As we referenced several times, security is one of the main topics for cloud providers looking to guarantee privacy for their customers’ data and information. Microsoft just announced the public availability for Storage Service Encryption (SSE) for Azure Managed Disks, with no additional cost.
We all already know the two biggest Public Cloud providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and, unless a catastrophic event occurs, these two will be leading the market in the next couple of years. A recent study between 550 companies showed some interesting results: AWS is the most preferred vendor in SMBs; Microsoft the “most known” in enterprises; AWS has been reviewed the most between all companies but Azure is the most used.
Tapes have been on the “backup market” for a long time and still are considered as a good option to store and secure a high amount of backup data. However, the continuous increase of backup size becomes a bottleneck in terms of fitting backup windows and reduces a simplicity and redundancy of backup solutions. Today more and more companies consider backing up their production data to more reasonable storage solutions, like Clouds.
Here comes in hand the technology that emulates physical tapes on top of inexpensive, fast, and high-capacity spindle drives.
On 28th of September, Microsoft has released the Virtual Network peering, in GA.
This new functionality gives you the opportunity to connect 2 Virtual Network in Azure between them, by using the network of the Azure Datacenter. Bye bye VPN S2S between virtual network 🙂
Microsoft has just released to the public, and with a stable version (preview was announced in September 2016), Azure Monitor. This platform represents a set of features and capabilities within Azure to provide detail logs, metrics and diagnostic about the workloads in the Microsoft public cloud.
Microsoft continues the expansion of its services for Azure in Europe, this time with new capabilities related to Big Data: Azure Data Lake Analytics and Data Lake Store. These new services appear as server-less options for companies that already have resources in Azure and a large amount of data, allowing them to transform that data into valuable information.
A major force of infrastructure today is the possibility to use CI/CD. Understand, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.
To resume, these technologies, give the possibility to your developers to create/modify their codes, send them to GitHub for example, build it with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), save it on you registry (Azure Container Registry for me), manage the versioning, always with VSTS, send it to your Docker Swarm cluster as container et to finish, access it through a simple web interface.
Microsoft keeps going big on offering VMware integration, we’ve mentioned in the past that they’ve released a freeware tool to backup VMware virtual machines into Azure: Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS). And now they keep insisting on taking over Enterprise VMware customers into Azure, or at least their Site Recovery solution: Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware.
The network component and the troubleshooting that sometimes we need to do represents a big factor on all cloud customers, not matter if you are using Azure, AWS, Office 365 or any other. If you don’t have control over the network and/or you are not capable of identifying issues root causes, then there’s most likely the cloud experience it’s not going to be a good one. Microsoft has that clear and is now offering a new tool to assist customers: Azure Network Watcher.
We talked about Azure Backup before in this blog, when they recently added the capability to backup VMware virtual machines, now they are introducing a new set of features: Central monitoring, enhanced security and available in new regions.
