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Security as a service on the rise in the UAE

By Alicia Buller as written on computerweekly.com

Take-up of security as a service in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is rising as firms become increasingly concerned about cloud-borne threats.

According to the latest IDC trends report, security continues to be the number one challenge facing Middle East-based CIOs, with spending on security systems in the region set to pass $2bn in 2017.

The value of the region’s security as a service sector grew by just over 26% last year to hit $210m, according to Gartner research.

“We continue to see a shift from legacy IT services to cloud-based services,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. “Organisations are pursuing a cloud-first strategy, which is driving market growth.

 “The growth in cloud management and security is testimony that cloud-related services, in addition to core cloud services, are critical to cloud adoption. Organisations will look for increased automation and management of these cloud assets, as well as focus on the security aspects of consuming public cloud.”

Experts say the upcoming Dubai World Expo 2020 will be a critical factor in driving demand for security as a service. The Expo is set to be the largest event ever hosted in the country and could drive up to 50 million extra visitors to the city.

“With the huge number of tourists and investors coming to the UAE, there will be a large influx of data, which will need greater infrastructure planning,” said Sachin Bhardwaj, director of business development at eHosting DataFort (eHDF).

“Businesses will have to manage this large amount of information in the most organised way. To ensure this, investing in additional storage, network capacity and security will be required and this will drive the demand for all aspects of cloud services, particularly security as a service.”

Rapidly evolving threat

Bhardwaj warned that the threat landscape in the UAE is rapidly evolving in sync with the increasing sophistication of cyber crime across the globe. “Cyber crime has become a heavily globalised industry, with many attacks happening across borders via the internet,” he said. “Hacker operations globally have become very organised and sophisticated and malicious actors seek to access the most valuable and sensitive information of organisations mainly in the financial services, energy and healthcare sectors.”

The shortage of cyber security talent in the region is driving companies to seek automated solutions for peace of mind, said Bhardwaj.

“Many organisations are seeking solutions that provide necessary expertise, are scalable, and serve as predictable operating expenses, rather than variable capital expenses,” he said. “Hence, they are looking for cost-effective technology that provides round-the-clock security. Managed security services fit the bill perfectly.”

Bhardwaj said eHDF has seen increased local demand for email encryption, security information and event management (SIEM), end-point protection and data loss prevention.

In response to this growing demand, the company recently launched a cyber defence centre to cater to both private and government clients. The centre offers a portfolio of managed security services (MSS) along with remote managed SIEM services, deliverable within eHDF’s datacentre, on customers’ premises or in the cloud.

The UAE market largely echoes global trends in shifting away from traditional security management technologies and techniques, said Bhardwaj. “Major factors that are contributing to the growth of security as a service include the rise in demand for cloud-based security and high on-premise security costs for organisations.”

Bhardwaj said demand for end-point protection is expected to increase in the next few years because of the rise in malware, ransomware and cyber attacks. “Managed security service providers are developing solutions to incorporate advanced analytics and more powerful tools for detecting, investigating and managing increasingly dynamic threats across an expanding range of attack vectors,” he said. “Cloud-based security services, in particular, will be the most sought-after services, particularly in the UAE and Qatar.”

Jameel Alsharaf, head of group IT for UAE conglomerate the Kanoo Group, predicted a rise in demand for data leakage prevention and mobile security systems over the coming years as “more enterprises realise that the biggest security threats are internal”.

Alsharaf said he has opted for a hybrid solution for the group’s security requirements. “We are currently using security as a service for our email security, but opted for an on-premise option for our network security.”

Slow evolution

However, some experts say security as a service will evolve slowly in the UAE as organisations gradually become more educated about the market. “The maturity of some of the offered services and their associated service-level agreements are still maturing, and this will influence wide-scale adoption,” said Saeed Agha, general manager – Middle East at Palo Alto Networks.

There is currently an imbalance between supply and demand in the UAE marketplace, said Agha. “We will see higher rates of adoption of some services, such as a managed security operations centre and public cloud security as we see more mature offerings come to the market,” he added.

Agha said securing the public cloud will be a growth area in 2017 as more customers move their workloads and infrastructure into the cloud in the expectation that their data will be protected across their premises and the cloud seamlessly.

“Security as a service will be a rising trend in 2017, but service providers should spend more time educating their customers to create more demand from the customer side,” he added.

