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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Microsoft Gets the Pentagon’s Highest Cloud Security Rating for Unclassified Data
By Phil Goldstein as written on fedtechmagazine.com
Last month, the Defense Department gave Microsoft’s Azure Government cloud platform its highest certification in terms of security for unclassified data.
In a company blog post, Tom Keane, general manager for Microsoft Azure, noted that Azure Government is “the first commercial cloud service to be awarded an Information Impact Level 5 DoD Provisional Authorization by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).”
Such an authorization allows all DOD customers to use Azure Government for the most sensitive controlled unclassified information (CUI), including CUI of National Security Systems. FCW reports that Microsoft already held FedRAMP High, FedRAMP Moderate and FedRAMP Accelerated approvals under the General Services Administration's Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.
“This achievement is the result of the collective efforts of Microsoft, DISA and its mission partners to work through requirements pertaining to the adoption of cloud computing for infrastructure, platform and productivity across the DOD enterprise,” Keane noted.
ACHIEVING A HIGH LEVEL OF CLOUD SECURITY
According to a March 2016 DISA guide on cloud computing security guidelines, “CUI is information the federal government creates or possesses that a law, regulation, or governmentwide policy requires, or specifically permits, an agency to handle by means of safeguarding or dissemination controls.”
CUI can encompass numerous kinds of information, including unclassified information concerning items, commodities, technology, software, or other information whose export could reasonably be expected to adversely affect U.S. national security and nonproliferation objectives.
This includes dual-use items; items identified in Export Administration Regulations, International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the munitions list; license applications; and sensitive nuclear technology information.
CUI can also include Personally Identifiable Information, Protected Health Information; and other data requiring explicit CUI designation (i.e., For Official Use Only, Official Use Only, Law Enforcement Sensitive, Critical Infrastructure Information, and Sensitive Security Information).
Level 4 authorization accommodates CUI or other mission critical data, according to DISA. Level 5 accommodates CUI that requires a higher level of protection than that afforded by Level 4 as deemed necessary by the information owner, public law or other government regulations. Level 5 also supports unclassified National Security Systems (NSSs) due to the inclusion of NSS specific requirements in the FedRAMP +Control and Control Enhancements.
IMPLICATIONS OF THE CLOUD SECURITY AUTHORIZATION
Microsoft has had to set up separate cloud infrastructure to achieve the certification. Keane noted that Information Impact Level 5 “requires processing in dedicated infrastructure that ensures physical separation of DOD customers from non-DoD customers.”
Keane added that DOD authorizing officials can use the Azure Government authorization “as a baseline for input into their authorization decisions on behalf of mission owner systems using the Azure Government cloud DOD Region.”
According to FCW, “the company said it has built multiple data centers to provide DOD with exclusive services for Azure and Office 365 U.S. Government Defense services.”
Over the past few months, Microsoft ran a preview program with more than 50 customers across the Pentagon, including all branches of the military, unified combatant commands and defense agencies.
“We are thrilled to announce the general availability of the DOD Region to all validated DoD customers,” Keane said. “Key services covering compute, storage, networking and database are available today with full service level agreements and dedicated Azure Government support.”
Katell Thielemann, research director for the public sector and U.S. federal government at Gartner, told MeriTalk that the approval is significant for both industry and the government “in that it sends a strong signal that companies like Microsoft are taking both security and Federal-specific requirements very seriously.”
“The FedRAMP and DISA review processes are stringent, lengthy, and costly. Federal agencies, and the DoD specifically, are looking for ways to leverage all the benefits of the cloud, but their mission environments demand high levels of data protection and security,” Thielemann said.
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A survey found Azure has opened up a sizable lead.
The survey was commissioned by Sumo Logic, a data analytics provider, and was performed by UBM Research. It surveyed 230 IT professionals from companies with 500 or more employees.
The survey found 80 percent of enterprises currently use or plan to use at least one public cloud provider, if not more. And given the figures, a large number are clearly using more than one. Around two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents said they use Azure while 55 percent said they use AWS. Salesforce App cloud comes in third at 28 percent, IBM fourth at 23 percent and Google is at 20 percent.
More than half of the Azure users were from enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, which suggests that Microsoft’s cloud is particularly popular with large enterprises, according to the survey.
The result is notable because this is the first survey to put Azure ahead of AWS. All other past surveys have always found AWS to be the leader in the public cloud provider market. Now 230 IT pros does not a major trend make, but it could be the first sign that Microsoft has taken the lead in this market. Or it could be an aberration.
Additionally, the survey found that 67 percent of those surveyed are using software-as-a-service (SaaS), about four out of 10 are using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and/or platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Also growing in popularity is DevOps, the new means of application development, which goes hand-in-hand with cloud use. UBM found 68 percent of those surveyed either plan to adopt DevOps or already have.
DevOps is meant to be a faster means of writing and deploying new applications, and that goes with the findings of the survey that 42 percent of respondents said they are deploying apps more frequently than in the past, while only 8 percent of respondents said they were deploying apps less frequently than in previous years.
