SQL Server 2016: Transforming businesses with data

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SQL Server 2016 is much more than a database – it is the data management and business analytics platform for intelligent applications that can tackle any data project for any application.
SQL Server 2016 is the only database that is born in the cloud. It is the summation of capabilities we released first in Microsoft Azure, where they are already being used in millions of production databases.
We celebrate our customers' success in business as demonstrated by powerful customers stories such as Docusign, MasterCard, Johnson Controls, and Renault Formula 1 Racing.
Microsoft is the new industry leader based on the Gartner in the Operational Database Management Systems MQ, the just released Data Warehouse MQ and the new Business Intelligence MQ.
Watch Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group in Microsoft, explain the benefits of using data in businesses. He also talks to executives at Docusign, Johnson Controls and Renault Sport F1 Team about how they are using data to transform their businesses.

Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296


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Announcing SQL Server on Linux

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Announcing SQL Server on Linux

By Scott Guthrie - Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft
It’s been an incredible year for the data business at Microsoft and an incredible year for data across the industry. At the March Data Driven event in New York, we kicked off a wave of launch activities for SQL Server 2016 with general availability. This is the most significant release of SQL Server that we have ever done, and brings with it some fantastic new capabilities.

SQL Server 2016 delivers:

These improvements, and many more, are all built into SQL Server and bring you not just a new database but a complete platform for data management, business analytics and intelligent apps – one that can be used in a consistent way across both on-premises and the cloud. In fact, over the last year we’ve been using the SQL Server 2016 code-base to run in production more than 1.4 million SQL Databases in the cloud using our Azure SQL Database as a Service offering, and this real-world experience has made SQL Server 2016 an incredibly robust and battle-hardened data platform.
Gartner recently named Microsoft as leading the industry in their Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems in both execution and vision. We’re also a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse and Data Management Solutions for Analytics, and Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, as well as leading in vision in the Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms.

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Extending SQL Server to Also Now Run on Linux

Today I’m excited to announce our plans to bring SQL Server to Linux as well. This will enable SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud. We are bringing the core relational database capabilities to preview today, and are targeting availability in mid-2017.
SQL Server on Linux will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solution. One with mission-critical performance, industry-leading TCO, best-in-class security, and hybrid cloud innovations – like Stretch Database which lets customers access their data on-premises and in the cloud whenever they want at low cost – all built in.
“This is an enormously important decision for Microsoft, allowing it to offer its well-known and trusted database to an expanded set of customers”, said Al Gillen, group vice president, enterprise infrastructure, at IDC. “By taking this key product to Linux Microsoft is proving its commitment to being a cross platform solution provider. This gives customers choice and reduces the concerns for lock-in. We would expect this will also accelerate the overall adoption of SQL Server.”
“SQL Server’s proven enterprise experience and capabilities offer a valuable asset to enterprise Linux customers around the world,” said Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat. “We believe our customers will welcome this news and are happy to see Microsoft further increasing its investment in Linux. As we build upon our deep hybrid cloud partnership, spanning not only Linux, but also middleware, and PaaS, we’re excited to now extend that collaboration to SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, bringing enterprise customers increased database choice.”
“We are delighted to be working with Microsoft as it brings SQL Server to Linux,” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical. “Customers are already taking advantage of Azure Data Lake services on Ubuntu, and now developers will be able to build modern applications that utilize SQL Server’s enterprise capabilities.”
Bringing SQL Server to Linux is another way we are making our products and new innovations more accessible to a broader set of users and meeting them where they are. Just last week, we announced our agreement to acquire Xamarin. Recently, we also announced Microsoft R Server , our technologies based on our acquisition of Revolution Analytics, with support for Hadoop and Teradata.
The private preview of SQL Server on Linux is available starting today and we look forward to working with the community, our customers and our partners to bring it to market.
Please join me Satya Nadella, Joseph Sirosh and Judson Althoff at our Data Driven event on Thursday to hear more about this news and how Microsoft is helping customers transform their business using data.

Source: http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-server-on-linux/

Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296


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Make sure your apps are keeping up with the speed of your business with SQL Server. Industry-first enterprise-class cloud data warehouse that can grow, shrink, and pause in seconds

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Make sure your apps are keeping up with the speed of your business with SQL Server:

 

Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296

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Starting July 1, Microsoft customers with 500 users or less will not have an enterprise agreement model to worry about! Contact us at 800-307-0296 to see what you could be saving by switching to Pay as You Go Pricing.

