed. You dont need to invest too much into data centres with servers, IT experts, continuous air-conditioning and expensive hardware and software. This, in turn, leads to better productivity and performance. Most cloud computing services are self-service and on-demand allowing flexibility and less pressure on capacity planning.

Another important advantage is that cloud computing is highly reliable. It makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud providers network. Cloud adoption resources can be scaled elastically, meaning in the right amount right where they are needed from anywhere in the world.

There are some disadvantages too, such as the risk of data confidentiality. Security is by far the biggest concern with cloud adoption. Public cloud especially poses a high-security risk due to its wide accessibility and makes it an almost wide-open opportunity for hackers.

The internet is also the only way to cloud computing, so if your connection is problematic, it is easy to be disconnected. Likewise, the quality of cloud computing servers needs to be on par. Lastly, if a problem occurs on the cloud, you need to call out an agent for assistance. Technical support is not always available - unless for an extra fee.

Cloud technology and the digital world are crucial parts of the way we do business in the new era. We are witnessing the next evolution of enterprises in which smarter businesses will have to transform the way in which they provide and differentiate value to take advantage of new or shifting business opportunities.

Technology has brought the business world to the point where almost everything is being digitised. Not only does this mean that new software and systems are constantly being introduced it requires a paradigm shift in approach to all aspects of business.

Like most new technologies, capturing the intended benefits of the cloud takes time; there is a learning curve influenced by many variables.

We conducted a survey, and most companies report having achieved some measure of their expected outcomes with 4% of those surveyed indicating they have not achieved their goal. While the vast majority of companies cite achieving some level of their desired outcomes, on average only 35% of companies report they have fully achieved their expected outcomes across the four categories of cost, speed, business enablement and service levels.

Further nuances appear as one starts to breakdown the results by degree of cloud adoption and the type of cloud model employed.

Cloud computing is not merely a set of technologies. It is a new business model that affects almost every aspect of an organisation. It is an approach to aligning technology with business strategy and needs in ways that offer unprecedented business flexibility and agility.

The cornerstones of cloud computing are inter-connectivity and collaboration between technologies and services, made possible through an overarching cloud framework that integrates everything and supplies the requisite information that all the constituent services use in our integrated cloud solutions.

For years, cost savings has topped the list of benefits offered by cloud computing. This is one of the factors that has resulted in a massive increase in the use of cloud services across the world...

2 Jan 2020

The strategy also needs to be executed successfully. To achieve this a business needs to go through a transformation process. Technology has to support tactical and strategic decision making as well as day-to-day operations, ensuring continuous alignment and allowing the organisation to bridge the gap between strategy and execution.

Every cloud project is different. After assessing your goals, you'll need to define the right cloud solution for your business needs with a holistic approach that addresses people and processes as well as technology.

One option available to companies in addressing the barriers to achieve the promise of the cloud is to leverage a qualified third-party to manage their cloud services.

We asked our IT leaders to indicate the extent to which they would consider using such services. Overall, 87% of those surveyed indicated they would moderately or greatly consider the use of such services. Accenture offers solutions for managed cloud services for companies who are willing to seek out advice and help with cloud adoption. These are typically larger companies and they are statistically more inclined toward the use of managed services.

For those in the early phases of cloud adoption, we have published numerous studies to assist in their decision-making, which are all available on our Accenture Cloud blog.

Absolutely yes! If they can effectively manage or overcome the barriers to adoption, then there is no reason not to move to the cloud.

The two most cited barriers across all phases of adoption were consistent with security and risk compliance the top concern, and complexity of business and organisational change second.

Accenture surveyed 200 senior IT executives (chief information officers, vice presidents/directors of IT, vice presidents/directors of Cloud) from companies around the world, to discover to what extent those leveraging cloud have achieved the expected benefits and their level of satisfaction with these achievements.

Four dimensions of cloud outcomes were considered - cost savings, speed to market, business enablement, and improved service levels.

Accenture then asked IT leaders to identify the greatest barriers in their organisations to fully exploit the promise of cloud. The blind survey was conducted with 200 companies having revenues in excess of $1bn per annum, across 10 industries in eight countries.

With this in mind, the study looked at the level of satisfaction the surveyed executives had with their reported results. In general, respondents indicated satisfaction with cloud results achieved, despite not fully realising the anticipated benefits.

On average, 93% of executives were satisfied (49%) or very satisfied (44%) with the outcomes delivered, indicating that for the most part, cloud-driven improvements of any degree were sufficient to clear the bar of minimum expectations.

Cost savings proved to be the area where the most dissatisfaction was raised, with 11% acknowledging expectations have not been met.

Dissatisfaction with expected outcomes for business enablement and speed to market came in at 8% and 7% respectively, with only 4% indicating being dissatisfied with progress on service level improvements.

Top concerns were largely dependent on company size. Large companies (>$10bn), not surprisingly, identified complexity of business and organisational change as the top concern (67%), with security and compliance risk ranked second (61%) and legacy infrastructure and/or application sprawl ranked third (47%).

