The content below is taken from the original (How to get started with Chef), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (10 Reddit Tips and Tricks to help you become a master Redditor), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Amazon releases Chime, a new cloud-based UCaaS), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (AWS Direct Connect Update – Link Aggregation Groups, Bundles, and re:Invent Recap), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

AWS Direct Connect helps our large-scale customers to create private, dedicated network connections to their office, data center, or colocation facility. Our customers create 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections in order to reduce their network costs, increase data transfer throughput, and to get a more consistent network experience than is possible with an Internet-based connection.

Today I would like to tell you about a new Link Aggregation feature for Direct Connect. I’d also like to tell you about our new Direct Connect Bundles and to tell you more about how we used Direct Connect to provide a first-class customer experience at AWS re:Invent 2016.

Link Aggregation Groups
Some of our customers would like to set up multiple connections (generally known as ports) between their location and one of the 46 Direct Connect locations. Some of them would like to create a highly available link that is resilient in the face of network issues outside of AWS; others simply need more data transfer throughput.

In order to support this important customer use case, you can now purchase up to 4 ports and treat them as a single managed connection, which we call a Link Aggregation Group or LAG. After you have set this up, traffic is load-balanced across the ports at the level of individual packet flows. All of the ports are active simultaneously, and are represented by a single BGP session. Traffic across the group is managed via Dynamic LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol – or ISO/IEC/IEEE 8802-1AX:2016). When you create your group, you also specify the minimum number of ports that must be active in order for the connection to be activated.

You can order a new group with multiple ports and you can aggregate existing ports into a new group. Either way, all of the ports must have the same speed (1 Gbps or 10 Gbps).

All of the ports in as group will connect to the same device on the AWS side. You can add additional ports to an existing group as long as there’s room on the device (this information is now available in the Direct Connect Console). If you need to expand an existing group and the device has no open ports, you can simply order a new group and migrate your connections.

Here’s how you can make use of link aggregation from the Console. First, creating a new LAG from scratch:

And second, creating a LAG from existing connections:

Link Aggregation Groups are now available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Seoul) Regions and you can create them today. We expect to make them available in the remaining regions by the end of this month.

Direct Connect Bundles
We announced some powerful new Direct Connect Bundles at re:Invent 2016. Each bundle is an advanced, hybrid reference architecture designed to reduce complexity and to increase performance. Here are the new bundles:

Level 3 Communications Powers Amazon WorkSpaces – Connects enterprise applications, data, user workspaces, and end-point devices to offer reliable performance and a better end-user experience:

SaaS Architecture enhanced by AT&T NetBond – Enhances quality and user experience for applications migrated to the AWS Cloud:

Aviatrix User Access Integrated with Megaport DX – Supports encrypted connectivity between AWS Cloud Regions, between enterprise data centers and AWS, and on VPN access to AWS:

Riverbed Hybrid SDN/NFV Architecture over Verizon Secure Cloud Interconnect – Allows enterprise customers to provide secure, optimized access to AWS services in a hybrid network environment:

Direct Connect at re:Invent 2016
In order to provide a top-notch experience for attendees and partners at re:Invent, we worked with Level 3 to set up a highly available and fully redundant set of connections. This network was used to support breakout sessions, certification exams, the hands-on labs, the keynotes (including the live stream to over 25,000 viewers in 122 countries), the hackathon, bootcamps, and workshops. The re:Invent network used four 10 Gbps connections, two each to US West (Oregon) and US East (Northern Virginia):

It supported all of the re:Invent venues:

Here are some video resources that will help you to learn more about how we did this, and how you can do it yourself:

• NET205 – Future-Proofing the WAN and Simplifying Security On the way to Cloud (slides).
• NET305 – Extending Data Centers to the Cloud (slides).
• NET402 – Deep Dive: AWS Direct Connect and VPNs (slides).

— Jeff;

The content below is taken from the original (Microsoft’s New Tools Make Surface Devices Better Suited For The Enterprise), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Microsoft’s line of premium laptops and tablets have been well received by enterprise customers and are being deployed all around the globe. The latest Surface devices, which all come with Windows Hello and are made of high-end materials, ship with Windows 10 but to help these clients have more control over the devices, Microsoft is giving them new tools for better management.

In some environments, where data leaks and security are of the highest order, corporations will lock down hardware so that USB drives and webcams cannot be operated by the user. To help its corporate customers obtain more control over their own devices, Microsoft has announced Surface Enterprise Management Mode which can be deployed to Surface Pro 4, Surface Book and Surface Studio.