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Azure Data Factory March new features update

Hello, everyone! In March, we added a lot of great new capabilities to Azure Data Factory, including high demanding features like loading data from SAP HANA, SAP Business Warehouse (BW) and SFTP, performance enhancement of directly loading from Data Lake Store into SQL Data Warehouse, data movement support for the first region in the UK (UK South), and a new Spark activity for rich data transformation. We can’t wait to share more details with you, following is a complete list of Azure Data Factory March new features:

• Support data loading from SAP HANA and SAP DW

• Support data loading from SFTP

• Performance enhancement of direct loading from Data Lake Store to Azure SQL Data Warehouse via PolyBase

• Spark activity for rich data transformation

• Max allowed cloud Data Movement Units increase

• UK data center now available for data movement

Support data loading from SAP HANA and SAP Business Warehouse

SAP is one of the most widely-used enterprise softwares in the world. We hear you that it’s crucial for Microsoft to empower customers to integrate their existing SAP system with Azure to unlock business insights. We are happy to announce that we have enabled loading data from SAP HANA and SAP Business Warehouse (BW) into various Azure data stores for advanced analytics and reporting, including Azure Blob, Azure Data Lake, and Azure SQL DW, etc.

• The SAP HANA connector supports copying data from HANA information models (such as Analytic and Calculation views) as well as Row and Column tables using SQL queries. To establish the connectivity, you need to install the latest Data Management Gateway (version 2.8) and the SAP HANA ODBC driver. Refer to SAP HANA supported versions and installation for more details.

• The SAP BW connector supports copying data from SAP Business Warehouse version 7.x InfoCubes and QueryCubes (including BEx queries) using MDX queries. To establish the connectivity, you need to install the latest Data Management Gateway (version 2.8) and the SAP NetWeaver library. Refer to SAP BW supported versions and installation for more details.

For more information about connecting to SAP HANA and SAP BW, refer to Azure Data Factory offers SAP HANA and Business Warehouse data integration.

Support data loading from SFTP

You can now use Azure Data Factory to copy data from SFTP servers into various data stores in Azure or On-Premise environments, including Azure Blob/Azure Data Lake/Azure SQL DW/etc. A full support matrix can be found in Supported data stores and formats. You can author copy activity using the intuitive Copy wizard (screenshot below) or JSON scripting. Refer to SFTP connector documentation for more details.

Performance enhancement of direct data loading from Data Lake Store to Azure SQL Data Warehouse via PolyBase

Data Factory Copy Activity now supports loading data from Data Lake Store to Azure SQL Data Warehouse directly via PolyBase. When using the Copy Wizard, PolyBase is by default turned on and your source file compatibility will be automatically checked. You can monitor whether PolyBase is used in the activity run details.

If you are currently not using PolyBase or staged copy plus PolyBase for copying data from Data Lake Store to Azure SQL Data Warehouse, we suggest checking your source data format and updating the pipeline to enable PolyBase and remove staging settings for performance improvement. For more detailed information, refer to Use PolyBase to load data into Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Data Factory makes it even easier and convenient to uncover insights from data when using Data Lake Store with SQL Data Warehouse.

Spark activity for rich data transformation

Apache Spark for Azure HDInsight is built on an in-memory compute engine, which enables high performance querying on big data. Azure Data Factory now supports Spark Activity against Bring-Your-Own HDInsight clusters. Users can now operationalize Spark job executions through Spark Activity in Azure Data Factory.

Since Spark job may have multiple dependencies such as jar packages (placed in the java CLASSPATH) and python files (placed on the PYTHONPATH), you will need to follow a predefined folder structure for your Spark script files. For more detailed information about JSON scripting of the Spark Activity, refer to Invoke Spark programs from Azure Data Factory pipelines.

Max allowed cloud Data Movement Units increase

Cloud Data Movement Units (DMU) reflects the powerfulness of copy executor used to empower your cloud-to-cloud copy. To copy multiple files with large volume from Blob storage/Data Lake Store/Amazon S3/cloud FTP/cloud SFTP into Blob storage/Data Lake Store/Azure SQL Database, higher DMUs usually provide you better throughput. Now you can specify up to 32 DMUs for large copy runs. Learn more from cloud data movement units and parallel copy.

UK data center now available for data movement

Azure Data Factory data movement service is now available in the UK, in addition to the existing 16 data centers.With that, you can leverage Data Factory to copy data from Cloud and On-Premise data sources into various supported Azure data stores located in the UK. Learn more about the globally available data movement and how it works from Globally available data movement, and the Azure Data Factory’s Data Movement is now available in the UK blog post.