Small and moderately sized companies ($1bn-$5bn and $5-10bn) ranked security and compliance risk as their top concern (61%) but next viewed lack of cloud skills and complexity of change equally concerning at (53%).

Download the Accenture's Perspectives on Cloud Outcomes: Expectation vs. Reality - A Global Survey of IT Executives report (PDF File: 455KB)

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Is there real benefit in cloud for SA businesses? - Bizcommunity.com

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Imperva, Inc., the cybersecurity leader championing the fight to secure data and applications wherever they reside, today launched the Cyber Threat Index, a monthly report and measurement of the global threat landscape based on data from Imperva sensors across the globe. In conjunction, Imperva also released the findings of the Cyber Threat Index monthly reports from August 2019 through January 2020, revealing sharp increases in high-risk vulnerabilities and public cloud-based attacks on organizations. Additionally, this months Index score of 776, on a scale of zero to 1000, is the highest to date.

The Cyber Threat Index is a monthly measurement and analysis of the global cyber threat landscape across data and applications. With over one trillion total requests analyzed and 21 billion application attacks blocked, it offers an unrivaled and comprehensive look at application security and provides an easy-to-understand score to consistently track cyber threat levels and observe trends over time. Viewers can dive deeper into the score and drill down for individual industries and countries, and also view historic Index scores.

The Cyber Threat Index is based on data gathered from Imperva sensors all over the world, including:

Cyber Threat Index Key Findings

Key findings from the past six months include:

The global threat landscape is evolving so rapidly that organizations need to have a constant pulse on it to stay one step ahead of attackers, Nadav Avital, head of security research at Imperva. We built the Cyber Threat Index to provide our customers and the industry at large with the valuable actionable insights around data and application threats that our massive network contains. The Cyber Threat Index is a testament to our technological capacities and security expertise, as well as our dedication to improving the worlds security posture as a whole.

The Cyber Threat Index was created by Imperva Research Labs, a premier research organization for security analysis, vulnerability discovery and compliance expertise. The organization provides round-the-clock research into the latest security vulnerabilities and is comprised of some of the worlds leading experts in data and application security. Incorporating exceptional insight, Imperva Research Labs publishes reports such as:

The Cyber Threat Index is available at https://www.imperva.com/cyber-threat-index/.

Imperva will showcase the Cyber Threat Index at booth #1227 at RSA Conference 2020, taking place Feb. 24-28 in San Francisco. Schedule a demo of the Cyber Threat Index at RSA.

About Imperva

Imperva is an analyst-recognized, cybersecurity leader on a mission to protect customers digital assets by accurately detecting and effectively blocking incoming threats, and empowering customers to manage critical risks, so they do not have to choose between innovating for their customers and protecting what matters most. At Imperva, we tirelessly defend our customers business as it grows, giving them clarity for today and confidence for tomorrow. Learn more at http://www.imperva.com, our blog, or Twitter.

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Spikes in High-Risk Vulnerabilities and Public Cloud-Based Attacks Dominate Threat Landscape, Imperva Researchers Find With New Cyber Threat Index -...

CJC, a leading independent market data technology consulting and services firm, has announced the launch of a DACS in the Cloud solution to the capital markets community.

This solution can be offered at varying levels of service from simple cloud deployment with remote management, to a fully managed, technical and commercial solution.

CJC have unrivalled, global experience and expertise in managing and supporting Refinitiv's TREP market data distribution platform, according to a press release by the firm, of which DACS is a major component.

CJC currently manages 150 DACS globally, according to the press release, so therefore understand the kind of challenges enterprises face in four key areas; migration to appropriate versions of the product, global consolidation of regional platforms, upgrades of operating systems and hardware, and database maintenance. By leveraging public cloud technology, the CJC solution provides agility and operational efficiencies, while reducing costs.

As part of CJC's broader capabilities, the firm provides cloud-based managed services for multiple market data solutions, including Refinitiv's TREP, BCCG's One Platform and Push Technology's Diffusion Server. CJC's approach deconstructs the traditional installation, allowing the firm to deploy and manage using cloud native technologies, including Kubernetes, Virtual Machines (VMs) and Containers, to accelerate deployment and ongoing management. Deployments provide full isolation between customer environments for security and compliance, as well as a full audit trail.

CJC's DACS in the Cloud solution uses the above approach while preserving all DACS functionality, with management and monitoring 24/7 by CJCs global support operations.

Peter Williams, CTO, CJC, said We are delighted to launch our DACS in the Cloud solution into the capital markets. The launch forms part of a wider enablement programme for customers and partners to deploy complex market data workloads into the cloud, as well as accelerate cloud strategies throughout the industry.

This has all been made possible by our Cloud Tools, which were developed to provide automated deployment and management of cloud-based applications. We are now partnering with major cloud providers and software vendors to provide the initial solutions for a marketplace of managed financial solutions, continued Williams.

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Asian Wealth Management and Asian Private Banking - CJC Expands Cloud Propositions With Launch of DACS in the Cloud Solution - Hubbis