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Google Authenticator

Google Authenticator finally syncs one-time codes in the cloud

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You may now synchronize your two-factor authentication codes with your Google account, a feature that has been long requested by users of Google Authenticator.

Thus, Authenticator won’t need to be set up separately when you configure a new phone and log in to your account. This also implies that logging back into your accounts from a different device will be less of a nerve-racking experience if you lose your phone or it is stolen.

Google Authenticator
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While cloud synchronization has become quite popular in other two-factor efforts like Authy, Google took a very long time to add it to Authenticator, which debuted back in 2010. You must upgrade the Authenticator app for Android and iOS to the most recent version in order to enable cloud syncing for two-factor codes.

Also Read: Google TV now has over 800 ad-supported free channels

More information on the feature is available on Google’s support page, which also confirms that “if you’re signed into your Google Account within Google Authenticator, your codes will automatically be backed up and restored on any new device you use.”

Google’s Christiaan Brand stated in a blog post that “one major piece of feedback we’ve heard from users over the years was the complexity in dealing with lost or stolen devices that had Google Authenticator installed.

Since one-time codes in Authenticator were only stored on a single device, a loss of that device meant that users lost their ability to sign in to any service on which they’d set up 2FA using Authenticator. With this update we’re rolling out a solution to this problem, making one-time codes more durable by storing them safely in users’ Google accounts.

This change means users are better protected from the lockout and that services can rely on users retaining access, increasing both convenience and security. While we’re pushing towards a passwordless future, authentication codes remain an important part of internet security today, so we’ve continued to make optimizations to the Google Authenticator app”

However, one-time passcode cloud syncing may make it much more alluring for bad actors to attack Google accounts. If you can hack into a system, you could have access to a lot of private information. Kimberly Samra, a Google spokesperson, verified that account syncing is entirely optional.

Also Read: Google wins appeal of $20 mln US patent verdict

But if you do, don’t anticipate any additional security measures beyond Google’s basic ones. Authy offers an option to allow (or disallow) the usage of numerous devices with an account in addition to a unique password for recovering two-factor backups in order to keep out unwanted visitors.

The bland vault design of the Authenticator app will be replaced with an asterisk in Google’s colors with this upgrade.

Kiaxis

Kinaxis- Cloud-based supply chain platform that transforms the supply chain in the industry under John Sicard’s policies

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One of the complex and unpredictable things in any industry is supply chains. At the same time, it is unpredictable as well as has unexpected threats. Keeping the clients and customers happy is not a cakewalk. However, Kinaxis make all these things easy. It is one of the well-known firm deals with cloud-based supply chain planning solutions.  Kinaxis is raising the confidence level of many leading firms to make the best decisions for exploration. As well, it monitors risks and opportunities in the supply chain. Not only simple problems but it also assists to overcome complex supply chain problems.

The most important thing, Kinaxis platform combines machine and human knowledge to deliver the best service. Presently, the firm has been helping billion-dollar companies and changed the way of their supply chains. So that, they achieve breakthroughs in a short period. Avaya, Agilent technology, Casio, EMS, Celestica, and many more firms used integrated supply chain planning of Kinaxis.

What is Kinaxis?

It is a well-known firm at the international level providing Cloud-based supply chain planning solutions. The firm is established back in 1984. Headquartered in Ottawa in Canada. Since the establishment, the supply chain solution platform enabled by Kinaxis has proved a game-changing for many companies. In 1995, Kinaxis enabled the first platform called RapidResponse. With time it has gone through lots of evolution and became one of the most innovative platforms for the supply chain. As well, it is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the marketplace.

No doubt, Kinaxis changed the scenario of supply chains all across the world. Because of the great service and ultimate solution, it acquired global customers. Also, it changed the way companies used to run supply chains.

Services

The firm offers cloud-based solutions in supply chains. These are configurable as per the industrial needs. Because the firm has many customers from different industries. Over the years, Kinaxis successfully fill the supply chain technique and planning gap in the market. Today, its customers are making decisions 100 times faster and cut down the risk as well as cost.

Its RapidResponse Platform

It is an integrated supply chain platform that is also cloud-based. The main feature of this platform is it’s easily scalable nature. Thus, enabled a platform that delivers the capacity as industry needs. As well, it comes with responsive design. Therefore, it can use on any device, making it easy to make decisions wherever the client is.

How Kinaxis is different?