This new tool allows an organization to take ownership of a device and lock down the hardware configurations within the device firmware. Hardware rules can be applied to Wi-Fi networks, Bluetooth, Ethernet, time of day, application access and certificates that can be included in initial deployments or dynamically pushed via the cloud.

In the event that a Surface device is lost or stolen with SEMM deployed, it requires both physical possession and a unique certificate to make any changes to the configuration of the device.

The goal with this new tool is obvious, to help move more of Microsoft’s hardware into the enterprise. By giving IT admins more control over the hardware, it helps to match what is considered best-in-class capabilities offered by other manufacturers and now that the Surface line is offering these tools too, it opens the door to additional customers who handle sensitive data.

Even though Microsoft hit a bumpy road when the company launched it Surface brand several years ago, the company has found success with its Pro 3, Pro 4 and Surface Book. The product line is frequently topping a billion dollars in a single quarter and the company is expected to refresh its laptop and tablet hardware in the first half of 2017.

The post Microsoft’s New Tools Make Surface Devices Better Suited For The Enterprise appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (Microsoft Increases Office 365 Security With Three New Tools), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Microsoft’s Office 365 platform is nothing short of a huge success for the company. With tens of millions of users accessing the tools every day, the company has successfully pivoted an on-premises piece of software to a cloud-based platform of productivity tools.

At Ignite last year, Microsoft began introducing new security features into the platform that started the process of turning this service into a new security layer for the company. Today, Microsoft is announcing three new features for the platform that will further enhance Office 365.

Office 365 Threat Intelligence is now available in private preview with general availability planned for later this quarter. This service provides near real-time insight into the threats that impact a network (malware, adware, ransomware, ect) and can help isolate or deflect these malicious threats.

A new public preview of Office 365 Advanced Data Governance has been announced; this feature uses the company’s foundation of machine learning to identify and protect data that may be exposing an organization to unnecessary risk. This appears to be an interesting feature but I’ll need a bit more time to fully dig in to see how it works and its effectiveness.

Finally, there is the new Office 365 Secure Core; Tony has a great write-up about this tool that’s worth checking out for a deeper dive. This feature allows IT pros to evaluate the strength of their Office 365 configuration and model how simple changes can enhance and reduce their security vulnerabilities.

Microsoft says that they scan over 200 billion emails each month for malware and phishing which gives them a huge graph of data that allows them to more effectively prevent attacks from reaching the end user. On average, for the last six months, the company says they have blocked 200,000 exploit attempts per day.

All of these new features will enhance Office 365 but more importantly for Microsoft, will further cement its productivity tools as the premier applications in this sector. While building a word processor, presentation tool and even spreadsheets are easy to do with modern development languages, creating the security layer that Office 365 provides is another story.

The post Microsoft Increases Office 365 Security With Three New Tools appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (Office 365 Drops Site Mailboxes. What Should You Do Next?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Office 365 Starts the Countdown for Site Mailbox Termination

According to a note (MC92090) published through the Office 365 Admin Center on January 31, 2017, beginning in March 2017, SharePoint site owners will no longer be able to create new site mailboxes. Existing site mailboxes will function until they are replaced by something else. The news was expected, but it poses some challenges for tenants who have deployed site mailboxes to serve purposes like contract management that involve a mixture of email communication and document management.

Site Mailboxes 101

A site mailbox allows users to share email information along with pointers (“stubs”) to files held in a document library. Administrators create a site mailbox by adding the mailbox app to a site, which causes SharePoint to create a new Exchange mailbox. Users can then create and send messages from the site mailbox or move items from their mailboxes to the site mailbox to share with other members of the site. Figure 1 shows how Outlook presents the stubs for documents stored in a SharePoint document library associated with a site mailbox.

Figure 1: Site Mailbox in use with Outlook (image credit: Tony Redmond)

Customers never embraced the concept of site mailboxes and their usage was low, even within Office 365 where Microsoft took care of the work required to integrate SharePoint and Exchange. The advent of Office 365 Groups and the continued popularity of shared mailboxes provided customers with sufficient means to share information. The long-term direction is to replace site mailboxes with Groups, and Microsoft expects to provide a migration tool in late 2017.

The Difference with Office 365 Groups

Two major features distinguish site mailboxes from Office 365 Groups. First, the integration between site mailboxes and Outlook clients functions more like a shared mailbox. For instance, users can drag and drop items from their personal mailbox or a shared mailbox into the site mailbox. Unlike the conversations stored in group mailboxes, Exchange treats items stored in the site mailbox as messages and retain all the characteristics of the messages.

