As the war against the novel coronavirus deepens with billions of people across the world facing a period of self-isolation to help contain the spread, Sony BBC Earth is bringing to India a critical docu-film ‘Coronavirus: How to Isolate Yourself’. Presented by Dr Xand Van Tulleken and Psychologist Kimberley Wilson, the 1-hour feature is a one-step guide to everything one needs to know about this pandemic and is full of useful and credible tips and advice.
Xand Van Tulleken is a registered doctor with the General Medical Council of the UK and a renowned presenter. To comprehend the situation, he visits leading experts who explain why self-isolation is most important in this fight against coronavirus, as well as finds out about people’s real-world challenges of self-isolating. The docu-film also focusses on Kimberly who offers insights into the psychological challenges of self-isolating, talks about how to manage anxiety and provides key takeaways that everyone must adapt while self-isolating.
Coronavirus is a serious concern and while there is a long road to recovery, the crucial thing to understand is that every individual can play a part in slowing it down by self-isolating. Additionally, there is a plethora of information accessible to all which may lead to confusion and contradiction but, one must remember that just like the virus, wrong information too is contagious. Hence Sony BBC Earth is premiering the most important docu-film of the current times, ‘Coronavirus: How to Isolate Yourself’.
Tune-in to ‘Coronavirus: How to Isolate Yourself’ every night, 13th April onwards only on Sony BBC Earth
Bengaluru, April 9, 2020: Helo has partnered with NGO Give Indiaand Action Aidto launch#MainBhiCOVIDWarriorcampaign. The initiative’s key focus is to provide support to 20,000 families of daily wagers, with a month long supplies of essential food and sanitization kits. Helo has donated INR 5 crore towards this effort.
Helo also collaborated with Jjust music and Cape of Good Film for a music video titled ‘Muskurayega India’. The song features actors like Akshay Kumar, Tiger Shroff, Kriti Sanon, Kartik Aaryan, Taapsee Pannu, Kiara Advani, Ananya Pandey, Shikhar Dhawan and more, who have come together to lift the spirits of people in this tough times of the COVID19 pandemic. The song has been launched and is composed by Vishal Mishra.
With an objective to further support COVIDrelief efforts for the larger community, Helo has contributed INR 2 crore as part of these initiatives to the PM CARES Fund and Maharashtra’s CM Fund. As part of Helo’s #MainbhiCOVIDWarriorcampaign, Shipa Shetty and popular creators on Helo, aim to encourage people to also come forward and contribute to the Give India initiative so that more such vulnerable families can be provided with basic supplies for a period of a month.
As a responsible platform, Helo continues to provide credible information with a dedicated page – #FightAgainstCoronavirus, created by the platform to facilitate timely updates in 14 languages, from credible sources like World Heath Organization, Indian Health Ministry etc. By using Helo’s live streaming, the Honourable Chief Ministers of Kerala, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh have been sharing necessary information and around key government initiatives to fight COVID-19.
Number of Virtual Cloud Network Customers Has Grown on Average 50 Percent Each Fiscal Year Since May 2018, Now Totaling More than 15,000
VMware NSX-T 3.0 and vRealize Network Insight 5.2 Simplify Cloud and Container Networking, Security, and Application Discovery to support Agility and Business Continuity
VMware Brings One-Click Automation Matching the Public Cloud Experience
Bengaluru. (April 9, 2020) – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced the number of VirtualCloud Network customers now exceeds 15,000, including 89 of the Fortune 100 and eight of the top 10 Telcos, and has grown on average 50 percent each fiscal year since May 2018. VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network solution is an integral component of VMware Cloud Foundation, which is offered on all major hyperscale cloud providers – AWS, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud – and uniquely enables VMware to make private clouds as efficient and agile as public clouds and support business continuity efforts.
The company also announced new networking and security innovations that will significantly enhance any company’s ability to deliver the public cloud experience on-premises. With the VMware NSX-T 3.0 and VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.2, enterprises gain even higher levels of automation and insight for networking functions that span services from Layer 2 switching all the way to Layer 7 application firewall, load balancing and IDS/IPS filtering.
Seven years ago, VMware pioneered software-defined networking, de-coupling network functions from physical devices analogous to de-coupling virtual servers from physical servers. This helped reduce application deployment times from months to minutes and made microsegmentation economically and operationally feasible to help stop the internal, lateral spread of malware. Two years ago, VMware introduced the Virtual Cloud Network, extending virtual networking and security capabilities from edge to core to cloud for any workload running in VMs, containers, or bare metal. Today, VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network solution is the industry’s only complete Layer 2-7 virtual networking stack, delivering highly innovative capabilities for switching, routing, firewalling, and SD-WAN completely in software for enterprise and Telco/5G environments.