First of all, it is a trusted platform all across the world for its best supply chain solution. Top manufacturers all over the world admire Kinaxis for its ultimate planning techniques. As well, it enabled unique platforms like RapidResponse which make it easier to choose.

Mastermind at Kinaxis

John Sicard- President and CEO

From 2016, he grabbed the position of CEO at Kinaxis. As well, he is serving as a president of the firm. However, he has been working with Kinaxis for more than twenty years. He started the job with Kinaxis as a key contributor in the architecture development of its supply chain. Since then he contributed to developing the supply chain platform at Kinaxis. John’s hard work pay and he got the chance to lead a management role at Kinaxis. Like he was the senior manager of sales and marketing, business consulting, and many more branches at the firm.

Education and Early Career

He is graduated in a Bachelor of Computer Science at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. During his degree, he had a strong focus on software architecture and UI Design. As well he attended Harvard Business School for Advanced Management Program.

Coming to his career achievements, John worked at the FastMAN software system as a senior software architect and management positions. Prior to that, he worked at Promira.  However, his career gains new heights with Kinaxis.

Bottom Line

Kinaxis is a unique platform to solve the problems related supply chain. It brought a transformation in supply chain solutions in all types of industries. With the assistance of Kinaxis, many organizations find it easy to keep their customers happy. The firm also knows it’s CSR very well. For that, it chooses to contribute to sustainable development. Supporting to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. Till now, a total of seven areas of social responsibility has been covered.

snaplogic

SnapLogic : One of the “Coolest” Cloud Platform Companies

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Another software company in the marketplace to deal with data integration is excelling in the field and satisfying millions of customers worldwide. The company provides clients with better and many efficient tools to connect applications and transfer data in a hassle-free way. Gaurav Dhillon’s company, SnapLogic was founded in 2006 and is majorly known for web data integration. After the internet has bathed the world with a new aura of possibilities, companies like SnapLogic had reached cloud eleven. The never-ending demand of cloud data sources, SaaS applications and most importantly, efficient data transfer gives a pictorial representation of the success of SnapLogic.

The Founder

SnapLogic was fully functional and became public from 2006. Before Dhillon created SnapLogic, he was already a founder of 2 more start-ups, including Informatica Corp and jaman.com.

Dhillon created Informatica, a software company in 1993 based in California, the United States with $75,000 provided to him by the National Institute of Health. He didn’t have many facilities then, so with this little amount of capital, he started the company in his garage. Informatica was quite a success, and it was acquired in 2015 for $5.3billion.

Snaplogic founder
Image Source: cbronline.com

Dhillon’s next start-up was Jaman.com, which was founded in 2005 in California as well. The website ceased all its operations in 2017. Jaman was a site that provided movie discovery sites and thus, let users download videos on demand.

SnapLogic

EAI stands for enterprise application integration, and this is what Dhillon’s interest lied upon. After Informatica emerged as one of the most successful start-ups in the world of EAI, Dhillon’s passion triggered to create more in this area. According to him, a lot of areas was unexplored in this field, and he buckled up to roll the stones.

So SnapLogic was created in 2006 after Dhillon himself invested in this business, and in 2009, he became the CEO of the company. The main focus of Dhillon was to reduce the problems the users faced with cloud computing. The company is based in San Mateo, California and serves throughout the world.

Success of SnapLogic

The first big news of SnapLogic was raising $2.3million in Series A funding in 2009. The prime investors were Andreessen Horowitz, Maples Investments, Brian McClendon (Google Engineering Vice President), Naval Ravikant and a few more. After the closing of this funding round, Dhillon was declared the CEO of the company, and he announced that the money will be invested in improving the DataFlow platform. The data integrating solution of SnapLogic turned out to be very useful for SaaS applications and websites, like SalesForce, Twitter, and SugarCRM, etc.

In 8th December 2010, Dhillon announced that the company has raised $10million in Series B funding, and new technologies have been incorporated in the products of SnapLogic, which is both time and cost-efficient. After this funding round, Dhillon planned to expand the business in the European market. One of the biggest success of SnapLogic was that it became the world’s first company to integrate data that existed both on-premise and in the cloud. This was followed by the launch of elastic integration in June 2013, which made application integration in the clouds even simpler. By the end of 2013, SnapLogic provided the users with 150 various data connectors for applications like SAP and Oracle.

