AlmaLinux – the prefered replacement for CentOS

AlmaLinux is a community-driven and commercially supported open-source operating system based on the popular Linux distribution, Fedora. It was created in response to the discontinuation of support for the popular Linux distribution CentOS. AlmaLinux aims to provide a stable and reliable platform for both personal and commercial use.

One of the main features of AlmaLinux is its commitment to compatibility with CentOS, making it a great choice for users who were previously using that distribution. This compatibility means that users can easily switch to AlmaLinux without having to make major changes to their existing setup.

Another key feature of AlmaLinux is its focus on security. The operating system includes security features such as AppArmor, SELinux, and firewalls, which help protect against potential security threats. The AlmaLinux team also closely monitors security updates and releases patches and security upgrades in a timely manner, ensuring that users always have the latest and most secure version of the operating system.

AlmaLinux also provides a user-friendly and customizable interface, making it accessible to users of all levels of experience. The operating system comes with a range of software and tools, including office applications, web browsers, and media players, allowing users to get started with their work or leisure activities right away.

In terms of support, AlmaLinux offers both community and commercial support options. The community support is provided through online forums, wikis, and mailing lists, where users can get help and advice from other users. Commercial support is also available, providing users with access to professional support and technical assistance.

In conclusion, AlmaLinux is a robust and reliable open-source operating system that offers a range of features and benefits to users. Its compatibility with CentOS, focus on security, and user-friendly interface make it a great choice for personal and commercial use. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced user, AlmaLinux offers a stable and secure platform for all your computing needs.

Is technology the new driving force for an organisation’s growth?

Technology has become the new driving force throughout organisations of every size, shape and industry. Companies that are still hesitating in embracing technology to fuel their business are sure to be left behind by companies automating, creating efficiencies, achieving scale, and providing a super customer experience all with the help of technology.

Operational benefits of technology are endless, not only startups but big companies are taking the help of technology to become a multi-billionaire organisation. Home grown companies like ‘Ola’ and ‘Oyo’ have doubled their profits with the smart use of technology. So, by creating nation-wide connectivity, cost-cutting in millions, technology is not only helping bigger firms grow bigger but is also supporting small firms in the growth process.

Here we have listed a few companies that are providing technological support to the corporate and big organisations:

  1. Calibehr: Calibehr is a new age award-winning Professional Business Service provider in India with a spectacular array of tailor-made, unconventional offerings. The company combines the synergies of people, process and technology to drive seamless operations for large Indian enterprises, multinational corporations and state governments. Calibehr’s passionate team works obsessively with its partners to create tools and capacities in this technology first world. Its solutions cater to needs of different organisations to create robust mechanisms for client growth. Calibehr also simplifies complex processes through new age technologies like AI, Automation etc. for their clients.Calibehr offers 350 delivery centers driven by a 15,000+ strong team of forward thinking and outcome oriented individuals, the company works in close collaboration to deliver quick, quantifiable results across 15 industries, in a digital-first world.
  1. IndusEntry: IndusEntry provides technology services and consulting that develops growth-oriented and cloud-based software solutions, services and support. It helps businesses and enterprises to integrate and implement existing and new technology solutions to improve productivity, performance & cost efficiencies in the sales, marketing, operations, manufacturing, and finance functions. With them, you also get the support of Digital and Social Media Advertising for your brand. India is one of the fastest growing digitally influenced markets. Telecom revolution has ensured that both rural and urban India has access to high-speed data. International search engines and social sites are today present in multiple Indian languages to ensure better user experience and greater exposure to businesses.
  2. Walsons:Walsons India’s longstanding presence offers steady service delivery with an understanding of local contexts, vital for managing essential business support services. It provides customers, wherever and whoever they may be, with a level of service that lives up to their brand promise. At Walsons, they believe that those who challenge the status quo today will do remarkable things tomorrow. By blending people, technology & knowledge, it delivers solutions for customers in a variety of industries.

Optim Servers Cloud Hosting Dedicated Servers Now Launched Within Minutes

Ten minutes after payment Receive, The Optim Servers Cloud Hosting server is ready for customer use.

The Optim Cloud Hosting dedicated server can now be in a client’s control within 5 minutes, with a new fast deploy system from the hosting company. Using automation technology developed in-house, Optim Servers is offering pre-configured dedicated servers that will be available to customers with the requested operating system loaded.

The fast deploy servers will be sold in popular configurations, ranging from Quad Core to 44 Core servers. The servers are marked as having a 5 minute setup time, instead of the regular time. The availability of fast deploy servers relies on Optim’s automation technology, which was first announced in August 2018.