Active Directory Isn't Enough

Identity and Access Management goes way beyond just Active Directory these days. 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.

Microsoft's Identity & Access Management Stack

Let’s talk  Microsoft’s stack of tools including ADFS, SSO, Advanced Threat Protection, Multi Factor Authentication, etc. all part of Microsoft Identity Management Strategy. Whether it’s on premise or hybrid cloud we can create and manage identities to create secure environments that are also compliant.

• ADFS

  • Active Directory Federation Services - AD FS is a standards-based service that allows the secure sharing of identity information between trusted business partners (known as a federation) across an extranet. When a user needs to access a Web application from one of its federation partners, the user's own organization is responsible for authenticating the user and providing identity information in the form of "claims" to the partner that hosts the Web application. The hosting partner uses its trust policy to map the incoming claims to claims that are understood by its Web application, which uses the claims to make authorization decisions.

• SSO

  • Single Sign-On

• Windows Intune

  • Microsoft Intune provides mobile device management, mobile application management, and PC management capabilities from the cloud. Using Intune, organizations can provide their employees with access to corporate applications, data, and resources from virtually anywhere on almost any device, while helping to keep corporate information secure.

 

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New Signature helps businesses navigate opportunities to improve security and support today’s mobile workforce

“Our customers don’t want to be sold to,” says Reed M. Wiedower, Chief Technology Officer of New Signature, a 2015 Microsoft United States Partner of the Year. “They just want their specific questions answered.” New Signature’s approach is to start by walking a customer through a consultative process to learn what their business challenges are. “They tell us about a problem and we say, ‘That sounds frustrating. Let’s get to the heart of it.’” Only after New Signature understands the larger business challenges behind the specific problems a customer describes do they talk about solutions.

Understanding customer challenges

For example, a customer may say their people face challenges working where they want to—remotely, in the office, or on the road. “This can easily end up in a very fruitful conversation,” Wiedower says, “about how their best workers really want to be able to work on pretty much any type of device and don’t want to be limited to a very specific set of hardware and software.” Businesses come to New Signature understanding that times have changed. They see their competitors carrying tablets and other devices, sending and receiving documents and collaborating on them in real time. “They know they can do these things,” Wiedower explains, “and they come to us wanting to know how.” New Signature prides itself on going above and beyond offering IT solutions to challenges like these. “We’re obsessed with helping drive a positive experience for our customer’s staff,” Wiedower emphasizes. “Historically, that’s been the bugaboo of all types of device management systems and solutions—people hate them. They don’t like having a containerized, weird looking contacts app, or the inability to share a file with someone easily. We provide a really compelling experience that makes the customer’s employees want to adopt the technologies we recommend, rather than forcing something on them in the name of security.”

Painting the “cloud first”picture

When clients tell New Signature that they want to access and update data,wherever they want, from any device and still stay secure, New Signature uses the opportunity to paint a “cloud first” picture for them. “There’s a lot of sticky points when employees go out to a retailer and bring back a shiny piece of hardware only to be told they can’t use it because the in-house system won’t support it, or that it requires some amount of
configuration.” Microsoft competitors do not have a comprehensive answer for securing data and “Bring Your Own Device” hardware, Wiedower explains. “We tell clients that if they use EMS, their devices can be managed and maintained completely in the cloud. Employees can log in with their email address, even using a device they just purchased from a retailer, and immediately get access to their documents and data in a secure fashion.”

When IT people in small businesses feel they still need a domain controller, a file server and a print server, New Signature tells them they can choose that route if they want. But they also explain that if the customer moves to the cloud, they will be more effective and efficient while giving less thought to back-end components than they do today. “This doesn’t mean a customer’s IT person goes away,” Wiedower points out. “It just means they’re not managing a piece of junk sitting in their kitchen pantry. Instead, they’re managing a cloud service. It’s better for them because they won’t have to come in over the weekend if something goes down because the air conditioning unit shut down.”