“Our Virtual Cloud Network solution is helping our customers provide the public cloud experience on-premise, removing the inefficient IT ticket requests and long waits for networking and security changes,” said Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager, Networking and Security Business Unit at VMware. “Across private, public and Telco clouds, and from the data center to the branch office, the Virtual Cloud Network has simplified networking, and saved customers time and money. Our data shows customers can experience as much as a 59 percent reduction in capital expenditures and 55 percent reduction in operational expenditures over traditional networking solutions (1).”
New Innovations for The Virtual Cloud Network
Automation and replacement of legacy network and security infrastructure continue to be the key drivers for adoption of the Virtual Cloud Network. Today, VMware is delivering new innovations against its vision for the Virtual Cloud Network as the enabler for delivering the public cloud experience on premises:
Delivering the Public Cloud Experience:Adoption of cloud computing and support for digital businessinitiatives demand improved data center network agility and business continuity. NSX-T 3.0 introduces NSX Federation, enabling enterprises to deliver a cloud-like operating model with fault isolation domains and global policies that are synchronized across all locations. A fault isolation domain allows customers to better ensure that networks aren’t brittle. They will now be able to contain any network problems to
a single zone minimizing the severity and impact of problems when they arise. VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.2 introduces flow-based application discovery across multiple VMware platforms using machine learning to better understand categorized applications by tier.
Making Security Intrinsic:VMware is taking internal security to the next level following the introductionsof the industry-first Service-defined firewall and NSX Intelligence with the general availability of Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDS/IPS) capabilities for the Service-defined Firewall. NSX Distributed IDS/IPS takes advantage of VMware’s unique intrinsic understanding of the services that make up applications to match IDS/IPS signatures to specific parts of the application. NSX Distributed IDS/IPS signatures are application specific and only applied to the appropriate servers, resulting in fewer false positives and significantly higher throughput. These capabilities enable efficiency and flexibility that cannot be matched by legacy and proprietary hardware-defined systems and are a major differentiator of the software-based scale-out approach of VMware NSX.
Full Stack Networking and Security for Modern Applications:Applications and microservices run on awide variety of heterogenous endpoints such as VMs, containers, and bare metal servers, creating a challenge to consistently connect and secure them. NSX-T treats containers and VMs as first-class citizens, having supported Kubernetes platforms for more than two years. With the NSX-T 3.0 release, enterprises can extend its full stack container networking services including switching, routing, distributed firewall, micro-segmentation, and load balancing to the newly released VMware vSphere with Kubernetes and VMware Cloud Foundation 4 platforms, the VMware Tanzu portfolio, and non-VMware Kubernetes platforms.
End-to-End Visibility and Analytics:VMware vRealize Network Insight, available as on-premises softwareor SaaS, provides end-to-end network visibility and analytics to optimize network performance and troubleshoot the entire Virtual Cloud Network, including the virtual overlay and physical underlay, and spanning data centers, multi-cloud environments, and branch locations. New flow-based application discovery leverages unsupervised learning, statistical techniques, enriched network flows, and advanced application labelling algorithms to discover application and tier boundaries, providing insights into network communication density, applications patterns, and enhanced security recommendations. Other enhancements include, AWS Direct Connect support, VMware SD-WAN application and business policy statistics, enhanced Kubernetes visibility and support for VMware NSX-T 3.0.
Networking for Next-Generation Telco Clouds and 5G:With the Virtual Cloud Network, operators canbuild scalable networks to support 5G and edge strategies. VMware NSX plays a key role in accelerating network performance and efficient end-to-end network operations in the network core, serving as an SDN layer for virtual network functions. NSX-T 3.0 introduces capabilities such as L3 EVPN for VM mobility, multicast routing for scalable networking, and accelerated data plane performance. Additionally, VMware SD-WAN acts as an intelligent overlay in conjunction with 5G’s network sliced underlays to deliver more cost-effective, high-performance, application-aware services at the network edge.
Virtual Cloud Networking for Azure Edge Zones:VMware is working with Microsoft to offer SD-WANsolutions for Azure Edge Zones, which deliver Azure services and enable customers to seamlessly deploy and run Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) including VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud. The VMware SD-WAN solution is fully integrated with the Azure portal and will enable Zero Touch Provisioning across Azure Edge Zones while shielding customers from operations and VNF life cycle management complexities. VMware SD-WAN makes intelligent decisions based on network conditions and steers traffic on the optimal network path that meets SLAs and helps optimize the user experience for applications such as Office 365 or Microsoft Teams.