This innovation is still available for clients who choose to custom configure their Saudi Arabian dedicated servers.
“Speed is essential to our dedicated hosting, and the time it takes for a client to receive their server is no exception,” said Arif Noor, CEO, and founder of Optim Cloud Hosting. “Our earlier automation project was designed to be a stepping stone to fast deploy servers.”

This automation project was designed to be a stepping stone to fast deploy servers. Optim’s fast deploy servers are part of a larger effort to make bare metal servers as easy to deploy as the Cloud VPS without the limitations of a shared virtual environment. This means that its dedicated servers include features such as auto-operating system installer, a native hosting API, and built-in scanners for hardware health and security vulnerabilities.

The Optim Cloud Hosting company also offers DDoS protection standard with every server. Since 2019, Optim has grown to provide unmanaged, enterprise-grade dedicated servers and fully-managed dedicated hosting in the Riyadh Saudi Arabia. The company offers 50% uptime SLAs and support staff who are on-site 24 hours a day.

 

WATI raises $23M in series B, powering WhatsApp for businesses in India and other regions

WATI (WhatsApp Team Inbox), a customer and sales engagement tool is today announcing a $23M series B funding, led by Tiger Global with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital India & Southeast Asia, as well as new investors DST Global Partners and Shopify. This marks Shopify’s first venture investment in a startup operating in the Southeast Asia region. The series B comes hot on the heels of an $8.3M series A round 10 months ago; in total, WATI has raised over $35M since 2020. WATI plans to use the Series B funds to scale the teams, product enhancement, and expand the customer base in India and key markets.

WATI has helped businesses power millions of conversations with thousands of customers across 78 countries in just 2 years since its launch. India continues to be WATI’s single largest individual market, with a third of its customers based out of the country. WATI has become an indispensable tool for startups to SMBs, and is deployed by businesses across verticals like e-commerce, healthcare, education, fashion, finance, professional service, and public services. Since its last round, WATI has grown its Indian customer base by 60%. Over the next few quarters, India will remain a critical focus for WATI both in terms of deepening market reach and tapa

Over 2 billion people around the world use WhatsApp to communicate everyday things and it is little wonder that businesses are taking to the messaging platform to support their customers where they feel most comfortable. In 2020, founders, Bianca Ho and Ken Yeung, launched WATI to help SMB with a self-service, low-code product on the WhatsApp Business API. WATI enables companies to have scalable, yet personalised conversations with its customer engagement software that is built on WhatsApp’s Business API. WATI’s vision is to help businesses meet their customers where they are – on messaging platforms – so they are always accessible, personalised, and can engage in real-time. Through the WATI platform, SMBs can support their customers through a collaborative team inbox with multiple agents, smart routing, canned responses, data tagging, and analytics. Many of these interactions can be automated through low-code workflow builders and chatbots.

Bianca Ho, Co-Founder, WATI commented: “It’s been an exciting 2022 at WATI culminating with this new funding round. We doubled down on our product with more automations, making it a seamless digital tool and must-have for any business. We went vertical in our approach and created integrations and partnerships with Zoho, Shopify, Google Sheets among others to really help scale growth and sharpen the product. The team has grown, revenue and customer numbers have doubled and now we look to scale the business, operations, teams around the world.”

This year, WATI has grown its remote-first team by 50%, attracting leaders from Twitter and Freshworks. Revenues and customer growth have doubled in the past 12 months as users find ROI in both time saved and increased revenue from automated workflows connected to eCommerce platforms and CRMs. WATI has over 6000 customers across 78 countries including SMBs providing domestic house cleaning services to schools, tutorial centres, medical institutions and ecommerce, Shopify stores and many more.

Currently, India has the highest number of WATI employees in any single market, across departments – Customer Success, Support, Partnerships, Marketing, Engineering, Product, etc. The company plans to increase the India headcount by 30%, in line with the growth of its revenues globally.

Ken Yeung, Co-Founder WATI, said “The business messaging market has grown enormously. Meta estimates that around a billion people per week communicate with a business or service account across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. This insight is critical for what’s happening now and what’s coming ahead. About 40% of Meta’s advertisers globally – over 4 million businesses – use click-to-message ads, which redirect people from Facebook or Instagram into one of Meta’s messaging products to chat with a business. WATI is well placed to service this demand and beyond.”

