Technocrat

It's all about the cloud nowadays, and the competition is tough. First, there's Amazon, arguably the largest cloud computing platform out there, but being a market leader is both a blessing and a curse - others are constantly trying to dethrone you. And the list of those others is a notable one: Google  and Microsoft are working tirelessly to improve their already impressive cloud platforms as are other industry heavyweights - IBM ,  HP , CA ; and let's not forget telecom giant - AT&T , Sprint , and Verizon ; and many others - Rackspace , GoGrid , Joyent , Savvis , SoftLayer , CloudShare , Skytap , ... So, how does Microsoft fair against the competition? I think it fairs quite well, thanks to its strong foothold in the Enterprise and the breadth and depth of its cloud solutions. Whether it is a traditional on-premise deployment, highly virtualized datacenter, private cloud, or public cloud offering - Microsoft has a compelling solution, great integration story, deep

Want to keep up on all the current cloud standards (as well as those that are work in progress), but have trouble keeping track of the rapidly changing field? Look no further than - Cloud Standards Wiki . Great resource!

Sometimes the subject of authentication in UAG seems to confuse people, and to lead them to the wrong conclusions. To set the record straight on a couple of issues: Misconception #1:  UAG includes robust authentication capabilities - this is a true statement, but sometimes is gets interpreted in a way that implies a presence of some sort of secure identity store within UAG. This is not the case.  UAG leverages different authentication repositories and options and can temporarily hold certain identity information to support things such as single sign-on (SSO), but is not a repository in itself. Here's a list of repositories and options supported out of the box (OOB):       Options such as "WINHTTP" and "Other" allow for new methods to be implemented to extend the OOB functionality (see a great example here ).  Misconception #2:   UAG  supports multi-factor authentication, including bio-metrics, hardware and software tokens, one time password

Sometime it may be desirable to disable certificate validation for the SSL protected back-end services published via UAG. You can do this by editing the following registry keys: Navigate to  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WhaleCom\e-Gap\Von\URLFilter\Comm\SSL right-click ValidateRwsCert , select Modify, and change the Value data to 0 right-click ValidateRwsCertCRL , select Modify, and change the Value data to 0 restart IIS P lease, note that disabling certificate validation process may not be an acceptable security practice in certain environments.   For a complete list of UAG registry keys consult the following TechNet article.  Also, there are different uses for certificates within UAG, to understand them better I strongly recommend reading through the following excellent blog post by Ben Ari.

Windows Live was born on November 1st, 2005; and now, almost seven years later, with Windows 8 and Windows Phone striding towards more meaningful cloud services integration than ever before, it is about to undergo some serious changes. Want to know more about it? Check out the following post - " Cloud services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone: Windows Live, re-imagined "