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Cropin, an agritech startup backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on Tuesday said that it was launching its industry cloud for agriculture, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Dubbed Cropin Cloud, the suite comes with the ability to ingest and process data, run machine learning models for quick analysis and decision making, and several applications specific to the industry’s needs.

The company claims that the cloud suite, which is built on a knowledge base of more than 500 crops and 10,000 crop varieties across 92 nations, will solve planet-scale challenges such as food security and climate-related issues, while reducing the environmental impact of farming.

The suite, according to the company, consists of three layers: Cropin Apps, the Cropin Data Hub and Cropin Intelligence.

Cropin Apps, as the name suggests, comprises applications that support global farming operations management, food safety measures, supply chain and “farm to fork” visibility, predictability and risk management, farmer enablement and engagement, advance seed R&D, production management, and multigenerational seed traceability.

These applications can also aid nutrition management as well as deforestation and carbon-emissions management, and help farmers adopt regenerative agriculture and climate-safe practices, the company said.

The second layer, Data Hub, can ingest data from a variety of sources including on-farm devices, drones, IoT devices and satellites. Agriculture businesses and farmers can use the hub to access structured and contextualized data from various sources for correlation and analysis at scale, the company said.

Cropin Data Hub also has prebuilt data frameworks designed to solve the most challenging problems, such as cloud-free satellite imagery, boundary detection of farm plots, and segmentation of land use, Cropin said. 

The third layer, Cropin Intelligence, uses the company’s 22 prebuilt AI and deep-learning models to provide insights about crop detection, crop stage identification, yield estimation, irrigation scheduling, pest and disease prediction, nitrogen uptake, water stress detection, harvest date estimation, and change detection, among others.

The company claims to have deployed such predictive maintenance or analysis across 200 million acres of land globally.

Bengalaru-based Cropin, which was founded in 2010 by Krishna Kumar, Kunal Prasad and Chittaranjan Jena, claims to have raised around $33 million to date from 12 investors such as ABC World Asia, BEENEXT, Invested Development and Sophia Investment APs among others. 

The company says it has partnered with more than 250 B2B customers.

There are other startups across the world that offer solutions and services similar to Cropin, including:

New Zealand-based startup Onfarm Data, which was founded in 2017, offers a cloud-based platform for farmers to control, monitor, and manage irrigation systems remotely.Founded in 2016, Malaysian startup Agritix offers a plantation workforce management solution, dubbed Agritix Workforce.Another startup, founded in 2018 in the UK under the name Glas Data, provides a cloud-based agriculture analysis platform that can aggregate data from various sources in the farm and provide insights in the form of dashboard visualizations.Norwegian startup Dynaspace, also founded in 2018, offers a platform called InsightSphere, that uses satellite imagery to provide a map of agriculture operations.In the US, Aggio, founded in 2016, offers a cloud-based sales and market-intelligence platform.

The global farm management software market is projected to reach $1.9 billion by 2028, from $921.4 million in 2021, a Valuates report showed. It also shows that the growth will be driven by factors such as growing awareness and increasing implementation of cloud computing in real-time farm data management, growing population, and a subsequent rise in demand for food worldwide.

Agriculture Industry, Cloud Computing

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Trying to explain secure access service edge (SASE pronounced ‘sassy’) and zero trust can be exasperating when you’re making the case for business leaders to invest in new products and infrastructure. The onus is on IT leaders to focus top executives on the business benefits these technology concepts entail and how they will advance the cause of enterprise security.

Both SASE and zero trust are fast-evolving security concepts, creating somewhat of a moving target. Vendors and service providers are eager to frame those concepts within the frameworks of their own offerings; that can create confusion, though.

“Currently, the single greatest hurdle the market is facing is a high degree of hype and confusion,” IDC analysts explained in 2021. “In its current state, SASE must be explained over and over again and customer expectations must be managed.”

Evolving quickly

The analyst insights underscore that the role and definition of SASE and zero trust is evolving at a faster pace than traditional legacy solutions for networks and security. “The SASE concept has placed tremendous pressure on vendors to combine networking and network security into a single as-a-service offering,” IDC points out.

According to Gartner, which coined the term, SASE combines network security with WAN capabilities, and can encompass multiple components such as SD-WAN, secure web gateways, cloud access security broker functions, firewall as a service, and zero trust network access (ZTNA) in a cloud-native delivery model.

While there are a growing number of available ZTNA offerings, “There is no silver bullet product or service, nor even a coherent, integrated suite of products or services, that delivers ‘zero trust in a box,’” according to Nemertes CTO John Burke writes.

ZTNA fits within a broader zero trust architecture (ZTA) that involves protecting assets, workflows, and services. An emerging class of zero trust application access (ZTAA) offerings further complicates attempts to explain the differences in business terms.

Transformative explanations

When it comes to networking and security, though, confusing acronyms are nothing new. But what has changed is the speed and nature of the delivery. The SASE model embodies flexibility and integration, and is delivered as-a-service, all of which should appeal to CEOs, CFOs, and other business decision-makers.

