Today’s topics include Microsoft’s efforts to introduce a new smartphone in 2017, why Cisco’s Talos research group decided to extend security flaw disclosure timelines, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s demonstration of memory-driven computing and Microsoft’s latest Azure Cloud update that supports disaster-recovery for Windows Server 2016.
Microsoft may not have enjoyed much success recently with its Windows Mobile operating system, but the software giant refuses to give up on the smartphone market.
Windows is clinging to a scant 0.4 percent of the smartphone OS market, according to Gartner’s latest analysis. Microsoft’s mobile OS ran on fewer than 1.5 million of the total 373 million smartphones sold worldwide in the third quarter of 2016.
However, instead of throwing in the towel, news leaks suggest that Microsoft is making a renewed push to challenge the galaxy of Android devices and Apple iPhones that currently dominate the smartphone market. Nokia Power Usermobile news website is reporting that Microsoft is readying a late-2017 Surface Phone launch.
Cisco’s Talos security research group is changing its policies for responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities. This will provide impacted vendors with more time to fix issues.
Previously, Cisco had a responsible disclosure timeline of 60 days. However, after publicly announcing a vulnerability, it is now extending the public disclosure timeline out to 90 days.
“Basically at the end of the day, our goal is to protect our customers and the vulnerability research we do is one of the ways we accomplish that objective,” Earl Carter, a threat researcher at Cisco, told eWEEK.
As to why Cisco is extending its responsible disclosure timeline now, Carter explained that over the past year, Cisco Talos’ own research has revealed that the overall average time to patch for vulnerabilities is 78 days.
HP has been working for more than two years on a new project called The Machine, a bold move to re-imagine data center architecture by putting memory, instead of processors, into the forefront.
The IT provider successfully demonstrated Memory-Driven Computing at its Discover London conference on November 28.
This concept puts memory at the center of the computing platform to realize performance and efficiency gains not possible today. SAP, Oracle and others have used this approach to run database systems, but no one yet has demonstrated it running a server—until now.
Customers of Microsoft’s cloud-based disaster recovery offering can now recover Windows Server 2016 workloads to Azure or another data center, the company announced on November 28.
“Customers can now use Azure Site Recovery to replicate, protect (or migrate) their Hyper-V virtual machines hosted on a Windows Server 2016 to Azure or to a secondary site,” a Microsoft program manager wrote.
Azure Site Recovery is offering support for protection and replication of virtual machines deployed. For example, Azure Site Recovery now supports replicating Hyper-V sites containing Windows Server 2016 hosts to Azure from local Hyper-V virtual machines.
The company plans to extend support to Hyper-V sites with Windows Server 2012 R2 hosts in a future update.
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