HashiCorp piles up Stacks; Tableau thinks globally

Welcome to Runtime! Today: HashiCorp presses ahead with Terraform while awaiting Big Blue's embrace, Tableau customers have a new way to manage data residency requirements, and the quote of the week.

(Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Runtime each week.)

Ship it

"Terraform 2.0": HashiCorp held its annual developer conference this week in Boston, and moved HCP Terraform Stacks, which co-founder and CTO Armon Dadgar called "Terraform 2.0" according to The Register, into public beta. Stacks is a new option for managing different Terraform configurations that removes a lot of the manual labor needed to track dependencies between those configurations.

The company also added new security features to Vault, its secrets-management product, that allow administrators to automatically rotate security credentials to help prevent breaches. The new features arrive as regulators scrutinize IBM's $6.4 billion acquisition of the company earlier this year, but CEO Dave McJannet told attendees he still expects the deal to close by the end of the year.

Rubrik adds seat belts to Copilot: Security is one of the primary concerns CIOs and CISOs have about adopting Microsoft's new Copilot tools for Microsoft 365, especially after researchers at Black Hat demonstrated how Copilot could be used to wreak havoc inside a company. This week Rubrik, which received substantial funding from Microsoft before going public earlier this year, introduced a new security tool for Microsoft 365 that was "designed to provide the data visibility and control needed to ensure sensitive data is correctly classified, labeled, and segmented – and has the right access permissions."

The Data Security Posture Management tool can find sensitive files across an organization and wall them off from Copilot, and also detect files that aren't labeled at all. But if CIOs feel that they need an additional security product just to use Microsoft 365 Copilot, the cost of adding generative AI to the daily workflow just went up.

Tableau's regional approach: As data residency requirements proliferate, especially in Europe, companies with a global presence often find themselves jumping through a lot of hoops to make sure they can stay on top of data that needs to reside within borders. The latest version of Tableau hopes to make that process easier for its business intelligence customers.

"Admins can now create and manage multiple Tableau sites in the regions of their choice, as well as centrally manage licenses and users across sites — without having to license a single user multiple times," the company said in a blog post. The new version also adds support for geospatial data, allowing users to add another way to sort their data by geography.

Honeycomb sweetens its platform: Honeycomb has been defining the evolution of monitoring to observability since it was founded eight years ago, and it added two significant products to its arsenal this week. Telemetry Pipeline was designed to let companies using older data-collection tools take advantage of newer observability tactics, and it is based around the open-source OpenTelemetry project.

Honeycomb for Log Analytics was designed to "use the full power and speed of Honeycomb’s analysis engine on log data, thanks to a much more log-native experience—no configuring of indexes necessary," according to the company. Logs paint a picture of activity across an application, and are just as valuable for security teams as they are for reliability engineers.

Dropbox's AI search: Dropbox rose to prominence during an era in which moving desktop files into the cloud was ground-breaking, but finding everything in the cloud isn't always easy. This week it unveiled Dash for Business, an AI assistant that allows users to search for the information they need using natural language.

"Dash for Business combines universal search and organization with in-depth content access control for businesses big and small, giving IT admins visibility and control over the content people share and access," the company said. The new service is only available in English to U.S. customers, but Dropbox intends to roll it out to a wider set of customers next year.

Stat of the week

Ransomware attacks are up 275% percent on a year-over-year basis, according to Microsoft, but there is a silver lining to this cloud story. Attacks that result in the encryption of stolen data have fallen 300% over the last two years, suggesting that companies are becoming more savvy about protecting their data and having backups.

Quote of the week

"If there are people who just don't work well in that environment and don't want to, that's okay, there are other companies around. When we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we're not in-person." — AWS CEO Matt Garman, talking to employees in an all-hands meeting about its return-to-office policy, according to Reuters, and perhaps inadvertently confirming the sentiment that AWS was caught off-guard by the generative AI revolution during the pandemic years.

The Runtime roundup

OpenAI could wiggle out of its contract with Microsoft by simply declaring that it has achieved artificial general intelligence, according to the New York Times, which would be hilarious.

Slack published a very interesting engineering retrospective of how it dealt with scaling challenges after bringing IBM on board as a customer.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!