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500 Users or Less? Significant Changes to Enterprise Agreements Save Big with New, Pay as you Go Microsoft Licensing

You asked for it and Microsoft is answering! Starting July 1, Microsoft customers with 500 seats or less will not have an enterprise agreement model to worry about!

What does this mean for you?

No more three year commitments. Pay only for what you actually use on a per user, per month basis. Yes that means you can have 50 users running on exchange online only and 150 users running with a fully loaded version of Office 365.
Buying Microsoft Products through a trusted Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP) gives you access to pricing up to 20% off what you'll find in the Microsoft portal and gives you unlimited access to support services and deployment services that only 1st Tier CSP's can provide you through their Microsoft Partnership.
Microsoft is currently running "jump start" incentives to help businesses move to the cloud and get secure, mobile and compliant as soon as possible. This includes big discounts and even FREE deployments on certain solutions for qualifying customers!

Customers with 500 seats or more?

Enterprise Agreements might not make sense for you anymore either. Microsoft's MPSA and CSP programs give you more options than ever to see which licensing purchase method makes the most sense for your ever changing business.

GET A FREE PRICE COMPARISON TODAY 800-307-0296

Tell us a little bit about your current plan and we'll figure out what you could be saving by switching to Pay as You Go Pricing and taking advantage of current Microsoft incentives.



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In the Cloud - Intelligent Management: What’s Changing & How You Capitalize

Intelligent Management: What’s Changing & How You Capitalize

As written by: Brad Anderson on blog.technet.com
When your job requires you to manage identity, devices, and protect information – you don’t have any “simple” tasks. Just staying up to date on the latest technology, ongoing trends, and emerging threats is a full-time job – to say nothing of having to implement all of this and keep up with the specific day-to-day demands of your organization.
We created the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) to address the enormous challenges associated with identity management, device management, and information protection – and, in this post, I’m going to dive in on what the EMS can do for you in each of these areas.

Identity Management

Single sign-on to multiple apps is something that would be a welcomed time-saver for any worker, and the fact that it would eliminate the need to remember multiple passwords and logins – that’s even better. In the past, many of these problems have been solved via on-prem identity management like Active Directory (AD).
As the current workforce’s workstreams, responsibilities, and data consumption move to the cloud, the management of their identity has to go there, too. Asking an on-prem solution to manage the nearly infinite scale of cloud-based apps is to (at best) invite chaos. Creating a direct connection between your identity management solution and every SaaS app your workforce uses will instantly become too complex to ever successfully manage. Unsurprisingly, however, this is exactly the situation in which many organizations find themselves today:

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Figure 4: Creating a direct connection between every organization’s identity management solution and every SaaS application would quickly become too complex to manage.

Rather than spend your days untangling your infrastructure from that sort of tangle, a much more productive approach is using the aforementioned cloud-based solution for identity management. There is only one cloud-based identity management solution that can interoperate with the one you’re already using on-prem: Azure Active Directory Premium (AADP).
With AADP, the AD you’ve been using (AD has a 90% share of the market, so I assume you’re using it!) is still an essential part of your operation, but now, by connecting it to AADP, you can manage all the connections your workforce makes to SaaS apps.
Rather than that train wreck shown above in Figure 4, see how much simpler AADP makes things in Figure 5:

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Figure 5: Cloud-based identity management with Azure Active Directory greatly simplifies managing single sign-on to SaaS applications.

AADP intelligently addresses a lot of otherwise intractable problems: SSO is made simple, you retain control of identities via the AD console you already know, and by leveraging the power of a cloud-based control plane you can control access to local and SaaS apps with a single login. Life immediately becomes easier for both the users and the admins.
Azure AD currently provides SSO to more than 2,000 cloud apps, including Office 365, Salesforce.com, Dropbox, Workday, and ServiceNow. To see what it can do in action, I really recommend checking out my recap of the Cloud App Discovery demo I did at Ignite.
It’s not all about SSO, however; this service offers a ton of other features, such as:
Support for multi-factor authentication (MFA).
This is based on the same technology we built to detect suspicious logins in Outlook.com. In the event our machine learning detects anything suspicious, the person requesting access will automatically get a challenge to provide their password + an additional piece of information (e.g. a code that is sent to their mobile phone). This makes you more secure.
The Cloud App Discovery tool.
As noted above, this is how you learn which SaaS applications your employees are actually using. For just about every organization, this tool represents the first time they see all the SaaS in use inside of their company. This makes you more educated.
Detailed reporting that tracks users and issues warnings about suspect behavior.
For example, Azure AD is alerted to logins from possibly compromised corporate identities. When I show this to people they are blown away by how we can identify compromised identities and stop attacks. This makes you more secure.
Integration with the most popular SaaS applications.
The list includes Salesforce, Workday, and others that go far beyond SSO. For example, you can automatically add a user to these applications when a new user is added to Azure AD. This makes you more efficient.

