Microsoft Azure

Anomaly detection plays a vital role in many industries across the globe, such as fraud detection for the financial industry, health monitoring in hospitals, fault detection and operating environment monitoring in the manufacturing, oil and gas, utility, transportation, aviation, and automotive industries. Anomaly detection is about finding patterns in data that do not conform to … Read more Azure Data Explorer and Stream Analytics for anomaly detection

We’ve released our newest Azure blueprint that maps to another key industry-standard, the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Microsoft Azure Foundations Benchmark. This follows the recent announcement of our Azure blueprint for FedRAMP moderate and adds to the growing list of Azure blueprints for regulatory compliance, which now includes ISO 27001, NIST SP 800-53, PCI-DSS, … Read more New Azure blueprint for CIS Benchmark

Cryptocurrency mining attacks continue to represent a threat to many of our Azure Linux customers. In the past, we’ve talked about how some attackers use brute force techniques to guess account names and passwords and use those to gain access to machines. Today, we’re talking about an attack that a few of our customers have … Read more Learning from cryptocurrency mining attack scripts on Linux

Few industries have been disrupted by emerging technology quite like retail. From exploding online sales to the growth of mobile shopping, the industry has made a permanent shift to accommodate digital consumers. The rise of IoT has forced the retail industry to take notice; IDC expects that by 2025 there will be 41.6 billion connected … Read more IoT Signals retail report: IoT’s promise for retail will be unlocked addressing security, privacy and compliance

When we talk about cost management, we focus on three core tenets: Ensuring cost visibility so everyone is aware of the financial impact their solutions have. Driving accountability throughout the organization to stop bad spending patterns. Continuous cost optimization as your usage changes over time to do more with less. These were the driving forces … Read more Azure Cost Management 2019 year in review

“This post continues our reliability series kicked off by my July blog post highlighting several initiatives underway to keep improving platform availability, as part of our commitment to provide a trusted set of cloud services. Today I wanted to double-click on the investments we’ve made in no-impact and low-impact update technologies including hot patching, memory-preserving … Read more Advancing no-impact and low-impact maintenance technologies

This blog post was co-authored by Nikhil Jethava, Senior Program Manager, Azure Lighthouse. Azure Lighthouse became generally available in July this year and we have seen a tremendous response from Azure managed service provider communities who are excited about the scale and precision of management that the Azure platform now enables with cross tenant management. … Read more Azure Lighthouse: The managed service provider perspective

In June 2019, Microsoft announced a cloud interoperability collaboration with Oracle that will enable our customers to migrate and run enterprise workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. At Oracle OpenWorld in September, the cross-cloud collaboration was a big part of the conversation. Since then, we have fielded interest from mutual customers who want to … Read more Connecting Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud in the UK and Canada

As 2020 is upon us, it’s natural to take time and reflect back on the current year’s achievements (and challenges) and begin planning for the next year. One of our New Year’s resolutions was to continue live streaming software development topics to folks all over the world. In our broadcasts in late November and December, … Read more Tips for learning Azure in the new year

A few months ago, we posted a survey to gather feedback on your experience with metrics in Azure Portal. Thank you for participation and for providing valuable suggestions! We want to share some of the insights we gained from the survey and highlight some of the features that we delivered based on your feedback. These … Read more New features in Azure Monitor Metrics Explorer based on your feedback

“Continuing our Azure reliability series to be as transparent as possible about key initiatives underway to keep improving availability, today we turn our attention to Azure Active Directory. Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a cloud identity service that provides secure access to over 250 million monthly active users, connecting over 1.4 million unique … Read more Advancing Azure Active Directory availability

Processing Big data in real-time is an operational necessity for many businesses. Azure Stream Analytics is Microsoft’s serverless real-time analytics offering for complex event processing. We are excited and humbled to announce that Microsoft has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q3 2019. Microsoft believes this report truly reflects the market … Read more Microsoft is a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q3 2019

Since releasing Microsoft Azure IoT Edge, we have seen many customers using IoT Edge automatic deployments to deploy workloads to the edge at scale. IoT Edge automatic deployments handle the heavy lifting of deploying modules to the relevant Azure IoT Edge devices and allow operators to keep a close eye on status to quickly address … Read more New enhancements for Azure IoT Edge automatic deployments