“Trends such as cloud computing and DevOps are helping companies become more flexible and responsive to market conditions. However, as cloud computing becomes standard in IT organizations, concerns about security persist,” said Amy Doherty, research director for UBM Technology in a statement.
Security remains the top concern of companies embracing the cloud. When asked about the biggest challenges related the cloud, security received the most votes (27 percent) from respondents. While the majority of those surveyed (55 percent) said public cloud services are more secure than they used to be, only 6 percent describe the security of public cloud as “excellent.”
Other sore spots for cloud adopters are migrating applications and data to the cloud (15 percent), obtaining a unified view of cloud and traditional IT infrastructure (8 percent) and managing cloud-based apps and operations (7 percent).
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Azure Backup’s cloud-first approach and why it matters
Backup is all about how quickly you can be back up from a disaster or data loss situation. On this World Backup Day, this blog post is dedicated to explaining Azure Backup's cloud-first approach and how it helps you be back up quickly and securely.
Backup is a deeply entrenched market and companies generally tend to stick with their backup solution unless there are major shifts in the IT infrastructure. When such a shift occurs, companies are open to evaluating alternate backup solutions that offer significant value tied to that infrastructure shift. Virtualization was a hardware infrastructure inflection that happened in the 2000s that allowed companies to significantly reduce their IT costs with the consolidation and portability benefits offered by virtualization. It also allowed new backup players to emerge and the ones that delivered significant value tied to virtualization became successful. The infrastructure inflection currently underway is the shift to the public cloud and Azure Backup has taken a cloud-first approach to deliver maximum value for backup scenarios in a cloud-transformed IT environment.
Cloud-first value propositions
These are the benefits customers would likely expect in backup scenarios as they augment the public cloud to their IT infrastructure:
Consistent management experience for Hybrid IT: Companies will be in a hybrid model where in addition to the on-premise IT, they will have a cloud foot print that has IaaS (“lift-and-shift applications”) that possibly extends to PaaS (“born-in-the-cloud applications”) and SaaS (O365). It is important to have a consistent experience to manage backups across the IT assets in this hybrid model.
Agility: Business owners are seeking more agility offered by the public cloud where they can deploy solutions from the marketplace to meet their business needs. From a backup perspective, an application admin should be able to sign up for backup and do self-service restores without having to go through a central IT process to provision compute/storage in the cloud to enable backup.
Reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership): A subscription based model (PAYG) is an obvious benefit of the public cloud, but it is also important to consider overall IT cost for backup. For example, if you need to deploy additional infrastructure in the cloud (compute and storage) for backups your overall costs would be higher.
Freedom from infrastructure: This is one of the fundamental benefits companies seek when they move their IT to the cloud and since backup has a significant infrastructure footprint in on-premises IT (storage, compute, licenses, etc), an infrastructure-less backup solution would be a natural expectation for customers.
There are 3 possible approaches backup solutions can take to leverage the cloud inflection and it is important to consider how well they deliver on the above promises in each approach:
Cloud as storage: In this model, the backup solution leverages the public cloud as a storage target for backup either for the second backup copy or to replace tape backups. The customer still needs to manage storage in the cloud, pay for any egress costs for restores, and manage bulk of backup infrastructure that is still on premises.
Cloud as infrastructure: This is the next level where the customer can run the backup application in an IaaS VM, which can protect applications deployed in IaaS. While it does offer a similar experience, it can only protect IaaS VMs and not the other cloud assets (PaaS, SaaS) and has TCO implications. For example, a single IaaS VM only supports 32 TB of total addressable storage, which is far too small for a backup application so to back up at scale, customers need to deploy additional IaaS VMs, configure scale sets for availability and provision/manage backup storage, all of which adds to the overall TCO for backup. Also, as the name implies, it does not free the customer from infrastructure management which is a fundamental promise of moving to the cloud.
Cloud as platform: Backup can be built in a PaaS model to deliver backup as a service and architected to provide a consistent management experience to both on premises infrastructure as well as backup for born-in-the-cloud applications (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS). Since all the service infrastructure is owned and managed by the service, there would be no additional costs for the backup and there is complete freedom from managing infrastructure associated with backup.
Azure Backup is architected from the ground-up as a first-class PaaS service in Azure as described in approach 3 and delivers on the cloud promises customers expect as they cloud transform their IT infrastructure. In addition, since it is a first-party service in Azure, it can also leverage other services in Azure to deliver value beyond backup scenarios. For example, rich monitoring and reporting using PowerBI or the capability to do advanced analytics on backup data in Azure.
Compelling backup scenarios enabled by the cloud first architecture
The cloud-first approach of Azure Backup provides unique benefits to customers which are either difficult or not possible in traditional approaches.
