TechSutram

J.P. Morgan, one of the major U.S. Banks, has launched its own Stablecoin (cryptocurrency) called JPM Coin.

The newly introduced stablecoin was used in the test where money was transferred between a client account and a J.P. Morgan account instantaneously.

With USD $2.6 trillion on J.P. Morgan's balance sheet, each JPM Coin is 1:1 redeemable in fiat U.S. dollar held by J.P. Morgan. This means each JPM Coin can be redeemable for exactly one US dollar. The support for other major fiat currencies will added in the future.               

According to the announcement, JPM coin is not intended to be used as money but as an instrument to make instantaneous payments and exchange value between different parties using blockchain technology to reduce overall settlement time.

In the faq section J.P Morgan's official stance was stated as, "We have always believed in the potential of blockchain technology and we are supportive of cryptocurrencies as long as they are properly controlled and regulated. As a globally regulated bank, we believe we have a unique opportunity to develop the capability in a responsible way with the oversight of our regulators. Ultimately, we believe that JPM Coin can yield significant benefits for blockchain applications by reducing clients’ counterparty and settlement risk, decreasing capital requirements and enabling instant value transfer."

The way overall transaction works is - A J.P. Morgan client first deposits to a designated account and then gets an equivalent number of JPM Coins. These newly received JPM Coins are then transferred over a blockchain network with other J.P. Morgan clients. At last, the holders of JPM Coins redeem those coins for USD at J.P. Morgan.

Quorum blockchain is used to issue JPM Coin. Developed for financial industry usages, Quorum blockchain is enterprise-ready distributed ledger and smart contract platform like Ethereum. The platform is designed to be used where high speed and high throughput processing of private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants is needed.

JPM Coin is not yet rolled out into production.

Baidu Cloud has launched its Baidu Blockchain Engine, BBE to simplify the development of blockchain applications aka decentralized apps (DApps) as easy as developing mobile applications.

BBE which stands for Baidu Blockchain Engine is built on the Baidu's ABC 3.0 (AI artificial intelligence, Big data big data, Cloud Computing ) technology stack.
BBE is built on the Baidu's intelligent cloud service platform and uses pluggable blockchain framework that will allow developers with a complete multi-chain, middle-tier and various contract templates, Dapp templates and other services to ease and simplify blockchain based development.

Baidu Blockchain Engine / BBE Deployment

BBE can be deployed on the Baidu cloud private cloud so that developers can create and manage the blockchain network quickly on the Baidu's private cloud platform. In addition, Baidu blockchain engine BBE can also be deployed inside enteprises. With this deployment model, it is quite possible to build a highly available and flexible implementation of privatized blockchain BaaS platform.

The announcement said that the Baidu Blockchain Lab has designed BBE platform on six functions viz. trusted computing environment, high performance and high throughput, scalable storage, cross-chain trusted interaction, general intelligent contract, and contract security audit.

Use Cases & Scenarios

The announcement further said that BBE is already applied in various use cases such as the Internet of Things, hazardous chemicals logistics, financial collection, asset securitization ABS, financial information sharing platform, and consumer finance.
Multi-type blockchain financial services such as credit, metering, ABS and transactions are supported by Baidu Cloud's unified blockchain platform in the consumer finance segment. The announcement also noted that Baidu Cloud Blockchain already supported the authenticity verification of 50 billion assets.

The Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform already supports three distinct blockchain protocols like Baidu’s own XuperChain, a permissioned version of Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric.

Baidu Cloud also said that open source and commercialization are the only way to build a blockchain operating system such as BBE.

DigitalOcean announced the launch of its Managed Database Service based on PostgreSQL.

Founded in 2011, DigitalOcean is developer-focused cloud provider with a community of 3.5 million developers and a global network of data centers. It has raised USD $305.4 millions in funding to date.

With managed database offering, DigitalOcean will look into the administrative hassles of setting up, maintaining, configuring and security databases on its cloud platform. Managed PostgreSQL service is the first of its kind offering from DigitalOcean.

