CDN Morning Briefing, September 24, 2020 – Microsoft Ignite news roundup, and Reddit discusses what the cloud means today

To keep up with the firehose of news, we’ve decided to deliver some extra channel news to you on the side. Some of it is an extension of our own reporting on the channel that didn’t make its way into a story, while others might be content we’ve bookmarked and thought of sharing with you. We’re doing a similar thing at IT World Canada –check it out here. Missed last week’s CDN Morning Briefing? Read it here. 




What you need to know right now

It’s what you need to know right now in the world of IT and tech – ’nuff said. (Often taken with a side of Hashtag Trending)

Tesla’s new battery goals, Toronto is a global powerhouse for startups, and new climate pledges for some of the world’s largest companies.

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ITCloud.ca signs distribution agreement with BitTitan 

ITCloud.ca today announced that it’s signing a distribution agreement with BitTitan to provide IT Channel and SMBs with cloud migration solutions, including MigrationWiz, a 100 per cent SaaS platform for moving mailboxes, documents, personal archives, and public folders.

For current partners, these new solutions are now available in their ITCloud partner portal: https://www.itcloud.ca/partnership.html



Microsoft Ignite news roundup

Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference went virtual this year, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to the virtual stage – his living room, to be exact – to kick things off and talk about “tech intensity,” while sharing stories about business resilience during the pandemic, and more. The three-day event featured more than 800 online sessions and 48 hours of programming. Here are some of the announcements you should know about right now.

Microsoft Canada launches Azure Availability Zones in Canada [Channel Daily News]

Microsoft Canada is launching availability zones in Canada, following through on a promise made in January and competing with similar infrastructure already rolled out by Google and Amazon Web Services.

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Microsoft Teams updates delivers new modes, background options, new walkie-talkie features, and MUCH more [Channel Daily News]

A complete rundown of the latest updates to Microsoft Teams.

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Microsoft Ignite 2020: Teams to get new well being features to reduce stress [IT World Canada] 

Microsoft’s key tool in connecting a distributed workforce is its Teams communication platform. At Microsoft Ignite, the company announced a slew of new features in Teams to reduce work-from-home stress and improve collaboration regardless of location.

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Responsible spending in Azure

Are you getting the most out of your Azure investment? Microsoft featured one of its biggest partners in shipping giant Maersk on a webcast about optimizing Azure costs. Microsoft’s David Blank-Edelman and Dante Rasera were joined by Maersk executives Rasmus Hald and Will Owen, who broke down seven tips. Here some takeaways from the presentation.

Microsofts Dante Rasera breaks down the seven Azure cost optimization tips.

Senior product marketing manager Rasera walked participants through the tips, emphasizing budgeting and proper waste reduction during the early stages of planning.

Waste reduction, panellists agreed, is often the easiest way to quickly reduce cloud costs – in some cases, reductions of up to 80 per cent, says Rasera.

All this talk about waste reduction also led to the unveiling of Azure Advisor Score, a new measurement tool in the Azure portal designed to help customers optimize cost, security, reliability, performance and operational excellence across all their Azure resources. Azure Advisor Score is available in preview now.

 

 

 

 

 

 



In case you missed it

The recent channel news that we maybe didn’t get to yet, or it’s the news we’ve reported on and feel is worth resurfacing. Sometimes we’ll also feature awesome stories from other publications.

 

ConnectWise launches bug bounty program

To supplement its own internal vulnerability management strategy boosting efforts, ConnectWise says it’s launching a bug bounty program. ConnectWise is partnering with HackerOne, a hacker-powered security platform, to host the program.

“Cyber criminals move fast, so we have to move faster. Employing a bug bounty program with the help of HackerOne, the industry leader in this space, will allow us to do just that by finding issues before bad actors get a chance to exploit them,” said Tom Greco, director of information security, ConnectWise, in a statement. “Crowdsourcing in this way represents a solid additional layer of security, and we clearly value the community’s expertise and participation in helping us keep our products secure. As we said earlier this year, the launch of this Bug Bounty program is yet another important addition to our security arsenal – and it’s the latest piece of our overall strategy to strengthen our own security standing so that we can better protect our partners and their SMB customers.” [News release]

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Hitachi Vintara announces updates

Storage vendor Hitachi Vantara is announcing new enhancements and capabilities to its hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio. Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform (UCP) server portfolio includes UCP HC, which is the vendor’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliance, and its rack scale infrastructure converged sister, Hitachi UCP RS.

Hitachi says it updated its UCP Advisor capabilities for the 4.0 updates to simplify IT management orchestration, which the vendor says accelerates deployments up to 80 per cent faster compared to earlier versions of its HCI management tools.

The Hitachi platforms now feature Intel’s Cascade Lake Xenon Refresh processor. [News release]

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Reddit recap

The MSP subreddit community is growing rapidly. It’s also a chatty bunch. With more than 80,000 members as of today, it’s worth taking a look at what they have to say every once in a while. Here are the recent top posts. Click on the posts to view additional responses.

 

Can we stop calling it ‘the cloud’, and start calling it what it is: ‘the data center’? from msp

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What is your lunch and break policy? How do handle schedule changes due to emergencies? from msp

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Taking on clients with outdated tech from msp

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Alex Coop
Alex Coophttp://www.itwc.ca
Former Editorial Director for IT World Canada and its sister publications.

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