ITPro SnapShot: What Else Happened This Week? (April 20 - 27, 2018) update from April 2018

There's a lot of product announcements every week -- and sooner or later, something gets announced that you'll want to know. Every Friday, we'll connect some of these newsy little dots and draw a picture as to what's going on with tech vendors and industry trends.

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New AWS Services Enable Multi-Account Capabilities Through AWS Organizations

The ability to monitor configuration and firewall compliance across an entire organization is critical for any company. This new feature from AWS enables administrators to get that broad view of their organization's compliance status at a glance, and to configure and manage firewall rules throughout the entire company.

G Suite Enterprise for Education Is Now Available

Google launched G Suite Enterprise for Education as a preview in January of this year. This new version of G Suite targets colleges, universities, and larger school districts to provide advanced management tools for the suite of software.

As of this week, G Suite Enterprise for Education is generally available for those educational customers in the United States. 

G Suite for Education, the always-free version of G Suite for teachers and students, will gain some of the new security features that are being released as part of G Suite Enterprise for Education's general availability:

The new G Suite Enterprise for Education subscription, which provides the advanced management tools mentioned earlier, will cost $4 per user (staff and student) per month. Special pricing is available for those institutions who move to G Suite in 2018. That cost will be $2 per user each month for faculty and staff then it will be free for eligible students. Google says this special pricing will remain in effect for three years across renewals.

General Availability: Transparent Data Encryption With Customer Managed Keys for Azure SQL

This capability provides enterprise customers the ability to protect sensitive company data and comply with regulatory entities who mandate the use of key management controls.

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and Bring Your own Key (BYOK) are part of Azure Vault. The highly available and scalable secure storage allows organizations to generate an RSA key, import it into their Key Vault and use it with other services such as SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse.

Tools are available to manage key rotation, key vault permissions, key deletion, and for conducting auditing/reporting.

Announcing 4 Free Digital Training Courses on New AWS Services

Anyone looking to learn more about Amazon Web Services has a bevy of free training tools available from Amazon at their aws.training portal.

This week four new courses were added to that portfolio and they focus on new Amazon Web Services which were announced at the April AWS Summit in San Francisco.

So whether your already using AWS or might be considering the services Amazon offers, this free training library can help you with that decision making progress. (We've written more on Amazon's training opportunities here.)

Android Things Launches a Release Candidate

Internet of Things (IoT) is everywhere these days. The proliferation of connected devices call for an increased emphasis on devices' security features.

Google's entry into this realm is called Android Things and this week they launched the release candidate for their IoT embedded operating system.

The Software Development Kit (SDK) is also feature complete and no more API changes are planned before the Android Things 1.0 release.

Google is already working with companies like Lenovo, LG, JBL, iHome, and Sony with this platform so that collection of products should grow once this update hits the stable channel.

Microsoft Introduces Service Trust Portal and the New Privacy/GDPR Resources

In mid-May, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will go into effect. Some companies are ahead of the curve in terms of cataloging their digital assets and seeing which ones could be construed as being in violation of GDPR. Other companies are just getting started. Fortunately for them, Microsoft has announced enhancements to their Service Trust Portal (STP) that will provide guidelines on what a company will need to address with data protection, compliance, and privacy leading up to the GDPR deadline and beyond.

The STP includes a Compliance Manager for managing your work towards compliance and conducting risk assessments on the cloud services you are using from Microsoft.

In addition, there is a preview of a new Privacy Area on the STP so you can look at how Microsoft is supporting you in the event of a data breach. You will also find tools and documents for responding to these situations in compliance with GDPR.