Data Storage
Globenewswire | July 04, 2023
ABP and OMERS Infrastructure have today announced the signing of an agreement for the acquisition of Kenter from Alliander Corporate Ventures. Kenter is an energy infrastructure solutions business providing medium-voltage infrastructure – including transformers and switchgear – and meters to over 25,000 commercial and industrial business customers in the Netherlands and Belgium. This investment is done by APG Asset Management on behalf of ABP, the largest pension fund in the Netherlands; OMERS Infrastructure is investing on behalf of OMERS, one of the largest pension plans in Canada.
ABP and OMERS investment in Kenter will be the consortium’s second joint investment in the Dutch B2B energy solutions sector, after reaching close on their investment in Groendus in November last year. Groendus develops, builds and operates rooftop solar and storage solutions, meters and electric vehicle chargers for its commercial and industrial business customers, as well as providing access to its proprietary energy management system and energy marketplace, Groendus Energiemarktplaats. Upon close, the shareholders envision that Kenter and Groendus will partner to offer existing and new customers holistic, integrated energy solutions to support the decarbonization of their operations and help them reach their net zero goals.
Harmen van Wijnen, Chairman of the Board of Trustees at ABP, said: “ABP likes to invest in the Netherlands in order to stimulate economic growth, employment and sustainable projects. We also want to contribute to the energy transition and wholeheartedly support our nation's climate objectives. Therefore, investments in the electrification infrastructure are needed on a large scale. This investment benefits our three million participants in several ways. It not only contributes to sufficient and sustainably generated energy in the Netherlands but also generates long-term value for our pension participants.”
Jan-Willem Ruisbroek, Head of Global Infrastructure Investment Strategy at APG, said: “The energy transition is propelling the electrification trend in the Netherlands and across Europe, aligning with the ambitious climate targets set by the EU. To ensure its success, substantial investments in essential electrical infrastructure such as transformers, meters, batteries and electric vehicle chargers are imperative for our society. By investing in Kenter, building upon our previous venture with Groendus last year, we intensify our efforts. We are looking forward to working with the management teams and staff to establish a national champion in the energy transition sector the Netherlands and abroad.”
Alastair Hall, Senior Managing Director and Head of Europe, OMERS Infrastructure, said: “We’re thrilled to announce OMERS second investment to enable the energy transition in the Netherlands. We look forward to growing a B2B energy solutions platform in the region, delivering energy infrastructure for businesses looking to meet their sustainability goals.”
Erik van der Ende, CEO of Kenter, said: “I am delighted with the choice of ABP and OMERS Infrastructure. As an independent company, when it comes to the energy transition, we take care of all the needs of our existing and new customers by offering total solutions in the field of energy infrastructure. We operate in an extremely attractive growth market and this proposed sale makes it possible for Kenter to really take full advantage of our potential. We look forward to continuing to work on the energy transition together with our customers, employees, partners and new shareholders.”
APG and OMERS Infrastructure were advised by DC Advisory, Emendo Capital and Allen & Overy. The closing of the transaction is expected in Q4 2023, subject to customary regulatory approvals. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.
About OMERS Infrastructure
OMERS Infrastructure manages infrastructure investments globally on behalf of OMERS, the defined benefit pension plan for municipal employees in the Province of Ontario, Canada, and third-party investors through its Strategic Partnership Program. OMERS Infrastructure manages approximately C$34 billion, including capital invested on behalf of OMERS and third parties, in over 30 investments located in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific and across sectors including energy, digital services, transportation and government-regulated services. OMERS Infrastructure has employees in Toronto, New York, the U.K., Amsterdam, Asia and Australia.
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Application Storage
prnewswire | July 14, 2023
Pure Storage®, the IT pioneer that delivers the world's most advanced data storage technology and services, today announced that University Hospital Centre of Saint-Etienne, one of the leading university hospitals in southeast France, is leveraging its portfolio - including FlashArray™, Pure1®, and its Evergreen® architecture - to secure and accelerate access to critical data in order to improve overall patient care and business continuity.
Customer Challenge:
The University Hospital Centre (CHU) of Saint-Etienne is a public institution that specializes in healthcare, research, and teaching, providing a variety of patient care to people in the region, ranging from pediatrics and maternity care to heart surgery and radiation treatment.
As CHU Saint-Etienne increased its data footprint, its legacy storage technologies - a mix of aging disk storage - struggled to meet growing capacity needs, taking up a great deal of space and threatening availability due to regular breakdowns.
Faced with growing demands and limited space, the hospital needed to modernize its IT infrastructure, which serves as the foundation for all of its patient systems. As a result, CHU Saint-Etienne worked with partner Axians to shift its legacy infrastructure to Pure Storage, replacing approximately 70 units of legacy hardware with just six units contained in two Pure Storage FlashArray systems, meeting the organization's space constraint requirements.
Customer Impact:
Pure Storage provides CHU Saint-Etienne the availability, security, and performance it needs to both scale and improve patient care, while enabling easy maintenance for its small IT team. Benefits include:
Modernized, Efficient Storage Infrastructure: With Pure Storage FlashArray, CHU Saint-Etienne has significantly reduced its power consumption while increasing storage capacity by 50% compared to its legacy storage environment. The increased capacity enables the hospital's IT team more flexibility to shift workloads and increase demand as needed, providing a future-proof foundation to scale with patients.
Reduced Time Spent on Storage Management: Pure Storage's Pure1 AI-driven management platform enables CHU Saint-Etienne to reduce administrative time with an easy-to-use interface that simplifies storage management and allows new IT team members to get up to speed quickly. Additionally, the Pure Evergreen architecture further simplifies management with seamless, non-disruptive upgrades to existing controllers, eliminating downtime for the hospital.