Other key points to keep the discussion focused on key business benefits, include:

SASE represents a transformative approach that “will ultimately enable better security outcomes and business value.” — IDC A single policy platform at the heart of zero trust architecture “would minimize the number of integrations the enterprise would have to create and maintain, or the amount of redundant work the enterprise would have to perform…” — Nemertes“SASE combines networking and security into a scalable cloud service that fits with the remote and hybrid work models companies use today. Potential benefits include easier network and security management, flexibility to scale up or down as business needs require, and lower costs.” – Network World“94% of respondents say their adoption of SASE solutions has accelerated due to the need to make digital services and/or remote/hybrid work sustainable for the long term.” — CIO 2022 SASE Market Trends Study

As you evaluate SASE and zero-trust offerings, making sure solutions and services providers are first making the business case for your organization is the best way to simplify decision-making process. Learn more about evolving security frameworks in the on-demand webinar from Comcast Business: “Beyond the Buzzwords – Networks and Security Converge”

Network Security

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Cybersecurity is top of mind for everyone. For IT teams, the list of concerns has been magnified by a more dispersed workforce and the need to assess the risks associated with a proliferation of connected devices, the vanishing perimeter and the ever-changing threat landscape. The increased adoption of cloud computing also poses inherent challenges. All these variables force the need for organizations to transform their security postures to protect against cloud infrastructure vulnerabilities. However, the increased complexity of a distributed application architecture brought on by digital transformation continues to challenge even the largest security operations. As a result of the rapid digital transformation, security postures may need to be updated and adjusted to support this increased complexity.

The uptick in remote work setups and more digital-first business models are pushing organizations to apply secure access no matter where their users, applications or devices are located. To provide the level of security necessary to protect the variety of new systems implemented, many enterprises are shifting to more cloud-friendly and behavior-based security approaches. The secure access service edge (SASE) framework in particular enables businesses to upgrade their network edge and security simultaneously, and then managed network and security services can provide much needed expertise and support in a quickly evolving field.

Hybrid model brings new challenges and security vulnerabilities

According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2022 report, people want the freedom to work where and when they want. To accommodate this trend and maintain operations as usual, it is critical for IT teams to help safeguard employees, facilities, data, reputation, and products. In many hybrid scenarios, workers are moving between secure office environments with enterprise network monitoring, firewalls, event and data analytics to vulnerable home networks that may have rogue devices, weak passwords or outdated equipment.

There is no one-size-fits all security posture, and IT leaders need to regularly assess their vulnerabilities to ensure that security spans every new internal digital process, external product developed, and Internet opportunity created.

In an accelerated digital transformation environment, the mix of on-premises and private cloud systems makes securing data even more complex. For this reason, the zero trust approach must be considered. With zero trust, it shouldn’t matter where employees are working. Security inside and outside the organization needs to be based on policies developed for their specific needs. Scaling this approach can be daunting, but the key is to focus on all threat vectors that could impact securing corporate infrastructure, cloud environments, and home networks while ensuring a great user experience and application performance.

Securing the shift to the cloud

As organizations look to build and sustain resiliency in the next phase of their digital transformation, they need to consider the security and risk implications of this journey to the cloud. Again, there is no one-size fits all protection and the security requirements for cloud differ from on-premise architectures. The evaluation process needs to involve a higher level of third-party scrutiny for cloud-based applications. For this, the expectation is that security needs to be incorporated at the development level through a “dev-sec-ops” model. This will prove to be a competitive advantage for all cloud application development going forward.

With an increase in remote users and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, data moving from the data center to cloud services, and more traffic going to public cloud services and branch offices than back to the data center, the need for a new approach for network security continues to increase. Unfortunately, weak security for cloud-based services opens the door to bad actors. SASE is a framework approach that addresses the need to connect network and security to secure all traffic flows. Legacy network technologies and approaches may no longer provide the levels of security and access control digital organizations need. These organizations demand immediate, uninterrupted access for their users, no matter where they are located.

The SASE framework is the convergence of network and security services. This framework brings geographically disparate end points together with a common security policy whether you’re in a coffee shop, at home or in an office. The SASE framework is somewhat of an evolution of software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) — taking the application awareness and traffic steering of wide area networking (WAN) and building upon that by extending to the cloud and providing security end to end. This approach allows the flexibility for deeper security protections as the extension of the network continues – further evolving businesses on their zero trust, multi-cloud, and edge computing journeys.

Managed network and security: Considering a partner

The last 2+ years have stretched the limits of IT teams across the board. Their plates are filled with digitally-based business challenges that they probably never expected and enhancing their cybersecurity posture likely tops most of their to-do lists. The sheer scale of work is emphasizing the value of managed services, including managed security. Trusted partners can provide a strong understanding of their network and find the best solutions for their business.

Working with a service provider that has a broad purview of the threat landscape can help a company reduce a threat before it even reaches the organization’s systems. In fact, 57% of respondents to a recent IDC survey on managed security services claimed that the top reason for engaging with managed security service providers is to protect against advanced security threats. Managed security providers that offer flexible delivery models across on-premises, hosted, and cloud environments can provide broad threat visibility for proactive detection of and response to malicious activities.

Conclusion

Cyberthreats are continually evolving, becoming more sophisticated, and more difficult to detect. At the same time, digital transformation to support a more remote workforce and customer experience is increasingly more mobile. Employees will continue working from anywhere and applications will continue to migrate to the cloud. More SaaS platforms will be adopted. As organizations look to optimize their security posture in this new environment, the need to shift towards software-defined networking, with advanced security enabled within the WAN and cloud environments, is more apparent than ever.

Be ready for tomorrow’s security threats with the next generation of secure networking from Comcast Business. Learn more about Comcast Business Secure Network Solutions.

Network Security