We introduced the preview of bursting support on Azure Premium SSD Disks, and new disk sizes 4/8/16 GiB on both Premium & Standard SSDs at Microsoft Ignite in November. We would like to share more details about it. With bursting, eligible Premium SSD disks can now achieve up to 30x of the provisioned performance target, … Read more Better performance with bursting enhancement on Azure Disks

We are pleased to introduce the ability to export high-resolution keyframes from Azure Media Service’s Video Indexer. Whereas keyframes were previously exported in reduced resolution compared to the source video, high resolution keyframes extraction gives you original quality images and allows you to make use of the image-based artificial intelligence models provided by the Microsoft … Read more Combine the Power of Video Indexer and Computer Vision

One of the toughest IoT quandaries is figuring out how to bake IoT into existing hardware in a secure, cost-effective way. For many customers, scrapping existing hardware investments for new IoT-enabled devices (“greenfield” installations) isn’t feasible. And retrofitting mission-critical devices that are already in service with IoT (“brownfield” installations) is often deemed too risky, too … Read more Azure Sphere guardian module simplifies & secures brownfield IoT

One of the toughest IoT quandaries is figuring out how to bake IoT into existing hardware in a secure, cost-effective way. For many customers, scrapping existing hardware investments for new IoT-enabled devices or “greenfield” installations isn’t feasible. And retrofitting mission-critical devices that are already in service with IoT “brownfield” installations is often deemed too risky, … Read more Azure Sphere guardian module simplifies and secures brownfield IoT

Do you need rugged, compact-sized hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) enabled servers to run your branch office and edge workloads? Do you want to modernize your applications and IoT functions with container technology? Do you want to leverage Azure’s hybrid services such as backup, disaster recovery, update management, monitoring, and security compliance?  Well, Microsoft and HPE have … Read more Azure Stack HCI now running on HPE Edgeline EL8000

Digital twins have moved from an exciting concept to reality. More companies than ever are connecting assets and production networks with sensors and using analytics to optimize operations across machinery, plants, and industrial networks. As exact virtual representations of the physical environment, digital twins incorporate historical and real-time data to enable sophisticated spatial analysis of … Read more Microsoft partner ANSYS extends ability of Azure Digital Twins platform

Today we are announcing the preview of a maintenance control feature for Azure Virtual Machines that gives more control to customers with highly sensitive workloads for platform maintenance. Using this feature, customers can control all impactful host updates, including rebootless updates, for up to 35 days. Azure frequently updates its infrastructure to improve the reliability, … Read more Introducing maintenance control for platform updates

Last month, we started sharing the DevOps journey at Microsoft through the stories of several teams at Microsoft and how they approach DevOps adoption. As the next story in this series, we want to share the transition one team made from a classic operations role to a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) role: the story of … Read more Building Xbox game streaming with Site Reliability best practices

Do you need rugged, compact-sized hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) enabled servers to run your branch office and edge workloads? Do you want to modernize your applications and IoT functions with container technology? Do you want to leverage Azure’s hybrid services such as backup, disaster recovery, update managment, monitoring, and security compliance?   Microsoft and Lenovo have teamed … Read more Microsoft has validated the Lenovo ThinkSystem SE350 edge server for Azure Stack HCI

Since the general availability of Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 in February 2019, customers have been getting insights at cloud scale faster than ever before. Integration to analytics engines is critical for their analytics workloads and equally important is the ability to programmatically ingest, manage, and analyze data. This ability is critical for key areas … Read more Extended filesystem programming capabilities in Azure Data Lake Storage

Many customers have questions when it comes to managing cloud operations. How can I implement real-time cloud governance at scale? What’s the best way to monitor my cloud workloads? How can I get help when I need it? Azure offers a great deal of guidance when it comes to optimizing your cloud operations. At the … Read more Achieve operational excellence in the cloud with Azure Advisor

This post was co-authored by Omar Aftab, Partner Director of Program Management, Power Virtual Agents. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is enabling organizations to improve their business in areas like customer service and employee engagement by automating some of the most commonly requested services, which frees up employees to take on more value-adding activities. While the … Read more Enabling collaborative bot development across your organization for any user