Second, site mailboxes use pointers to represent files. The pointers hold some attributes, such as the author, file size, document name, and so on, and a synchronization process keeps the pointers updated. Office 365 Groups always defer to the browser interfere when users want to open files in the group document library.

What Now?

The question for those using site mailboxes is how to proceed. They can wait until Microsoft delivers the migration tool to move existing site mailboxes to Office 365 Groups, but what should they do to satisfy new user needs after March 2017? The options are to use:

• Shared mailboxes.
• Office 365 Groups.

The answer will be different depending on the business needs. Shared mailboxes are best if the functionality required is email-centric, like the need to provide a single repository for a team to handle collective tasks. Dedicated folders, such as one for each customer or project, can hold any documents related to the tasks.

Office 365 Groups are best when the need is more document-centric. For example, a team managing contracts on behalf of a company is likely to need some of the document management capabilities found in document libraries, like check-in/check-out. In these circumstance, an Office 365 group is the best option.

OWA’s Access to Group Mailboxes

Interestingly, although Outlook desktop does not allow you to drag and drop (or copy) items from personal mailboxes to a group mailbox, OWA is perfectly happy to accommodate this functionality. To do this, you add the group mailbox to OWA as a shared folder, which is OWA-speak for a shared mailbox. Here’s how:

• Expand the Folders section of OWA to expose your mailbox name.
• Select the mailbox name and select “Add shared folder” from the right-click menu.
• Input the name (or SMTP address) of the group mailbox you want to access (Figure 2). In this case, I’m selecting the Exchange Grumpy Old Men group (a fine collection of humans). See this article for the steps used to create this group by converting an email distribution group.

Figure 2: Adding a group mailbox as an OWA shared folder (image credit: Tony Redmond)

• OWA adds the group mailbox to its resource list.
• Click the group mailbox to open it and expose its folders. Group conversations are in the Inbox, but all the other folders are available (Figure 3).
• You can now drag and drop or copy items from your mailbox to the group mailbox.

It is possible that this access is because OWA treats group mailboxes in the same way as shared mailboxes. The same technique does not work with Outlook desktop because you cannot add group mailboxes to an Outlook profile in the same way as you can add a shared mailbox.

Figure 3: Accessing the items in a group mailbox Inbox with OWA (image credit: Tony Redmond)

Collaboration Options

Microsoft offers many collaboration methods within Office 365 – Groups, Teams, Yammer, shared mailboxes, and plain-old email. It is reasonable to expect that they should whittle down the less successful methods, which is exactly what has happened with site mailboxes. Transitions are painful for users and tenant administrators alike. At least there are some places to go!

Follow Tony on Twitter @12Knocksinna.

Want to know more about how to manage Office 365? Find what you need to know in “Office 365 for IT Pros”, the most comprehensive eBook covering all aspects of Office 365. Available in PDF and EPUB formats (suitable for iBooks) or for Amazon Kindle.

The post Office 365 Drops Site Mailboxes. What Should You Do Next? appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (.NET: Manage Azure Managed Disks), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

We are announcing beta 5 of the Azure Management Libraries for .NET. Beta 5 adds support for Azure Managed Disks.

Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Managed Disks – it simplifies the management and scaling of Virtual Machines. Specify the size and disk you want to use for Virtual Machines. You do not have to worry about creating and managing Storage Accounts.

You can use the Azure Management Libraries for .NET to manage Managed Disks.

http://bit.ly/2kYKF51

You can download beta 5 from:

Create a Virtual Machine with Managed Disks

You can create a Virtual Machine with an implicit Managed Disk for the operating system and explicit Managed Disks for data using a define() … create() method chain. Creation is simplified with implicit creation of managed disks without specifying all the disk details. You do not have to worry about creating and managing Storage Accounts.

var linuxVM1 = azure.VirtualMachines
  .Define(linuxVM1Name)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithNewResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithNewPrimaryNetwork("10.0.0.0/28")
  .WithPrimaryPrivateIpAddressDynamic()
  .WithNewPrimaryPublicIpAddress(linuxVM1Pip)
  .WithPopularLinuxImage(KnownLinuxVirtualMachineImage.UbuntuServer16_04_Lts)
  .WithRootUsername(“tirekicker”)
  .WithSsh(sshkey)
  .WithNewDataDisk(100)
  .WithSize(VirtualMachineSizeTypes.StandardD3V2)
  .Create();

You can download the full, ready-to-run sample code.

