Archive for September 28, 2023

Visa Expands Installments Program with Air Transat and London Drugs

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 28, 2023 by itnerd

Visa has announced two new collaborations, with Air Transat and London Drugs, to expand Instalments enabled by Visa to more eligible Canadian credit cardholders. Using Installments enabled by Visa, consumers can convert qualifying purchases into smaller, equal installment payments over a specified period of time, using their eligible credit card.

Visa research shows that nearly half of Canadian consumers prefer their installment financing be provided by their current credit card issuer and 30% say they would be more likely to purchase again at the store if it was an available payment option.1 Air Transat and London Drugs are the latest to join a growing list of retailers supporting Installments enabled by Visa.

Installments enabled by Visa provides issuers, processors, and retailers an option to seamlessly add a flexible payment option for their customers. For more information on Visa Installments, visit: Visa.ca/installments.

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OVHcloud Adds Cutting-edge GPUs Helping Organisations to Power AI’s Most Demanding Workloads

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 28, 2023 by itnerd

OVHcloud, the European Cloud leader and a part of the NVIDIA Partner Network continues to develop its portfolio of AI solutions, today adding new NVIDIA GPU product offerings that form an integral part of its strategic vision for artificial intelligence. Acknowledging the tremendous impact AI will have in the years to come, OVHcloud is on a mission to help customers grow their businesses, uniting an ecosystem through innovative, easy and affordable AI solutions, featuring transparent, ethical and open models that preserve data privacy.

With over 20 years of expertise in infrastructure, through a unique vertically integrated industrial model, OVHcloud is designing AI-enabled infrastructures, which include new best-of-breed NVIDIA H100 and A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Customers will be able to choose from many options to power their most ambitious machine learning workloads, including large language models.

Adding to critically acclaimed options already offered at a competitive price with older generation NVIDIA V100 and NVIDIA V100S GPUs, the Group today announced new offerings based on the following GPUs: NVIDIA H100, NVIDIA A100, NVIDIA L40S and NVIDIA L4, with effective deployment ramping up in the coming weeks.


New GPU instances with NVIDIA A100 for deep learning training and inference 

New NVIDIA A100 80GB powered GPU instances are immediately available and let AI specialists run complex projects on highly specialized NVIDIA Tensor Cores. With exceptional abilities in deep learning training, A100 is also ideally suited to run inference thanks to various optimizations in tackling those workloads, including LLM-related projects. High-performance computing is another playing field where the A100 GPU instances help unlock the next-generation of discoveries, through advanced simulations, thanks to double-precision compute and high-bandwidth memory.

A100-based public cloud instances can be configured as A100-180 with 1x A100, 15 vCore and 180GB of RAM, A100-360 with 2x A100, 30 vCore and 360GB of RAM and A100-720 with 4x A100, 60 vCore and 720GB of RAM.


New GPU instances with NVIDIA H100 for deep learning training

OVHcloud is also announcing upcoming H100-based GPU instances built around NVIDIA’s latest accelerator with a compute power starting at 26 petaFLOPS (FP64) per PCIe GPU. Purpose-built for the most demanding AI models, the NVIDIA H100 is the de facto choice for innovation in AI, whether accelerating LLMs with its Transformer Engine, or creating generative AI applications.

For the most demanding use cases, such as extreme fine-tuning and training, the Group will offer NVIDIA H100 SXM-based solutions. With 67 TFlops of FP64 compute power and a higher GPU bandwidth, this select offering will showcase the full power of the NVIDIA Hopper GPU architecture. 

New GPU instances and bare-metal servers with NVIDIA L4 and L40S

The Group also today unveiled GPU instances featuring NVIDIA L4 GPUs with 24GB of memory. The L4, based on the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, is a universal GPU for every workload with enhanced AI and video capabilities. It provides efficient compute resources for graphics, simulation, data science and data analytics.

The NVIDIA L40S GPU with 48GB of memory is also joining the Group’s GPU instances. NVIDIA L40S benefits from fourth-generation Tensor Cores and FP8 Transformer Engine providing robust performance for AI workloads both in training and inferencing.

These GPUs will be available through public cloud instances as well as in dedicated bare-metal servers with L4 in SCALE-GPU and L40S in HGR-AI.

Establishing a foundation to supercharge customer AI journeys

Thanks to an unprecedented choice of NVIDIA GPU architectures, OVHcloud now delivers an AI-designed infrastructure for AI engineers, researchers, data scientists and data practitioners that can leverage the elasticity of the cloud to support their needs from training to running inference.

Furthermore, OVHcloud will gradually add NVIDIA H100 and A100 options to its set of comprehensive AI PaaS solutions designed to accompany the data life cycle: AI Notebooks, AI Training and AI Deploy. OVHcloud AI solutions act as a complete set of tools that are easy to use, and designed to explore data, train models and serve them into production.

Executing on a strong dedicated AI roadmap, OVHcloud is set to announce in the weeks to come a wave of AI innovations designed to further help its customers in navigating this new paradigm.

Pricing & availability

GPU instances based on NVIDIA A100 are available now on public cloud starting at 2,75 EUR per hour for A100-180, 5,50 EUR per hour for A100-360 and 11 EUR per hour for A100-720. Managed AI solutions based on A100 will be available later at 3 EUR per hour. NVIDIA H100 PCIe-based instances in the public cloud universe will launch later this fall with pre-reservation starting now. Customers interested in upcoming NVIDIA H100 SXM offers can apply for a personalized quote.

