Microsoft Makes It Harder To Avoid Azure 164
itwbennett writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft rolled out a handful of hybrid cloud services that make it easy for businesses to start using Azure in a small way. What struck blogger Nancy Gohring about the announcement was 'how deeply Microsoft is integrating Azure into other products,' with the intention of moving long-time customers onto Azure in ways that are hardly perceptible to them."
Re:Cloud OS (Score:4, Insightful)
The big item in today's announcement is the automated backup to the cloud of "data" on your in house server.
There are a lot of small businesses that are running naked with minimal or haphazard backup. If they can get this
widely accepted they will be doing those people a favor.
But then there is this:
Microsoft makes a point of noting that the data is encrypted on site at the customer’s premise before it is sent to Azure and the customer retains and manages the encryption key.
One has to assume the "Customer retains and manages one copy of the many encryption keys" that can decrypt their data.
Microsoft's crypt APIs are all back-doored to the NSA.
True, most small businesses probably don't care all that much, as long as they can get their data back.
But I would still opt for local and off site storage in physical media before trusting a company with Microsoft's
track record.
Cloud Backup and Single Sign-In Services (Score:5, Insightful)
Azure is marketing hype for the Cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
The cloud is the most hyped word that IT has ever come endured. It is nothing more than the old concept of the mainframe to centralize resources to a given location. People replaced that with thin clients and again it was nothing more than a way to centralize resources to a given location. Now we have the cloud and we are centralizing resources to a given location.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like duck it must be a duck. Azure and other cloud variants are nothing more than attempts to move everyone to the cloud (and encourage outsourcing of services). However the cloud doesn't even mean a third party provider anymore. You can get a cloud provider to put their cloud services in your own facilities (Amazon and Microsoft Azure both support doing this). It's really nothing more than the old architecture diagram model for saying "the network" that got hijacked by marketing departments.
All your doing with the cloud is putting resources in a given location. It might be your location, Amazon's, Rack Spaces or any other providers. That's it, there's nothing magical about it. Therefore all Azure is doing is making it easy to put resources in another location. This is something that IT professionals have been doing for over 40 years, changing the name make it special.
Re:WTF is Azure? (Score:5, Insightful)
same here, i have not used microsoft since windows 2000 pro, and never bought any Apple products, if you seen the beat up old 686 i use you would laugh, but it keeps chugging along on Linux just fine
Then clearly this story is not for you.
Move on. No need to weigh in with yet another "me neither" post.
Re:What is old is new (Score:0, Insightful)
If you think Azure is like iCloud then you're a moron.
Re:Azure is marketing hype for the Cloud (Score:0, Insightful)
If you look at their materials, they clearly identify the different Azure services that are IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS. However, those terms don't mean anything to most people, but they hear Cloud OS and while they still don't know what it is, they think 'Oh, how modern.' The people building these things know that 'cloud' is a bullshit term, but the people buying don't.
Re:Trainwreck waiting to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me try to explain this in simple terms for you. People do not blame Linux for Knight's trading losses because they do not believe the error had nothing to do with Linux. People do blame Microsoft for the LSE outage because they believe it had everything to do with Microsoft.
Note: the famous seven hour outage not the first, there were three others before it, all coinciding with high volume. Not particularly high volume compared to contemporaneous Linux platforms, but apparently too high for the Microsoft platform.
Incidentally, when LSE decided to eject the Microsoft platform, they also ejected the executive who brought in the Microsoft platform [computerworld.com] in the first place. Something to keep in mind for any exec contemplating going with Microsoft for a critical application.