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Microsoft Makes It Harder To Avoid Azure
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."
Everyone leasing time to run their applications and access their data. Like it or not, welcome back to the mainframe age folks, just with more shine and color.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Seriously, I don't use any Microsoft products so I have no idea what Azure is supposed to be. A small description or at the very least a link to Wikipedia should have been at the beginning of your text, itwbennett.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Who in their right mind would throw down that kind of recurring cash for Azure?
Modern hardware is insanely capable, reliable and cheap. Our Internet pipes are as cheap and fat as ever... This leaves me to scratch my head on justification for this.
You still need "IT" people to manage clients and access environment even if servers are hosted elsewhere. We have four racks of Windows and Linux systems running for years with only minimal maintenance. If you don't buy complete crap shit just runs.
If people see value in this so be it good for them... Just hope there are options to "export" accounts back "on premise" once your source of limitless funding dries up.
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
http://letmebingthatforyou.com/?q=azure
1) Do not use Microsoft products
2) Rinse and repeat
Don't tell me it's unavoidable because that's bullshit. There is always a choice, you are just too comfortable and/or inflexible to use an alternative.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The are using Azure to provide cloud backup (and Azure active directory syncing) and Single Sign-In Services. It's not so much making Azure hard to avoid but actually providing useful utility near seamlessly in Azure.
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.
Who in their right mind would throw down that kind of recurring cash for Azure?
Modern hardware is insanely capable, reliable and cheap.
More to the point, who would bet that kind of cash, and their corporate health and/or reputation, on Microsoft? Case in point, the 7 hour outage on the London Stock Exchange, blamed on Microsoft's Tradelect electronic trading platform. Microsoft was trying to ramp the system up to 10,000 messages/second at that point, a pitifully small number compared to contemporary platforms based on Linux. Not only was Microsoft unable to achieve even remotely respectable performance, they were unable to design and implement a system that could resist catastrophic failure, or when it did fail, bring it back up in less than a day. One can reasonably ask, did Microsoft ever test the failure modes of this system, even once? And what does this say about the efficacy of the .NET + MSQL database platform this was built on?
As a direct result of this incident, LSE decided to replace the Microsoft system with a Linux-based platform developed in Sri-Lanka, presumably by competent engineers not harrassed by the likes of Steve Ballmer.
What are the chances of the Tradelect fiasco playing out again on Microsoft's cloud platform? I would say, virtually 100%. Everybody who wants the equivalent of having their business model towed back to shore after suffering the Microsoft effect, please raise your hand and repeat: please, can I have some more of that!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
As they say, if you're not leading you're following. By doing these kinds of tie-ins, MSFT is trying to position themselves as innovative but Azure, while good isn't on par with other Cloud services that cost less and deliver more. What'll be really sad is when customers realize that MSFT will start locking them out of using other Cloud solutions because they "cause problems with Windows Server" or "We don't support the use of product x on an untested Cloud solution." That is the way this usually pans out and eventually if you want to use MSFT Server products with "Cloud" that will mean Azure. Usually after that the anti-trust hawks start suing, so I have 2015 in the pool when Amazon, Rackspace and a couple of other Cloud providers sue MSFT for anti-competitive practices.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Citation please
I can confirm that I am now much more difficult to avoid.
Put down the tinfoil hat and join the real world. You haven't got a citation because it's only something you want to believe and has no basis in reality. What's next, claiming that Linux has a backdoor for the NSA and that Linus Torvalds is on their payroll?
If something like what you claim existed Snowden would have dumped it along with the rest. It would have been revealed and Microsoft stock would have taken a massive multi-billion dollar hit from the news. All that kind of talk does it make you sound like a crazy conspiracy theory nut.
Last i checked Apple actually uses azure for some of its cloud offering. It's been that way since 2011.. or maybe longer..