NVIDIA L4 and L40S GPU instances will be available in October. New bare-metal servers featuring NVIDIA L4 and L40S GPUs are expected to launch this fall.

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Elon Musk Fires Twitter’s Entire “Election Integrity Team”…. Showing That He Has No Integrity

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 28, 2023 by itnerd

News broke late last night that Elon Musk clearly has zero integrity by firing Twitters “Election Integrity Team”. And this has been confirmed by Elon himself:

So let’s think about this. We’re heading into the 2024 elections with no protections on Twitter from nation states running disinformation campaigns on Twitter. And Elon thinks that this is a good idea. I think this illustrates that Elon is not an honest broker. Far from it in fact. And this highlights the fact (again) that nobody should spend any time on Twitter.

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75% of Companies Struggling with IT Operational Challenges in a Hybrid World: HP

Posted in Commentary with tags on September 28, 2023 by itnerd

HP Inc. today announced the findings of a new commissioned study, conducted by Forrester Consulting, highlighting the need for companies to adopt always-on endpoint management to cater for increasingly dispersed global workforces.

72% of companies surveyed currently have a hybrid working model, with 75% of respondents reporting that the shift to remote and hybrid working models has magnified IT operational challenges. 

Forrester Consulting’s survey of 312 IT and Security Decision makers shows that companies are struggling to balance asset management, user experience assurance, and risk management. 

Key findings in the 2023 study, “Mastering Endpoint Security In A Hybrid World” include:

  • The top challenges companies face when managing remote endpoints are ensuring data security (60%); keeping software on remote devices up to date (55%); and maximizing the accuracy of asset databases (55%). 
  • Just 42% of companies perform firmware updates annually, 23% update every two years or less, and 12% only update “when essential” – putting firms at risk of security vulnerabilities and compatibility issues.
  • Two-thirds (67%) of respondents say ensuring secure and continuous communication with remote endpoints is a major concern for their company’s IT department. 
  • IT is having to rely on subpar protection, with 50% citing inadequate endpoint security solutions as an obstacle to addressing security and management challenges. Meanwhile, 54% believe full-disk encryption provides substantial protection for endpoints but acknowledge it can be insufficient. For example, if the attacker has physical access to the device.

Always-on connectivity is the lynchpin of comprehensive endpoint management

In considering how these challenges may be overcome, 75% of respondents believe improved endpoint management would have a positive impact on overall business operations and efficiency.

Companies cited a need for more efficient endpoint software tracking and management (48%). To achieve this, respondents want device backup and restore capabilities (55%), automation of device recovery processes (47%), BIOS update deployment (46%), and device location tracking (46%).

To enhance remote endpoint security and management, 82% of respondents are also considering investment in solutions that can geo-locate, lock, and erase PCs remotely.

For example, HP Wolf’s Protect and Trace utilizes HP Wolf Connect to perform these functions on a PC even when it’s turned off or disconnected from the Internet.

About the research

This study, commissioned by HP and carried out by Forrester, surveyed 312 IT and security decision makers at companies with 500 or more employees across multiple industries in NA, EMEA and APJ. The study began in March 2023 and was completed in September 2023.

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Ransomware Takes Out One Of The UK’s Largest Logistics Firms

Posted in Commentary on September 28, 2023 by itnerd

KNP Logistics, one of the UK’s largest privately owned logistics groups has declared bankruptcy, blaming a June ransomware attack and potentially leaving 730 employees without jobs. According to administrators, the “major ransomware attack” impacted necessary systems, processes and financial information, and, consequently, adversely affected the financial position of the Group which left them unable to secure critical funding to recover.

  • “Against a backdrop of challenging market conditions and without being able to secure urgent investment due to the attack, the business was unable to continue. We will support all affected staff through this difficult time,” said Raj Mittal, the joint administrator who is handling the insolvency process for FRP Advisory.

After KNP was added to the Akira ransomware list of victims in June, Avast publicly released a decryptor for the Akira ransomware in July. It is not known whether KLP Logistics used the decryptor or if KLP had contacted law enforcement or an external incident response company following the ransomware attack.

Stephen Gates, Principal Security SME, Horizon3.ai:

   “Ransomware attackers are now putting all organizations in the ransomware crosshairs primarily for three reasons:

  1. Ransomware attackers are being emboldened to perform more attacks since they are rarely arrested and/or prosecuted for such crimes.
  2. Ransomware attackers know that many organizations are highly likely to pay the ransom to keep critical systems, technologies, and networks online.
  3. Too many organizations are actively paying the demands of attackers, further incentivizing new actors to use this extremely profitable attack vector at everyone else’s cost.

   “The most effective way to defeat ransomware attacks is to continuously assess your own infrastructure, find the attack paths an attacker would take, and then fix those issues and validate that your fixes defeated the discovered attack paths. Once complete, you rinse and repeat the process regularly to discover new attack paths. No other defensive or offensive method of reducing the risk of a successful ransomware attack against your organization will be as successful as the method explained here.”

If you needed one more reason to take ransomware seriously, this is it. This business was taken out by ransomware. And if you don’t have your house in order, you can be next. Consider this situation a case study in what could happen to you.

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