An easy transition to the cloud

While traditional IT Pros may be hesitant to move to the cloud, Wiedower says that Microsoft makes the transition easy. “If customers are used to Outlook, switching to Office 365 isn’t a big deal,” he says. Customers pretty much know they want Office, he continues. “When they talk to friends in other organizations and learn that five out of eight of them want Office, he continues. “When they talk to friends in other organizations and learn that five out of eight of them are planning to move to Office 365 or have moved, it’s a no-brainer. In the last two years we’ve heard organizations say they tried cheaper solutions because IT forced it down their throats or likes new shiny stuff, but people want to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, so it’s been a pretty consistent path to a Microsoft solution.” Office 365 opens the door for New Signature, but it’s just the initial conversation. “We go on to explain the entire universe of things they can do to be more effective,” says Wiedower. The topic of speed and agility actually opens most doors, but as long as New Signature is adding business value, Wiedower explains, they can establish themselves as a trusted advisor to a client from any entry point. “We’re not here to patch their legacy IT system with technology they read about and found interesting,” Wiedower says. “We want to help them look at the bigger picture. Our goal is to help clients think like a business.”

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How can you keep data safe during festival season?

Mobile Device Management

Protect at the “front door”

Our solution starts with identity protection capabilities to secure access at the “front door” of your company’s apps and data. Azure Active Directory Identity Protection leverages billions of signals to provide risk-based conditional access to your applications and critical company data, including the option of multi-factor authentication. We also help you manage and protect privileged accounts with Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management so you can discover, restrict and monitor privileged identities and their access to resources.

Protect your data from user mistakes

We provide deep visibility into user and data activity, so you can protect your company when users make poor choices as they work with critical company data. Microsoft Cloud App Security provides visibility and controls for cloud apps, including popular SaaS apps like Box, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and of course Office 365. With the new Azure Information Protection, we have brought together classification and labeling with persistent data protection to enable secure file sharing, internally and externally. Finally, Microsoft Intune Mobile App Management (MAM) helps you prevent data loss on mobile devices, with the unique ability to manage the Office mobile apps without requiring device enrollment.

While your employees are out taking pictures by a giant ferris wheel, take control of your IT. A backup and disaster recovery plan is a must-do for any company these days. Downtime can cost companies way too much money. Make sure your company doesn't fall victim by establishing your BDR plan.

Detect attacks before they cause damage

As more organizations move to an assume breach posture, we help you identify attackers in your organization using innovative behavioral analytics and anomaly detection technologies―on-premises with Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics and in the cloud with Azure Active Directory and Cloud App Security. Our threat intelligence is enhanced with the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph driven by vast datasets and machine learning in the cloud.

With the addition and expansion of these innovative and holistic security solutions, we are renaming the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) to Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) to more accurately communicate its value. We are also announcing a new expanded EMS E5 plan. This is described in the graphic below and will be available in Q4 calendar year 2016 in line with the new Secure Productive Enterprise plans announced today.

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As one of the biggest, brightest and friendliest IT companies in Southern California we want you to take advantage of our free security assessment or just request a quote for managed services. We can even work on your behalf to get appropriate projects funded by Microsoft. Call Managed Solution at 800-790-1524.

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Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016

By Kurt Mackie as written on redmondmag.com

Microsoft today announced that Windows Server 2016 and the System Center 2016 management suite of products have reached "general availability" (GA) status.

GA means that the products can be purchased and used in production environments. Both are now licensed on a per-core basis, instead of the earlier per-processor approach. In addition, today's GA milestone means that that Microsoft's service provider partners can now begin testing Windows Server 2016 in their datacenters.

In late September, both products were at the earlier "release-to-manufacturing" stage. They got a small bit of stage time during Microsoft's Ignite keynote product "launch" back then.

Microsoft seems to have reserved Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 product details for its Ignite session attendees. Many of those sessions are currently available on demand via the Ignite 2016 Channel 9 portal. The agenda for Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 sessions at Ignite can be found at this page.

Also, Microsoft announced this week that it will broadcast a Windows Server 2016 Webcast on Oct. 13, starting at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time. The Webcast will feature talks by Microsoft luminaries such as Jeffrey Snover, Jeff Woolsey and Erin Chapple.

Windows Server 2016 Highlights

Microsoft is marketing Windows Server 2016 as another advance in its "hybrid cloud" approach. The "hybrid" part means that the traditional customer-maintained server model can work with the services delivered from Microsoft's datacenters, such as Microsoft Azure services and Office 365 services.

Windows Server 2016 was "forged in our own Azure datacenters," Microsoft stressed in its announcement. The new server also has software-defined capabilities that come from Microsoft's experience in running Azure datacenters. Microsoft also had previously announced that the Docker Engine was added to Windows Server 2016 at "no additional cost" to customers. It facilitates running applications without conflict by using either Windows Server Containers or Hyper-V Containers, which both tap Docker Engine technology.

