WebRTC is great technology to build your own communication tools. It will be even more exciting experience it with advanced devices, such as a 360 Camera, 360 microphone, and a depth sensor camera. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Masashi Ganeko, a manager at INFOCOM Corporation, introduced two experimental projects from his team and what they learned from them. «Shotoku Tamago» uses the robot audition software HARK to track speakers in 360 video of a remote party. «Virtual Teleport» uses a multiple Intel RealSense Depth Camera to scan 3D and build 3D models in real-time, and display as hologram in front of remote participants.

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Founded in 2000, Chetu Inc. is a global provider of customized software development solutions and IT staff augmentation services for software technology providers. By providing clients with unparalleled niche technology expertise and industry experience, Chetu has become the premiere long-term, back-end software development partner for start-ups, SMBs, and Fortune 500 companies. Chetu is headquartered in Plantation, Florida, with thirteen offices throughout the U.S. and abroad.

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The standardization of container runtimes and images has sparked the creation of an almost overwhelming number of new open source projects that build on and otherwise work with these specifications. Of course, there’s Kubernetes, which orchestrates and manages collections of containers. It was one of the first and best-known examples of projects that make containers truly useful for production use. However, more recently, the container ecosystem has truly exploded. A service mesh like Istio addresses many of the challenges faced by developers and operators as monolithic applications transition towards a distributed microservice architecture. A tracing tool like Jaeger analyzes what’s happening as a transaction moves through a distributed system. Monitoring software like Prometheus captures time-series events for real-time alerting and other uses. Grafeas and Kritis provide security policy attestation and enforcement. And there are many more.

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Wayne Williams

Windows remains by far the most popular desktop operating system, but it faces increasing pressure from rival software. Chrome OS, Google’s browser-based operating system, is used a lot in schools and is spreading its influence in business environments, not least because the Chromebooks that Chrome OS runs on are secure and cheap, which makes them especially popular with students and IT departments.

Windows 10 S – a locked-down version of Windows 10 – is Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Chrome OS. Here’s how you can try it out without needing to fork out for a new laptop.

What is Windows 10 S?

Windows 10 S is, essentially, a more secure version of Windows 10 that can only run apps from the Windows Store. In other words, you can’t install regular Windows programs on it. This might seem like a strange idea but the reasoning behind it is sound – by controlling what software can be installed on the operating system, Microsoft is safeguarding users from everyday threats. Windows 10 S is, for example, immune from most malware, including ransomware.

Where can you get Windows 10 S?

The new operating system is currently only available pre-installed on certain devices, like Microsoft’s Surface Laptop. This will no doubt change in the future, but for now you can’t simply download and install it on any PC you like.

Except, that’s not strictly true.

Microsoft recently made Windows 10 S available for developers on the MSDN network to download in ISO format, and then released an installer (aimed at the education market) which lets anyone take the new OS for a spin. If you want to try out Windows 10 S, but you don’t want to spend money on a new laptop to do so, the easiest solution is to install it in a virtualised environment. The process is a little more convoluted than normal and takes a while longer as a result, but it’s easy enough to do.

What you need to know before you start

Unless you have the developer ISO (from the MSDN network) currently the only way to test Windows 10 S is to install it over a copy of Windows 10.

You don’t need to own or run Microsoft’s operating system to do this, as it’s easy enough to get a free (and perfectly legal) copy to use. This is the main reason why the process of installing and running Windows 10 S in a virtual environment takes so long – you first need to install Windows 10, and then «upgrade» it to Windows 10 S, which isn’t a quick process…

There are some other restrictions to be aware of. Firstly it’s not recommended to install Windows 10 S over Windows 10 Home as you won’t be able to activate it. You’ll also need to be running the Creators Update (1703), or later, which is currently only available as a Windows Insider Preview build.

You don’t need to activate Windows 10 S but if you want to, and can’t, then the troubleshooting option should solve your problem

While you can install a new version of Windows 10 and convert it to Windows 10 S, without a key, you won’t be able to access all of the features – including the personalization options – without activating it. If you plan on activating the installation, you’ll need to activate Windows 10 before starting the upgrade. Windows 10 S may activate once installed, but if not you’ll have to click the troubleshoot option on the upgrade page to do this.

Get a Windows 10 ISO

If you don’t have a copy of Windows 10 to hand (either on DVD or a digital download) you’ll need to get one. In some countries, you can download a Windows 10 ISO direct from Microsoft, but in the UK you need to download and use the software giant’s Media Creation Tool. Head here for the tool, then download and run the program.

