Hentsū Achieves Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform Competency Partner Certification
[et_pb_section fb_built="1" _builder_version="3.22"][et_pb_row _builder_version="3.25" background_size="initial" background_position="top_left" background_repeat="repeat"][et_pb_column type="4_4" _builder_version="3.25" custom_padding="|||" custom_padding__hover="|||"][et_pb_text _builder_version="3.27.4"]Hentsū, the global leader in cloud services for asset managers, are proud to have achieved the Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform Competency partner certification.In recognition of our experience and technical ability providing cloud solutions, Hentsū is now Cloud Platform Gold status in the Microsoft Partner Network, both in the UK and the US. This is less than 1 year since our Silver certification and compliments our Microsoft Tier 1 Cloud Services Provider status in both regions.Hentsū have been providing Microsoftcloud solutions since our inception in October 2015.The Microsoft Gold partner certification signifies that Hentsūhas achieved the highest level of Microsoftpartnership program status. Hentsū will continue to work closely with Microsoft to remain at the forefront of the latest cloud developments, products and services, as well as ongoing enablement and training.The Gold competency is a recognition of the outstanding skillsand expertise of our staff, which are the foundations of Hentsūcapabilities in financial services.This type of investment in training and certification is a hallmark of Hentsūas a technical solutions provider.Bringing value to our clientsThis important designation recognizes that our certified associates are at the leading edge of cloud knowledge and can offer clients the best technical guidance and solution execution. Collaborating with a Microsoft GoldCertified Partner means working with proven technical experts who have built up realexperience in the solutions they deploy.OurMicrosoft Certified Partner status has a wide range of technical benefits which includes access to cloud services and support.We are proud of the continued dedication of our staff and their hardwork which has enabled us to reach this prestige status. In order to achieve this certification, we had to fulfil extensive requirements, training, certification, and reference case studies. We are honoured to be considered amongst the best when it comes to cloud solutions and support.Our servicesSince our inception in 2015, Hentsū has been pioneering asset manager solutions across all three cloud providers – AWS, Microsoft and Google. We have been steadily growing our expertise and experience with each provider and the solutions we offer. Today we cater for all technology requirements – from the staple of collaboration and security using Microsoft 365, to the high-end data science and quant workloads.
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[/et_pb_text][et_pb_cta title="Talk to us about your public cloud strategy today" button_url="https://hentsuprod.wpengine.com/contact" url_new_window="on" button_text="Contact Us Today" _builder_version="3.16" button_text_size__hover_enabled="off" button_one_text_size__hover_enabled="off" button_two_text_size__hover_enabled="off" button_text_color__hover_enabled="off" button_one_text_color__hover_enabled="off" button_two_text_color__hover_enabled="off" button_border_width__hover_enabled="off" button_one_border_width__hover_enabled="off" button_two_border_width__hover_enabled="off" button_border_color__hover_enabled="off" button_one_border_color__hover_enabled="off" button_two_border_color__hover_enabled="off" button_border_radius__hover_enabled="off" button_one_border_radius__hover_enabled="off" button_two_border_radius__hover_enabled="off" button_letter_spacing__hover_enabled="off" button_one_letter_spacing__hover_enabled="off" button_two_letter_spacing__hover_enabled="off" button_bg_color__hover_enabled="off" button_one_bg_color__hover_enabled="off" button_two_bg_color__hover_enabled="off"]Need to improve how you run your hedge fund technology? Concerned with your legacy private cloud provider? Not getting the service you need? Hentsū can help!
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We are pleased to announce that our recent submission to the CSA Star registry, for our Security self-assessment document, was successful. The Security Trust Assurance and Risk (STAR) Program encompasses key principles of transparency, rigorous auditing, and harmonization of standards. Companies who use STAR indicate best practices and validate the security posture of their cloud offerings.
The STAR registry documents security and privacy controls provided by popular cloud computing offerings. This publicly accessible registry allows cloud customers to assess their security providers in order to make the best procurement decisions.
As a member of this registry we:
Provide our customers with a high level of transparency and confidence that we use best cloud security practices
Help customers make the best procurement decision for them
Define gaps and improve our security posture
Continuously improve and reach higher, third-party audited, security level and certification
With the successful submission of our self-assessment document to the CSA registry, we have completed our first step on the road to the full STAR Level 3 Goal.