With additional funding, WATI will continually scale the team and invest in the product stack for low-code automation encouraging wider adoption of digital tools. WATI plans to scale sustainably in India and has aggressive go-to-market plans in emerging markets such as Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Skyharbour Signs Option Agreement with Tisdale Clean Energy to Option the South Falcon East Property, Saskatchewan

Under the Option Agreement and assuming the 75% interest is earned, Tisdale will  issue Skyharbour 1,111,111 Tisdale shares upfront, fund exploration expenditures totaling CAD $10,500,000, and pay Skyharbour CAD $11,100,000 in cash of which $6,500,000 can be settled for shares in the capital of Tisdale (“Shares”) over the five-year earn-in period.

Jordan Trimble, President and CEO of Skyharbour, stated: “We are very excited to have this new Option Agreement signed as we continue to execute on our business model by adding value to our project base in the Athabasca Basin through strategic partnerships and prospect generation, as well as focused mineral exploration at our core projects of Moore and Russell Lake. We are looking forward to working with Tisdale Clean Energy and its management team as they advance the South Falcon East Project over the coming years with a substantial amount of exploration planned and significant cash and share payments to Skyharbour. Assuming the option earn-in is completed, Skyharbour will retain a minority interest in the project as well as an NSR while maintaining a 100% interest in the surrounding claims. News will be forthcoming on exploration plans at the Property and will complement our aggressive drill campaign forthcoming at Russell Lake as well as those at various other partner-funded projects in our portfolio.”

Terms of the Option Agreement:

Pursuant to the Option Agreement, Tisdale may acquire up to a 75% (seventy-five percent) interest in the Property, in two phases. Initially, Tisdale can acquire a 51% (fifty-one percent) interest in the Property by completing the following payments and incurring the following exploration expenditures on the Property:

  1. On the closing date (“Closing”), paying CAD $350,000 and issuing 1,111,111 Shares to Skyharbour upfront;
    1. By the eighteen-month anniversary of Closing, completing at least $1,250,000 in exploration expenditures, and paying Skyharbour $1,450,000, of which up to $1,000,000 may be paid in Shares based on the 20-day volume-weighted average closing price calculated on the day of issuance (“VWAP”), at the election of Tisdale;
    2. By the second anniversary of Closing, completing an additional $1,750,000 in exploration expenditures, and paying Skyharbour $1,800,000, of which up to $1,000,000 may be paid in Shares based on the VWAP, at the election of Tisdale;
    3. By the third anniversary of Closing, completing an additional $2,500,000 in exploration expenditures, and paying Skyharbour $2,500,000, of which up to $1,500,000 may be paid in Shares based on the VWAP, at the election of Tisdale.

After acquiring a 51% interest, Tisdale may increase its interest in the Property to 75% by:

  1. Completing a payment of $5,000,000 to Skyharbour by the fourth anniversary of Closing, of which up to $3,000,000 may be satisfied in Shares based on the VWAP, at the election of Tisdale, and incurring exploration expenditures on the Property of an additional $2,500,000 in each of the fourth and fifth anniversaries of Closing.

All common shares issued to the Company will be subject to a four-month-and-one-day statutory hold period in accordance with applicable securities laws.  No finders’ fees or commissions are owing by Skyharbour in connection with entering into the Option Agreement. Completion of the transactions contemplated by the Option Agreement, and the issuance of any common shares to Skyharbour, remains subject to the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange.

In the event that additional share issuances to Skyharbour would result in Skyharbour owning 10% or more of Tisdale, a cash payment must be made in lieu of the shortfall to prevent Skyharbour becoming a reporting insider of Tisdale. Furthermore, Tisdale will be the operator during the earn-in period with Skyharbour retaining the final approval authority over the proposed work and exploration programs.

In the event that Tisdale spends, in any of the above periods, less than the specified sum, it may pay to the Company the difference between the amount it actually spent and the specified sum before the expiry of that period in full satisfaction of the exploration expenditures to be incurred. In the event that Tisdale spends, in any period, more than the specified sum, the excess shall be carried forward and applied to the exploration expenditures to be incurred in succeeding periods.

Assuming Tisdale exercises the option and acquires an interest in Property, the parties intend to form a joint venture for the ongoing development of the Property. A small portion of the Property is subject to an existing 2% net smelter returns royalty owing to a former owner, and Tisdale has agreed to grant a further 2% royalty to Skyharbour on the remaining bulk of the project area including the Fraser Lakes Zone B deposit. One-half of the royalty, being 1%, to be granted to Skyharbour can be purchased at any time by completing a one-time cash payment of $1,000,000.

