Cloud Data Remains Your Responsibility
Security has always inhibited the take-up of cloud. I believe in most cases fears are overstated, but data security in the public cloud cannot be taken lightly. Data remains the responsibility of the organization that owns it, regardless of where it is stored. Your data may be held in an external cloud, but you cannot abdicate your own security responsibilities.
Your choice of cloud service should be based on what your organization can do and your appetite for risk. If you have limited resources, you will be more reliant on your cloud provider, but it is up to you to ensure they offer the security you need and continue to provide it throughout the contract.
When choosing a service, be aware that different types of public cloud include different levels of security. Very simplistically, with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the service provider will secure access to the underlying host and provide good general security up to and including the host and hypervisor patching. They may also provide proactive infrastructure security monitoring, often as a chargeable additional service, but you will still be responsible for securing access to the instance(s) and everything inside them, plus security of integration between instances unless you contract the provider or another third party to do it for you.
With Platform as a Service (PaaS) you also get a secured OS and service platform, plus normally patching of this, but you have to take responsibility for access and authentication to the service plus application patching and code updates for your service running on the platform.
With Software as a Service (SaaS) the provider is responsible for overall security of the service including securing any data hosted in their environment, so your responsibility is primarily authentication to the service and data transfer between service providers.
If you have very specific security needs, public cloud may not be right for you. The major public cloud providers have defined, standard processes and services, which is one of the major benefits of cloud and key to its cost effectiveness. If you need the provider to tailor its processes to suit you, you will be better off talking to private and virtual private cloud providers.
Having chosen public cloud, you need to find the right provider – which I believe is more about risk management than security. You must carry out effective due diligence, evaluating potential cloud providers as you would any other supplier and seeking independent verification of their capabilities and financial security.
It is the cloud provider’s responsibility to ensure your data is secured and protected within their environment, and their SLA should offer appropriate guarantees. However, it is your responsibility to ask them to deliver the appropriate levels of information security, and you must measure and audit them yourself to ensure they apply what has been agreed.
Agreements do not normally include backup unless you specify it in the contract, but all data you host with the provider should be recoverable and returnable at the end of the agreement.
To ensure data sovereignty, you should ask the cloud provider where it will be stored. You need to ensure this is in a jurisdiction with the correct safeguards in place and which does not contravene the Data Protection Act (GDPR from May 2018) or comparable legislation in other jurisdictions. Many providers who previously hosted offshore are setting up UK data centers to meet this requirement. Remember to ask where both primary and backup sites are located. If the provider cannot guarantee this, walk away.
I recommend asking your potential service provider:
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Who is the ultimate holder of the data?
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Where is the data held?
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Do you operate good processes and can you prove it?
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What specific security standards and levels of security are you applying to my data?
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How can you guarantee no-one else can get access to my data unless I specifically want them to?
Organizations should check this information for themselves and manage it as they would for every other corporate risk.
Finally, consider how to manage your cloud supply chain. In many cases the organization you contract with is not the ultimate provider of the service, so you need to ensure they have suitable underpinning agreements or back-to-back contracts with their providers. Multiple providers may be necessary to deliver core services.
Risks arise when it is not clear where responsibility lies, which can lead to a blame culture. I recommend developing an operational agreement whereby suppliers commit to a code of conduct designed to remove any barriers to effective relationships and interworking and which operates alongside SLAs. This helps suppliers work together and removes any gaps or overlaps between contracted boundaries of responsibility, with mechanisms to resolve disputes in a collaborative and effective manner. It can be formalized in a Customer Service Charter.
Looking for a partner in your business' managed services needs? Call us at 800-790-1524 to learn about all that we offer!
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OneNote Class Notebook add-in now includes grade scales, improved LMS integration and sticker customization
As written on blogs.office.com
Since launching the OneNote Class Notebook add-in a year ago, hundreds of thousands of teachers have downloaded and started using the add-in. Teachers all over the world have saved time in distributing assignments, individualizing learning, connecting to their existing systems’ assignments/grades and reviewing student work all within Class Notebooks.
First-grade teacher at the Ashton Elementary School, Rachel Montisano, said, “Now, with two clicks, I can send out all the tabs/pages I created or wanted to share with the students. Truly remarkable! Microsoft had just given me a tool that made me an even more effective teacher and gave me time back!”
Today’s updates for the Class Notebook add-in for OneNote desktop update include:
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Grade scale support for Canvas and Skooler.