We have the breadth and depth of knowledge and experience to design, build and manage every aspect of your hedge fund technology. We offer next generation Corporate IT with cloud-based offerings such as O365 and OneDrive, Cloud Strategy Roadmap Design and Implementation, Data Science as a Service and Regulatory Technology solutions.
Talk to us about your public cloud strategy today. Contact us at hello@hentsu.com
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Need to improve how you run your hedge fund technology? Concerned with your legacy private cloud provider? Not getting the service you need?
We are pleased to announce that the 2019 AITEC DDQ is now available to all AITEC and AIMA members and we are now formally on the AITEC vendor list. The AITEC-AIMA DDQ for Vendor Technology and Cyber Security was created to streamline the process of conducting due diligence on vendors servicing the alternative asset management industry. We are proud to join this list of innovative solution providers as we continue to offer top expertise to our clients.
Do not hesitate to reach out to us for more information on the AITEC DDQ.
We have the breadth and depth of knowledge and experience to design, build and manage every aspect of your hedge fund technology. We offer next generation Corporate IT with cloud-based offerings such as O365 and OneDrive, Cloud Strategy Roadmap Design and Implementation, Data Science as a Service and Regulatory Technology solutions.
Talk to us about your public cloud strategy today. Contact us at hello@hentsu.com
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Need to improve how you run your hedge fund technology? Concerned with your legacy private cloud provider? Not getting the service you need?
Hentsu has taken the time to carefully construct this Azure Data Factory case study, to highlight the benefits of both the cloud and MS ADF. A client recently approached us with a data science challenge regarding one of their data sets. The data was provided to the client in an AWS environment in a Redshift data warehouse. While this was fast they found it to be very expensive, in AWS the data and compute costs are coupled together. As such, a large data set necessitates a high spend on computing costs, even if this level of speed is not necessary for their analysts.
However, the data was also available in CSV format in an S3 storage bucket, which could be the starting point of a new approach. The client already had all their infrastructure deployed and managed by Hentsū in Azure, so they wanted to consolidate into the existing infrastructure.
After reviewing the challenges, we were able to create an elegant solution leveraging the huge power and scale of the cloud, which is simply not possible in traditional infrastructure.
The solution had to be able to process this large data set consisting of over 11,000 files and a total compressed size of ~2TB, with additional files every day.
Raw files had to be stored for any future needs, whilst also being ingested into a database.
The ingestion should both be parallelisable and rate controlled, to ensure we manage the number of database connections and have orderly ingestion.
Not only was this to be a one-time load of historical data, but new files created needed downloading and ingesting in an automated fashion.
Every file had to be accounted for to ensure that all the data is moved correctly, so keeping track of each file's status was important. Things happen; connections break, processes stop working, so we must have a system in place when these do occur.
Keep ongoing maintenance low effort, cost-efficient and automated, and delegate as much of the maintenance away from end-users.
Hentsū recommended a solution built on Azure Data Factory (ADF), Microsoft's Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) solution for Azure. While there are many ETL solutions that can run on any infrastructure, this is very much a native Azure service. It also easily ties into the other services Microsoft offers.
The key functionality is the ability to define the pipelines to move the data in a web user interface, set the schedules which can either be event based (such as a creation of a new file) or on a time schedule. After that, Azure handles the execution of the pipelines to process the data. The pipeline creation requires relatively little coding experience. In other words, makes it easy to delegate this to staff with little technical experience.
In this particular azure data factory case study, Hentsūbuilt out the data pipelines to move the data from AWS into Azure. The initial load was triggered manually, but then the update schedules were set to check for new files at regular intervals.
Hentsūcreated status tables to keep track of each file. This allows us to keep track of the state of the data as it passes through the pipelines and use a decoupled structure so that any troubleshooting or manual intervention can happen at any stage of the process without creating dependencies. The decoupled structure meant that individual files and steps can be fixed in isolation. Following that, the rest of the pipelines and steps continue uninterrupted. The clean decoupling means any errors on a particular step were easily identified and notified to users for investigation.
All the data was then mapped back to these tables, to be used if we ever needed to do further processing or cleaning on the final tables. The data was further transformed with additional schema changes to match the client's end use and to map it to the traditional trading data.
The pipelines were deliberately abstracted to allow for the least amount of work to add new data sources in the future. The goal was to make it easy for the client's end users to do themselves as and when required.
ADF can run completely within Azure as a native serverless solution. This means there is no need to worry about where the pipelines are run, what instance types to choose upfront, manage any servers/operating systems, configure networking, and so on. The definitions and schedules are simply set up and then the execution is handled.
