ITPro SnapShot: What Else Happened This Week? (April 6 - 13, 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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Microsoft Announces Windows Admin Center

Codenamed Project Honolulu during its technical preview, the Windows Admin Center (WAC) is now open to general availability.

The Windows Admin Center is a web-based, lightweight graphical interface that can be used to remotely manage Windows Server and Windows 10 machines. The four key features for WAC:

You can learn more at the WAC Document portal.

Google How-To: Automatically Scan Cloud Storage Buckets for Sensitive Data

Users of Google's Cloud Platform have tools at their disposal which allow them to address security across their various GCP resources.

A new tutorial from Google helps you understand one method for uploading, sharing, and flagging sensitive data in Cloud Storage Buckets.

With the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) going into effect in about six weeks, using best practices along with the right tools will help you protect customer and user data in addition to maintaining compliance with GDPR.

Amazon WorkMail Introduces New Ways to Share Mailboxes

Looking for a solution to share mailboxes among members of your team? Customers on Amazon's WorkMail can now do that with enhancements that were made available this past week.

Permissions can be set on these shared mailboxes to allow multiple modes for sending email:

This feature is now available in all AWS regions which support Amazon WorkMail.

Azure DevTest Labs Available in Azure Government

Users of Microsoft's government cloud services can now take advantage of the sandbox environment of Azure Dev Test Labs as they build and test their cloud environments.

Configuring the cloud environment during development eliminates delays transferring it into the live environment.

The service does have three limitations:

Here's How to Secure Your Google Cloud Databases

This Google article focuses on best practices the company has developed working with customers and looking at security models for compliance with programs like the GDPR.

Key areas which they cover include:

At the end of this information article, you will find links to organizations that can assist with further security data.

Announcing Amazon Linux 2 LTS Candidate 2

Amazon's own distro of Linux, Amazon Linux 2, has reached the second release candidate stage. Amazon Linux 2 is the companies nextgen operating system based on Linux.

"LTS Candidate 2 provides an updated version of the Linux Kernel (4.14) tuned for optimal performance on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), systemd support, a newer compiler (gcc 7.3), an updated C runtime (glibc 2.26), newer tooling (binutils 2.29.1), and the latest software packages through the extras mechanism."

It can also be used on-premises as a virtual machine on tools such as VMWare, Oracle, VirtualBox, KVM, and Microsoft's Hyper-V.