Microsoft lists its application server product support on Windows Server 2016 in this TechNet publication. The main Microsoft application server products that aren't yet supported on the new Windows Server 2016 product include Skype for Business Server 2015, BizTalk Server 2016, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 15 and Host Integration Server 2016. They will get supported eventually, though, a Microsoft spokesperson indicated.

IT pros looking for hardware recommendations for Windows Server 2016 might take a look at this listcompiled by Thomas Maurer, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. He's also compiled other useful links on "deployment, upgrading and certification" in this blog post.

Microsoft is touting access to its new server technology via a relatively new licensing portability option. It's for current Windows Server users that have Software Assurance coverage. Under this "Azure Hybrid Use Benefit" option, if an organization has Windows Server products installed on premises that are covered by the Software Assurance annuity program, then it's possible to move that licensing from an organization's infrastructure and use Windows Server virtual machines on Microsoft Azure datacenter infrastructure.

Windows Server 2016 currently can be downloaded. It's available via the MSDN subscriber portal and the TechNet Evaluation Center (a free 180-day trial copy).

System Center 2016 Highlights

The GA announcement of Microsoft's System Center 2016 suite of products means that all of its components are now available, including Virtual Machine Manager, Operations Manager, Orchestrator and Service Management Automation, Service Manager, Data Protection Manager and Configuration Manager. A 180-day trial edition is available for download at Microsoft's evaluation portal here.

Instead of listing the exhaustive feature details, Microsoft broadly listed the following highlights of the System Center 2016 suite:

• Faster time to value with simple installation, in-place upgrades, and automated workflows.

• Efficient operations with improvements in performance and usability of all System Center components.

• Greater heterogeneity and cloud management with broader support for LAMP stack and VMware, including monitoring resources and services in Azure and Amazon Web Services.

There's also a Microsoft white paper listing the System Center 2016 highlights (PDF).

Microsoft is also touting an option to license System Center 2016 components via its Operations Management Suite (OMS) subscriptions. OMS is Microsoft's solution for managing public cloud workloads. There are four service options available to OMS subscribers, namely Insights & Analytics, Automation & Control, Security & Compliance, and Protection & Recovery. They are priced per node.

Various System Center 2016 components come with each of those OMS service options. For instance, Configuration Manager use rights come with an Automation & Control OMS subscription. It's also possible to "attach OMS services to your existing System Center license," which Microsoft calls the "OMS Add-on for System Center." It requires having Software Assurance coverage on System Center to use this add-on option. More details about these System Center-OMS licensing options can be found in Microsoft's OMS "Pricing and Licensing Datasheet" (PDF).

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Microsoft launches new tools to help enterprises move to its Azure cloud

By Frederic Lardinois as written on techcrunch.com

Since the dawn of Azure, Microsoft has talked about how enterprises can benefit from a hybrid cloud approach — that is, using the public cloud while still running some of their applications in their own data centers. Even today, Microsoft says that 80 percent of the companies it talks to still want to use a hybrid cloud approach and to help them move to its cloud services, the company is launching a number of new tools and resources today.

The most important of these is the new Cloud Migration Assessment service. With this, companies can scan their existing IT infrastructure and get an estimate for what it would cost to move these services to Azure (and how much they could save in the process).

Azure users can now also get a discount for moving their Windows Server licenses (with Software Assurance) to Azure. This new Azure Hybrid Use Benefit can save them up to 40 percent and is obviously meant to make it more attractive for existing Windows Server users to move their workloads to the cloud.

For those who want to make that move, the Azure Site Recovery (ASR) tool is also getting a minor update. This service is mostly meant to help enterprises orchestrate their disaster recovery plans, however, it can also be used to migrate existing virtual machines to Azure. It’s currently in use by the likes of Marquette University and United Airlines (no word on whether United dragged its servers over to Azure or whether it was a voluntary re-accommodation). Today’s update adds support for both the new Azure Hybrid Use Benefit and in the coming weeks, it’ll add some new features that will make tagging virtual machines in the Azure portal easier.

Update: even though Microsoft’s own marketing materials names United as an ASR customer, the company has now informed me it is not. I’m sure the company will soon re-accommodate United’s logo. Until then, it’s worth mentioning that Rackspace, Generali and Pantaenius (a yacht insurance company) are ASR customers.

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