Virtual Cloud Network Empowers a Remote Workforce
With VMware NSX and SD-WAN, organizations can support business continuity with more secure, reliable access for traditional and SaaS applications, including VoIP, UCaaS, collaboration, and VDI, from providers such as Microsoft, Zoom, Vonage, Ring Central, Windstream. With VMware NSX, customers can protect their remote workers who are using virtual desktops to access enterprise applications. NSX allows customers to easily microsegment and comprehensively enhance the security of their VDI environment without making any changes to their existing network infrastructure. VMware SD-WAN delivers an optimal teleworking experience for work-at-home users. VMware SD-WAN recently released significant enhancements for enterprise routing and security, analytics, and management as well as specific enhancements for business continuity and work from home deployments. To help organizations quickly empower a remote digital workforce, VMware is offering a comprehensive solution with SecureVDI with NSX and offering the VMware SD-WAN Work @Home free trial, which provides end user hardware and hosted services for up to 90-days for up to 100 employees using two Work @Home bundles.
Proposed Customer and Industry Commentary
IDC is a premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services and events. Brad Casemore,research VP for datacenter networking at IDC said: “In a world increasingly defined by hybrid IT andmulticloud, network agility must involve not just network automation, but intelligent network automation capable of delivering actional insights. Modern cloud-native applications and multicloud deployments have resulted in the need for network and security services to become software-defined, distributed, and increasingly composable and modular so that they can be applied on a per-application basis. With a complete Layer 2-7 portfolio – built both organically and through acquisitions such as VeloCloud, AVI Networks, Nyansa and Veriflow – VMware is well positioned to help enterprises successfully address the proliferation of multiple, heterogenous siloes of infrastructure created by modern applications and to deliver a simpler approach to providing intelligent networks for hybrid IT and multicloud environments.”
Ceridian is a leading provider of Human Capital Management software, transforming the employeeexperience through a combined payroll, HR, benefits, workforce management, and talent management solution. Warren Perlman, CIO at Ceridian said: “For Ceridian, cloud is the play. We’re looking to drivethe highest levels of automation across our environment like you get in the public cloud. The VMware Virtual Cloud Network gives us this model for networking and security. VMware NSX enables Ceridian to treat network infrastructure as code to deliver new software releases and deploy our applications much faster. VMware has helped us change our network security architecture by replacing many physical security solutions with the VMware Service-defined Firewall. VMware vRealize Network Insight provides network visibility and real-time access to application and network security information that previously took multiple people and multiple solutions to gather.”
Availability
VMware NSX-T 3.0 is generally available today. VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.2 is expected to be available in VMware’s fiscal Q1 FY21 which ends on May 1, 2020.
Bangalore, Wednesday, April 09, 2020 – Bangalore based Tree Free paper manufacturer, Bluecat Paper today announced the collaboration with Poland based founder of BEE SAVING PAPER, Anna Gadecka to create a one of its kind paper which helps save the diminishing bee population. The paper is created from residual lemon grass, as bees love and are attracted to the scent of lemon grass. Seeds such as mustard and basil are added to further attract bees.
The Bee Saving Paper is also used to produce a range of products like bookmarks, gift bags and tags, notebooks and thank you cards. The paper has seeds of bee friendly flowering plans embedded to facilitate pollination.
It is a researched fact that bees play an important role in maintaining the ecological balance and it is said that humans will not survive beyond four years if bees were to become extinct. Bees are perfectly adapted to pollinate, helping plants grow, breed and produce food. They do so by transferring pollen between flowering plants and so keep the cycle of life turning.
Sadly, the bee population across the world is on a rapid decline due to excessive mobile phone signal radiation, loss of habitat due to deforestation, abandoned farms and simply reduction in bee friendly flowering plants. The bee saving paper can help struggling bees. Tear pieces of bee saving paper, wet it and put in under the bee. The paper acts like an energy drink for the bee, helping it revive itself
Speaking about this initiative with Bluecat Paper, Anna Gadecka, Founder, Bee Saving paper, said, “I have been researching on this for a while now and was looking for a tree free paper manufacturer and I was thrilled when I came across Bluecat Paper. It would have been detrimental to the cause if this had to be done with paper made from felling trees and this moral dilemma didn’t allow me to progress with my efforts. Now that we are associated with Bluecat Paper in our efforts, I am looking forward to Bee Saving Paper becoming a more widely accepted norm.”
Kavya Madappa, CEO, Bluecat Paper, said, “When Anna reached out to us, I was excited with the possibilities of this effort. Bluecat Paper was saving trees and Anna was trying to save bees. This alone was a valid reason to collaborate and take this forward. It’s going to be an exciting journey with Anna in our attempt to save our planet.”
