Meanwhile, In News of the Coming Software Apocalypse...

via Paul Kunert, writing at El Reg, comes this story of persistent login issues with Microsoft Corporation's (Nasdaq: MSFT) 'Cloud' based Office Not-So-Productive productivity product, monikered O365 - Oh, but you knew that, since you've been unable to fire up good ol' Word for days... Perhaps a non - Cloud based solution to run your business might be in order, eh?

New S3 Encryption Feature, Is Amazon's Encryption Move Enough? →

You be the judge... Essentially, all are targeted at data-and-objects-at-rest, rather than in-motion (except, perhaps the new cross-region replication feature with KMS).

Regardless, all of the annouced new features are welcome (in my currently rather jaded opinion). Now, if we can just overcome human error (not to mention blatant developer and data-owner lack-of-attention-to-detail, read about that here)...

• Default Encryption – You can now mandate that all objects in a bucket must be stored in encrypted form without having to construct a bucket policy that rejects objects that are not encrypted.
• Permission Checks – The S3 Console now displays a prominent indicator next to each S3 bucket that is publicly accessible.
• Cross-Region Replication ACL Overwrite – When you replicate objects across AWS accounts, you can now specify that the object gets a new ACL that gives full access to the destination account.
• Cross-Region Replication with KMS – You can now replicate objects that are encrypted with keys that are managed by AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
• Detailed Inventory Report – The S3 Inventory report now includes the encryption status of each object. The report itself can also be encrypted. - via Jeff Barr, writing at the AWS Blog

And, thanks for the H/T go out to Trey Blalock over at rapidly growing Firewall Consultants!

Amazon Snowmobile →

When you've got 100 Petabytes of data burning a big hole in your datacenter's front pocket, and you just have to import said data into Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier storage... Whom - shall we say - are you going to call?

H/T