The Media Creation Tool lets you download a Windows 10 ISO file to use in VirtualBox

Agree to the terms and then select the option to ‘Create installation media.’ Select the version of the OS you require. If you’re running Windows 10 already, the program will automatically select the same version for you. If that’s not suitable (perhaps you’re running Windows 10 Home but want an ISO for Windows 10 Pro) then untick ‘Use the recommended options for this PC’ and select the version you do want. Click Next and select ‘ISO file.’ Download this to your hard drive.

What’s new or different in Windows 10 S

You can download software from outside the Windows Store as normal but if you try to install it, you’ll be greeted with a message stating ‘For security and performance Windows 10 S only runs verified apps from the Store’. You have to use Microsoft Edge in the OS, not only because you can’t install Firefox or Chrome, but because Microsoft’s browser is the fixed default and there’s (currently) no way to change it.

Windows 10 S looks and behaves much like Windows 10, but starts quicker

Microsoft sees this as a big plus, because Edge is designed to work very closely with the operating system, but if you’re used to a different browser, Edge will seem rather alien. Many of the extensions you might rely on in your regular browser won’t be available to you.

Windows 10 S is tied to Microsoft products, so when you search the web in the operating system you’ll be using Bing (unless you browse to Google.com manually).

One good point about Windows 10 S is it’s much faster than Windows 10 because it isn’t bogged down in any way. This means it can run on lighter hardware. It can boot in around 15 seconds and, when installed on a laptop, deliver significantly better battery life. You won’t notice this kind of difference so much in a virtualised environment, though.

Installing Windows 10 S to a virtual machine

While there are a number of virtual machine options available, we used the highly popular VirtualBox application from Oracle.

Step 1

Download and install a copy of Oracle’s VirtualBox here www.virtualbox.org. Run the program and click ‘New’ in the Manager window. In the ‘Create Virtual Machine’ dialog box enter Windows 10 S as the name of the operating system. Select Windows 10 as the version or choose ‘Windows 10 (64bit)’ if you downloaded a 64-bit ISO.

Step 2

Click Next, then accept the default Memory Size. Choose to ‘Create a virtual hard disk now’ and click Create. Accept VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) as the hard drive file type. Choose the option to have your virtual drive dynamically altered (it will resize as required) and increase the default size to 64GB or above.

Step 3

Click Create and VirtualBox will build the drive. When done, select the entry in the Manager
and click the Start button. In the ‘Select start-up disk’ window, click the folder icon and
navigate to the Windows 10 ISO. Select it, click Start and Windows 10 will install.

Select your language settings, then click the ‘Install now’ button.

Step 4

Once Windows 10 is installed in VirtualBox and fully updated, you’ll be ready to convert it to Windows 10 S. Open Microsoft Edge (since this is the only browser you’ll have installed in your new virtual environment) and go to bit.ly/wins431. Read all about Windows 10 S and then when you’re ready, click the ‘Download installer’ button.

Step 5

Run the installer and you should see a message stating ‘Congratulations, Windows 10 S can be installed’. Click Next and the installation process will begin. Windows 10 S will be downloaded and once the files have been verified, you’ll be asked what you want to keep from your existing installation. Select ‘Nothing’.

Step 6

Click Next and the installer will fetch some updates, restart your system and begin the full installation. It will reboot several times along the way. When it finishes, you’ll be guided through the usual configuration steps. Spend some time customising the privacy settings. Once that’s out of the way, you can start using Windows 10 S.

Image: Shutterstock

As enterprises continue to embark on their digital transformation journeys part of this change may involve migrating in-house applications, databases and data to the cloud.  But while all the benefits of cloud are widely understood, migrating a database or an application to the cloud is not always smooth sailing and there can be challenges to overcome when transitioning.  Here I wanted to highlight some of the steps enterprises should take to ensure their database migration is successful.

Why migrate to the cloud?

