Microsoft continues pushing hybrid cloud with new launches

Microsoft continued its push to get companies on the hybrid cloud train on Monday, with the launch of several products all tailored at helping bridge on-premises datacenters and the public cloud.The company announced that Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 will be available for purchase on October 1, and generally available in mid-October. On top of that, it unveiled new Azure functionality that makes it easier to monitor both public cloud infrastructure and on-premises datacenters in one control plane.The second technical preview of Azure Stack is now also broadly available, after Microsoft launched it in private beta last month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Clonezilla Server Edition Installation on Ubuntu

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The tutorial describes installation steps for Clonezilla Server Edition (SE) on Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS using a Bash script. Clonezilla is OpenSource Cloning System (OCS) and it is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program . It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition).

Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment because it can clone many computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the hard disk. It decreases time and saves the hard disk space and increases the clone efficiency.

Clonezilla is a part of DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux) which provides a diskless environment for client machines. Therefore we need to install and configure DRBL server first. I created DRBL deployment script deploy_drbl.sh that helps you to install DRBL and configure server on Ubuntu with a single Ethernet card. You have to provide only the name of Ethernet interface and the script creates virtual interface for you based on your physical interface. It also downloads a DRBL project public key, download and install drbl package from repository. The script starts interactive Bash and Perl scripts that come with Continue reading

Real-time Insights Into App Delivery with Ansible Tower Data in Splunk

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Here at Ansible by Red Hat, we’re always looking for ways to make Ansible more useful when automating all the things.

That being said, most people know this UI when they see it:

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When we ask Ansible users about their favorite tools, Splunk is a very common answer. Splunk software is at its most powerful when it is used to aggregate and correlate data from numerous sources across your environment. However, there hasn't been an easy way to use Splunk to analyze data from Ansible Tower job runs.

Not any longer. Today we’re happy to announce the result of our latest integration project - the Ansible Tower App for Splunk.

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The value of analytics platforms such as Splunk, is the ability to collect and correlate machine data including environment events with the actions that caused them. Application lifecycle management teams need the ability to correlate deployment-related data (i.e. Tower job runs) with host events (i.e. system and service logs).

Picture the following scenario:
A development team is working to release a new version of their application. What is the easiest way for a team to validate the success of the application deployment process?

The Ansible Tower app for Splunk allows a team to deploy Continue reading

Meet MailSniper, a tool to search Microsoft Exchange emails for sensitive info

Meet MailSniper, a new pen tester tool that may be of interest to you if you need to find sensitive data such as passwords, credit card numbers and healthcare data, or need to access databases, or even to discover insider and network architecture information.MailSniper is a penetration testing tool, written in PowerShell, to allow for mass searching through email across every mailbox of an organization’s Microsoft Exchange environment.Beau Bullock, from the penetration testing firm Black Hills Information Security, cited a 2016 Mandiant M-Trends Report (pdf) which claimed organizations are compromised an average of 146 days before detecting a breach. That long of a window gives attackers plenty of time to locate, compromise and exfiltrate sensitive data; pen testers, however, may only have a window of five days or less to do the same thing in order to prove risk to an organization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Meet MailSniper, a tool to search Microsoft Exchange emails for sensitive info

Meet MailSniper, a new pen tester tool that may be of interest to you if you need to find sensitive data such as passwords, credit card numbers and healthcare data, or need to access databases, or even to discover insider and network architecture information.MailSniper is a penetration testing tool, written in PowerShell, to allow for mass searching through email across every mailbox of an organization’s Microsoft Exchange environment.Beau Bullock, from the penetration testing firm Black Hills Information Security, cited a 2016 Mandiant M-Trends Report (pdf) which claimed organizations are compromised an average of 146 days before detecting a breach. That long of a window gives attackers plenty of time to locate, compromise and exfiltrate sensitive data; pen testers, however, may only have a window of five days or less to do the same thing in order to prove risk to an organization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to implement an effective BYOD policy

Concerns around BYOD once revolved around security with third-party services, but that's getting easier to manage, says Fred Ouawad, founder and CEO of TaskWorld, a company focused on employee performance and management. Now businesses are finding it more difficult to govern BYOD policies internally.Businesses are more focused on internal security. For example, if an employee doesn't perform regular updates on their smartphone, it can pose a risk to the business says Mouawad."At the moment, pushback mostly comes from highly regulated industries like banking and government agencies. But even they are slowly realizing that BYOD is something that can't be resisted," he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The Emergency Alert System: Failure IS an option

Even a failed result can be a successful test If you live in the United States, it's likely that you've fallen asleep with the television on only to be woken in the middle of the night by shrill tones blaring from your television set, followed by a deep baritone voice letting you know that there is no active nuclear attack or alert and what you experienced was only a test. The Emergency Alert System (EAS) was designed as a tiered distribution mechanism, very much like a pyramid, with the President of the United States positioned at the pinnacle. As you move down the tiers of the pyramid, you become more regionalized and localized in the coverage area that is served. Using this logic, any participating station in the chain can initiate an emergency alert message, and by default, the information will trickle down to the lower tiers as stations monitor the tier above them. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iOS 10 slower off the uptake mark

iPhone and iPad owners adopted Apple's iOS 10 at a slower tempo during its first dozen days than they did last year's upgrade, according to data from an analytics vendor.At the 12-day mark, iOS 10 accounted for 41.9% of all iOS editions detected by Mixpanel, whose metrics platform is widely used by mobile app developers to track usage and user engagement.That was significantly lower than the 52.4% accumulated by iOS 9 last year at the same post-release point, but slightly higher than iOS 8's 40.6% in September 2014.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD 25 iOS 10 features that will change your life +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why you should embrace SaaS ID management