Executive opinion

Senior Vice President of Product, DigitalOcean, Shiven Ramji, said, “Our product development is driven by one vital question: How we empower developers to do more valuable work in less time. With Managed Databases, developers and their teams can focus on creating meaningful applications and sharing them with their communities, without the headache of having to manage the database infrastructure that enables the process. We do this all with an intuitive interface, full API support, transparent pricing, feature richness and flexible scalability.”

Research Vice President for Data Management Software research at IDC, Carl Olofson, said, "Cloud managed databases represent the future of enterprise data management for most businesses. The best way for any enterprise to get the full benefits of cloud, with its elasticity and pay-as-you-go model is to have databases in the cloud running under managed services. DigitalOcean is specializing in such a service and is thus likely to offer expert service. They deserve active consideration by anyone considering locating a database workload in the cloud."

The Managed database Service

The newly introduced managed database service will provide features such as free daily backups with point-in-time recovery, standby nodes with automated failovers, end-to-end security by encrypting data both at rest and in transit with SSL and provide seamless scalability for the underlying database as they grow, the announcement noted.

DigitalOcean plans to add other major database support iteratively in the year 2019. However, the announcement did not mention the names of to be supported databased as a part of its managed service.

From the pricing perspective, DigitalOcean has waived all bandwidth fees for Managed Databases until 2020 as an introductory offer. Detailed pricing for Managed database service is available here.

Qualys announced that it has acquired San Francisco based cloud security startup Adya. The financial terms of acquisitions are not disclosed.
Qualys is a provider of cloud-based security and compliance solutions while Adya helps enterprises in managing and security their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.

Adya brings in cloud capabilities like visibility into cloud security & compliance, a central administrative console for cloud applications, license Management for SaaS apps to manage cost and finally, pre-built custom reports for auditing and reporting purpose.

Executive opinion

Chairman and CEO, Qualys, Philippe Courtot, said, “Enabling security and compliance audits of SaaS applications is becoming critically important as enterprises increasingly rely on cloud-based software to accelerate their digital transformations. Adya has built an impressive solution that addresses this issue by bringing SaaS application administration, licensing, security and compliance into a single-pane view, and delivering comprehensive reports for auditors and stakeholders. We welcome them to the Qualys family.”

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, SaaS Security, Adya, Deepak Balakrishna said, “Qualys is a pioneer that saw the market move to cloud-based subscription services over 15 years ago. We are excited to be part of this great company, and to scale the efficiencies of Cloud Application Management by integrating Adya’s solutions into the Qualys Cloud Platform.”

Acquisition Focus

With this acquisition, Qualys intends to provide the ability to consolidate the administration of their Software as a Service (SaaS) applications into one console, manage license costs across SaaS applications, set and enforce security policies in one place and report and audit on all activity with a single tool, the announcement said.

Qualys plans to bring all newly acquired cloud capabilities fully integrated into Qualys Cloud Platform in Q3 2019.

The announced further noted that Adya co-founders Deepak Balakrishna as Chief Technology Officer, SaaS Security and Amit Agarwal as VP Engineering, SaaS Security, will join Qualys.

IBM has launched a set of hybrid cloud tools and services to enable enterprise with their digital transformation efforts.

The IBM Cloud Integration Platform is offering IBM API Connect, IBM App Connect, IBM MQ, IBM DataPower Gateway, IBM Secure Gateway Service, IBM Message Hub and IBM Aspera on Cloud. All these cloud integration services allow to securely connect applications, software, and services from any cloud vendor.

Along with their cloud integration platform, few other cloud services are also launched to assist enterprises in their multi-cloud transformation journey.

Executive opinion

General manager, cloud integration, IBM, Denis Kennelly, said, "Most large organizations have data and workloads spread across multiple public and private clouds, SaaS and on-premises environments – sometimes as a result of their business process infrastructure, but also for compliance, regulatory and data privacy reasons. The challenge in this environment is to overcome data and technology siloes to quickly deploy new business services and applications with security. Today, we are launching new capabilities designed to help unleash the full power of the hybrid cloud."