Let’s first look at why organisations might want to migrate their mission critical database to the cloud. As stated above, the benefits of cloud adoption have been widely documented over the last few years. Factors such as convenience, scalability, flexibility, and economic efficiency, all leading to improved productivity being the key takeaways. During the first wave of cloud adoption we saw that the main benefit was the cloud’s availability of low-cost IT infrastructure, which suited project-based development, Test & Dev, and DevOps. Now during the current wave of adoption, we are seeing more mission critical applications and a wider range of workloads migrating to the cloud. The net effect is a shift up the stack with an increased emphasis on application availability and assurance. Along with this, cloud environments are becoming more manageable, which enables companies to focus on more strategically relevant IT tasks such as defining transformative IT services for their internal and external users.

With the rise of remote working, the ease of access that cloud provides to its users is important. With cloud accessible from a multitude of devices, employees have access to vital information wherever they are located.  What we are seeing more often now is organisations migrating mission critical applications into the cloud including workloads with a variety of requirements. Furthermore, cloud migration enables very effective disaster recovery and high availability options for geographically‑distributed businesses.

Don’t migrate half-heartedly

Migrating workloads to the cloud is a strategic decision for an organisation, as it underpins the transformation towards a more agile and business-aligned operating model for their IT. Because of this, I would avoid migrating half-heartedly. If you are going to migrate to the cloud you should move over as much as possible. While a database can be migrated to the cloud independently, it usually makes more sense – technically and strategically – to also migrate with it the applications which are served and interact with it in order to take full advantage of the benefits of cloud.

If you are going to migrate a database to the cloud in isolation without its associated application, it’s crucially important to rely on specific expertise both for the migration and the following service management related to it. The migration should consider all the interdependencies and resource requirements to guarantee performance, availability and security in the cloud; and adequate service management skills are key to ensure proper configuration and change management. That’s why when it comes to a mission critical database, those serving an ERP system – a specialised enterprise‑class cloud provider which also provides managed services and SLAs – should be considered over general purpose or pure‑IaaS cloud alternatives.

Three key reasons why enterprises don’t migrate to the cloud

Enterprises are often cautious about putting their mission critical workloads into the cloud for very specific reasons:

• Security and compliance. Often security burdens are so heavy that enterprises are cautious about considering alternatives
• Performance degradation. Many enterprises cannot compromise on the performance of mission critical apps
• Availability. If users cannot access applications, they are unproductive; workflows are stifled and the business is up in arms. That’s exactly what Enterprise‑class cloud providers which specialise in mission‑critical workloads effectively address, with a combination of ad hoc cloud architectures and cloud management tools as well as stringent operating principles and expertise.

For example, rather than using a general‑purpose cloud architecture, with Enterprise‑class cloud providers who specialise in mission‑critical workloads, enterprises can utilise dedicated individual VRF domains. VRF is a network virtualisation technique used by Telco Providers, the same one used to isolate MPLS circuits. This helps in isolating domains in a multi-tenanted cloud, with many benefits in terms of security, compliance, resource utilisation and optimisation of network topologies and segmentation. This option provides enterprises the freedom of the public cloud while still keeping it virtually private and as secure – or even more secure – than what they have on-premise.

Make sure you have a plan

With any large-scale programme of work like moving a mission critical application into the cloud, the first step is to devise a plan. By doing so, organisations can avoid the worst-case scenarios that may appear both during and after the migration. This plan should cover what features you require in the cloud and what steps are being taken to secure this data. It is also important to truly understand the cloud environment being used, whether private, public, hybrid or multi-cloud, as no one cloud does it all, and different use cases require specialised attributes. Therefore, preparing and understanding the use case is another important requirement.

There is another key aspect, which is the complexity of different application environments. They don’t live in isolation. There is a lot of interdependency between different application modules or between the applications and the databases. The way those interdependencies are sustainable in a private cloud environment is via very sophisticated network topologies through the use of VLANs, and so on. These are the driving principles which govern the network or VLAN configuration in a private environment. When you consider moving legacy applications to the cloud, you don’t want to disrupt those configurations, topologies and related private IP addressing schemes, as the ripple effect could be fatal. Lifting and shifting to a standardised cloud environment just won’t work here.

And finally – cost efficiencies

The biggest cost of mission critical applications and databases is not building them and starting them up, but rather the total cost of running them. Migrating a database to an enterprise‑class specialised cloud gives access to a set of automation tools and operating templates which reduce human intervention and improve speed and accuracy for most of these important tasks, while significantly reducing the associated operating costs.

Headquartered in Plainsboro, NJ, Synametrics Technologies has provided IT professionals and computer systems developers since 1997. Based on the success of their initial product offerings (WinSQL and DeltaCopy), the company continues to create and hone innovative products that help its customers get more from their computer applications, databases and infrastructure. To date, over one million users around the world have chosen Synametrics solutions to help power their accelerated business or personal computing needs.

