Security: Great.

Permissions management: Sounds good.

Decentralized identity: Not sure exactly what that is yet, but I like it, I like it.

With its newly announced product suite Entra, Microsoft is bringing together these individual pillars of identity and access management—threat detection, multi-cloud handling, and credential approval—into one portfolio.

The three parts of the one Entra-ty:

Identity security: Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory flags anomalous access patterns and offers single sign-on, multifactor authentication, and conditional access. With a level of automation, admins can control and authorize access to apps and data for specific users.

Multicloud management: Formerly known as CloudKnox Permissions Management, the rebranded product is scratching out that first part and going with Entra Permissions Management, which will be offered as a standalone product in July 2022. The cloud infrastructure entitlement manager, or CIEM, helps users access an organization’s many off-premises environments. “Through one unified pane of glass, you can manage Google Cloud permissions and Azure permissions and AWS permissions,” Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft’s CVP of security, compliance, identity, management, and privacy, told IT Brew.

That unified window, a Permissions Management Dashboard, includes a dropdown list of authorized systems (Azure, AWS, GCP) and folders, along with a funny-sounding “Permission Creep Index.” Not a phonebook of IT’s most eccentric and obnoxious, the Creep Index uses a range of factors to determine an unnecessary accumulation of access rights.

Decentralized identity: Rebranded from Azure Active Directory Verifiable Credentials, Entra Verified ID acts as a kind of digital wallet, according to Jakkal. Each verifiable credential is a signed container of identity data from an authoritative source—the issuer.

A user then chooses to share that credential with another entity: the verifier. The “decentralized” idea, available in August, brings together privacy and identity as new digital technologies emerge, Jakkal said: “Think metaverse and all of these new concepts which are coming into being. You need that trust fabric, and I think that’s where privacy and identity are going to have to connect together.”

The unified Entra portal aims to merge the above components of identity and access management—features that had been provided separately.

“The real unifying idea of Entra is none of these should be siloed and different things. They all need to be connected,” said Jakkal.

Read it here.—BH

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Big data, big bucks: Capital expenditure on data centers grew at the fastest rate YoY in three years during the first quarter of 2022, according to recently published research from Dell’Oro Group.

The report projects the biggest four hyperscalers—Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—are projected to expand their spending by 25% to $18 billion in 2022 as they “expand to as many as 30 new regions.” Yet Dell’Oro Research Director Baron Fung told IT Brew the capex surge is primarily due to lingering pandemic supply-chain disruptions.

“There’s still really strong demand in the markets for data-center construction and new build-outs,” Fung said. “But, as we know, the supply-chain issues have been ongoing for years. So it’s sort of, I suppose, limiting the growth. And we see shipments of servers and other data-center equipment constrained. We are seeing long lead times. It’s no surprise the situation is not really getting better or worse.”

The biggest issue isn’t high-end components like processors or memory, but lower-end chipsets with less-specialized production processes like “some storage controllers and analog ICS power supplies,” Fung told IT Brew. That’s because those products are competing for the same factory floor space as other industries like automotive and consumer electronics, according to Fung. Fung projected that the supply constraints won’t ease until at least 2023. Technology transitions also play a role, with companies’ increased interest in accelerated computing and new server architectures, such as Intel’s Ice Lake or the delayed Sapphire Rapids, requiring new and better hardware, he added.

Updated architecture has “an impact on driving up the server cost with more memory, more processor cores, more storage, more accelerators,” Fung said. “In addition, a lot of these companies are investing more in accelerated computing, right? So servers with more GPUs, FPGAs, or other AI accelerators in them, which is driving up the infrastructure cost overall.”

The Dell’Oro report projected that capex spending will continue to trend upward, with the long-term result being increased cloud adoption among enterprises that run their own data centers seeking more flexibility via hybrid solutions. In the meantime, Fung said, he hasn’t heard of the major hyperscalers and cloud providers passing on the capex costs to customers as their sheer scale puts them in a favorable position to hide costs.

“I think there’s gonna be a lag, it’s gonna take some time before we see these costs being passed on,” Fung said. “Usually, it’s not immediate, especially if you’re talking about higher capex costs, translating into the operating costs later on, which will translate into higher costs to customers…It takes many quarters, even for any price increases to take effect.”

Read more here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected] or DM @thetomzone on Twitter. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: Nearly 30,000. That’s the number of satellites SpaceX intends to launch to further its Starlink satellite broadband service, but companies like Amazon are asking the FCC to delay further deployment. (PCMag)

Quote: “Naughty Dog believes reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy are basic human rights and essential to the health and well-being of everyone.”—Video-game studio Naughty Dog after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade (Ars Technica)

Read: Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants workers back in the office. Unfortunately, there may not be enough room for them. (The Verge)