ITPro SnapShot: What Else Happened This Week? (April 6 - 13, 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.

Richard Hay, Senior Content Producer

April 13, 2018

3 Min Read
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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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Microsoft Announces Windows Admin Center

Codenamed Project Honolulu during its technical preview, the Windows Admin Center (WAC) is now open to general availability.

The Windows Admin Center is a web-based, lightweight graphical interface that can be used to remotely manage Windows Server and Windows 10 machines. The four key features for WAC:

  • Simple and modern management experience

  • Hybrid capabilities to manage systems in the cloud, on-premises, or in Hyper-V

  • Integrated toolset so you only need one view to gather critical data on remote systems

  • Designed for extensibility with extensions from 3rd party vendors for management of their own machines

You can learn more at the WAC Document portal.

Google How-To: Automatically Scan Cloud Storage Buckets for Sensitive Data

Users of Google's Cloud Platform have tools at their disposal which allow them to address security across their various GCP resources.

A new tutorial from Google helps you understand one method for uploading, sharing, and flagging sensitive data in Cloud Storage Buckets.

With the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) going into effect in about six weeks, using best practices along with the right tools will help you protect customer and user data in addition to maintaining compliance with GDPR.

Amazon WorkMail Introduces New Ways to Share Mailboxes

Looking for a solution to share mailboxes among members of your team? Customers on Amazon's WorkMail can now do that with enhancements that were made available this past week.

Permissions can be set on these shared mailboxes to allow multiple modes for sending email:

  • Full Access - access entire account; create folders including those with limited access

  • Send As - account alias used to send emails

  • Send on Behalf - uses the shared account alias but still shows as sent by the originator of the email

This feature is now available in all AWS regions which support Amazon WorkMail.

Azure DevTest Labs Available in Azure Government

Users of Microsoft's government cloud services can now take advantage of the sandbox environment of Azure Dev Test Labs as they build and test their cloud environments.

Configuring the cloud environment during development eliminates delays transferring it into the live environment.

The service does have three limitations:

  • Azure Resource Manager templates to create multi-VM environments and PaaS resources within a Lab is not available at this time.

  • Connect to an external GitHub repository to add Azure Resource Manager Templates is not available at this time; however adding artifact repositories to leverage custom artifacts is available.

  • Azure DevTest Labs will not be available in the US Gov Iowa region.

Here's How to Secure Your Google Cloud Databases

This Google article focuses on best practices the company has developed working with customers and looking at security models for compliance with programs like the GDPR.

Key areas which they cover include:

  • Access controls

  • Data security

  • Configuration

  • Application considerations

  • Self-hosted database concerns

  • Organizational security

At the end of this information article, you will find links to organizations that can assist with further security data.

Announcing Amazon Linux 2 LTS Candidate 2

Amazon's own distro of Linux, Amazon Linux 2, has reached the second release candidate stage. Amazon Linux 2 is the companies nextgen operating system based on Linux.

"LTS Candidate 2 provides an updated version of the Linux Kernel (4.14) tuned for optimal performance on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), systemd support, a newer compiler (gcc 7.3), an updated C runtime (glibc 2.26), newer tooling (binutils 2.29.1), and the latest software packages through the extras mechanism."

It can also be used on-premises as a virtual machine on tools such as VMWare, Oracle, VirtualBox, KVM, and Microsoft's Hyper-V.

About the Author

Richard Hay

Senior Content Producer, IT Pro Today (Informa Tech)

I served for 29 plus years in the U.S. Navy and retired as a Master Chief Petty Officer in November 2011. My work background in the Navy was telecommunications related so my hobby of computers fit well with what I did for the Navy. I consider myself a tech geek and enjoy most things in that arena.

My first website – AnotherWin95.com – came online in 1995. Back then I used GeoCities Web Hosting for it and WindowsObserver.com is the result of the work I have done on that site since 1995.

In January 2010 my community contributions were recognized by Microsoft when I received my first Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for the Windows Operating System. Since then I have been renewed as a Microsoft MVP each subsequent year since that initial award. I am also a member of the inaugural group of Windows Insider MVPs which began in 2016.

I previously hosted the Observed Tech PODCAST for 10 years and 317 episodes and now host a new podcast called Faith, Tech, and Space. 

I began contributing to Penton Technology websites in January 2015 and in April 2017 I was hired as the Senior Content Producer for Penton Technology which is now Informa Tech. In that role, I contribute to ITPro Today and cover operating systems, enterprise technology, and productivity.

https://twitter.com/winobs

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