Microsoft.com Operations Team Blog

Hi, all,

You asked, we delivered.  As announced on Steve Guggenheimer's blog, and Microsoft VP Brad Anderson’s blog post, “Ready Now for TNS & MSDN:  Download Windows Server 2012 R2”, the Released to Manufacturing (RTM) bits for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 are now available for download to current MSDN and TechNet subscribers. 

Regulatory compliance is a hot topic among many of the customers I talk to. Of particular interest is compliance as it relates to the cloud. It is a challenging topic and there are many regulations that Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) need to be aware of and adhere to and these can vary significantly by industry and location.

Birthdays are always special and we wanted to take this moment to celebrate the birthday of a special product. This week we are celebrating the birthday of Windows Server 2012. The product has done really well in the market and has super human strength. So here’s a question for you, “If Windows Server 2012 were a superhero, who would it be?”

In celebration of kids heading back to school, today we’re providing advance notification for the release of 14 bulletins, four Critical and 10 Important, for September 2013. The Critical updates address issues in Internet Explorer, Outlook, SharePoint and Windows. 

Many of the Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and security executives that I talk to tell me that they are always craving information. It always seems as though while some parts of their job responsibilities are under control, they think that other areas need more of their attention or could be more efficiently managed.  Since they typically have limited time, limited information and limited resources, they look for sources of information that are tailored for their specific needs, making the information easy to consume and highly valuable.  One such source of information for security executives is… other security executives. Most, if not all of the CISOs that I talk to, rely on other security executives in the industry to provide insights into topics they are interested in.  When they can get valuable information and advice on an important topic from someone doing a similar job in another organization, they typically are willing to listen and engage.  Read more

A frustrating reality for IT leaders is that their teams continue to struggle with the complications of data growth even though they spend more money on storage every year. It’s not surprising that IT leaders are looking for new storage architectures to help them solve their scalability problems and reduce their costs. A post to this blog in June briefly discussed the problems customers are having with data growth and mentioned how a StorSimple Cloud-integrated Storage system could be used to alleviate them. This post expands on that conversation and introduces the Microsoft hybrid cloud storage solution.  

By now, readers of this blog may have already heard of our presence at VMworld in San Francisco this week. As you can imagine, planning a “guerrilla” activity is never a trivial task, and making it happen requires a lot of hard work behind the scenes. Therefore, I was feeling pretty pleased with what our team had managed to organize as I boarded my flight for San Francisco early Monday morning. Add to this the fact that I was visiting the Bay Area, a place that I called home for seven memorable years – I was really looking forward to the trip.