Running as a serverless solution means true "utility computing", which is the entire premise of cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, and Google. The client only pays for what is used, there are no times with idle servers costing money without producing anything, and it can scale up as needed.
ADF also allows the use of parallelism while keeping your costs to only what is used. This scaling up was a huge benefit of ADF for the client and when time is of the essence; one server for 100 hours or 100 servers for one hour cost the same, but the work is done in 1/100th of the time. Hentsūtuned the solution so the speed of the initial load was only restricted by the power of the database, allowing the client to balance the trade-off between speed and cost.
ADF has some programming functionality, such as loops, waits, and parameters for the whole pipeline. Although there is not as much flexibility as a full language (Python for example) it allowed Hentsū significant flexibility to design the workflows.
There are limited sources and sinks (i.e. inputs and outputs). The full list is available in the Microsoft documentation. Microsoft's goal with ADF is to get data into Azure products, so if one needs to move data into another cloud provider a different solution is needed.
The pipelines are written in their own proprietary "language." This means the pipelines code does not integrate well with anything else, which would not be the case if they were written in a language like Python, as many other ETL tools will provide. This is also the key reason we have developed our own ETL platform for more complex solutions which uses Docker and more portable Python code.
There were some usability issues when creating the pipelines, with confusing UI or vague errors on occasion; however, these were not showstoppers. Our advice when using the ADF UI is to make small changes and save often. We can see that Microsoft is already aggressively addressing some of the issues we encountered.
The client was very pleased with the ADF and Azure SQL Data Warehouse solution. This Azure Data Factory case study brought an elegant solution. The solution automatically scales the compute power to process the data as it changes week by week. It also scales up when there is more data, and scales down with less data. Overall, the solution costs a fraction of what it did previously whilst keeping it all within the client's Azure environment.
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Microsoft recently had a flurry of announcements about Office 365 and especially Microsoft Teams. Below, we highlight some of the key changes important to the asset management space.
Microsoft: Now Available
Outlook on the web - Conditional Access
Office 365 can now set up policies that block users from downloading files from Outlook on the web to non-compliant devices. This helps provide more flexibility on the go, but still retains a good degree of security around your company files.
Azure AD Password Protection
Azure AD Password Protection helps you eliminate easily guessed passwords from your environment, which can dramatically lower the risk of being compromised by a password spray attack. Specifically, these features let you:
Protect accounts in Azure AD and Windows Server Active Directory by preventing users from using passwords from a list of more than 500 of the most commonly used passwords, plus over 1-million character substitution variations of those passwords.
Manage Azure AD Password Protection for Azure AD and on-premises Windows Server Active Directory from a unified admin console.
Update to Exchange Mailbox Auditing – Mailboxes Audited by Default and New Mailbox Actions to Audit
To ensure clients have access to critical audit data to investigate security or regulatory incidents in their tenancy when required, the Exchange Online service introduces a configuration that automatically enables mailbox auditing on all applicable mailboxes to users of the Commercial service. With this update, it is no longer required to configure the per-mailbox audit setting for the service to begin storing security audit data. These actions are of high interest to understand the activities that are taking place within the tenant.
Combined Password Reset & MFA Registration
Microsoft released a preview of a new user experience that allows users to register security info for multi-factor authentication (MFA) and password reset in a single experience. Now when a user registers security info such as their phone number for receiving verification codes, that number can also be used for resetting a password. Likewise, users can change or delete their security info from a single page, making it easier to keep information up-to-date.
Outlook Calendar: Option to Block Forwarding of Meeting Invites
Meeting organizers have the option to prevent attendees from forwarding a meeting invitation. This option is available only for users in Office 365. In the first release, the option to prevent forwarding is available when creating or editing meetings in Outlook on the web, but the option will become available in Outlook for Windows shortly after.
In Development: To Keep an Eye On
Admin tool: TeamSite Auto-Mount
Admins can specify TeamSite Libraries that they want their users to automatically sync with OneDrive for Business.
Passwordless Sign-in for Work Accounts
Microsoft Authenticator mobile app now supports sign-in with your face/fingerprint or device PIN to your work accounts. You can take out the security risk of passwords and have the convenience of using a device you already own and carry with you. This option can be configured by administrators in the Azure Active Directory.
For more Information on the latest Microsoft updates check out the roadmap here.