On 10th December 2015, SnapLogic raised $37.5 million in the funding round led by Microsoft, Silver Lake Waterman, Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, and Triangle Peak Partners. At the end of this year, the net worth of SnapLogic turned out to be $96.3million. By this time, machine learning and artificial intelligence already started spreading like a wildfire in the tech market. Taking a note, the company made a very smart move by introducing the SnapLogic Integration Assistant, an AI-powered product of the company in May 2017. In this year, the company also raised $136.3 million from the existing investors.

SnapLogic Today

The latest and one of the biggest successes in the history of SnapLogic is Gartner naming the company (SnapLogic) as a leader in the Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) Magic Quadrant for four consecutive years. The fascinating performance of SnapLogic in data integration has driven the world crazy with more time-efficient and better ways to connect applications and integrate data.

Docker

Solomon Hykes : The Founder of Enterprise Container Platform, ‘Docker’

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Open-source is one technology that has helped developers to improve their software and lead it to the next level with the help of other developers, without even knowing them. This technology not only helps the main developer but also the other developers to grow their skills. WordPress being one of the biggest examples of such successful startup that has emerged mostly because it is open source and the community behind it. Soloman Hykes, also known as a French founder in Silicon Valley, is another startup owner, who made use of the open-source technology and established one of the biggest open-source development and deployment container providers, Docker.

Solomon Hykes was born to an American father and a French-Canadian mother in New York. But his family flew to France when he was four years old. He was introduced to computers when he was seven and instantly, became interested in coding. Hykes joined the Epitech School in 2001, where he started learning to programme. Alongside his studies, he got a job at a nearby cyber cafe, where he practised coding and ran the cafe’s servers. During this time, he also spent six months at the University of California, San Diego, and even, worked for a French movie company in Los Angeles.

In 2006, he graduated as a computer engineer and bagged a job at a computer security company. But there was something else he wanted to do. Only two years after starting his first job, in 2008, Hykes resigned to start a company of his own, along with Sébastien Pahl, a fellow student from Epitech. The two named the company as dotCloud, with which the two started working on a software that would offer a platform for developers to code on Amazon’s cloud.

Solomon Hykes Docker
Image Source: techcrunch.com

The two co-founders took the startup to Y Combinator in summer 2010 but got rejected. They again applied for the startup program in the winter session of the same year. But yet again were not selected. But at the very last moment, Paul Graham from Y Combinator changed his mind and selected dotCloud on a condition. The condition was to make all the Y Combinator peers to signup for dotCloud’s software.

At the startup program, Hykes presented the idea of a common container for software development and deployment. He wanted to create a container that could be accessed from anywhere, such that many computers interconnected into a cluster. With the very idea, dotCloud raised a decent amount of seed funding and started developing the software.

In 2011, Hykes shifted the company to the Silicon Valley, and the company raised an $11 million in Series A in April in the same year, from names like Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital. At that time, the company was the only PaaS provider, and even, AWS was providing better support for the software. The company started to grow rapidly, and in 2013, the company dotCloud became Docker.

Though the company was going through a good time, there was still something that it was lacking. During the same time, Hykes got a decent offer for selling the company, but he decided not to and was tinkering around to make things right for the company.

So in the same year, Hykes made the company’s software an open-source platform, and RedHat was the one big company to step in to use the very software for its PaaS platform, OpenShift. In 2014, Microsoft announced that it will be integrating the Docker products into its Windows Server version in 2016. The same year, Google, Amazon and IBM also came in a partnership with the company. In 2014, the company raised a $40 million in the Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company also acquired another startup named startup Orchard.

In 2015, the company became a unicorn company, after it valued $1 billion through a $95 million Series D fundraising led by Insight Venture Partners. By the end of the same year, the company again raised an $18 million in the Series D round. In the latest round of funding in 2018, the company has raised a $92 million.

In the beginning, Docker started with a single project, but now, it hosts projects like containers, LinuxKit, SwarmKit, and the Moby, etc, based on the Docker technology.

On 28 March 2018, Solomon Hykes stepped down as the CEO of the company, remaining on the board of the company valued $ 1.3 billion.

Dell Wants to Bring Automated and Efficient Cloud Infrastructure

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Hybrid-cloud
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Dell, one of the biggest computer maker company, which started its journey 35 years ago by selling PCs directly to the consumer is now planning to expand its cloud infrastructure to make it more intelligent, automated and efficient.