Device Management

The need to manage devices of every shape/size/platform has long-since been the new normal for IT. Managing the devices themselves (aka Mobile Device Management or MDM) is a must-have first step, but, in order to be proactive/scalable/secure, managing the apps on those devices (aka Mobile Application Management or MAM) is critical.
Mobile devices are much more likely to have the majority of the content they consume come from the cloud and other SaaS apps, so, just like with identity management, the management of these devices also needs to be cloud-based. Running MDM on-prem will require you to route your communications between devices and apps through your on-prem setup:

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Figure 6: Traditional solutions for MDM and MAM often require communication between mobile devices and cloud applications to go through an on-premises bottleneck.

There are a lot of legit concerns with this setup, notably: There is a really low ceiling on its performance and scalability. There’s also the fact that when one of your users purchases a new mobile device and is setting it up at home, the communication to the cloud app goes directly to the app and never comes back through your organization. Big problems all around.
Using an on-prem solution for MDM means you have to wrestle with the fact that you’re limiting the speed of interaction between devices and cloud apps, and you’re requiring your own IT organization to worry about scaling in order to do this. Save yourself the years this will take off your life by doing both your MDM and MAM from the cloud. Do it the modern way:

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Figure 7: By providing MDM and MAM as a cloud service, Microsoft Intune provides a simpler, more sensible approach for the modern world.

This is the exact approach we have developed with Microsoft Intune. With Intune, devices can use both on-prem and SaaS apps via a common, cloud-based control plane. As noted in Figure 7, what was once a huge bottleneck with on-prem is now a scalable, cloud-based service. Intune can manage all the cloud-based traffic, and your infrastructure can manage on-prem traffic the same as before (in most cases with SCCM).

The benefits of using a cloud-based solution for MDM and MAM are vast.

Consider, for example, the challenge of keeping up with constant stream of OS and app updates – iOS, Android, and now Windows 10 will be updated frequently (and, oftentimes, in ways that affect how those devices are managed). The volume of new material is immense. These updates require subsequent updates to the MDM software so that 1) those devices can continue to operate as expected, and 2) so that the users can take advantage of those new updates.
Here’s what this process looks like using an on-prem setup:
1.The MDM/MAM vendor will need to ship out the new patches to each customer (which takes time).
2.Then you have to install these patches (which takes time).
3.Next, your team will have to test these patches (even more time).
4.Now, multiply this by all the different types of devices and each platform (an insane amount of time).
Considering how often these updates roll out, the odds of you ever being 100% current are very small.
A problem like this seems almost too big to solve – but, with cloud-based MDM/MAM, every time a new version of (for example) iOS is available, we update Intune simultaneously and every one of your devices remains up to date. Automatically. You never see or feel it happen. It just works.
A quick overview of the additional benefits of Intune include:
•The unique ability to effectively manage Office mobile applications on your users’ iOS, Android, and Windows devices. (We’ll look more closely at what this means later.)
•The ability to effectively manage your internal applications – and have them fully participate with the Office mobile apps.
•The ability to effectively manage the key apps from partners like Box, SAP, Adobe and Citrix.
•The ability to remotely delete all corporate information from a user’s device while leaving his personal data intact. You might do this when an employee leaves your organization, or when his device falls out of compliance.
•A unified endpoint management solution that lets you manage your organization’s mobile devices and desktop PC’s from the same administrative environment. This relies on the tight integration Microsoft has built between Intune and System Center Configuration Manager.

Information Protection

Any IT organization is going to sleep a lot easier if they can consistently answer questions like: Who is allowed to access a particular document? and What kind of access is permitted (reading, writing, etc.)?
Being able to get this granular with data protection is worth its weight in gold – if you can do it. Even in the on-prem era, before documents were flying between devices and living in the cloud, this type of control was more aspirational than reality, but now, with a need for it greater than ever, a solution is finally intact.
For the last several years, we have offered something called Active Directory Rights Management Service, but it came with its own limitations:

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Figure 8: Relying on an on-premises technology for information protection requires manually configuring point-to-point connections for identity management between individual organizations.

