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ITPro SnapShot: What Else Happened This Week? (Jan. 19 - 26, 2018)

ITPro SnapShot offers a short and snappy round-up on the week's industry-related announcements and news around the globe. Here's what happened in the last week.

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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Azure Standard Support Plan: Now With Price Drop and Faster Initial Response Time

Microsoft has dropped the price of their Azure Standard Support from $300 per month to $100 and halved the response time for critical support case from two hours to just one. Azure Standard Support targets those customers who are using Azure for production purposes and covers unlimited support 24/7 and includes operational and billing support.

Tools for Every School: G Suite for Education Updates

Google announced two new updates for their G Suite for Education this week. The first is new security features including Data Loss Prevention, security key management and enforcement, and hosted Gmail S/MIME for email encryption.

The second announcement is the new G Suite Enterprise for Education and it provides larger institutions for learning a more robust set of features to provide data and device management plus enterprise-grade communications.

Key features users will get with the G Suite for Education service include:

  • Advanced mobile device management
  • Cloud Search
  • Gmail logs analysis
  • Security Center
  • Record Meetings
  • Hangouts Meet supports up to 50 participants
  • Dial-In to Meet

AWS Config Supports New Managed Rules

AWS Config helps users check their usage of AWS resources and their configurations to make sure they comply with industry best practices.

Seven new managed rules are now supported in all public regions that have AWS Config rules available. In addition, they are also supported in the US based AWS GovCloud.

Here are the new rules:

  • codebuild-project-envvar-awscred-check
  • codebuild-project-source-repo-url-check
  • elb_acm_certificate_required
  • elb_custom_security_policy_ssl_check
  • elb_predefined_security_policy_ssl_check
  • iam-group-has-users-check
  • s3-bucket-server-side-encryption-enabled

General Availability: Azure DNS in Microsoft Azure Government

Customers using Microsoft's Azure Government Cloud service can now host their own DNS in Azure plus manage all aspects of their DNS services using the same logins, APIs, and tools they already use for Azure services.

Wi-Fi Alliance Introduces Security Enhancements

This news was announced during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month but is still worth a mention now because of the number of wireless devices that are being used in enterprise and business organizations these days.

The third iteration of Wi-Fi Protected Access, WPA3, will introduce four new capabilities to consumer and enterprise wireless networks.

  • Better protection on networks even when a user picks a password that lacks complexity
  • Easier process for configuring security on devices without full display interfaces
  • Individual data encryption on open networks
  • 192 bit security features for networks with higher security requirements such as those used by government, defense, and industrial organizations.

Hardware manufacturers will have to add these features in their hardware in order to receive WPA3 certification once the new standard is live.

Azure Search enterprise security: Data Encryption and User-Identity Access Control

In order to provide increased security for customer data, all data indexed after January 24, 2018, will now support encryption at rest.

This means Azure now supports the encryption of search data across its entire process from connection, transmission, and now in indexing.

This new feature is on by default and covers any data after January 24, 2017. However, you can go back and re-index search data that was available before that date to encrypt it. Microsoft handles all aspects of this encryption process internally and there is no end user controls associated with the service.

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