Create a Virtual Machine Scale Set with Managed Disks

You can create a Virtual Machine Scale Set with implicit Managed Disks for operating systems and explicit Managed Disks for data using a define() … create() method chain.

var vmScaleSet = azure.VirtualMachineScaleSets
  .Define(vmScaleSetName)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithSku(VirtualMachineScaleSetSkuTypes.StandardD5v2)
  .WithExistingPrimaryNetworkSubnet(network, "subnet1")
  .WithExistingPrimaryInternetFacingLoadBalancer(publicLoadBalancer)
  .WithoutPrimaryInternalLoadBalancer()
  .WithPopularLinuxImage(KnownLinuxVirtualMachineImage.UbuntuServer16_04_Lts)
  .WithRootUsername("tirekicker")
  .WithSsh(sshkey)
  .WithNewDataDisk(100)
  .WithNewDataDisk(100, 1, CachingTypes.ReadWrite)
  .WithNewDataDisk(100, 2, CachingTypes.ReadOnly)
  .WithCapacity(3)
  .Create();

You can download the full, ready-to-run sample code.

Create an Empty Managed Disk and Attach It to a Virtual Machine

You can create an empty Managed Disk using a define() … create() method chain.

var dataDisk = azure.Disks.Define(diskName)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithData()
  .WithSizeInGB(50)
  .Create();

You can attach the empty Managed Disk to a Virtual Machine using another define() … create() method chain.

var linuxVM2 = azure.VirtualMachines.Define(linuxVM2Name)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithNewPrimaryNetwork("10.0.0.0/28")
  .WithPrimaryPrivateIpAddressDynamic()
  .WithNewPrimaryPublicIpAddress(linuxVM2Pip)
  .WithPopularLinuxImage(KnownLinuxVirtualMachineImage.UbuntuServer16_04_Lts)
  .WithRootUsername("tirekicker")
  .WithSsh(sshkey)
  .WithNewDataDisk(100)
  .WithNewDataDisk(100, 1, CachingTypes.ReadWrite)
  .WithExistingDataDisk(dataDisk)
  .WithSize(VirtualMachineSizeTypes.StandardD3V2)
  .Create();

You can download the full, ready-to-run sample code.

Update a Virtual Machine

You can detach Managed Disks and attach new Managed Disks using an update() … apply() method chain.

linuxVM2.Update()
  .WithoutDataDisk(2)
  .WithNewDataDisk(200)
  .Apply();

You can download the full, ready-to-run sample code.

Create a Virtual Machine From a Specialized VHD

You can create a Virtual Machine from a Specialized VHD using a define() … create() method chain.

var linuxVM4 = azure.VirtualMachines.Define(linuxVmName3)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithNewPrimaryNetwork("10.0.0.0/28")
  .WithPrimaryPrivateIpAddressDynamic()
  .WithoutPrimaryPublicIpAddress()
  .WithSpecializedOsUnmanagedDisk(specializedVhd, OperatingSystemTypes.Linux)
  .WithSize(VirtualMachineSizeTypes.StandardD3V2)
  .Create();

You can download the full, ready-to-run sample code.

Create a Virtual Machine Using a Custom Image

You can create a custom image from a de-allocated and generalized Virtual Machine using a define() … create() method chain.

var virtualMachineCustomImage = azure.VirtualMachineCustomImages
  .Define(customImageName)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .FromVirtualMachine(linuxVM) // from a de-allocated and generalized Virtual Machine
  .Create();

You can create a Virtual Machine from the custom image using another define() … create() method chain.

var linuxVM4 = azure.VirtualMachines.Define(linuxVM4Name)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithNewPrimaryNetwork("10.0.0.0/28")
  .WithPrimaryPrivateIpAddressDynamic()
  .WithoutPrimaryPublicIpAddress()
  .WithLinuxCustomImage(virtualMachineCustomImage.Id)
  .WithRootUsername(userName)
  .WithSsh(sshkey)
  .WithSize(VirtualMachineSizeTypes.StandardD3V2)
  .Create();

You can download the full, ready-to-run sample code.

Create a Virtual Machine Using Specialized Disks From Snapshots

You can create a Managed Disk Snapshot for an operating system disk.

// Create a Snapshot for an operating system disk
var osDisk = azure.Disks.GetById(linuxVM.OsDiskId);
var osSnapshot = azure.Snapshots.Define(managedOSSnapshotName)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithLinuxFromDisk(osDisk)
  .Create();

// Create a Managed Disk from the Snapshot for the operating system disk
var newOSDisk = azure.Disks.Define(managedNewOSDiskName)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithLinuxFromSnapshot(osSnapshot)
  .WithSizeInGB(100)
  .Create();

You can create a Managed Disk Snapshot for a data disk.