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Skooler joins the OneNote add-in family.
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Stickers—now includes the ability to customize.
Grade scale support for Canvas and Skooler
Last spring, we released Assignment and Grade integration for the OneNote Class Notebook. A top request from teachers and schools using Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Student Information Systems (SIS) has been to support additional assignment values beyond just 1-100 points. Many LMS and SIS have richer grade scales—such as custom points, letter grades, pass/fail, percentages—and teachers want to be able to have more flexibility in the assignments they create.
Today, we are releasing the initial updates to allow grade scale support, depending on the LMS or SIS being used. The first two partners that support grades scales are Canvas and Skooler. The Class Notebook add-in will support different grade scales, based on what the specific LMS or SIS supports.
In the example below, a teacher can choose a “Letter Grade” type when creating the assignment, and the assignment will be created in Canvas with that attribute. When the teacher goes to enter grades under the Review Student Work choice, a letter grade can be entered.
Example of grade scale support in Canvas.
Skooler joins the OneNote add-in family
Today, we welcome Skooler to the Class Notebook add-in family for assignment and grade support. Watch the Getting Started with Skooler video to learn more. As mentioned above, our Skooler integration will also add grade scale support.
To see the current list of committed education partners, please visit our new OneNote Education Partners page.
Stickers—now includes the ability to customize
Last month, we announced the arrival of stickers for OneNote Online and Windows 10. Today, the Class Notebook add-in for OneNote 2013 and OneNote 2016 for the desktop includes stickers, including the ability to customize them. To add a sticker to your page, check the Insert menu after you install the latest version of the add-in. We will release more sticker packs in the future—based on student and teacher feedback—so stay tuned!
Customizable stickers in OneNote desktop.
Since the school year started, we’ve been making improvements to the Class Notebook add-in for OneNote on the desktop. To update your OneNote Class Notebook add-in, just click the Update button on your toolbar to download and install the latest version. If you’ve never installed the Class Notebook add-in, you can get it from the OneNote Class Notebook website.
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Why automation doubles IT outsourcing cost savings
By Stephanie Overby as written on cio.com
New research analyzes automation’s impact on the IT outsourcing market, revealing double-digit productivity improvements and specific cost reductions between 14 percent and 28 percent.
Outsourcing consultancy and research firm Information Services Group (ISG) this week unveiled a new research report to quantify the cost savings and productivity gains from automating IT services.
The inaugural Automation Index shows improvements in productivity fueled by automation can more than double the cost savings typically derived from outsourcing IT. Total cost reduction ranged from 26 percent to 66 percent, depending on the service tower, with 14 to 28 percentage points of these savings directly attributable to automation, according to ISG. (The typical cost savings from labor arbitrage and process improvements alone range from 20 percent to 30 percent).
The report is based on cost and labor data from ISG’s database covering outsourcing agreements with an annual contract value of $10 million or more in which service automation is a core component. The index is one of the first to quantify the impact of automation on IT services. Automation-related technologies and platforms improve the productivity of employees by enabling them to do more with less and prevent problems before they arise, translating into lower costs for buyers by not only reducing the number of provider employees needed to perform the work but also by reducing the amount of work that needs to be performed.
The result, says Steve Hall, partner with ISG Digital Services, is a buyer’s market that’s putting tremendous pressure on services providers to deliver more and more savings to stay competitive. “As automation moves up the IT process value chain and into business processes, it will eliminate a significant amount of workthrough problem avoidance and self-healing, and with it, a significant amount of the headcount needed to deliver large-scale ITO services,” Hall said in a statement accompanying the report.
Where automation has the biggest impact
Automation is having the biggest impact on areas in which employees manage physical devices, such as network services. Most IT towers see an average 25 percent decrease in the number of resources required as a result of automation, but certain IT services experience a 50 percent headcount reduction, according to ISG. ISG found that network and voice costs are declining by 66 percent mostly due to the convergence of voice, video and data solutions built on highly standardized and virtualized capabilities, an environment ripe for leveraging automation. Service desk and end user support costs declined by 26 percent due to increased adoption of self help and remote support, the introduction of self-healing functionality, and significant automation of level one and two incidents.
Higher-order automation
Most of today’s automation is focused on computerizing repetitive tasks based on standard operating procedures but more complex automation is beginning to emerge that takes advantage of more advanced data mining and machine learning capabilities, says Stanton Jones, ISG director of research. That higher-order automation can make operational decisions with no human involvement.
