Organizations whose Office 365 environments were set up by third-party partners are at risk of a number of security misconfigurations, a federal computer security watchdog warned on Monday.
In an analysis report titled "Microsoft Office 365 Security Observations," the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) described four common security misconfigurations found during a multi-month investigation begun last fall. CISA is the new standalone agency within the Department of Homeland Security that functions as the lead national government unit on civilian cybersecurity. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 13, 20190 comments
Buried in Microsoft's slew of Build-related announcements this week was an expansion of the co-sell program that has already incented the Microsoft field to sell billions of dollars worth of partners' solutions.
Begun as a program for Azure ISVs, the Microsoft co-sell program was a way for Microsoft to get its own salesforce selling the partners' cloud infrastructure-based solutions. Under co-sell, the Microsoft field got 10 percent of the total value of the ISV partner solution, paid by Microsoft, for landing a sale. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on May 07, 20190 comments
VMware infrastructure will run on the Microsoft Azure cloud with full support from both companies under a partnership announced Monday.
CEOs of Microsoft, VMware and VMware majority owner Dell Technologies Inc. announced the deal at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 29, 20190 comments
Microsoft, which has been approaching a $1 trillion market capitalization for about a year, crossed the big business milestone in after-hours trading on Wednesday after outperforming Wall Street expectations with its third quarter earnings.
Microsoft was in a tight race among big tech companies last year with Apple, Amazon and Alphabet to reach the $1 trillion threshold. Apple made it first with Amazon following later, although both fell back below $1 trillion later in the year. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 24, 20190 comments
The ongoing security and public relations mess at Wipro, a massive IT outsourcing company based in India with many major U.S. customers, provides an object lesson in how not to handle a security incident as a managed service provider (MSP).
The story was broken this week by Brian Krebs at his respected security blog Krebs on Security. Official information from Wipro has been slow to come out and inconsistent, which is part of the problem. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 18, 20190 comments
Have you or your clients had any problems with Azure consumption overages?
It turns out that Microsoft is counting on customers to end up paying more for Azure than they may have planned to. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 11, 20190 comments
Many organizations are under some risky misconceptions when it comes to the compliance and security of their Office 365 environments.
That's the upshot of a new 37-page report by CollabTalk LLC and the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University titled "Organizational Security & Compliance Practices in Office 365." The report, released last week, was commissioned by Spanning Cloud Apps, RecordPoint, tyGraph, Rencore and Microsoft. (RCPmag.com sister site Redmondmag.com is an in-kind sponsor of the research.) It's based on surveys of more than 270 IT professionals, executives and managers across 19 industries, and includes commentary from several Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and experts. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on April 01, 20190 comments
Microsoft on Thursday released previews for two new cloud-based security services in advance of the RSA Conference 2019 next week.
Microsoft Azure Sentinel is a native security information and event management (SIEM) tool that runs in Microsoft's public cloud. Microsoft Threat Experts is a new "managed threat hunting service" within Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 28, 20190 comments
A report this week from subscription technology site The Information suggests that Microsoft and VMware are drafting a deal that would make it much easier for enterprise customers to move VMware workloads to the Azure public cloud.
The historical rivals are jointly working on the integration and could be within weeks of an announcement, according to article author Kevin McLaughlin, who attributed the information to "a person with direct knowledge of the project and six others who have been briefed on it." More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 27, 20190 comments
One of the most dynamic International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) chapters in the United States will hold a party this fall to celebrate its tenth anniversary.
The SoCal IAMCP chapter will hold a tenth anniversary party in Irvine, Calif., on Oct. 24, a Thursday. Formed 10 years ago this July with Justin Slagle as its original president, the Southern California chapter had strong engagement and support from Microsoft from the beginning. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 19, 20190 comments
This week brought the next logical step in the evolution of the Azure Stack with the unveiling of a ruggedized version from Dell EMC.
From the beginning, Microsoft's vision for the Azure Stack involved situations where you're getting your hands dirty. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 06, 20190 comments
Microsoft is connecting its most significant-breadth partner business model with a strategic technology initiative in a way that could unlock truly scalable partner-to-partner (P2P) business interaction within its giant partner ecosystem for the first time.
"Today, we're excited to announce that by connecting our marketplace to our cloud solution provider companies, through our channel, we're enabling ISVs that publish their solutions to our marketplace to have unfettered access to our entire ecosystem directly," said Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of Microsoft One Commercial Partner (OCP), during a media briefing on Tuesday. More
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 05, 20190 comments