// Create a Snapshot for a data disk
var dataSnapshot = azure.Snapshots.Define(managedDataDiskSnapshotName)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithDataFromDisk(dataDisk)
  .WithSku(DiskSkuTypes.StandardLRS)
  .Create();

// Create a Managed Disk from the Snapshot for the data disk
var newDataDisk = azure.Disks.Define(managedNewDataDiskName)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithData()
  .FromSnapshot(dataSnapshot)
  .Create();

You can create a Virtual Machine from these specialized disks using a define() … create() method chain.

var linuxVM5 = azure.VirtualMachines.Define(linuxVm5Name)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithExistingResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithNewPrimaryNetwork("10.0.0.0/28")
  .WithPrimaryPrivateIpAddressDynamic()
  .WithoutPrimaryPublicIpAddress()
  .WithSpecializedOsDisk(newOSDisk, OperatingSystemTypes.Linux)
  .WithExistingDataDisk(newDataDisk)
  .WithSize(VirtualMachineSizeTypes.StandardD3V2)
  .Create();

You can download the full, ready-to-run sample code.

Convert a Virtual Machine to Use Managed Disks With a Single Reboot

You can convert a Virtual Machine with unmanaged disks (Storage Account based) to Managed Disks with a single reboot.

var linuxVM6 = azure.VirtualMachines.Define(linuxVM6Name)
  .WithRegion(Region.USEast)
  .WithNewResourceGroup(rgName)
  .WithNewPrimaryNetwork("10.0.0.0/28")
  .WithPrimaryPrivateIpAddressDynamic()
  .WithNewPrimaryPublicIpAddress(linuxVM6Pip)
  .WithPopularLinuxImage(KnownLinuxVirtualMachineImage.UbuntuServer16_04_Lts)
  .WithRootUsername("tirekicker")
  .WithSsh(sshkey)
  .WithUnmanagedDisks() // uses Storage Account
  .WithNewUnmanagedDataDisk(100) // uses Storage Account
  .WithSize(VirtualMachineSizeTypes.StandardD3V2)
  .Create();

linuxVM7.Deallocate();
linuxVM7.ConvertToManaged();

You can download the full, ready-to-run sample code.

Try It

You can run the samples above or go straight to our GitHub repo. Give it a try and let us know what do you think (via e-mail or comments below). Over the next few weeks, we will be adding support for more Azure services and applying finishing touches to the API.

The content below is taken from the original (Office 365 Secure Score Analyzes Tenant Security), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Scoring Office 365 Tenant Security

In August 2016, I wrote about the Office 365 Secure Score service, which was then in preview and noted that my tenant had scored 50 out of 243. Now, the service is in production and my score has advanced to 55 (Figure 1). Naturally, I am thrilled.

Figure 1: Viewing the Secure Score for an Office 365 tenant (image credit: Tony Redmond)

The idea behind Secure Score is simple. Microsoft acknowledges that it can be difficult for an administrator to understand how best to secure an Office 365 tenant. There are many places in administrative consoles where settings can be tweaked and much to monitor on an ongoing basis. It therefore makes sense to measure a tenant against a set of predetermined standards and score the tenant based on the actions taken to increase security. At the same time, outstanding actions can be flagged to the administrator, who then decides whether to implement the action and so increase the tenant score.

For example, if Rights Management is configured to allow tenant users to protect confidential content, it’s worth five points. Even better, if users store documents in OneDrive for Business, it’s worth ten points. Although you can argue that OneDrive for Business is a more secure location for documents than a local hard drive or a network file share, assigning ten points to this measurement seems like more of an encouragement to do better.

The points awarded for different aspects are combined into a tenant score. The maximum rating is 450 points. I have some work to do to increase my score from 55. On the upside, the dashboard says that the average score for an Office 365 tenant is 18, so most tenants have even more to do.

To assess a tenant, you log onto http://bit.ly/2lwihFf using a global administrator account (the plan is to include the service in the Security and Compliance Center). Global administrator access is required to measure all the areas that contribute to the security of a tenant. The first time you assess a tenant, you’ll be asked to grant access.

Assessment is not a one-time operation as a check is performed daily to determine an updated score, which is then published to the tenant dashboard.

Suggested Actions

The dashboard includes a useful list of suggested list of actions (Figure 2) that can be taken to improve the score. I noted some errors in the list such as the edict to enable mailbox auditing for all users, something that has been in place in my tenant for some time now. The report informed me that auditing was enabled or 343 mailboxes out of 385, which was an interesting observation considering that the tenant includes just 49 user, room, and discovery mailboxes. Another suggestion is to force password resets every 60 days, a technique that is not best practice when multi-factor authentication and strong passwords are used.