Over a million on-premises SQL Server databases have moved to Azure, representing a massive shift in where customers are collecting, storing, and analyzing their data. Modernizing your databases provides the opportunity to transform your data architecture. SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines allows you to maintain control over your database and operating system while still … Read more Faster and cheaper: SQL on Azure continues to outshine AWS

Today, we are sharing the general availability of Microsoft Azure Backup’s solution for SAP HANA databases in the UK South region. Azure Backup is Azure’s native backup solution, which is BackInt certified by SAP. This offering aligns with Azure Backup’s mantra of zero-infrastructure backups, eliminating the need to deploy and manage backup infrastructure. You can … Read more SAP HANA backup using Azure Backup is now generally available

Whether you’re a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and you need to know what you’re spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Microsoft Azure Cost Management comes in. We’re always looking for … Read more Azure Cost Management updates – November 2019

Azure Media Services provides a platform with which you can broadcast live events. You can use our APIs to ingest, transcode, and dynamically package and encrypt your live video feeds for delivery via industry-standard protocols like HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and MPEG-DASH. You can also use our APIs to integrate with CDNs and deliver to … Read more Preview: Live transcription with Azure Media Services

We are excited to announce the general availability of multi-protocol access for Azure Data Lake Storage. Azure Data Lake Storage is a unique cloud storage solution for analytics that offers multi-protocol access to the same data. This is a no-compromise solution that allows both the Azure Blob Storage API and Azure Data Lake Storage API … Read more Multi-protocol access on Data Lake Storage now generally available

This post is co-authored by Anny Dow, Product Marketing Manager, Azure Cognitive Services. In an age where low-latency and data security can be the lifeblood of an organization, containers make it possible for enterprises to meet these needs when harnessing artificial intelligence (AI). Since introducing Azure Cognitive Services in containers this time last year, businesses … Read more A year of bringing AI to the edge

Multi-language speech transcription was recently introduced into Microsoft Video Indexer at the International Broadcasters Conference (IBC). It is available as a preview capability and customers can already start experiencing it in our portal. More details on all our IBC2019 enhancements can be found here. Multi-language videos are common media assets in the globalization context, global … Read more Multi-language identification and transcription in Video Indexer

As SQL Server 2019 continues to push the boundaries of availability, performance, and data intelligence, a centrally managed, enterprise-scale backup solution is imperative to ensure the protection of all that data. This is especially true if you are running the SQL Server in the cloud to leverage the benefits of dynamic scale and don’t want … Read more Azure Backup support for SQL Server 2019 and Restore as files

Change feed support for Microsoft Azure Blob storage is now available in preview. Change feed provides a guaranteed, ordered, durable, read-only log of all the creation, modification, and deletion change events that occur to the blobs in your storage account. This log is stored as append blobs within your storage account, therefore you can manage … Read more Change feed support now available in preview for Azure Blob Storage

Organizations face challenges when it comes to extracting insights, finding meaning, and uncovering new opportunities in the vast troves of content at their disposal. In fact, 82 percent of organizations surveyed in the latest Harvard Business Review (HBR) Analytic Services report say that exploring and understanding their content in a timely manner is a significant … Read more How AI can supercharge content understanding for businesses

HBv2 Virtual Machines for HPC, Azure’s most powerful yet, now in preview Azure HB v2-series Virtual Machines (VM) for high-performance computing (HPC) are now in preview in the South Central US region. HBv2-series Virtual Machines are Azure’s most advanced HPC offering yet, featuring performance and Message Passing Interface scalability rivaling the most advanced supercomputers on … Read more Azure high-performace computing at SC’19

Historically, data has been protected at rest through encryption in data stores, and in transit using network technologies, however as soon as that data is processed in the CPU of a computer it is decrypted and in plain text. New confidential computing technologies are game changing as they provide data protection, even when the code … Read more Bringing confidential computing to Kubernetes