In Figure 8 we see two organizations that want to share a protected doc, and they want only certain people within each org to see it. To do this, each attempt to access the doc has to be verified by a data protection service. An on-prem solution can meet this need if you go to the trouble of setting up a point-to-point federation between the identity management solution each org is using. That’s a lot of trouble for a handful of people to view 1 document. So much trouble, in fact, that it was very rarely done – and this left the boundaries around sensitive docs very porous.
A cloud-based data protection setup, however, looks a lot simpler:

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Figure 9: Using a shared cloud solution for identity management and information protection greatly simplifies controlling access to documents.

What you see in Figure 9 is a way for the two orgs to work securely without the giant time commitment of setting up direct connections to each other. Instead, they both securely connect to a cloud service – in this case, Azure AD and Azure Rights Management Service (RMS). With this cloud-based model in place, you can work securely with limitless numbers of organizations and this model moves with you. Working securely means operating simply.
For reference, Azure RMS also delivers:
•Support for policy templates, which allow defining policies for sharing protected documents. For example, an organization might define a template that restricts access to a particular document to people only in the R&D organization.
•Document tracking that monitors successful and unsuccessful access attempts by recipients of a protected document. It also provides the ability to revoke access to a document.
•The option to encrypt documents using your own key rather than one provided by Azure RMS.
•Cloud identity + AADP – we can help protect your cloud identities and your on-prem identities.

 

Industry Leading System Center Engineering Talent

Do you have the tools in place to empower the "always on" worker, the co-mingling of company and personal business, compliancy, access and data loss? It's time to think about your overall Identity & Access Management Strategy and we can help. Get started with System Center.

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Why IoT Security Is So Critical via @TechCrunch

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Why IoT Security Is So Critical

By Ben Dickson (@bendee983) as written on techcrunch.com
Twenty years ago, if you told me my phone could be used to steal the password to my email account or to take a copy of my fingerprint data, I would’ve laughed at you and said you watch too much James Bond. But today, if you tell me that hackers with malicious intents can use my toaster to break into my Facebook account, I will panic and quickly pull the plug from the evil appliance.
Welcome to the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), where digitally connected devices are encroaching on every aspect of our lives, including our homes, offices, cars and even our bodies. With the advent of IPv6 and the wide deployment of Wi-Fi networks, IoT is growing at a dangerously fast pace, and researchers estimate that by 2020, the number of active wireless connected devices will exceed 40 billion.
The upside is that we are able to do things we never before imagined. But as with every good thing, there’s a downside to IoT: It is becoming an increasingly attractive target for cybercriminals. More connected devices mean more attack vectors and more possibilities for hackers to target us; unless we move fast to address this rising security concern, we’ll soon be facing an inevitable disaster.

IoT Vulnerabilities Open Up New Possibilities To Hackers

Some of the more frightening vulnerabilities found on IoT devices have brought IoT security further up the stack of issues that need to be addressed quickly.
Earlier this month, researchers found critical vulnerabilities in a wide range of IoT baby monitors, which could be leveraged by hackers to carry out a number of nefarious activities, including monitoring live feeds, changing camera settings and authorizing other users to remotely view and control the monitor.
In another development, it was proven that Internet-connected cars can be compromised, as well, and hackers can carry out any number of malicious activities, including taking control of the entertainment system, unlocking the doors or even shutting down the car in motion.
Wearables also can become a source of threat to your privacy, as hackers can use the motion sensors embedded in smartwatches to steal information you’re typing, or they can gather health data from smartwatch apps or health tracker devices you might be using.
Some of the most worrisome cases of IoT hacks involve medical devices and can have detrimental — perhaps fatal — consequences on patients’ health.

What Is being Done To Secure The IoT?