In order to seize the benefits of increased automation and plummeting IT services costs, however, buyers will have to transform to more standardized technology stacks across the IT organization. “The more clients standardize things like operating system instances, application interfaces, ITIL processes, and network infrastructure, the easier it is to automate operations,” says Jones. “Standardization means less interfaces, less complexity and fewer decisions that need to be made, therefore, it becomes easier to automate.”
Buyers should also approach process automation tools with standardization in mind. “Service providers are driving increased productivity into their services by using data mining and machine learning to aggregate and correlate data and then improve the quality and timeliness of decision making for routine and repetitive tasks,” Jones says. “Clients can enable and execute these transformations by accepting standard processes and technologies providers bring to the table.”
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Learn more about managed services provided by Managed Solution
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Looking for a partner in your business' managed services needs? Call us at 800-790-1524 to learn about all that we offer!
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CONGRATULATIONS TO SHAWN WEEBE: JANUARY 2017 PLAYER OF THE MONTH
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This award is given on a monthly basis to a Managed Solution employee who has done an amazing job of exemplifying and living up to the Managed Solution Core Values.
The Managed Solution leadership team selected Shawn Weebe as Player of the Month because he has shown outstanding determination and initiative with both his team and clients.
For starters, Shawn has shown incredible leadership by volunteering to lead and overtake some major projects. Shawn went above and beyond when he showed independent leadership to bring client-focused training to the PMO. Not only is Shawn a great person to work with, he has also shown a great work ethic and built relationships with clients. He advanced our Client Roadmapping Initiative to allow our clients to have a timeline of events to reach their goals. As a result, Shawn continues to receive high survey marks from his customers.
Shawn's positive attitude and dedication to the company, his team, and his clients, is greatly appreciated by everyone here at Managed Solution. Leadership is excited to award his dedication and hard work with this month’s Player of the Month. Congratulations Shawn!
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At Managed Solution, we strive to be the best technology based company by investing in our top assets; our people!
Here at Managed Solution we thrive in an energetic, performance-driven environment where results, teamwork, and quality of customer satisfaction are recognized and rewarded. Our corporate culture is diverse, open and creative. We look for team members with proven experience, a strong sense of passion and dedication to the highest levels of excellence, technology and business ethics.
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6 Reasons Team Collaboration Should Be at the Top of Your 2017 To-Do List
According to a recent informal poll on Twitter, 41% of business owners think that team collaboration is the top benefit of the cloud.
While it may be an informal poll, it helps demonstrate the importance other business owners place on team collaboration.
But what’s behind that belief? Lots of good reasons.
Here are six reasons you should make team collaboration a major priority.
Drive More Efficiency
Team collaboration can help your business achieve more in less time by working from anywhere allowing you to be mobile while still having access to important tools and files. For example, say you’re at the airport on your way to an important meeting.
Without the proper tools, catching up with that extra work you had back at the office is out of the question and sitting around at the airport is just wasted time.
But what if you could access all those important files and work on them from your smartphone or tablet? They’re not sitting on your office computer. They’re in the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere.
Or say you’re filling in for a co-worker who’s out on vacation. You’re helping a few of her clients and without the cloud might not have access to their files. But with cloud technology those files are all available to anyone in your company, which makes jumping in a breeze.
Manage Employees
Hiring remote workers can help your business find the best employees because you’re not bound by geography. It also gives team members a level of flexibility many employees are looking for in a workplace today.
But if you’re not in the same office as someone on a day-to-day basis, managing and working together can be difficult.
Cloud collaboration tools can be absolutely vital with distributed teams — or even for people who work down the hall.
With team collaboration tools in the cloud like Microsoft Teams, the chat-based workspace for Office 365 and others, you can work on projects together, communicate back and forth, assign different tasks and check on your team’s progress.
Increase Profit for the Business
Team collaboration also allows you to potentially increase your business’s profits. Think about it – if you’re able to cut down on inefficiencies around your office and allow each of your team members to focus on what they do best, your business is likely to get more done. And when you’re not spending all that extra time on those tasks, you can focus on things that actually move your business forward.