Today’s question and answer style post comes after I had the chance to sit down with Bryan Heymann, Head of Cloud Architecture at Finastra, discussing his experience with Azure Site Recovery. Finastra builds and deploys technology on its open software architecture, our conversation focused on the organization’s journey to replace several disparate disaster recovery (DR) technologies … Read more Finastra “did not expect the low RPO” of Azure Site Recovery DR

The next wave of analytics is here with Azure Synapse Analytics! Simply unmatched and truly limitless, we’re excited about this launch and want to share the highlights with you. Please join us for the Analytics in Azure virtual event on Tuesday, December 10, 2019 from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Pacific Time. Be among the … Read more Learn how to accelerate time to insight at the Analytics in Azure virtual event

Over the last couple of years, deep learning has become widely adopted across the Bing search stack and powers a vast number of our intelligent features. We use natural language models to improve our core search algorithm’s understanding of a user’s search intent and the related webpages so that Bing can deliver the most relevant … Read more Bing delivers its largest improvement in search experience using Azure GPUs

As a company, we work every day to empower every person on the planet to achieve more. As part of that, we’re committed to investing in IoT and intelligent edge, two technology trends accelerating ubiquitous computing and bringing unparalleled opportunity for transformation across industries. We’ve been working hard to make our Azure IoT platform more … Read more Forrester names Microsoft a leader in Wave report for Industrial IoT Software Platforms

This post was co-authored by Mikhail Shilkov, Software Engineer, Pulumi. Pulumi is reinventing how people build modern cloud applications, with a unique platform that combines deep systems and infrastructure innovation with elegant programming models and developer tools. We live in amazing times when people and businesses on different continents can interact at the speed of … Read more How to build globally distributed applications with Azure Cosmos DB and Pulumi

One of the most dynamic landscapes embracing Internet of Things (IoT) is the modern city. As urbanization grows, city leaders are under increasing pressure to make cities safer, accessible, sustainable, and prosperous. Underlying all these important goals is the bedrock that makes a city run: infrastructure. Whether it be water, electricity, streets, traffic lights, cities … Read more Democratizing Smart City solutions with Azure IoT Central

Over the past few years, we’ve seen significant changes in how an application is thought of and developed, especially with the adoption of containers and the move from traditional monolithic applications to microservices applications. This shift also affects how we think about modern application monitoring, now with greater adoption of open source technologies and the … Read more Improving observability of your Kubernetes deployments with Azure Monitor for containers

The Azure Container Registry (ACR) team is rolling out the preview of repository scoped role-based access control (RBAC) permissions, our top-voted item on UserVoice. In this release, we have a command-line interface (CLI) experience for you to try and provide feedback. ACR already supports several authentication options using identities that have role-based access to an entire registry. However, for … Read more Azure Container Registry: preview of repository-scoped permissions

We’ve just released our newest Azure Blueprints for the important US Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certification at the moderate level. FedRAMP is a key certification because cloud providers seeking to sell services to US federal government agencies must first demonstrate FedRAMP compliance. Azure and Azure Government are both approved for FedRAMP at … Read more FedRAMP Moderate Blueprints helps automate US federal agency compliance

If data-access challenges have been keeping you from running high-performance computing (HPC) jobs in Azure, we’ve got great news to report! The now-available Microsoft Azure HPC Cache service lets you run your most demanding workloads in Azure without the time and cost of rewriting applications and while storing data where you want to—in Azure or … Read more Announcing the general availability of the new Azure HPC Cache service

Today, more and more organizations are focused on delivering new digital solutions to customers and finding that the need for increased agility, improved processes, and collaboration between development and operation teams is becoming business-critical. For over a decade, DevOps has been the answer to these challenges. Understanding the need for DevOps is one thing, but … Read more Sharing the DevOps journey at Microsoft

We’re constantly working to improve your user experience in the Azure portal. Our goal is to offer you a productive and easy-to-use single-pane-of glass where you can build, manage, and monitor your Azure services, applications, and infrastructure. In this post, I’d like to share the highlights of our latest experience improvements, including: Improved portal home … Read more 10 user experience updates to the Azure portal

On November fourth, we announced Azure Synapse Analytics, the next evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. Azure Synapse brings … Read more Azure SQL Data Warehouse is now Azure Synapse Analytics