Advice on good practice when using cloud.
Bradford College deliver BSc (Hons) courses in Software Engineering and Networking Infrastructure and Security (among other things) and are part of the AWS Academy program. I had the privilege of visiting the team behind the courses and an opportunity to see their recently refurbished teaching rooms to put our discussion in context. A big thank […]
AWS has made the recording available from their recent webinar, Scaling genomics workloads using HPC on AWS, presented by Aniket Deshpande and Evan Bollig. This is a great resource and I strongly recommend watching it, especially if you are relatively new to the idea of running research workloads on a public cloud platform like AWS. […]
Ever wondered how much energy your cloud computing is using? Jisc have, but it is not all that easy to get an answer. In an attempt to find out, Etsy created what they call their Cloud Jewels. These are estimated conversion factors that turn cloud compute consumption into watt-hours. Building on this, an open-source project […]
In our discussions with our customers, one of the most common questions that arise is “Do I need to back up my Office 365 data?”. While this blog is not written to answer that question, my next post might attempt to, one of the key services in the Microsoft 365 platform to reduce or remove […]
This blog has been written in collaboration with the Jisc Trust & Identity and Cyber Security teams. Jisc has recently become aware of a potential security risk associated with the default Azure Active Directory (AAD) security settings that are commonly in place across our membership. If your organisation uses AAD (or plans to use it), […]
With the start of the pandemic last year, and the huge increase of working from home that it prompted, Azure Virtual Desktop (or Windows Virtual Desktop as it was then) became an important tool for providing a wide variety of applications to remote users. Ostensibly AVD is easy and quick to deploy, meaning environments can […]
Zero Trust is a concept which has been around for at least the last decade. Whilst organisations were aware of it and implementing aspects of a Zero Trust architecture, it was not until 2020, for obvious reasons, that pretty much every organisation was forced into thinking about its adoption; responding to a distributed and fragmented […]
One of the requirements of our partner agreement with AWS is that we “own” the payer account for all AWS accounts where we are the reseller. This applies regardless of the procurement route – G-Cloud, OCRE, OGVA or direct award. Many of the members we speak to are nervous about this requirement because they are […]
Single sign-on (SSO) plays a key part in providing a secure authentication solution. However, the architecture and authentication flow of these solutions are paramount in ensuring that your identity broker retains its availability and integrity. IAM makes up a core component of the NCSC Cloud Security Principles. Therefore, when implemented it is important that the […]
Even though the pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption through 2020 into 2021, the leading cloud providers recognised the potential and benefits of the cloud long before the events of the last twelve months; they have been planning for some time now. They are preparing the future workforce is ready to help them realise the potential […]