For example, David Smith, Microsoft’s VP of worldwide SMB sales shared a case study about Holwick Constructors in a recent Twitter chat. According to Smith, the company was spending about 12 unnecessary hours on IT each week. But when it began utilizing the cloud for team collaboration, all that recouped time led to an estimated $2 million in additional business.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
When you’re able to increase efficiency among your employees, it can also lead to an improved experience for your customers. For example, if you have just a few employees who are in charge of customer service, they might not be able to dedicate as much time as they’d like to each customer or situation. However, if you have a team collaboration system in place like Outlook Customer Manager, it can streamline your team’s communication and spread out some of the tasks necessary in order to provide great service to every customer.
In fact, many businesses have already found that technology like cloud-based collaboration tools have helped them improve customer satisfaction. According to another tweet from Smith, 44 percent of small business owners surveyed said that cloud and mobile technology has led to increased satisfaction among their customers.
Streamline Your Communications
With a team collaboration system in place, your team members never have to wonder about how they should go about contacting you or another member of the team. In other cases, an employee with a question or idea might have to consider whether they should email you, set up an appointment or share their concerns in another way.
But if you have a system like Skype for Business in place, where everyone on your team can work together and stay in contact, it can make sharing ideas or concerns a lot easier for everyone. This can save everyone on your team time, both when they have questions or concerns and when they have to answer questions or concerns from others.
Make Employees More Satisfied
When your employees are able to work together seamlessly and do work that is well suited to their particular set of skills, it can make the whole experience a lot more enjoyable. And that can lead to increased job satisfaction throughout your team.
There are many tangible benefits to having happier employees. Those who are satisfied with their jobs are likely to be more productive and engaged at work. And they’re also likely to stick around for longer periods of time, meaning you can potentially even reduce employee turnover and save on HR costs. It’s a win-win!
Managed Solution Recognized for Excellence in Managed IT Services
San Diego, CA, February 23, 2017. Managed Solution announced today that they have been named on CRN's 2017 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 500 list in the Pioneer 250 category. This annual list recognizes North American solution providers with cutting-edge approaches to delivering managed services. Their offerings help companies navigate the complex and ever-changing landscape of IT, improve operational efficiencies, and maximize their return on IT investments.
In today’s fast-paced business environments, MSPs play an important role in helping companies leverage new technologies without straining their budgets or losing focus on their core business. CRN’s MSP 500 list shines a light on the most forward-thinking and innovative of these key organizations.
The list is divided into three categories: the MSP Pioneer 250, recognizing companies with business models weighted toward managed services and largely focused on the SMB market; the MSP Elite 150, recognizing large, data center-focused MSPs with a strong mix of on-premise and off-premise services; and the Managed Security 100, recognizing MSPs focused primarily on off-premise, cloud-based security services.
Managed Solution was named to the MSP Pioneer 250 list because of their innovative business solutions. With exceptional managed services such as 24/7 IT help desk support, Managed Solution is dedicated to catering to every business' specific needs.
“Managed service providers play an increasingly important role in the day-to-day operations of businesses across North America,” said Robert Faletra, CEO of The Channel Company. “MSPs help organizations streamline their spending, effectively allocate limited resources, and benefit from advanced expertise in the latest technologies. We congratulate the service providers on CRN’s 2017 MSP500 list, who have continually succeeded in meeting their customers’ changing needs and help them get the most out of their IT investments.”
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Introducing #AzureAD Pass-Through Authentication and Seamless Single Sign-on
Howdy folks,
Today’s news might well be our biggest news of the year. Azure AD Pass-Through Authentication and Seamless Single Sign-on are now both in public preview!
When we talk to organizations about how they want to integrate their identity infrastructure to the cloud, we often hear the same set of requirements: “I’ve got to have single sign-on for my users, passwords need to stay on-premises, and I can’t have any un-authenticated end points on the Internet. And make sure it is super easy”.
We heard your feedback, and now the wait is over. I’m excited to announce we have added a set of new capabilities in Azure AD to meet all those requirements: Pass-Through Authentication and Seamless Single Sign-on to Azure AD Connect! These new capabilities allow customers to securely and simply integrate their on-premises identity infrastructure with Azure AD.
Azure AD pass-through authentication
Azure AD pass-through authentication provides a simple, secure, and scalable model for validation of passwords against your on-premises Active Directory via a simple connector deployed in the on-premises environment. This connector uses only secure outbound communications, so no DMZ is required, nor are there any unauthenticated end points on the Internet.
That’s right. User passwords are validated against your on-premises Active Directory, without needing to deploy ADFS servers!
We also automatically balance the load between the set of available connectors for both high availability and redundancy without requiring additional infrastructure. We made the connector super light-weight so it can be easily incorporated into your existing infrastructure and even deployed on your Active Directory controllers.
