Organizations are now shifting their data on cloud. This creates a problem for IT in terms of security and handling, because security teams needs strong visibility, control and threat protection for cloud applications.    

Microsoft Azure is an open, flexible, enterprise-grade cloud computing platform. Microsoft Azure’s part Cloud App Security makes it possible for IT to set up application discovery and check with the existing security. Since there are numerous applications it is not always possible for IT to know the risk of running an App. But cloud app security gives a risk score(based on prior examination, certificates and information) to most of the App .It gives IT department the same control as their internal software as they can also track how the App is being used through Connecting.

To know more: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3055849/saas/dont-overlook-saas-the-original-cloud-option.html

Both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, offer a wide range of database services. But, when choosing between Azure and AWS for a data management platform, a business needs to be clear about their requirement. Organizations can ask several questions like: Will your enterprise use the database for analytics or transaction processing applications? Do you need a relational or NoSQL database? Does your enterprise prefer a database as a service (DBaaS) option over managing its own instance? To know more about these, follow: http://searchaws.techtarget.com/tip/Azure-or-AWS-A-cloud-database-comparison?utm_medium=EM&asrc=EM_NLN_47247618&utm_campaign=20150907_The%20public%20vs.%20private%20cloud%20cost%20debate_fchurchville&utm_source=NLN&track=NL-1839&ad=902777&src=902777

Last month, Microsoft announced Microsoft Azure Stack at its Ignite Conference. Since then, there has been a lot of commotion among cloud technology enthusiasts as to what it is, how is it different from the existing Microsoft Azure pack, etc.

Tim Anderson (author) has answered these questions in his highly informative article at theregister.co.uk. According to him, the special features of Azure Stack fall into three categories. They are:

• Infrastructure services
• Application services
• Azure Resource Manager

To know more about this private cloud solution, please visit the following link:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/18/azure_stack_versus_azure_pack_whats_the_difference/

IoT has been present since long. But, recently this concept has achieved infinite fame with its easy to use nature and its feature of simplifying the complex devices. With IoT’s horizon widening and Microsoft being the Cloud software giant, with its program called, Azure, there are humongous possibilities of getting the benefits of both by combining their usage.

Kevin Miller, Microsoft’s Principal Program Manager for Azure IoT, has shared best practices for creating IoT solutions with Azure. They are:

• Think big. Start small
• Telemetry First
• Stream Analytics
• Don’t interrupt the fast path
• Defense in depth

Follow these guidelines and try the magic that this synergy provides.

To know more, please read the following article by Jonathan Allen at infoq.com:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/04/Azure-IoT

Cloud Analytics is one application that is growing very fast and will accelerate in the coming decade. According to Ashutosh Kulkarni (Sr. Vice President and General Manager, Informatica Cloud), scalability, affordable price, simplicity to offer domain specific and user-specific capabilities make cloud analytics unbeatable. The scalability of Hadoop, and the emergence of highly elastic cloud analytic services like AWS, EMR and Redshift, Microsoft Azure, and Salesforce Wave Analytics, has helped in moving IT infrastructure to the cloud and cloud integration Platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) is designed to support the scalability, reliability and security of cloud analytics. Read more at: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2924846/data-analytics/the-future-of-cloud-analytics-is-now.html

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There exists price war among major cloud providers. Amazon Web Services announced to lower the prices of a number of its cloud services, soon after Google cut down its prices. According to the vice president of Amazon Web Services, cost slashing is aggressive in nature. Slashing prices is a regular process. Whenever it is possible to reduce costs, they lower the prices for the customers.As soon as Google announced to reduce its  Google Compute Engine (GCE) by 32 percent, Google Storage  by 68 percent Amazon Web Services decided to cut its price of AWS' Simple Storage Service (S3) by 51 percent, Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) by 30 percent to 40 percent, AWS' Relational Database Service (RDS) by 28 percent, ElastiCache service  by 34 percent on average.The repeated cloud price cuts make it hard  to run in-house operations, which would create both hardware costs and preservation costs costly. Read more at:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247216/Price_war_Amazon_cuts_cloud_costs_to_counter_Google

There is a huge demand for production ready MongoLab plans on Microsoft Azure. The MongoLab and Microsoft are excited about their latest high-memory MongoDB database plans with virtual machine options that can immediately supply up to 56GB of RAM per node. These will be available in all eight Microsoft Azure data centres worldwide, which will be able to fulfil the massive need.The cloud-served MongoDB instances come from MongoLab, a fully managed database service provider that works with major cloud platforms such as those provided by Amazon and Google. Along with the new memory capacity, the service also provides management tools for backups, performance monitoring of key metrics, analysis to speed up queries and index recommendations. Support is also provided via e-mail or an around-the-clock emergency hotline, depending on the plan.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2014/04/22/announcing-new-mongodb-instances-on-microsoft-azure.aspx