On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team sits to talk about AWS’s new patching policies, the general availability of Azure OpenAI, and the role of addressing IM or access management challenges in ensuring the seamless transition to the Cloud.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

• 🚨 AWS announces new patching policies,
• 🚨 Azure OpenAI service is now generally available.
• 🚨 IM/Access Management in CCOE…

Top Quotes

• 💡 “I think it(access management) should be the first challenge that’s tackled, and I usually try to approach it as such but it’s also sort of hard to do when it starts off as an experiment…and you have to retrofit it in”

AWS: Announcement of new patching policies

• 👤 AWS Systems Manager announces Patch Policies, enabling cross account and cross Region patching
• ️🕵️ This allows users to deploy policies to enforce patch compliance across their AWS accounts and regions…

Azure: Azure OPN AI service is now generally available.

• 0️⃣ General availability of Azure OpenAI Service expands access to large, advanced AI models with added enterprise benefits
• 0️⃣ This is Close to Jonathan’s prediction that Azure will launch a ChatGPT service, and more businesses can now access the most advanced AI models with pricing based on the mode of use..

The Cloud Journey Series; The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE)

• IM or Access management should be the first area people look at and the first challenge to be tackled, while also defining data protection boundaries.
• CCOE also provides the opportunity to identify activities in production that are unnecessary and should be changed.
• Permissions are the least important part of your IM journey; permissions change and would need to be evaluated continually.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• Announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Perth and Santiago
• AWS Clean Rooms is now available in preview
• AWS announces changes to AWS Billing, Cost Management, and Account consoles permissions
• AWS CloudTrail vulnerability: Undocumented API allows CloudTrail bypass
• EC2 Image Builder adds Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks for security hardening of Amazon Machine Images
• Amazon Corretto January, 2023 Quarterly Updates
• EC2 network performance metrics add support for ConnTrack Utilization metric
• AWS Network Firewall announces IPv6 support
• Amazon EFS Supports 1,000 Access Points per File System
• Amazon CloudFront now supports the request header order and header count headers
• AWS Nitro Enclaves announces support for multiple enclaves
• Amazon RDS now supports new SSL/TLS certificates and certificate controls
• AWS Lambda now supports Maximum Concurrency for Amazon SQS as an event source
• AWS Resource Groups now emits lifecycle events
• Amazon Kendra releases the Microsoft Teams Connector to enable Microsoft Teams messaging search
• Amazon Kendra releases Microsoft Exchange Connector to enable email-messaging search
• Amazon Detective adds new AWS managed IAM policies to improve secure access for security analysts
• Announcing the general availability of Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller zonal shift
• Amazon RDS now supports restoring database snapshots from Multi-AZ with two readable standbys
• Changing the customer experience with Contact Center AI: Look back and look forward
• General availability: IoT Edge Metrics Collector 1.1
• Public Preview: Azure Automation Visual Studio Code Extension
• General Availability: Azure Active Directory authentication for exporting and importing Managed Disks
• General Availability: AzAcSnap 7 — Azure Application Consistent Snapshot tool updates