The system works by passing the password entered on the Azure AD login page down to the on-premises connector. That connector then validates it against the on-premises domain controllers and returns the results. We’ve also made sure to integrate with self-service password reset (SSPR) so that, should the user need to change their password, it can be routed back to on-premises for a complete solution. There is absolutely no caching of the password in the cloud. Find more details about this process in our documentation.
Seamless single sign-on for all
Single sign-on is one of the most important aspects of the end-user experience our customers think through as they move to cloud services. You need more than just single sign-on for interactions between cloud services – you also need to ensure users won’t have to enter their passwords over and over again.
With the new single sign-on additions in Azure AD Connect you can enable seamless single sign-on for your corporate users (users on domain joined machines on the corporate network). In doing so, users are securely authenticated with Kerberos, just like they would be to other domain-joined resources, without needing to type passwords.
The beauty of this solution is that it doesn’t require any additional infrastructure on-premises since it simply uses your existing Active Directory services. This is also an opportunistic feature in that if, for some reason, a user can’t obtain a Kerberos ticket for single sign-on, they will simply be prompted for their password, just as they are today. It is available for both password hash sync and Azure AD pass-through authentication customers. Read more on seamless single sign-on in this documentation article
Enabling these new capabilities
Download the latest version of Azure AD Connect now to get these new capabilities! You’ll find the new options in a custom install for new deployments, or, for existing deployments, when you change your sign-in method.
The fine print
As with all previews there are some limits to what we currently support. We are working hard to ensure we provide full support across all systems. You can find the full list of supported client and operating systems in the documentation, which we’ll be updating consistently as things change.
Also, keep in mind that this is an authentication feature, so it’s best to try it out in a test environment to ensure you understand the end-user experience and how switching from one sign-on method to another will change that experience.
And last but by no means least, it’s your feedback that pushes us to make improvements like this to our products, so keep it coming. I look forward to hearing what you think!
Best regards,
Alex Simons
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Guidance for running Elasticsearch on Azure
Elasticsearch is a scalable open source search engine and database that has been gaining popularity among developers building cloud-based systems. When suitably configured, it is capable of ingesting and efficiently querying large volumes of data very rapidly.
It’s reasonably straightforward to build and deploy an Elasticsearch cluster to Azure. You can create a set of Windows or Linux VMs, then download the appropriate Elasticsearch packages to install it on each VM. Alternatively, we published an ARM template you can use with the Azure portal to automate much of the process.
Elasticsearch is highly configurable, but we’ve witnessed many systems where a poor selection of options has led to slow performance. One reason for this is that there are many factors you need to take into account in order to achieve the best throughput and most responsive system, including:
•The cluster topology (client nodes, master nodes and data nodes)
•The structure of each index (the number of shards and replicas to specify)
•The virtual hardware (disk capacity and speed, amount of memory, number of CPUs)
•The allocation of resources on each cluster (disk layout, Java Virtual Machine memory usage, Elasticsearch queues and threads, I/O buffers)
You cannot consider these items in isolation, because the nature of workloads you are running will also have great bearing on the performance of the system. An installation optimized for data ingestion might not be well-tuned for queries, and vice versa. Therefore, you need to balance the requirements of the different operations your system needs to support. For these reasons, we spent considerable time working through a series of configurations, performing numerous tests and analyzing the results.
The purpose was to illustrate how you can design and build an Elasticsearch cluster to meet your own requirements, and to show how you can test and tune performance. This guidance is now available in Azure documentation. We provided a series of documents covering:
•General guidance on Elasticsearch, describing the configuration options available and how you can apply them to a cluster running on Azure
•Specific guidance on deploying, configuring, and testing an Elasticsearch cluster that must support a high level of data ingestion operations
•Guidance and considerations for Elasticsearch systems that must support mixed workloads and/or query-intensive systems
We used Apache JMeter to conduct performance tests and incorporated JUnit tests written using Java. Then we captured the performance data as a set of CSV files and used Excel to graph and analyze the results. We also used Elasticsearch Marvel to monitor systems while the tests were running.
If you'd like to repeat these tasks on your own setup, the documentation provides instructions on how to create your own JMeter test environment and gather performance information from Elasticsearch, in addition to providing scripts to run our JMeter tests.
By Richard Blanford as written on www.infosecurity-magazine.com
