Security is the one topic that everyone loves to hate. Sure it’s exciting to read about the vulnerabilities, but sometimes implementing the fixes can be a real headache.
Richard Green
Recent Posts
In my previous post, I talked about the benefits of using Azure Instance Reservations to save money on the cost of IaaS virtual machines (VMs). There’s also an opportunity to save money by reducing duplication on your Windows Server licences.
One of the reasons more and more organisations are adopting cloud services of one flavour or another is that the costs can come out of operational expenditure in nice little monthly packages instead of giant wedges of capital expenditure. Cloud also has the benefit of scale, enabling us to obtain better protected and more reliable services faster than we can often build them on-premise for the equivalent cost. However, that doesn’t mean we need to pay the recommended retail price.
In the last few days, there’s been a lot of discussion of a security flaw (Meltdown and Spectre) affecting the X86 CPU architecture and more specifically Intel CPUs. It was discovered by Google some time ago and was not scheduled to be made public just yet. However, growing information and leaks online led to Google releasing it early. This forced Microsoft to release the hotfix for Windows and the Microsoft Azure planned VM maintenance scheduled for 10th January has been brought forward to happen almost immediately.