Figure 2: Actions to improve a tenant’s Secure Score (image credit: Tony Redmond)

Some of the actions are noted as “Not Scored”. This indicates that addressing the action won’t influence the tenant score now – but it might in the future when Microsoft incorporates the action into the Secure Score assessment.

The Secure Score dashboard includes a Score Analyzer tab to allow administrators to:

• Track progress of their score over time.
• Understand the actions that contribute to the current tenant score.
• Understand how they can improve their score by completing various actions. For example, a tenant score increases by 30 points if multi-factor authentication is enabled for all users whereas 15 points is added if the outbound spam policy notifies an administrator when a tenant user is blocked for suspicious activity.

Analysis tools like Secure Score are constantly reviewed to ensure accuracy and relevance. Some of the errors that I noted in August have been addressed by Microsoft and some new tests have been added. But that’s not the point. The reason why Secure Score exists is to drive awareness of the actions that administrators can take to increase the security of their tenant. You might not agree with Microsoft’s assessment of the importance of the various measurements but that’s just detail. The more important thing is to maintain awareness of security on an ongoing basis.

Pay Attention

More information on Secure Score can be gained by watching the Ignite 2016 session on the topic. You can help Microsoft develop Secure Score by noting any issues that occur in the Microsoft Technology Community. Overall, despite some minor glitches, Secure Score is a very worthwhile service that deserves your support – and your attention, especially if your tenant is one of those that scores below mine.

Follow Tony on Twitter @12Knocksinna.

Want to know more about how to manage Office 365? Find what you need to know in “Office 365 for IT Pros”, the most comprehensive eBook covering all aspects of Office 365. Available in PDF and EPUB formats (suitable for iBooks) or for Amazon Kindle.

The post Office 365 Secure Score Analyzes Tenant Security appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (Microsoft celebrates 20 years of Visual Studio), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Microsoft announced today it is celebrating 20 years of Visual Studio with the introduction of Visual Studio 2017, the latest iteration of its developer tool suite, on March 7.

A lot has changed in those 20 years, as illustrated by a picture Microsoft posted of the contents of Visual Studio 97 (below), the first iteration of the IDE. Back then it was pretty much just a bunch of languages in one box with no real integration. 

Microsoft

And most of the languages supported back then are gone—such as Visual J++, a Java compiler that caused all kinds of legal problems with Sun Microsystems, and Visual C++, which has been ditched in favor of C#. Also, Visual FoxPro is pretty much dead, and the support apps, including SourceSafe and InterDev, have been replaced with newer apps or functions. 

Things changed in 2002 with the launch of Visual Studio .NET. C#—designed to be an easier-to-use object-oriented language than C++—was first introduced, and a radically changed Visual Basic.NET also made its debut. Apps were compiled through the .NET Framework instead of to machine code. 

Microsoft would dump the “.NET” suffix from the name with the release of Visual Studio 2005, but the intention remained. Microsoft settled on C# as the main programming language, with Visual Basic designated the beginner language. 

Over time, Microsoft would add more internet-oriented language support through add-ons, such as Python, Ruby, node.js and M. It also added a new language, F#, which doesn’t have a large following, but what it does have for users are very dedicated.

Visual Studio 2017 launch event

Microsoft will hold a two-day event beginning on March 7 to launch Visual Studio 2017, which will be livestreamed. March 8 will include “a full day of live training with multiple topics to choose from.”

The launch event will feature top members of the Visual Studio team showing off the latest developments from Visual Studio, .NET, Xamarin, Azure and more. Developers can engage in demo sessions focusing on key improvements within the product.

Microsoft is also asking for developers to share their stories of their using Visual Studio by recording a video on their smartphone and including details such as how long they have been using Visual Studio, what is the coolest software they’ve built, what do they like about Visual Studio and, showing Microsoft hasn’t lost its sense of corny behavior, birthday wishes for Visual Studio. At least they don’t call it “bae.”

Join the Network World communities on

Facebook

and

LinkedIn

to comment on topics that are top of mind.

The content below is taken from the original (Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery now available in UK), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

We’re pleased to announce Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery now available in the UK.

Azure Backup – The Azure-based service you can use to back up (or protect) and restore your data in the Microsoft cloud. Azure Backup enables Azure IaaS VM backup as well as replace your existing on-premises or off-site backup solution with a cloud-based solution that is reliable, secure, and cost-competitive. Learn more about Azure Backup.

Azure Site Recovery – Contributes to your BCDR strategy by orchestrating replication of on-premises virtual machines and physical servers. You replicate servers and VMs from your primary on-premises datacenter to the cloud (Azure), or to a secondary datacenter. Learn more about Azure Site Recovery.

