CLOUDTECH | March 29, 2019
Cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google were created to provide compute resources to save enterprises money on their infrastructure. But cloud services pricing is complicated and difficult to understand, which can often drive up bills and prevent the promised cost savings. Here are just five ways that cloud providers obscure pricing on your monthly bill. For the purpose of this article, I’ll focus on the three biggest cloud service providers: AWS, Azure, and Google. Between these three cloud providers alone, different terms are used for just about every component of services offered.For example, when you think of a virtual machine (VM), that’s what AWS calls an “instance,” Azure calls a “virtual machine,” and Google calls a “virtual machine instance.” If you have a scale group of these different machines, or instances, in Amazon and Google they’re called “auto-scaling” groups, whereas in Azure they’re called “scale sets.”There’s also different terminology for their pricing models. AWS offers on-demand instances, Azure calls it “pay as you go,” and Google has “on-demand” resources that are frequently discounted through “sustained use.” You’ve also got “reserved instances” in AWS, “reserved VM instances” in Azure, and “committed use” in Google. And you have “spot instances” in AWS, which are the same as “low-priority VMs” in Azure, and “preemptible instances” in Google.
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Sdxcentral | March 27, 2019
The European Commission (EC) this week set out its strategy to ensure the security of 5G networks across the European Union (EU), but ignored U.S. calls to ban Huawei equipment from next-generation mobile networks.The EC is recommending a set of actions that all member states should use to assess the cybersecurity risks of 5G networks. It stopped short of banning any suppliers outright, merely stating that member states “have the right to exclude companies from their markets for national security reasons if they do not comply with the country’s standards and legal framework.”The overall aim is to build a coordinated EU risk assessment that will ensure the security of key infrastructure, including 5G.The EC’s position could have been predicted based on Germany’s recent robust response to a perceived threat by the U.S. to limit intelligence sharing if Huawei was allowed to be part of Germany’s future 5G infrastructure. Germany has refused to explicitly ban Huawei from future network deployments, including 5G.
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CRN | March 28, 2019
Microsoft Azure today announced Azure Security Center for IoT, which provides hybrid cloud security management and threat protection capabilities to help its manufacturing customers monitor the security status of their Azure-connected Internet of Things devices used in industrial applications.The cloud provider’s new offering is designed to make it easier for partners and customers to build enterprise-grade industrial IoT solutions with open standards and ensure their security.“They want security more integrated into every layer, protecting data from different industrial processes and operations from the edge to the cloud,” Sam George, Microsoft Azure’s IoT director, said in a blog post yesterday. “They want to enable proof-of-concepts quickly to improve the pace of innovation and learning, and then to scale quickly and effectively. And they want to manage digital assets at scale, not dozens of devices and sensors.”
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