The silver lining is that IoT security, previously ignored, has now become an issue of high concern, even at the federal government level. Several measures are already being taken to gap holes and prevent security breaches at the device level, and efforts are being led to tackle major disasters before they come to pass.
After the Jeep Cherokee hack, automaker Fiat scrambled to have the problem fixed and quickly issued a safety recall for 1.4 million U.S. cars and trucks to install a security update patch. The whole episode also served as a wakeup call for the entire IoT industry.
Now security firms and manufacturers are joining ranks to help secure the IoT world before it spins out of control. Digital security company Gemalto is planning to use its experience in mobile payments to help secure IoT devices. Gemalto will be offering its Secure Element (SE) technology to automotive and utility companies. SE is a tamper-resistant component that gets embedded into devices to enable advanced digital security and life-cycle management via encryption of and access-control limitation to sensitive data.
Microsoft also is entering the fray, and has promised to add BitLocker encryption and Secure Boot technology to the Windows 10 IoT, the software giant’s operating system for IoT devices and platforms such as the Raspberry Pi. BitLocker is an encryption technology that can code entire disk volumes, and it has been featured in Windows operating systems since the Vista edition. This can be crucial to secure on-device data. Secure Boot is a security standard developed by members of the PC industry to help make sure that your PC boots using only software that is trusted by the PC manufacturer. Its implementation can prevent device hijacking.
The IoT security issue has also given rise to new alliances. A conglomeration of leading tech firms, including Vodafone, founded the Internet of Things Security Foundation, a non-profit body that will be responsible for vetting Internet-connected devices for vulnerabilities and flaws and will offer security assistance to tech providers, system adopters and end users. IoTSF hopes to raise awareness through cross-company collaboration and encourage manufacturers to consider security of connected devices at the hardware level.
“The opportunity for IoT is staggering,” said John Moor, a spokesperson for IoTSF. “However, there are ever-real security challenges that accompany those opportunities.” Moor stressed the importance to address security from the start. “By creating a dedicated focus on security,” he promised, “our intention is simple — drive excellence in IoT security. IoTSF aims to be the home for providers, adopters and beneficiaries of IoT products and services.”
Other companies are working on setting up platforms that will enable large networks of IoT devices to identify and authenticate each other in order to provide higher security and prevent data breaches.
There also is research being conducted to enhance IoT security through device and smartphone linking. The effort is being led by experts at the University of South Hampton, who believe smartphones can help overcome IoT devices’ limits in user interfaces and complexities in networking.

What More Needs To Be Done?

While the effort to tackle security issues regarding IoT devices is laudable, it isn’t enough to ensure that we can leverage the full power of this new technology in a secure environment.
For one thing, the gateways that connect IoT devices to company and manufacturer networks need to be secured as well as the devices themselves. IoT devices are always connected and always on. In contrast to human-controlled devices, they go through a one-time authentication process, which can make them perfect sources of infiltration into company networks. Therefore, more security needs to be implemented on these gateways to improve the overall security of the system.
Also of concern are huge repositories where IoT data is being stored, which can become attractive targets for corporate hackers and industrial spies who rely on big data to make profits. In the wake of massive data breaches and data theft cases we’ve seen in recent years, more effort needs to be made to secure IoT-related data to ensure the privacy of consumers and the functionality of businesses and corporations.
There also must be a sound plan for installing security updates on IoT devices. Each consumer will likely soon own scores — if not hundreds — of connected devices. The idea of manually installing updates on so many devices is definitely out of the question, but having them automatically pushed by manufacturers also can be a risky business. Proper safeguards must be put in place to prevent updating interfaces from becoming security holes themselves.
What is evident is that the IoT will become an important part of our lives very soon, and its security is one of the major issues that must be addressed via active participation by the entire global tech community. Will we be able to harness this most-hyped, emerging technology that will undoubtedly revolutionize the world, or will we end up opening a Pandora’s Box that will spiral the world into a new age of mayhem and chaos? Let’s hope for the former.
Source: techcrunch.com/2015/10/24/why-iot-security-is-so-critical/

Case Study: Watch this video to see how GODIVA is using Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite to access information when and where they need it, enabling them to deliver the ultimate chocolate experience for every single one of their customers.

With Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite, Godiva has access to information when and where they need it, enabling them to deliver the ultimate chocolate experience for every single one of their customers.

About GODIVA:
Since 1926 GODIVA has been the premier maker of the fine Belgian chocolate. Learn more.
Enterprise Mobility Resources
Source: microsoft.com

Do You Have A Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan? 3 Obvious Reasons You Need One

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3 Obvious Reasons You Need A Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan

  1. You need to protect your company data from security threats and hackers. Did you see how cheating site Ashley Madison was breached by hackers who exposed "secure" user data?
  2. Natural disasters do occur and 90% of companies that experience one week of data downtime go out of business within 12 months.
  3. Systems do crash, data gets erased or corrupted, viruses attack.
With vast quantities of vital data moving through your business, even with limited resources and budget, it is critical for an organization to have a true business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place. This is the only solution to deliver an advanced insurance policy against loss of data and downtime.
Managed Solution provides a Business Continuity/Backup & Disaster Recovery Service to protect data from loss and prevent costly downtime in the event of a catastrophic server failure. Learn more.