There's a lot of product announcements every week -- and sooner or later, something gets announced that you'll want to know. Every Friday, we'll connect some of these newsy little dots and draw a picture as to what's going on with tech vendors and industry trends.
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Android Enterprise Recommended: Raising the Bar of Excellence for Enterprise Mobility
Google launched a new program, Android Enterprise Recommended, to provide validated best practices to help enterprise companies evaluate their options when it comes to fielding and managing android based devices in their company.
They provided a list of what some of these key requirements and it includes:
- Minimum hardware specifications for Android 7.0 or higher devices
- Support for bulk deployment of Android devices
- Delivery of Android security updates within 90 days of their release from Google for a period of at least three years
- Unlocked devices must be available directly from the manufacturer or reseller
- Consistent application experience in managed profiles and on managed devices
Right now the list of recommended devices contains a total of 21 devices and includes of course Google Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, and Pixel 2 XL however, devices from BlackBerry, Huawei, LG, Motorola, Nokia, and Sony are also listed.
Conspicuously absent form the list are any devices from Samsung.
Network Load Balancer now Supports Cross-Zone Load Balancing
Amazon's Network Load Balancer now handles requests for cross-zone loading more efficiently with this update using DNS to take requests from clients and spreading them across multiple Availability Zones in your AWS resources.
With this cross-zone load balancing, clients who cache DNS requests will now have their workload distributed evenly across the available resources you have on AWS instead of creating imbalances due to the DNS caching targeting a specific IP address.
Announcing Compliance Manager General Availability
Three months after it appeared in preview, Microsoft's Compliance Manager for Azure, Dynamics 365, and Office 365 moved to general availability.
Compliance Manager helps you abide by mandatory compliance laws and regulations by providing three capabilities:
- Risk assessments and get a Compliance Score
- Actionable insights with a certification/regulation view
- Compliance activity management, with multiple assessments for each compliance requirement
For those of you using these services from Microsoft and required to comply with the upcoming General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) which go into effect this May, you will find these regulations also available for use with Compliance Manager.
Freedom of Data Movement in the Cloud Era
Google shared an update on their support of the pending U.S. bill Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (Cloud) Act. It is intended to establish specifics about the physical location of data storage and related disclosure requirements for data on those systems by U.S. companies.
Google discussed providing enhanced security and integrity for that data and that laws about disclosure of that data need to be updated to reflect this new distributed landscape.
AWS Trusted Advisor's S3 Bucket Permissions Check Is Now Free
Adding free services for customers to use is a great way to enhance a company's ROI and build vendor loyalty. Microsoft did it a couple of weeks ago with a Meltdown and Spectre compliance-scanning service for Azure customers. Now Amazon is helping out their AWS customers with a free offering.
AWS subscribers can use Trusted Advisor -- for free -- to check the permissions associated with any buckets stored in AWS S3. This service checks all of your publicly accessible S3 Buckets and provides a list of those permissions so that you can compare them to your own access lists and policies to make sure the right users have the correct access levels.
End of supplemental servicing for Windows 10, version 1511
The Windows 10 November Update will drop out of formal support on April 10, 2018, without any further support extensions being expected.
There have been three other feature updates released for Windows 10 since then including the Anniversary Update (Version 1607), Creators Update (Version 1703), and Fall Creators Update (Version 1709). All three of these versions of Windows 10 also got a six month extension to their support lifecycles recently.
Microsoft is providing these extended periods of support to accommodate customers whom are still working on migrating to one of the new feature updates. Microsoft would like to see all business and enterprise customers moving to new feature updates a few weeks after their release but that would entail possibly large migrations twice per year. It seems most are working just to do one upgrade per year to minimize the churn within their organizations.