At the Dell Technologies World 2019 held in Las Vegas, Michael Dell the founder, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, revealed about the new Dell Technologies Cloud offering, that will be a combined project of Dell, Azure, Microsoft and VMWare. All those companies have partnered with each other to accelerate the digital transformation for their customers and bring a hybrid cloud solution to them. All the three will be combining their data centres, workplace solutions and cloud technologies to attain the very objective.

“Every business, every organisation, every government, and every healthcare organisation needs to re-imagine itself in this digital age. There are an explosion and tsunami of data that is sweeping us into the digital age. Data is our greatest asset and most important resource. Turning that data into action and progress and outcomes and success is the heart of digital transformation,” said Dell.

According to the company, other companies own their separate clouds, and it becomes tough for them to set up a multi-cloud strategy. So to simplify such complex tasks Dell is planning to bring a hybrid cloud solution, that will also render easy to handle interface. Dell’s cloud approach revolves around VMWare and targets to connect with public cloud service providers like AWS.

“For many organisations, the increasingly diverse cloud landscape is resulting in an enormous amount of IT complexity, and no one is more qualified or capable to help customers solve this challenge than Dell Technologies,” said Jeff Clarke, the vice chairman of products and operations at Dell.

Todd McKinnon : The Founder of Okta, a Company that Specializes in Enterprise Security

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Taking risks, is what most of the people are afraid of, especially, when they are running in their late 30s. At the time when people are earning enough money by working under someone else, it was Todd McKinnon, who wanted to pursue his childhood dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Even he was heading a team of more than a hundred employees in his last company and was earning an adequate amount of money to survive in a place like Silicon Valley, he decided to leave the job and just work for his dream. Having years of experience and a great vision, today, he is the founder of a billion dollars company, Okta.

Early Life

McKinnon was born in Southern California and grew up in its bay area. His father was a VP of HR, who worked for various different companies, and his mother was a homemaker.

He completed his under graduation from Brigham Young University, and later, went to the California Polytechnic State University, where he completed a degree in computer science.

Career

McKinnon finds himself lucky, to be born and brought up in the capital of technology. Being a native of Silicon Valley, since his childhood, he was convinced that he would work for an IT company in Silicon Valley.

ToddMcKinnon
Image Source: sbnonline.com

During his graduation, he got recruited by PeopleSoft, in the campus placement, in 1995. At the time, he was building a database application for the recreation department on campus. Co-incidently, the recruiter from PeopleSoft was also working on a similar project and liked Mckinnon’s work and recruited him.

McKinnon was hired as an engineer in the company and received multiple promotions in the span of eight years.

After working for eight long years in PeopleSoft, in 2003, McKinnon left the job and started working at SalesForce. In 2009, he left SalesForce to start his own company, i.e. Okta.

Founding Okta

Besides the dream of working in a Silicon Valley company, McKinnon was also fascinated with the idea of starting his own business. The reason he gives for not starting a business earlier is that he always had good jobs in hand, and those were helpful in gaining good business experience.

In SalesForce, he was managing over hundreds of employees, and he had got a good reputation. He decided that it was the right time to start a business, as he was financially and mentally capable of doing that at the time.

At the same time, people got introduced to the cloud, and not many were sure how long it is going to last. But McKinnon saw an opportunity in the same. He started off developing with a macro product, and when he went out to talk and sell the product to people, he realized there was much more to the cloud, and finally, started working on identity management on the cloud.

McKinnon pitched the idea in over 75 meetings in a span of four to five months. He also asked a former SalesForce colleague, Freddy Kerrest, to join him for the startup, and finally, after seven months of hard, work was able to raise a million dollars seed funding to start the business and founded Okta in 2009. Okta provides cloud software that helps companies manage their employees’ passwords, by providing a “single sign-on” experience.

The company earned its first paying client, in December 2009. In 2015, the company was valued at $1.2 billion and raised $75 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital.

In 2017, the company went public, and in its IPO it raised $187 million. Okta has its offices in Bellevue, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, San Jose and Washington D.C., and its headquarter is located in San Fransisco. In January 2019, the company reported a number of 100 million registered users on Okta and the company valued at over $7 billion.

Personal Life

McKinnon is married and has two children. He lives with his family in San Francisco. He is a fitness freak, and in 2017, he was named as the 14th fittest man on earth in the age group of 45-to-49, in the annual CrossFit Games, held in Madison, Wisconsin. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Okta.