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The RSA Conference in San Francisco is a hotbed of news, analysis and reports on the security industry, with research from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and automation software provider Sonatype being of particular interest.

The CSA report, State of Cloud Security 2018, assesses the steps cloud providers and enterprises are taking when it comes to security, as well as regulation and the changing threat landscape.

The report notes that as the landscape for cloud services expands, so do the security options with it. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) overlaps with platform as a service (PaaS), while serverless enables the hardware and software to be decoupled, and the software as a service market (SaaS) also expands. The rise of cloud access security broker (CASB) providers, and managed security services, is a sign that organisational security goes beyond the traditional corporate perimeter.

Regarding the role providers have to play, the report warns around the evolving landscape. “Training videos and manuals may not be enough as enterprises are using multiple cloud services and can’t keep up,” the report explains. “To help enterprises battle against the technology sprawl of features, the aim needs to be towards safe and secure default configurations and ensuring the proper use of new features.

“Any breach of a service, even due to user error, can negatively impact customer trust and reliability of a product,” the report adds. “User interface and behaviour should be just as important as the features themselves.”

The report concludes that, ultimately, technology moves faster than the business’ skills to adopt them, and the dreaded cloud skills gap needs to be met head on by the industry through partnership and collaboration.

Vinay Patel, managing director at Citigroup and chair of the CSA Global Enterprise Advisory Board, said that cloud security remained a ‘work in progress’. “It is incumbent upon the cloud user community to collaborate and speak with an amplified voice to ensure that their key security issues are heard and addressed,” he said.

“We hope this document will serve as a roadmap to developing best practices in the establishment of baseline security requirements needed to protect organisational data,” Patel added.

Elsewhere, a report from Sonatype concluded that organisations with mature DevOps practices were significantly more likely to integrate automated security than firms with no DevOps practice. More than three quarters of mature DevOps organisations have open source policies in place, with greater adherence than those without, while nine in 10 (88%) with mature DevOps practices are investing in application security training.

You can read the CSA report here (registration required) and the Sonatype report here (registration required).

The past few years have brought a sea change in the way applications are architected, developed, and consumed—increasing both the complexity of testing and the business impact of software failures. How can software testing professionals keep pace with modern application delivery, given the trends that impact both architectures (cloud, microservices, and APIs) and processes (DevOps, agile, and continuous delivery)? This is where continuous testing comes in. D

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Cloud services are becoming practically ubiquitous – but according to the latest study from McAfee, one in four organisations who use the public cloud has had their data stolen.

The findings appear in ‘Navigating a Cloudy Sky: Practical Guidance and the State of Cloud Security’, a report which surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals around security concerns with private and public cloud services.

Usage numbers are as strong as one would expect – except for one. 97% of respondents said they were using cloud services of some form, while more than four in five (83%) say they store sensitive data in the public cloud. Yet while two thirds (65%) said they had a cloud-first strategy, this was down from last year’s ranking of 83%. McAfee puts this down to caution on the part of certain companies – but added that ‘the more they know, the more confident IT professionals are that cloud-first is the course they want to be on.’

A quarter of firms polled who use IaaS, PaaS or SaaS said they have had data stolen, while one in five has experienced an advanced attack against its public cloud infrastructure. This is particularly serious given the various types of sensitive data stored. 61% of firms polled said they stored personal customer information, while 30% store intellectual property and healthcare records.

With GDPR just around the corner – only a month away – organisations reported a significant increase in their compliance efforts. Fewer than 10% of respondents said they were dialling back investment in their cloud provider because of GDPR.

The report gives three best practice tips for organisations looking for greater security gains. Firms should, if they’re not already, explore DevOps and DevSecOps environments – ‘integrating development, quality assurance and security processes within the business unit or application team is crucial to operating at the speed today’s business environment demands’ – as well as invest in a unified management platform across multiple clouds and automation techniques.

“Despite the clear prevalence of security incidents occurring in the cloud, enterprise cloud adoption is pressing on,” said Rajiv Gupta, McAfee senior vice president. “By implementing security measures that allow organisations to regain visibility and control of their data in the cloud, businesses can leverage the cloud to accelerate their business and improve the security of their data.”

You can read the full report here (registration required).