Vice president, IT, Tribune Publishing, Sarp Uzkan, said, "As we grow our digital business, moving our applications to the cloud is critical to help modernize our processes and deliver even better experiences for our customers. Adopting the right strategy and migration approach to the cloud needs to be seamless and requires an understanding of our IT landscape. IBM cloud advisory services and tools provided a detailed assessment that determined not only which applications would be best to move to the cloud but a strong business case that would meet our needs and enabling us to explore the best approach for moving to the cloud."

Integration tools and Services

Part of cloud integration platform, IBM API Connect handles entire API lifecycle from creation to management, IBM App Connect simply helps in connecting applications and data across all of your environments. IBM MQ solutions help in moving data across the different cloud environment.

IBM DataPower Gateway intends to enable enterprise with security, control, integration and optimized access demanded by digital transformation of businesses. IBM secure Gateway service provides a persistent connection between the IBM Cloud and on-premises or third-party cloud environments.

IBM Aspera on cloud, a hosted service, claimed to provide data migration in hybrid cloud environments with speeds potentially hundreds of times that of FTP and HTTP

The announcement also noted that the newly introduced cloud integration platform brings these tools in a single development environment.

IBM also started offering Services for Cloud Strategy and Design to their enterprise customers in terms of migration, integration, future road map and architectural services. IBM is setting up a dedicated team of professionals who will advice open and secure multicloud strategies.

IBM is also launching the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Service, industry-leading security on the public cloud by introducing IBM LinuxONE into IBM's global cloud data centers.  It will provide encryption key management with a dedicated cloud hardware security module (HSM) built on the only FIPS 140-2 level 4-based technology offered by a public cloud provider.

To summarize, IBM in all has offered its cloud Integration Platform and services to advice on cloud strategies, to simplify resource management in the cloud and to provide security for data and applications in the public cloud.

IBM announced that Watson, IBM's artificial intelligence (AI) platform is now open and available on any cloud platform.

This means it is quite possible that enterprise can use Watson AI on major cloud platform providers such as AWS, Azure and the Google Cloud or any other cloud vendor. Watson and Watson OpenScale can be run on any environment including on premises, or on any private, public or hybrid-multicloud thus allowing enterprises to bring AI to the data where it resides.

To achieve this goal, IBM  integrated a series of Watson microservices on IBM's cloud-native information architecture for artificial intelligence (AI) called IBM Cloud Private for Data. The architecture includes and supports capabilities such as integrated with advanced data science, data engineering, and application-building. The multicloud support is achieved with the help of open-source Kubernetes software, a microservices/container orchestration technology.

As of now any cloud customer who would like to leverage AI capabilities in their applications or environment, need to source AI capabilities from the very same cloud vendor. Obviously, the availability of the Watson AI platform in a multicloud environment will help enterprises avoid such vendor-lock.

Executive opinion

General Manager, IBM Data and AI, Rob Thomas, said, "Businesses have largely been limited to experimenting with AI in siloes due to the limitations caused by cloud provider lock-in of their data. With most large organizations storing data across hybrid cloud environments, they need the freedom and choice to apply AI to their data wherever it is stored. By breaking open that siloed infrastructure we can help businesses accelerate their transformation through AI."

What's Next

This new development Waston AI will allow the enterprise to build advanced conversational interfaces into applications and devices with the help of Waston Assistant.

IBM said its new AI service will be offered through its forthcoming IBM Business Automation Intelligence with Watson and will be made generally available later this year. With IBM Business Automation Intelligence with Watson, customers can able to apply AI directly to the applications.

IBM also announced that IBM Watson Machine Learning is being extended with a new Watson Machine Learning Accelerator which allows high performance GPU clustering on Power Systems and X86 systems.

Institutional grade cryptocurrency exchange platform, Globitex launched their EURO wallet.

In 2017, the company was granted with European Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license by the Bank of Lithuania, a regulatory authority in the European Union, to carry out payment services and e-money issuance in the EU. The license was granted to its parent Globitex Holding (Latvia) group subsidiary NexPay UAB to provide money transfer service.

Executive opinion

The CEO of Globitex, Uldis Teraudkalns, has spoken about the EURO Wallet, stating: "Globitex strives to be the market leader in convenience, security, and compliance. With these values in mind, we have created the EURO Wallet. The EURO Wallet offers unrivaled functionality of having access to a fully functional IBAN account via the Globitex cryptocurrency exchange as well as instant deposits/withdrawals on Globitex trading account."

