Channel Brief: Microsoft to Hold Post-CrowdStrike Security Summit, IBM Unveils New AI Chips

Microsoft announced last week it will hold a security summit in September to discuss ways to improve cybersecurity systems in the wake of the global CrowdStrike outage. The event will be held on Sept. 10 at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and government representatives are among those invited to the gathering, it said in the blog.

"The CrowdStrike outage in July presents important lessons for us to apply as an ecosystem," Microsoft said, including concerns that many organizations are not well prepared to implement contingency plans when a single point of failure, such as an IT system or a piece of software within it, goes down.

"We look forward to bringing our perspective to the discussions with Microsoft and industry and government stakeholders on the need for a more resilient ecosystem," a CrowdStrike spokesperson told Reuters.

Earlier in August, Delta Air Lines said it was pursuing legal claims against CrowdStrike and Microsoft after the outage caused mass flight cancellations and cost the carrier at least $500 million. CrowdStrike is scheduled to report its second-quarter financial results after the U.S. market closes on Aug. 28.

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Grab your coffee. Here's what else you need to know today.

Today’s Tech, Channel and MSP News

1. IBM unveils new AI chips: At the annual Hot Chips conference in Stanford, California this week, IBM unveiled its Telum II processor and Spyre accelerator chip, promising partners and solution providers new tools for bringing artificial intelligence use cases to life when the chips become available for Z and LinuxOne in 2025. IBM is positioning the chips as a boon to help customers adopt traditional AI models, emerging large language models (LLMs) and use the ensemble AI method of combining multiple machine learning (ML) and deep learning AI models with encoder LLMs, CRN reports.

2. N2WS names new sales leaders to further growth strategy: Enterprise and MSP data protection firm N2WS announced it named Jay Iparraguirre as global vice president of sales and Nir Veledniger as head of customer success to drive revenue growth by reshaping the company's customer success, go-to-market strategy and channel business, the company said. These key appointments come on the heels of hiring Alon Maimoni as chief revenue officer (CRO) in March 2024 to spearhead the company’s growth aspirations. Iparraguirre, as global VP of sales, will drive a proactive approach to sales with an increased emphasis on outbound sales and channel partnerships. He has more than 15 years of experience in cloud security, disaster recovery, CDN, DNS, and other cloud-related solutions for mission-critical sites and applications. He has worked directly with many of the largest companies in the world, including Google, Meta, X, Autodesk, Workday, the U.S. government, and Oracle. He has also partnered with many of the largest channel avenues, such as SHI, AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI, as well as numerous other resellers, ISVs, MSPs, and MSSPs. As head of customer success, Veledniger will focus on onboarding processes and educational initiatives to ensure customers maximize product value. With extensive experience in customer success roles at companies such as Dealtale (MarTech), Verbit, and Feedvisor in the U.S. and Israel, he has established processes, provided training, and conducted client workshops, contributing to increased revenues for these companies. Congratulations!

3. Soteria and Panther partner on managed SIEM: Cybersecurity services firm Soteria and cloud-native security information event management (SIEM) provider Panther are teaming up to deliver managed detection and response (MDR) services, the companies said. Soteria customers can now leverage the Panther platform while offloading time- and resource-intensive security tasks to the cybersecurity expertise of Soteria’s Detection and Response Team, the companies said.

4. Microsoft to make 'Recall' feature available in October: In other Microsoft security news, the company announced, after an earlier delay in June, that the controversial “recall” feature for its artificial intelligence-powered Copilot+ PCs will be available to Windows Insiders users in October. The new release date was added to a previous blog post about Recall, which was billed as a way for users to find information previously viewed on a PC. The feature was flagged by security advocates as being problematic due to the potential for malicious scraping of users’ computer history.

5. US sues Georgia Tech over cybersecurity failings: The United States is suing Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT), commonly referred to as Georgia Tech, and its contracting entity, Georgia Tech Research Corporation (GTRC), over a litany of alleged failures to meet cybersecurity standards set by the Department of Defense (DoD) for contract awardees. Whistleblowers Christopher Craig and Kyle Koza alleged Georgia Tech and GTRC failed to protect controlled unclassified information (CUI). The series of allegations date back to 2019 and continued for years after, although Koza was said to have identified the issues as early as 2018. As The Register reported, among the allegations is the suggestion that between May 2019 and February 2020, Georgia Tech's Astrolavos Lab – ironically a group that focuses on cybersecurity issues affecting national security – failed to develop and implement a cybersecurity plan that complied with DoD standards (NIST 800-171).

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