As part of this dedication to instilling the greatest level of trust with our clients, we recently took part in the UK Cyber Essentials Plus Scheme.
What is the Cyber Essentials Scheme?
The Cyber Essentials Scheme is a UK government-backed certification to help organisations protect themselves against common cyber threats. The certification comes in 2 categories: Essential and Essential Plus, the latter being a more comprehensive set of technical controls with a hands-on technical audit.
The aim of the certification is to give organisations of any size the ability to demonstrate they have the necessary technical controls in place to be cyber secure. Secure against threats such as:
Why is Cyber Essentials important?
At Transparity we’re committed to being a Trusted Partner to all of our customers, from trust in the services we deliver, trust in the systems underpinning Transparity, and trust in our team of specialists that make it possible. Cyber threats may target an individual organisation, but the impact can often be widespread.
For that reason, we decided to undergo the process of becoming Cyber Essentials Plus certified. This demonstrates to all of our partners that we continuously take cyber security seriously – giving our partners peace of mind that we have the tools and measures in place to be cyber secure.
What does this mean for Transparity and our customers?
It’s easy to take cyber security for granted and to fall into the trap that common sense will prevail. With every aspect of working life becoming digital, and cyber attacks growing in sophistication, the likelihood of falling foul increases exponentially. Being able to demonstrate to both employees and customers that cyber security is a subject that we take seriously is invaluable helps reinforce the fact that we are a trusted partner in all aspects.
Being awarded Cyber Security Essentials Plus is not the end of the journey for us, cyber security, and the threat it poses to Transparity and our partners is a continual focus.
As always, Microsoft Ignite came packed with major updates across the Microsoft stack. And Azure is no exception.
With a focus on “Do more with less in the Microsoft Cloud”, Microsoft Ignite aimed to enable customers to:
As premium event sponsors, we had a front-row seat to the exciting updates Microsoft announced. Here, we’ll share our key takeaways from the event and the updates we think you need to know about in Azure.
Of course, some of these updates are quite technical – if you have any questions or want to discuss how these updates affect your cloud environment don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Customers commit to spending a fixed hourly amount for one or three years on compute services – paid all upfront or monthly.
As you use select compute services across the world, your usage is covered by the plan at reduced prices, helping you get more value from your cloud budget. If you go over your committed usage, you’ll be billed at the regular pay-as-you-go prices. Savings automatically apply across compute usage globally.
Customers may see estimated savings between 11%-65%.
By default all logs are sent to Log Analytics, this new integration will let you send logs to Azure Monitor and choose where to send the logs.
You can now leverage Azure Storage, Event Hubs and other partner solutions. This provides a single pane of glass for monitoring by allowing you to use Azure Monitor to Monitor Container apps.
New capabilities added to Azure Automanage, this allows you to save time, reduce risk and improve workload uptime by automating day-to-day configuration and management tasks.
New SKU To enable DDoS protection on individual public Ips. IP Protection will contain the same features as Network protection.
Network protection will gain the following services:
Billing is effective as of 1 Feb 2023.
Windows Server 2022 is now supported on AKS bringing security improvements, available for Kubernetes v1.23 and higher.
New option for SQL servers on VMs ensure the data in use as well as the data at rest stored on your VM’s drives, are inaccessible to unauthorized users from the outside of the VM without changing the code of the SQL Applications.
ART is replacing the Network watcher topology. ART will allow users to draw a unified topology across multiple subscriptions, regions and resource groups.
ART will allow deep dives into the environments layout, it also allows for monitoring/diagnostics with the capability of running ‘Next Hop’ directly from a resource within the ART view after specifying a destination. Plus:
Azure Monitor can forecast CPU Load to your VMMSS based on historical CPU usage patterns and scale-out occurs in time to meet demand. You can configure how far in advance the new instances are provisioned and view predicted CPU forecast without triggering the scaling action with forecast only mode.
Access WAC within Azure – perform maintenance and troubleshooting tasks such as managing your files, viewing your events, monitoring your performance, getting an in-browser RDP and PowerShell session,