More about EURO wallet

Globitex exchange's users can make and receive payments in EUR with newly introduced euro Wallet with their personal IBAN account like any other EUR bank account.

International Bank Account Number (IBAN) is used in to uniquely identify a user's bank account. An alphabetical country code, followed by two digits, and then up to thirty-five characters for the bank account number makes an IBAN code.

Thus money can be deposited directly to the account as soon as conversion from cryptocurrency to EURO complete post-trade. Generally, exchanges allow users to access to fiat money after transfer to the user's bank account when initiated manually. This could be time consuming. Gobitex now provides EURO account on its trading platform thus eliminating this extra step to initiate the money transfer.

Further Gobitex allows SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) for cross-border Euro bank transfers which are almost instantanious. Gobitex has also enabled third party payments with the introduction of their EURO wallet.

Twistlock announced the release of its Twistlock Istio Compliance Checks.

Twistlock provides automated and scalable cloud security platform that is purpose-built for containers, serverless and other cloud technologies.

The latest announcement about Twistlock Istio Compliance Checks highlights the company's efforts to help organizations deploy and run the popular Istio service mesh in a secure fashion.

Istio makes it easy to manage the cloud environment by providing capabilities like traffic management, policy enforcement, and telemetry collection. It does so by creating a service mesh.

A service mesh is a software-defined part of an infrastructure that allows a network of microservices to communicate with each other.  Service mesh uses a small and specialized proxy server called sidecar to lookup the address of any other services within the same environment.

Twistlock also authored compliance implementation guides for standards such as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and NIST SP 800-53. Twistlock CTO John Morello also authored the first official advisory on container security from NIST, SP 800-190. Additionally, the announcement also noted that Twistlock Labs security research team was responsible for 14 CVEs related to cloud-native technologies.

Executive opinion

Twistlock Chief Technology Officer (CTO,) John Morello. said, "Since Istio's 0.1 release in May 2017, we've seen many of our customers deploy it to manage their microservices by publicly releasing our first set of Istio Compliance Checks, along with a detailed implementation guide, Twistlock is helping Istio users trust that their service mesh is deployed securely and protected from threats."

Istio Compliance Checks and Standards

In addition to the checks themselves, Twistlock has also released a detailed guide to security for Istio and other service mesh technologies, including detailed instructions on how to implement compliance best practices.

The Istio Compliance standards for the Istio service mesh are available at Twistlock website.

The release of the Twistlock Istio Compliance Checks continues its leadership of standards for cloud-native security, the announcement said.

Cointelligence, a provider of data research and analysis for the crypto economy, launched their new cryptocurrency exchange rating system.
The rating systems are not very new to Cointelligence as they already offer initial coin offerings (ICOs) and security token offerings (STOs). The company processes crypto economy data widely available to the public, collecting everything and brings out their ratings. Addition of cryptocurrency exchanges will further strengthen their portfolio in the crypto industry.

The rating system considers inputs from industry expert reviewers in anonymous fashion thus preventing unnecessary influence on their review boards. The reviewers include the rater, their supervisor, and the head of research. The combination of anonymity and fact-checking protects our ratings from both bias and error.

Executive Opinion

Founder and Chief Executive Officer On Yavin said, "We looked around the industry and we didn't see anyone really doing this. Given the number of hacks and exit scams the exchange industry has seen, we felt this was an important tool to protect the community."

Key Metrics

According to the announcement, Crypto exchanges ratings will be based on key metrics such as accessibility and usability, financial metrics, the credibility of the team behind the crypto-exchange, risk measures are taken the exchange.

The usability aspect considers how it is smoothly an account can be set up, funds can be deposited and withdrawn depositing and withdrawing funds, the quality, and speed of customer support while financial metrics look at commissions, trading volume, amount of markets and tokens available, fiat currency support, and any insurance covers. The risk measures look at regulatory compliance, security protocols, and the withdrawal process.
Cointelligence said that the new rating system of crypto exchanges will help the crypto community with the information they need to find the most reliable platform for trading cryptocurrencies.

The exchange ratings can be accessed here.