South Falcon East Project Summary:

The South Falcon East Project is a uranium exploration project in the southeast Athabasca Basin and represents a portion of Skyharbour’s existing South Falcon Project. The project covers approximately 12,464 hectares and lies 18 kilometers outside the Athabasca Basin, approximately 50 kilometers east of the Key Lake Mine.

South Falcon Point Project Location Map:

https://www.skyharbourltd.com/_resources/maps/Sky_FalconSouth20211209.jpg

Historical exploration at the South Falcon East Project identified an area of U-Th-REE mineralization at the Fraser Lakes Zone B over an area comprising 1.5 km by 0.5 km along an antiformal fold nose cut by an east-west dextral ductile-brittle cross-structure adjacent to a 65 km long EM conductor. The near-surface Fraser Lakes Zone B deposit consists of a current NI 43-101 inferred resource totaling 7.0 million pounds of U3O8 at 0.03% and 5.3 million pounds of ThO2 at 0.023% within 10,354,926 tonnes using a cut-off grade of 0.01% U3O8. The independent NI 43-101 technical report by GeoVector Management Inc. supporting this mineral resource estimate was filed on SEDAR on March 20, 2015 by Skyharbour. Independent qualified person, Dr. Allan Armitage, P.Geo., is responsible for the contents of the technical report and comments related to the resource estimate and its parameters.

Qualified Person:

The technical information in this news release has been prepared in accordance with the Canadian regulatory requirements set out in National Instrument 43-101 and reviewed and approved by David Billard, P.Geo., a Consulting Geologist for Skyharbour as well as a Qualified Person.

 

The Top 5 Cloud Security Vulnerabilities that Enterprises must know about

By Neelesh Kripalani, Chief Technology Officer

Ever since the cloud has gained momentum, enterprises across the globe have adopted it to reap its benefits such as high speed, easy accessibility, enhanced security and low latency. The global cloud computing market size was estimated at USD 396.18 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach USD 456.05 billion by the end of 2022. The market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 15.14% to reach USD 923.46 billion by 2027.

Despite the array of benefits that the cloud offers, enterprises are struggling to make the most of it due to security vulnerabilities. Cloud infrastructure is complex and this complexity creates a lot of security vulnerabilities that threat actors can exploit.

Below mentioned are the top 5 cloud vulnerabilities that enterprises must watch out for:

Misconfigurations on the cloud – Misconfigurations refer to any glitches, gaps, or errors that could expose a cloud computing infrastructure to risks. As per industry research, around 70% of all security challenges in the cloud arise from misconfigurations. Cloud consists of a multitude of settings, policies, assets, interconnected services, and resources that make it a sophisticated environment to fully understand and operate in. To avoid these misconfigurations, enterprises need to make concerted efforts at all stages of its usage.

Unauthorized Access – Although accessibility is one of the most significant benefits of cloud computing, it can create a major security threat by granting access to unauthorized people. Since cloud-based environments are outside an organization’s network perimeter and directly accessible from the public internet, improperly configured security or compromised credentials can provide easy access to threat actors.

Insecure Interfaces/APIs – An API basically allows applications or components of applications to communicate with each other over the internet or a private network. They have the ability to streamline cloud computing processes. However, when APIs are left unsecured, they can open lines of communication that allow threat actors to exploit private data. Gartner predicts that by 2022, API attacks will become the most-frequent attack vector, causing data breaches for enterprise web applications.

Hijacking of Accounts – Cloud account hijacking is a common tactic in identity theft schemes in which a threat actor uses the stolen account credentials to conduct malicious or unauthorized activity. Cloud account hijacking at the enterprise level can be very devastating as company’s integrity and reputation gets maligned and confidential data can be leaked or falsified causing significant loss to businesses or their customers.

Malicious Insiders – As per many security leaders, insider threats have become a major security issue for organizations. Insider threats come from users who have authorized and legitimate access to a company’s assets and abuse it either deliberately or accidentally. On the cloud, detection of a malicious insider is even more difficult as companies lack control over their underlying infrastructure. Further, since cloud environments are directly accessible from the public internet, they are more vulnerable to security misconfigurations.

Wrapping up

By migrating to a cloud computing environment, enterprises can attain cost efficiency and higher productivity. However, without careful planning, adoption of the cloud can expose an enterprise to a lot of security vulnerabilities. Hence, enterprises need to be proactive in their security approach and leverage best practices to generate optimum RoI from cloud adoption.