Weekly Cloud Provider News – AWS Africa, Azure Product Enhancements, Oracle Extended Support, VMware vRealize Integration and Google Cloud
Here’s our weekly update on recent cloud provider news. This week, we cover AWS’ opening of a new Africa region, two Azure enhancements, Oracle’s waiving of Extended Support Fees, VMware’s vRealize Network Insight/Operations integration and Google Cloud updates for Anthos.
- AWS announced the immediate availability of the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region, which is the first AWS Region in Africa. It includes three availability zones. With this launch, AWS now offers 23 Regions and 73 Availability Zones worldwide, serving customers in more than 190 countries. This a great news for customers operating in Africa, and will ensure better regional support for their geographic, latency and compliance needs for hosting applications and services on AWS. Read more here.
- Azure Security Center has announced enhancements to protect customers’ security posture and provide threat protection for their cloud resources. This includes the ability to scan container images in Azure Container Registry for vulnerabilities, threat protection for Azure Kubernetes Service Support and more. These improvements are an important step forward in countering threats in the cloud—introducing greater security automation, visibility and guidance that will help IT teams to maintain their security posture—and are especially critical now as companies look to enable greater access to remote workers Get all the details here.
- Azure Archive has announced general availability of expanded capabilities for Azure Block Blob storage and Azure Archive storage, which will make these storage services faster, simpler and more capable. With these enhancements, “cold” or archive data uploaded to Microsoft Azure for archival purposes will now be made available more quickly once the data is required. This capability gives IT teams faster response times when archived data is required for discovery or legal purposes. Organizations may also use this capability to help facilitate a cloud migration approach to initially move archival data knowing it will be quickly available once necessary. Learn more about the enhancements here.
- Oracle announced that Extended Support fees are waived for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2—for Oracle database licenses used for Oracle E-Business Suite—through July 31, 2022. Given that many Oracle E-Business Suite customers still use versions 12.1 and 12.2, this will allow them to avoid having to make urgent costly product upgrades in the near term, providing additional time and freedom to focus on other priorities, including their road map for upgrades and hosting options. Learn more here.
- VMware vRealize Network Insight2 (vRNI) can now be integrated with vRealize Operations 8.1 (vROps). With this integration, VMware brings configuration and operational information into one interface—further bridging the gap between network, security and infrastructure admin teams. This will help customers and IT admins see vRNI events in their vROps dashboard. They will also benefit from single sign on between vROps and vRNI and be able to launch in context to vRNI straight from vROps. Get the details here.
- Google Cloud has made several announcements that are closely coupled: a tool for converting Virtual Machines into containers where they can be managed by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE); an enhancement to Anthos (Google’s hybrid cloud container management solution) to allow Anthos to manage workloads in GCP, on-premises and on AWS and Azure (in preview); and, finally, a networking tie in that allows networks defined inside GCP to be extended into the customer-owned data center. Together, these improvements will enable customers to convert their existing on-premises workloads to a Kubernetes-managed container that can by moved between the customer’s data center, GCP, AWS and Azure without network reconfiguration. In other words, customer will be able to move workloads around the three hyperscale clouds and on-premises depending on capacity and price. Read more here.
If you have any questions about these product updates and how they can optimize your environment, please contact us at hello@navisite.com.
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