Microsoft appoints new security boss

Two men shaking hands across a corporate desk
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Former Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive Charlie Bell will reportedly take charge of a new engineering organization inside Microsoft that will oversee security, compliance, identity and management. 

A long-time AWS veteran, Bell joined Microsoft last month as a corporate vice president, though his exact responsibilities weren’t announced.

“We all want a world where safety is an invariant, something that is always true, and we can constantly prove we have...I believe Microsoft is the only company in a position to deliver this, and I couldn’t be more excited to work with this talented team to make the world safer for every person and organization on the planet,” Bell wrote on LinkedIn.

According to CNBC, Bell was one of the candidates to head AWS following Andy Jassy's departure to take over as CEO of Amazon following Jeff Bezos’ retirement.  

Still negotiating

ZDNet has learnt that as part of his new role, Bell will be put in charge of several teams from across Microsoft to shore up the company’s cybersecurity posture, and will report directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Reportedly, however, the two companies are still negotiating over Bell’s move to the Redmond-based software giant.

"We believe Charlie Bell's new role can help advance cybersecurity for the country and the tech sector as a whole, and we are committed to continuing our constructive discussions with Amazon. We're sensitive to the importance of working through these issues together, as we've done when five recent Microsoft executives moved across town to work for Amazon," Frank Shaw, Corporate Vice President of Communications at Microsoft told ZDNet.

Via ZDNet

Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.