• 10 lakh pieces of Savlon soaps• 6 lakh packets of Sunfeast Biscuits• 3 lakh packets of YiPPee! noodles• 1.5 lakh packets B Natural Juices distributed so far• ITC’s Foods Business has curated special boxes of Aashirvaad and Sunfeast for children and elderly• ITC Hotels and ITC Paperboards Divisions distributing meals and hygiene products
As part of the multiple initiatives undertaken by ITC in India’s fight against the Coronavirus, the Company is working closely with district administrations across 17 states in the country to provide essential food items like atta, noodles, biscuits & juices and hygiene products like soaps for people in distress.
This initiative is currently going on in full swing with more than 1 million pieces of Savlon soaps, 3 lakh packets of YiPPee! noodles, nearly 6 lakh packets of Sunfeast biscuitsand 1.5 lakh packs of B Natural fruit juices being delivered to district authorities till date. In some parts, the police administration has requested for soaps for their personnel which has also been provided. Savlon soaps have also been provided for district health centres in some states including West Bengal.
ITC Foods Distributing food items to children and elderly:
To provide support to the children and senior citizens across Indian households, ITC Foods is sending food supplies across the country through its ‘Aashirvaad Box of Hope’ and ‘Sunfeast Box of Happiness’ initiative. ITC has joined hands with 3 leading NGOs building a seamless network to deliver essential food supplies to those severely impacted by the current lockdown. With support from the State Government, ITC’s Foods Division has also provided help to the residents of Bhilwara district in Rajasthan, one of the worst affected districts by distributing 10 kilograms of Aashirvaad Atta to cover approximately a month-long staple requirement and some snacks like Bingo! for the members of some of the families from the region.
Distribution of cooked meals:
Given the urgent requirement to provide cooked meals to migrant workers and needy people across the country, ITC Hotels as well as ITC factories are providing extensive support to Governments across different states, based on the requirements of the local administration as well as hospitals. ITC Maurya and Sheraton in New Delhi have been providing over 1500 meals daily for distribution to migrant workers. ITC Gardenia in Bengaluru is lending its support with 1000 food packets daily for 15 days (15000 meals) to the Municipal Corporation. ITC Grand Central in Mumbai has made arrangements to deliver meals to doctors in MG Hospital. Food has also been catered to doctors at the Kasturba Hospital in Mumbai by ITC Grand Central. Fortune Hotel in Lucknow is also lending assistance through the provision of more than 1000 meals per day. This initiative will be progressively rolled out in other metros based on the need. ITC’s Paperboards Business has been distributing over 1400 meals to migrant labourers around the factory in Bhadrachalam. In addition, ITC factories in Saharanpur, UP well as ITC teams in Patna have been providing more than 3500 cooked meals per day in proximate areas.
Distribution of Hygiene Products:
In addition to providing meals, ITC Hotel properties in Jaipur and Goa have made meaningful contributions by providing shower caps for doctors and healthcare workers as well as ensuring availability of sanitisers.
In Bhadrachalam, ITC’s Paper and Paperboards Divisiondistributed masks and hand gloves to truck drivers as well as sanitisers to public health workers in Secunderabad. The Business also disinfected around 18 villages around the Bhadrachalam factory. Awareness programmes were also conducted by the Well Being out of Waste Teams in 16 districts of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
ITC’s Corona Contingency Fund of Rs 150 crore:
As an organisation committed to serving national priorities, ITC has taken several other initiatives over the last few weeks to support lives and livelihoods during the unprecedented crisis posed by the Coronavirus pandemic. ITC has set up a Contingency Fund of Rs 150 crore to provide relief to the vulnerable and most needy sections of society who have been harshly impacted by the pandemic. In support of the Government’s efforts in mitigating the crisis, ITC pledged its contribution of Rs 100 crore to the #PMCaresFunds
Ensuring Distribution of Essential Commodities to Consumers:
To ensure the availability of essential items such as ITC’s different Food products and Savlon hygiene products across the country, ITC’s entire supply chain right from agri sourcing to production to distribution is working tirelessly battling all odds to ensure that consumers are not inconvenienced on account of shortages or unavailability. ITC has also been working closely with Government authorities and local administration to ensure that manufacturing and distribution of ITC’s essential commodities continue uninterrupted with minimum people. ITC has redoubled its efforts to ensure a heightened level of precaution and have implemented strict protocols for personal hygiene, sanitation and social distancing in its factories that are producing essential commodities. For those who have to work in factories or maintain supplies in markets, every safety precaution including supply of sanitizers, protective gear, masks, regular temperature checks, staggered work timings and availability of 24×7 medical support have been implemented.
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