AD Connector enables you to use your existing on-premises Microsoft Active Directory (AD) identities to access the AWS Management Console and compatible AWS applications, such as Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon Connect, and Amazon Chime . With AD Connector, you can enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for AWS applications users and use your existing Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS)–based infrastructure for an additional layer of security. You also can join Amazon EC2 instances to your on-premises AD domain and manage the instances using Group Policy objects.

This Quick Start provides the fundamentals for implementing identity and isolation in multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS) environments, using Amazon Cognito as the underlying identity provider. 

Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region.

Amazon EC2 now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2017, the most recent release of Microsoft SQL Server. With this release, your Microsoft SQL Server 2017 workloads can take advantage of the scale, performance, and elasticity of the AWS Cloud. You can deploy SQL Server 2017 Always-On Availability Groups across multiple AWS Availability Zones (“AZs”) for enhanced availability and data durability. When you deploy your SQL Server databases on AWS, they benefit from all the security capabilities from AWS such as Amazon VPC, data encryption, and integration with AWS Microsoft AD for role based access control, while also leveraging security enhancements provided in SQL Server 2017 such as Always-Encrypted, dynamic data masking, and row-level security. You can integrate your SQL Server deployment with other AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, and AWS CloudWatch to provide easy deployment, management, monitoring, and other administrative tasks. These capabilities help ensure your SQL Server deployments meet your performance, manageability, security, and availability requirements while benefitting from the scale and agility of the AWS Cloud. In addition, when you run SQL Server 2017 on Amazon EC2 instances, you can take advantage of all the latest features available in Microsoft SQL Server 2017 such as container support for DevOps scenarios, graph databases, automatic database tuning, as well as R and Python analytics.

A consortium of Spain’s GS Inima and Claro Vicuna Valenzuela of Chile have won the engineering and construction contract for a desalination plant in Atacama, Chile, reports Diaro Finaciero.

Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) is reviewing its options over Teshie-Nungua desalination plant, as it emerged that the facility results in a loss to the utility of about $2 million a month, reports CitiFMonline.com.

The US Department of Energy is to award $15 million across up to 10 projects to research solar desalination technology, as part of its SunShot initiative.

Temporary desalination facilities will begin supplying Cape Town by December or January, city mayor Patricia de Lille confirmed in a briefing on Wednesday 4 October 2017.

China Pak Investment Corporation has acquired the Port City project in Gwadar, Pakistan, and is reviewing plans in line with international development standards.

UK-based military electronics specialist Ultra Electronics has won a $16.2m extension to a security technology contract with the US Navy.

This story continues at Ultra Electronics wins $16m extension to US Navy security contract

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