Enhanced Data Protection and Greater Availability: Using Pure Storage SafeMode Snapshots in FlashArray, CHU Saint-Etienne can now secure its storage environment with fast recovery of data that has been inadvertently deleted, making it easier to comply with data retention requirements. Snapshots, along with ActiveCluster™ active-active replication across the FlashArray systems, help to minimize the impact of cyberattacks. Pure Storage thus reinforces CHU Saint-Etienne's business continuity plan by helping to deliver greater availability.
Improved Application Performance: The new Pure Storage infrastructure dramatically improves application performance for CHU Saint-Etienne, reducing latency from around 17 milliseconds to under a millisecond in most use cases. Staff and clinicians can access data faster and provide a better quality of care to patients and other users of the hospital.
Executive Insight:
"Moving our legacy storage environment to Pure Storage was one of the best decisions we could have made as an IT team. Not only does Pure Storage deliver unrivaled performance and management capabilities that meet our data storage needs, but it enables us to truly secure and scale sensitive and business-critical data to meet growing patient demands, ultimately helping us deliver better care across the region." – Samuel Pelissier, IT Infrastructure and Operation Manager, CHU Saint-Etienne
"We're supporting CHU Saint-Etienne to power the healthcare of tomorrow. Data is central to delivering better patient outcomes and faster diagnosis and our solutions enable the University Hospital in this regard. Not only are we meeting CHU's needs and positively impacting patients' lives, we're also supporting sustainability for the public sector organisation in greatly reducing its data centre footprint." - Hugues Hueze, Country Manager France, Pure Storage.
About Pure Storage
Pure Storage uncomplicates data storage, forever. Pure delivers a cloud experience that empowers every organization to get the most from their data while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. Pure's commitment to providing true storage as-a-service gives customers the agility to meet changing data needs at speed and scale, whether they are deploying traditional workloads, modern applications, containers, or more. Pure believes it can make a significant impact in reducing data center emissions worldwide through its environmental sustainability efforts, including designing products and solutions that enable customers to reduce their carbon and energy footprint. And with a certified customer satisfaction score in the top one percent of B2B companies, Pure's ever-expanding list of customers are among the happiest in the world.
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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Data Storage
businesswire | August 03, 2023
Ermetic, a leading cloud infrastructure security company, today announced CNAPPgoat, an open source project that allows organizations to safely test their cloud security skills, processes, tools and posture in interactive sandbox environments that are easy to deploy and destroy. CNAPPgoat supports AWS, Azure and GCP platforms for assessing the security capabilities included in Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP).
The CNAPPgoat project will be officially presented at DEF CON Demo Labs in Las Vegas on Friday, August 11 from 12:00pm-1:55pm by Noam Dahan, Research Lead and Igal Gofman, Head of Research for Ermetic. On Wednesday, August 16 at 10am PST/1pm EST, Ermetic will present a webinar on using CNAPPgoat, to register visit thislink.
Unlike projects that illustrate possible attack paths, CNAPPgoat provides a large and expanding library of scenarios that security teams can execute to create a customized cloud environment for simulating unsecured and vulnerable assets and validating their defenses. The ability to easily provision a vulnerable environment with a broad range of risk scenarios provides the following benefits:
Create a sandbox for testing an organization’s security posture by assessing security team capabilities, procedures and protocols
Use vulnerable environments for hands-on workshops to train team members on new skills and techniques
Provision a “shooting range” for pentesters to test their skills at exploiting the scenarios and developing relevant capabilities
Benchmark CNAPP tools against known environments to evaluate their capabilities
“Compared to existing open-source projects that create ‘capture the flag’ scenarios where participants are expected to follow a certain path, CNAPPgoat spans the leading cloud provider platforms and CNAPP capabilities while providing a modular and granular approach for provisioning specific categories of risks and vulnerabilities,” said Igal Gofman, Director of Research for Ermetic.
“This breadth and depth allows pentesters and defenders to precisely isolate the elements they want to explore for training, new skills acquisition, prevention and security posture assessments,” added Noam Dahan, Research Lead.
CNAPPgoat enables security teams, trainers and pentesters to provision and run vulnerable scenarios from the following modules that make up the CNAPP specification defined byGartner:
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) - covers risks associated with identities and entitlements, such as the unintended ability of an identity to escalate its privileges
Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) - includes the exposure of workloads to vulnerabilities such as running vulnerable/end of life software or OS versions
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) - spans the misconfiguration of cloud infrastructure components, such as publicly exposed storage resources
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning - will be added soon for finding misconfigurations directly in the code
CNAPPgoat is an open community initiative designed to be used by anyone for commercial, technical and educational purposes. See today’sblogfor implementation details. Additional artifacts including deeper technical dives and guides will be released soon. Contributions are encouraged including new scenarios, scenario proposals, issues, suggestions, feature requests or simply sharing feedback. To learn more and access CNAPPgoat visit thislink.
About Ermetic
Ermetic reveals and prioritizes security gaps in AWS, Azure and GCP and enables organizations to remediate them immediately. The Ermetic cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) uses an identity-first approach to unify and automate cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud workload protection and Kubernetes security posture management (KSPM). It unifies full asset discovery, deep risk analysis, runtime threat detection and compliance reporting, combined with pinpoint visualization and step-by-step guidance. The company is one of America’s Best Startup Employers according toForbesand led by proven technology entrepreneurs whose previous companies have been acquired by Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and others. Ermetic has received funding from Accel, Forgepoint, Glilot Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Qumra Capital and Target Global.
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