Microsoft recently announced Windows Hello for Business Hybrid Cloud Kerberos Trust to help with the complexity of passwordless authentication. It is commonly thought passwords are the weakest link in a company’s cybersecurity posture. While Azure has seen various aspects of passwordless authentication, Windows has been lacking.

For some time now, Microsoft has made a single-node configuration available for its cloud service Azure Stack HCI. The name is somewhat misleading since a cluster requires two or more servers to form a group for high availability. Nonetheless, this version is good for dev, test, proof of concept, or initial setup tweaking for further scaling.

Microsoft Defender SmartScreen provides a host of new cybersecurity features in Windows 11 22H2, including better protection against phishing. Enterprises often overlook the threat of phishing, which is unfortunate because it’s a matter of human error, i.e. users lacking cybersecurity awareness. Windows 11 now helps tackle that.

Containers and containerized applications are becoming more and more popular by the day, which is why they are part of the latest Windows Server operating system release. Moreover, Microsoft has also included several modifications designed to improve customer experience working with containerized apps.

VMware recently announced a new way to enhance cybersecurity for Amazon Web Services cloud-based infrastructure — Advanced Workload Security for AWS. This new offer is based on the Carbon Black portfolio developed by VMware. It presents cloud-native endpoint security options that make cloud environments just as secure as on-prem ones.

Windows Update for Business recently introduced safeguard holds, which prevents a user from updating until an issue likely to happen is fixed. Previously, admins would deter from performing regular updates for various issues. Now, the manager uses machine learning to monitor millions of unmanaged PCs for rollback during upgrading for context. It pauses updates for users at potential issue risk and offers it again once the issue is dealt with.

Microsoft Secured-Core PC Configuration Lock is a new feature that enables you to prevent configuration drift of secured-core PC settings and features. Secured-Core PCs united various layers of protection to combat the growing trend of attacks on kernel drivers. The Lock makes sure the secured-core PC remains secure no matter what.

The traditional security model implies combining different solutions to increase safety. However, cyberattacks are constantly developing and becoming more sophisticated, which makes the “layered approach” fairly obsolete. That’s why Microsoft has opted to concentrate on the hardware level instead. Meet Microsoft Pluton, a new step in the hardware chips evolution.

Windows Autopatch is a new cloud-centric way to streamline the process of updating OS instances across your IT environment. It is meant to take the heavy-lifting and complexity out of applying patches to your Windows clients registered in Microsoft Endpoint Manager. It’s applicable to Windows 10 &11, M365 for Enterprise, MS Edge and Teams.

VMware vSphere+ is an Enterprise hybrid subscription service, which provides a blend of on-prem vSphere plus VMware Cloud services through Cloud Gateway. In other words, it’s a combination of your current vSphere environment with SaaS-delivered VMware components from the VMware Cloud offering.