Mark Wantling could also be 200 miles away however his discomfort is apparent to see, even on the small video window of a Zoom convention name. “That pen check was a automobile crash,” he says. “It was completely horrendous.”
A sequence of high-profile cyberattacks on universities already had him on excessive alert, so too the realisation that re-engineering the College of Salford’s infrastructure for hundreds of distant college students would have repercussions for cybersecurity.
Certainly, Pink Hat is the main Linux-based supplier of enterprise cloud infrastructure. It’s been adopted by 90 % of enterprises and has greater than 8M builders. Its OpenShift expertise is a key part of its success, because it gives a solution to simply deploy multi-cloud environments by a full stack management and administration functionality constructed on prime of business normal Kubernetes and deployed in a digital Linux stack.
However a brutal penetration check that efficiently poked holes all through his community in a matter of hours was what lit the touchpaper. It was this train which proved the catalyst for figuring out and remediating zero-day vulnerabilities linked to the WannaCry and SolarWinds incidents, for issuing of 38,000 important safety patches and for bringing his IT operations and infosec groups collectively in course of and tooling.
But on the time, again in March 2020, Wantling had different priorities. With the primary UK authorities lockdown on the horizon, the college, primarily based in Higher Manchester, was within the means of migrating its digital studying atmosphere to a SaaS-based platform and had additionally deployed Home windows Digital Desktop and Citrix Apps and Digital Desktop on a Nutanix HCI to permit college students to remotely entry purposes and desktop PCs.