Native Backup for IaaS/PaaS: Azure Backup seamlessly integrates with IaaS VM by providing an enable-backup experience in the VM blade itself. A VM extension is deployed when the customer chooses to enable backup and with a few clicks, the IaaS VM is configured for backup. Backup can also be enabled via ARM templates and it supports all the features of IaaS VMs such as disk encryption, premium disks etc. This capability will be extended for SQL Azure, Azure Files, and other Azure PaaS assets like WebApps and Service Fabric for a first-class backup experience in Azure.
Restore as a service: One of the key concerns customers have when they store their backups in the cloud is the restore experience. There are egress costs, the time it takes to restore data back on premises and handling encryption requirements. Restore operation typically requires all the data has to be restored on premises or a restore appliance needs to be hydrated in the cloud to browse items from the cloud restore points. Azure Backup, restore-as-a-service feature uses a unique approach to mount a cloud recovery point as a volume and browse it to enable item-level-restore. The customer does not need to provision any infrastructure and the egress from Azure is free which are both unique value propositions of Azure Backup. This feature is currently available for IaaS VMS (Windows and Linux) and on premise Windows servers. The same capability for System Center Data Protection Manager and Microsoft Azure Backup Server will be available over the next few months.
Secure Cloud Backups: Azure Backup leverages Azure authentication services to provide multiple layers of security to secure cloud backups against malware attacks such as ransomware. While the predominant ransomware attacks are limited to infecting on-premises data, some of the more evolved ransomware attacks also target backup copies of the data. Typical infections include reducing backup retention, re-encrypting data, and deleting backup schedule/copies that are initiated from compromised machines. Azure backup has several layers of protection to prevent and alert against such attacks.
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Digital transformation is being driven by Indian companies such as Flipkart (the country’s leading marketplace) and Tata Motors, as well as Korean companies such as LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics and Asan Medical Center, through the leveraging of Microsoft cloud.
Azure is available from two new cloud regions in Korea, part of 38 Azure regions around the globe which is more regions than any other cloud provider. 13 of those regions are in Asia which gives customers across the region the opportunity to leverage the Azure cloud platform’s ability.
Across industries, including finance and health care, Korean companies are putting local Azure services to use in their organizations. LG Electronics is sending real-time data and using the scalability of virtual machines in order to better serve their customers and Asan Medical Center is able to collaborate with the industry & academia in order to supply anonymous clinical notes through Microsoft's hybrid cloud.
Other Korean companies, such as Samsung Electronics, are leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT). Using its remote energy reduction solutions (S-Net Cloud), Samsung is able to monitor energy use and deliver efficiencies to customers in order to save them money on energy costs.
Data center regions in India opened in September 2015 have provided the immense computing power of Microsoft cloud for the purposes of growth and innovation. Flipkart has adopted Azure as its exclusive public cloud platform to do just this, grow and innovate. The collaboration between Microsoft and Flipkart has marked the process towards providing customers with the best online shopping experience possible, aided in addition by Flipkart's use of Azure Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics to optimize the areas of merchandising, marketing, and customer service. This partnership comes on the heels of Microsoft's cloud collaboration with Tata Motors – India’s leading auto manufacturer – to provide connected driving experiences with Azure.
The rise of cloud computing and the plethora of new business opportunities it comes with ushers virtually every organization in every industry into the realm of becoming a digital business in at least some respect. This, in turn, makes it pivotal that every company master the legalities that come with the digital economy.
One challenge that technology leaders such as Microsoft have consistently acknowledged is the risk of patent infringement. With over two decades of experience and a broad legal infrastructure designed to manage these risks, Microsoft will use its patent portfolio to help protect cloud customers.
Microsoft announces its launch of the Azure IP Advantage program – the industry’s most comprehensive protection against intellectual property (IP) risks.
The goal is to foster innovation and investments in the cloud while businesses can respond to the changing needs of their customers without worrying about lawsuits.
The cloud-based economic opportunity is great with an estimated more than $1 trillion in IT spending by 2020, according to the research firm Gartner, representing an huge economic opportunity for individuals and businesses everywhere.
At the same time, however, the growing risk of IP lawsuits in the cloud is essential to acknowledge. According to Boston Consulting Group, there has been a 22 percent rise in cloud-based IP lawsuits over the last five years in the US. During the same period of time, non-practicing entities (NPEs) have increased their acquisition of cloud-related patents by 35 percent.
Microsoft Azure IP Advantage program includes the following to address this issue:
1) Microsoft's best-in-industry IP protection with uncapped indemnification coverage will now also cover any open source technology that powers Microsoft Azure services, such as Hadoop used for Azure HD Insight.
2) 10,000 Microsoft patents will be made available to customers that use Azure services for the sole purpose of allowing them to better defend themselves against patent lawsuits against their services that run on top of Azure.
3) Any patents that Microsoft transfers to non-practicing entities in the future can never be asserted against them. Microsoft does not have a practice of making such transfers, but see this as an extra protection that many customers value.
These measures are put in place to make sure the cloud is used for good & to protect users against intellectual property risk.
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Microsoft Gets the Pentagon’s Highest Cloud Security Rating for Unclassified Data