Adopting single sign-on software to federate access to corporate applications is a key task priority for many CIOs seeking to make employees more efficient without sacrificing security.Experian has consolidated identity management with a single cloud application, laying the foundation for a hybrid cloud computing model that supports its credit scoring software. The company has standardized on software from startup Okta, which has quickly become a favorite among CIOs seeking to gain efficiencies in anything from adopting cloud and mobile services to onboarding employees. Experian CIO Barry Libenson.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

These new features in Office 365 can help users work smarter

Microsoft is going big on features powered by machine learning in its productivity services, with the announcement of a handful of updates to Office 365 on Monday.As part of its Ignite conference in Atlanta, Georgia, the company unveiled a set of new capabilities for Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and Sway. Microsoft faces tight competition in the productivity space, and these services may help the company compete with Google for market share among businesses. Microsoft Microsoft Word's Tap feature makes it easier for users to bring information from other Office files into a document. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Announces Commercial Partnership with Microsoft to Double Container Market by Extending Docker Engine to Windows Server

With industry analysts declaring Windows Server with more than 60% of the x86 server market, and citing Microsoft Azure as the fastest-growing public cloud, it comes as no surprise that Microsoft, even at its current scale, is further extending its leadership as a strategic, trusted partner to enterprise IT.

It is this industry leadership that catalyzed our technical collaboration in the Docker open source project back in October 2014, to jointly bring the agility, portability, and security benefits of the Docker platform to Windows Server.  After two years of joint engineering, we are excited to unveil a new, commercial partnership to extend these benefits for both Windows developers targeting Windows Server and enterprise IT professionals.

Specifically, the commercial partnership entails:

  • The Commercially Supported Docker Engine aka “CS Docker Engine”, Docker, Inc.’s tested, validated, and supported package of Docker Engine, will be available to Windows Server 2016 customers at no additional cost
  • Microsoft will provide Windows Server 2016 customers enterprise support for CS Docker Engine, backed by Docker, Inc
  • Docker and Microsoft will jointly promote Docker Datacenter to enable IT Pros to secure the Windows Server software supply chain and manage containerized Windows Server workloads, whether on-prem, in the Continue reading

Verizon’s shift into digital media is much bigger than Yahoo’s data breach

Yahoo will recover from the latest news about its email data breach that happened in 2014. Looming much larger than the breach is the post-merger challenge Yahoo faces as part of Verizon. It is what Richard Windsor of Radio Free Mobile calls the irrelevant challenge. Can Yahoo’s assets pose a relevant challenge to Google, Facebook and other digital media companies after the merger?+ Also on Network World: A requiem for Yahoo +In the mobile-first world, Yahoo repeatedly missed the opportunity to convert its fixed internet users to mobile. Windsor suspects that most of Yahoo’s 600 million mobile monthly active users (MAU) are Yahoo email users. Though this sized audience is not insignificant, Yahoo does not have relevant mobile engagement with multiple mobile apps. How can post-merger Verizon, Yahoo and AOL turn its billions of MAU mobile users into an ecosystem that prints money like Google with search, Gmail, Maps and Youtube and like Facebook with Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Rare Tour Of Microsoft’s Hyperscale Datacenters

If you want to study how datacenter design has changed over the past two decades, a good place to visit is Quincy, Washington. There are five different datacenter operators in this small farming community of around 7,000 people, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Intuit, Sabey Data Centers, and Vantage Data Centers, and they have located there thanks to the proximity of Quincy to hydroelectric power generated from the Columbia River and the relatively cool and arid climate, which can be used to great advantage to keep servers, storage, and switches cool.

All of the datacenter operators are pretty secretive about their glass …

A Rare Tour Of Microsoft’s Hyperscale Datacenters was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Here’s how Microsoft is using containerization to protect Edge users

One of the biggest security risks for computer users is their web browser. According to Microsoft, 90 percent of phishing emails use the browser to initiate attacks, which can then be used to help attackers establish a beachhead inside a company. Microsoft is aiming to better protect users and organizations from the threats that they face with a new feature called Windows Defender Application Guard. It's designed to isolate Microsoft Edge from the rest of the files and processes running on a user's computer and prevent computer exploits from taking hold. This is a move that could drive greater adoption of Microsoft's browser in the enterprise, at a time when the company is fiercely competing with Google in that space. Security of company assets is a big problem for enterprises, and Microsoft is offering them another way to help protect their users without requiring those users to be security experts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Here’s how Microsoft is using containerization to protect Edge users

One of the biggest security risks for computer users is their web browser. According to Microsoft, 90 percent of phishing emails use the browser to initiate attacks, which can then be used to help attackers establish a beachhead inside a company. Microsoft is aiming to better protect users and organizations from the threats that they face with a new feature called Windows Defender Application Guard. It's designed to isolate Microsoft Edge from the rest of the files and processes running on a user's computer and prevent computer exploits from taking hold. This is a move that could drive greater adoption of Microsoft's browser in the enterprise, at a time when the company is fiercely competing with Google in that space. Security of company assets is a big problem for enterprises, and Microsoft is offering them another way to help protect their users without requiring those users to be security experts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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