Cloud Computing

Mention the name "Defender" in relation to Microsoft and I'm taken back to the launch of the Windows Defender anti-spyware product, in 2006. This was truly breaking news that Microsoft would launch their own protection software, off the back of the acquisition of GIANT anti-spyware, that would be free to users of Windows XP. Fast forward fourteen years and there's a new Defender in town - or is there? Not a new product - but some new capabilitiesPreviously we've talked about Azure Security Center having two "tiers" of features and pricing: the Free tier and the Standard tier. Azure resources were enabled with the free tier by default and could be upgraded to Standard. Azure Defender is the new name for the standard tier, but it goes further than just a name change. Azure Defender unifies the security management of different workload types, within the Azure Security Center. In addition to a list of supported (generally available) and newly supported (in public preview) services, Azure Defender also analyzes signals from Azure network fabric and the service control plane, to detect threats across all Azure resources.…

Rome was not built in a day, nor were the data centres. Picking the real estate, power and cooling plant installations, server installations take months and not to forget how expensive the whole ordeal is. The time duration increases whenever an organisation decides to upscale. So, for companies who do not want to burden themselves with the woes of building a data centre, on-prem cannot be an option. That said, the cloud is not without its own hassles. Even migration is a tricky, tedious process for many organisations. When it comes to open-source software solutions, both on-premise and cloud platforms have their fair share of challenges. Companies like Google, with its diverse big data solutions, have been trying to address challenges on both ends. In the next section, we take a look at pressing issues concerning big data applications, according to Google Cloud. On-Prem & Cloud Challenges Companies might find themselves locked into a certain cloud provider. Vendor lock-in can become an issue in cloud computing because it is very difficult to move databases once they’re set up, especially in a cloud migration, which involves moving data…

Samsung is linking up with VMware to integrate its network core, edge, and radio access network (RAN) offerings with VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform. The agreement calls for Samsung to extend its support for cloud-native architecture by adapting its suite of products for containerized network functions (CNFs) and virtual network functions (VNFs) on VMware’s software stack and network automation services. The partnership with VMware follows a run of efforts taken by Samsung of late to join the wave of 5G network virtualization. The vendor plans to release a fully virtualized 5G RAN portfolio with a virtual centralized unit, a virtual distributed unit, and software that allows operators to move from dedicated baseband hardware to x86-based servers before the end of the year. Samsung also recently inked a deal with Red Hat that makes it the first major RAN vendor to publicly build 5G services on OpenShift. Samsung said it has been working with VMware at its lab to integrate and validate its VNFs and CNFs for virtualized RAN, the 5G core, mobile edge computing, management, and analytics with VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform. The result of those efforts will allow mobile network operators to onboard and deploy new 5G services more…

How Microsoft Is Enabling Its AI-Based Technology To Be Disability-Inclusive The lack of machine learning datasets that include people with disabilities has proved to be a major roadblock for developing technological solutions customised to their needs. This is often referred to as ‘data desert’. It is a common practice for organisations building technology products and services to use data at an aggregate level, which leads to stereotyping and being exclusionary in the process. Earlier this week, Microsoft, in a lengthy blog, revealed its roadmap to deal with this data desert which has become a major hindrance in making artificial intelligence accessible to people with disability. The tech giant Microsoft has revealed its various collaborations to ‘shrink this data desert’ as discussed below. Seeing AI Just recently, Microsoft introduced the Seeing AI app for iOS. This app, designed specifically for visually impaired persons, uses the device camera to identify people and objects and then describes them audibly. The company believes that its use can be further enhanced to recognise objects that are specific to that particular user. If this is truly realised, then such an innovation would…

Over the years you might have worked with either AWS or Azure as cloud providers, both offer fairly similar services, so the experience in one of them mildly translates into the other one, as long as you know the basics. So here is a map of the services and their brother from another mother. This is a shallow comparison for the main services, with the service purpose and key differences I could think of, so once you know the service name you can do a full investigation. Compute Azure Virtual Machines / EC2 (Elastic compute cloud) When you want to manage your own virtual machines, IaaS, this is the services you are looking at. Azure function / Lambda Sometimes you just need to execute a bit of code, but you don’t need a dedicated virtual machine for that. You can go server-less and use Azure functions or Lambda. Azure App Services / Elastic Beanstalk For running applications in the cloud, without having to worry too much about the servers they are running. They will have dedicated virtual machines under the hood. A key difference…