We are excited about these new Azure Services, and invite customers using these Azure regions to try them today!

The content below is taken from the original (Instant File Recovery from Cloud using Azure Backup), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Since its inception, Azure Backup has empowered enterprises to embark on the digital transformation to cloud by providing a cloud-first approach to backup enterprise data both on-premises and in the cloud. Today, we are excited to go beyond providing Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and introduce Restore-as-a-Service (RaaS) in the form of Azure Backup instant restore!

With Instant Restore, you can restore files and folders instantly from cloud based recovery points without provisioning any additional infrastructure, and at no additional cost. Instant Restore provides a writeable snapshot of a recovery point that you can quickly mount as one or more iSCSI based recovery volumes. Once the snapshot is mounted, you can browse through it and recover items by simply copying them from the recovery volumes to a destination of your choice.

Value proposition

• One restore mechanism for all backup sources – The Restore-as-a-Service model of Azure Backup unifies the approach for recovering individual files and folders backed up from sources in the cloud or on-premises. You can use instant restore, whether you are backing up on-premises data to cloud using Azure Backup agent or protecting Azure VMs using Azure VM backup.
• Instant recovery of files – Instantly recover files from the cloud backups of Azure VMs or on-premises file-servers. Whether it’s a case of accidental file deletion or simply validating the backup, instant restore drastically reduces the time taken to recover your first file.
• Open and review files in the recovery volumes before restoring them – Our Restore-as-a-Service approach allows you to open application files such as SQL, Oracle directly from cloud recovery point snapshots as if they are present locally, without having to restore them, ​and attach them to live application instances. 
• Recover any combination of files to any target – Since Azure Backup provides the entire snapshot of the recovery point and relies on copy of items for recovery, you can restore multiple files from multiple folders to a local server or even to a network-share of your choice.

Availability

Azure Backup Instant Recovery of files is available in preview for customers of Azure Backup agent and Azure VM backup (Windows VMs).

Learn how to instantly recover files using Azure Backup Agent

Watch the video below to start using Instant Restore for recovering files backed up with Azure Backup Agent for files and folders.

The supported regions for this preview are available here and will be updated as new regions are included in the preview.

Learn how to instantly recover files from Azure Virtual Machine Backups

Watch the video below to instantly recover files from an Azure VM (Windows) backup.

Visit this document to know more about how to instantly recover files from  Windows Azure VM backups.

The instant file restore capability will be available soon for users who are protecting their Linux VMs using Azure VM backup. If you are interested in being an early adopter and provide valuable feedback, please let us know at [email protected]. Watch the video below to know more.

Related links and additional content

• Learn more about Azure Backup
• Want more details? Check out Azure Backup documentation
• Sign up for a free Azure trial subscription
• Need help? Reach out to Azure Backup forum for support
• Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones.
• Follow us on Twitter @AzureBackup for the latest news and updates
• Azure Backup Agent version for instant restore

The content below is taken from the original (Europeans will get ‘portable’ streaming libraries next year), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The European Union is supposed to be a big, borderless family of member states, but this concept is far from true in the online world. For several years, EU regulators have been working towards a "Digital Single Market" with the aim of breaking down some of the regional barriers. One success story is free mobile roaming across the EU, which comes into force this summer, and now various European bodies have agreed upon new rules that’ll put an end to the geo-blocking of various online services like Netflix.

You see, Netflix offers different catalogs of films and TV shows in different EU countries. If you’re a British Netflix subscriber in Paris for the weekend, for example, you’ll still be able to log in to your account, but you’ll see the French content library. Similar geo-blocking tactics are employed on various music and video streaming services, as well as on video game and e-book stores. The EU would ideally like everything to be available to everyone across the region — just ask Paramount — but unravelling the complex web of country-specific licensing and copyright agreements is going to take some time.

Thus, the EU has come up with the quick fix of "portability," allowing Europeans to access services in other countries as if they were at home. How this will work in practice has now been agreed upon, and it’s all pretty simple. Paid services like Netflix already require that you create an account and, of course, it knows where you call home. When the new rules go into effect, your country’s film and TV catalog will effectively become linked to your account, meaning you can binge anything you normally could even though you’re accessing it from a German IP address. This will be mandatory for paid services, whereas free ones like BBC iPlayer will be able to decide for themselves whether to offer portability or not.

The portability regulations still need a final stamp of approval from the European Parliament and Council of the EU, but given how simple and common sense they are, it’s likely this will be mere formality. After the go-ahead is given, providers will have nine months to make their services portable, meaning everything should be working as the EU intends by the beginning of next year.

