This Week I Learned - Week #220

This Week I Learned -

By using the long-term backup retention feature of Azure SQL Database, you can “store your SQL database backups in an Azure Recovery Services vault for up to 10 years”.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Application Gateway provides you with all the benefits of a Basic Application Gateway, as well as protection against malicious web requests. WAP is a feature of Application Gateway that provides centralized protection of your web applications from common exploits and vulnerabilities.

App(lication) Insights not only allows monitoring but also allows you to manage application performance. It works with live web applications that are developed using .Net, Java, Node.js and can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. 

In order to monitor live desktop and mobile apps, Microsoft recommends the use of HockeyApp platform. 

Azure Advisor blade integrates with Security Center to come up with recommendations around high availability, performance, security and cost.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a cross-platform data center monitoring system for operating systems, hypervisors, network and hardware. It uses a single interface that shows state, health and performance information of computer systems.

OMS is an IT operations management solution from Microsoft that is available as a cloud service, It can manage both on-premise and cloud environments. The OMS suite consists of components for log analytics, automation, backup, disaster recovery, security and compliance - Simple Talk

* Google Maps has started posing questions about places you've been to. These can be turned on & off with Notification settings.

..the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google now dominate much of the global economy. Their growth has prompted calls for greater regulation and antitrust intervention. There’s rising worry, too, over their softer, noneconomic influence over culture and information — for instance, fears over how Facebook might affect democracies — as well as the implicit threat they pose to the jurisdictions of world governments.

* "Amazon is ...a kind of butler in the sky" - Farhad Manjoo

* Unlike competing assistants (like Apple’s Siri or Google Now), Amazon's Echo can be activated hands-free from far across the room (Siri only works from a couple of feet away), and it can decipher your voice in noisy environments, even when it’s playing music. Compared with the trudge of chatting with Siri, speaking to Alexa feels natural, closer to speaking to a human than a machine - NY Times

* Reed Hastings' Netflix is worth $65 billion and has 100 million subscribers

AppLabs, an independent software testing company with 2,500 professionals, to Computer Sciences Corporation in September 2011 for Rs 1,200 crore (Rs 12 billion), giving 10 times return on investments to Series-A investors such as Westbridge and Sequoia Capital India, Sashi Reddi returned to his original passion - investing in start-ups. The founder and managing partner of SRI Capital, a Hyderabad-based seed-stage venture capital fund with an initial corpus of Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion), Reddi has in his portfolio start-ups such as Glassbeam (machine log analytics for technology support), ThinCI (graphics chip design firm), Identropy (identity management services firm), Edutor (tablet-based e-learning player), iMomentous (mobile-based talent engagement platform), Hello Curry (quick service restaurant chain), YuppTV (live Internet TV channel streaming platform), GIBSS (green energy leader), and NumberMall (hyperlocal marketing) - Rediff

NumberMall started out as a phone recharge business but is now evolving to using that customer data to provide hyperlocal offers to customers from nearby merchants.

India’s stock market capitalization has crossed $2 trillion. This makes India the 9th largest equity market globally and second largest amongst the emerging markets after China. This rally in market cap has pushed India’s market cap to GDP ratio at 0.88. The 10 year average for India’s market cap to GDP ratio is 0.78, it had peaked at 1.48 in 2007. India's contribution to global Mcap has risen to a six-year high of 2.7% against a six-year average of 2.2%, whereas India's contribution to global GDP is 2.9%, up from 2.4% in 2013. Typically, the M-cap-to-GDP ratio is anywhere between 0.2 and 0.8 for emerging markets while it moves in a wider range of 0.5-2.2 for developed markets. Emerging markets such as Brazil and Mexico have among the lowest M-cap-to-GDP ratios of 0.18 and 0.27, respectively, thanks to their higher dependence on commodities amid falling prices. For France and Germany, it's at 0.67 and 0.47, respectively, even though their benchmark indices are at new highs.

Ramadan ..is a month when Muslims take time to reflect on their own paths of personal and spiritual growth.

* Three South American countries hold over half the world’s lithium. Lithium-ion batteries store energy that powers mobile phones, electric cars and electricity grids (when attached to wind turbines and photovoltaic cells).

* "What? Why did it break? The parts are of the highest quality. They come from the China of China: India" - Homer Simpson in Season 28, Episode 18

* “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do” - Michael Porter

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