An in-depth security guidance report aimed at Internet of Things developers has been released by the Cloud Security Alliance.

Titled Future-proofing the Connected World: 13 steps to developing secure IoT products, the report offers practical and technical guidance to devs trying to secure networks of IoT devices.

“An IoT system is only as secure as its weakest link,” wrote Brian Russell, chair of the CSA’s IoT working group. “This document is our attempt at providing actionable and useful guidance for securing the individual products that make up an IoT system.”

Split into comprehensive sections, the guide covers: the need for IoT security; why dev organisations should care about securing IoT networks; device security challenges; and includes detailed guidance for secure IoT development, including everything from tips on implementing a secure dev environment to designing in hardware security controls and securing your firmware updates. A “detailed checklist for security engineers to follow during the development process” is also included.

Source: Devs! Here’s how to secure your IoT network, in, uh, 75 easy pages

Avi Freedman has worked in networking for 30+ years and seen over 100 startups scale their infrastructure. Here are the most vital pieces of advice he has to share.

They land themselves in Cloud Jail.

They get sucked in by “hipster tools.”

They don’t design for monitorability.

Source: The Three Infrastructure Mistakes Your Company Must Not Make

A tweak to Microsoft’s Outlook.com cloud service has blocked a good number of people from accessing their messages.

Specifically, the baffling and unannounced change affects Outlook.com users with connected accounts: these are email accounts hosted on third-party servers (such as a company’s private server or an ISP’s mail server) that are accessed via the Outlook.com cloud. People with this setup are no longer able to send or receive mail through Redmond’s webmail service.

Source: Never explain, never apologize: Microsoft silent on Outlook.com email server grief

MS cloud services are doing their best to piss people off!