Via: Digital TV Europe

Source: European Commission

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As you begin to implement your organization’s 2017 tech strategy, here are the top five most interesting things that are going on in the world of Hybrid Cloud with Microsoft Azure that you should consider.

Backup

Almost every business struggles with backup, and the funny (or unfunny) thing about these struggles is that they are the same no matter what size the organization is.

• Complexity: Backup should be simple. Every minute we spend looking at backup is time wasted. We should take backup for granted and only spend time with it when we need to change services or restore things. Unfortunately, backup products, in a race to be the best, have bolted on unnecessary bells and whistles, and legacy (they support tape) solutions often never worked in the first place.
• Cost: Every business has a lot of data that must be protected. And that means you need lots of storage to protect that data on. We can be clever with that storage, but it’s another capital expenditure cost that detracts from business flexibility. Additionally, we have to pay upfront for backup software, which is often very expensive.

There are some newer players in the backup market that don’t fall fowl of the above, but, like with email, many businesses view backup as a service that should be taken for granted as a utility. Many of us have moved email to the cloud, so why don’t we move backup, too? Backup is one of the easiest services to move to the cloud, and Microsoft offers a rapidly evolving and very cost-effective solution in Azure Backup. Many small-medium enterprises are adopting Azure Backup to protect single file servers or to backup Hyper-V and vSphere. Depending on the solution, you can:

• Seed the first backup by tape.
• Perform backups directly to the cloud, using very cheap storage, negating the need for local storage.
• Keep backups for a short time on-premises, and keep long-term backups in the cloud.
• Encrypt all backup data and keep it for up to 99 years in the cloud.

Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery (DR) has a different objective to backup; with DR we need to return a business to an operational state with minimal loss of data, in a short time, with as much automation as possible, and in another location. These goals made DR very expensive and very complex, and this is why few organizations have DR solutions, and of those that do, the solutions are unreliable and costlier than they should be.

Azure Site Recovery (ASR), a DR-site-in-the-cloud, offers IT business continuity services for customers using physical, VMware, or Hyper-V servers at a very cost effective rate. Automation is central to all-things-Azure, and ASR enables you to completely automate the failover of services to Azure once you decide to invoke your business continuity plan. Instead of being a “snowflake solution,” ASR is a cloud service that is used by many businesses and tested on a daily basis. This means that you can have faith in the service, and you can build on that faith by performing test failovers of your services to an isolated network within Azure without impacting production systems.

Operations Management Suite

It’s true that Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery are a part of the Operations Management Suite (OMS), but OMS is much more than backup and DR; most of what is included is automation and management.

Enterprise management solutions have been around for decades; in that time, there has been one constant — we seem to spend more time installing, fixing, and upgrading the management system than we do on the systems we are meant to be managing.

OMS offers us a management service from the cloud; we simply choose which management features we want and we turn them on. The focus is on data. A searchable database can be queried, alerted on, and visualized using dashboards and Power BI. OMS is evolving at a fast rate, adding features to manage services no matter where they are (Windows or Linux, in Azure, on-premises, or in AWS). Recent examples of new features include on-premises network and vSphere monitoring!

Azure Stack

Hybrid Cloud is more than just a network connection, and Microsoft is in a unique position to act on that. Microsoft started down this path when Azure was powered by Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and improvements in Azure started to trickle down. Windows Server 2016 includes not only security and features from Azure but also pieces of the Azure fabric such as storage and networking.

Later in 2017, three OEMs (HPE, Lenovo, and Dell) will start to sell pre-tested hardware configurations with a solution called Azure Stack — this is a version of Azure that you can run in your own data center, using the same Azure Resource Manager API as Azure; offering some (and this will grow) of the features of Azure such as storage, compute, and networking; and giving developers and operators a common platform. No matter where you choose to deploy services, the underlying architecture will be the same; you can use the same PowerShell cmdlets, the same JSON templates, and even use the same VM OS images from the Azure Marketplace.

Remote Desktop

The desktop is where we run applications, such as Microsoft Office or File Explorer. Usually, we run these applications on our PC or laptop, but many organizations move some or all applications to a remote location for the following reasons:

• Centralized deployment
• Better information security
• Speed up migrations, such as Office 365

Microsoft and Citrix have announced a very close relationship in which Citrix Cloud will

• Be sold via the Azure Marketplace
• Deploy Citrix VDI and XenApp services as virtual machines in a customer’s Azure subscription

This partnership will benefit both corporations, and hopefully customers, too, if the licensing works smoothly and is cost effective, and it is sure to generate many headlines once the services go live.

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