Microsoft continues with its expansion over Europe, offering new Azure Services most precisely within their brand new UK datacenters. The new services focus on PowerBI, SQL Server and Azure Functions; all of those are currently available for European customers.

We’ve discussed in previous posts about Azure and the security topic as being one of the most critical ones for customers and therefore to Microsoft as well. Because of that, the Redmond based company has been including several new enhancements and features into Azure Security Center. One of the latest is the integrated vulnerability assessment.

Microsoft is expanding the features and functionalities constantly, two of the key aspects related to the new Azure features are related to enhancing end-user interaction and facilitate the work in the DevOps world. Azure now has the “Bot-as-a-Service” available where customers can use these automated text-based exchanges systems with their own customers.

Probably Amazon started to ask themselves on how to accelerate cloud migrations if they can’t control the amount of data customer needs and the fact they can’t offer –yet- unlimited upload speed. And most likely following the “simple is safe” guideline, Amazon is now offering migration your data to the cloud by driving a truck to your datacenter, filling it with what you need and “driving it back” to AWS and the cloud.

If you’ve been talking to customers about a cloud, no matter what platform, I’m pretty sure that you heard from almost any of them that one of their major concerns about the public cloud paradigm is security. Especially when you are talking to the public sector or private companies, like financial institutions, where their entire business relies on their workloads and users secure environment. Azure Government represents an isolated version of Azure dedicated to these customers, where most of the Azure features are available under strict compliance rules. In order to enhance this service, Microsoft released recently to GA (General Availability) a key component of the Azure Government service: Virtual Cloud Defense (VCD).

Adding a new feature among these is the recent update to their main backup tool for the cloud: Azure Backup Server now supports VMware virtual machines. MABS (Microsoft Azure Backup Server) it is not a new tool, it’s been around for a while now offering backups for Hyper-V virtual machines, physical machines, file servers, SQL, SharePoint, and Exchange.

What’s the impact for IT regarding the US Presidential Election or Brexit? How is the world economy going to be affected in 2017 for the IT world? Where do we stand regarding private, hybrid and public clouds consumption? Will companies put IT jobs in danger by migrating massively to the public cloud in the next couple of years? Those are some of the big questions a lot of people are asking right now.

There was a time when “open source” and “Microsoft” were two words that did not get along, at all. Bill Gates when he was leading the Redmond Company said, even though the free software should be part of the ecosystem, the General Public License (GPL, licenses that used to rule most of the open source projects) has a “Pac-Man-like nature” that was destroying the “healthy ecosystem” for companies. Or even later when he said that the open source software is a “New Communism” (in a despicable way, of course).