Microsoft Azure

I’m pleased to share that SAP recently named Microsoft its Partner of the Year for the 2020 SAP® Pinnacle Award category of Public and Private Cloud Provider. SAP presents these awards annually to the top partners that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP and helping customers run better. Winners and finalists … Read more Microsoft Receives 2020 SAP® Pinnacle Award: Public and Private Cloud Provider Partner of the Year

The global health pandemic has impacted every organization on the planet—no matter the size—their employees, and the customers they serve. The emphasis on social distancing and shelter in place orders have disrupted virtually every industry and form of business. The Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry is no exception. Most physical productions have been shut down … Read more Solutions and guidance to help content producers and creators work remotely

Incremental enrichment is a new feature of Azure Cognitive Search that brings a declarative approach to indexing your data. When incremental enrichment is turned on, document enrichment is performed at the least cost, even as your skills continue to evolve. Indexers in Azure Cognitive Search add documents to your search index from a data source. … Read more Introducing incremental enrichment in Azure Cognitive Search

From agriculture to healthcare, IoT unlocks opportunity across every industry, delivering profound returns, such as increased productivity and efficiency, reduced costs, and even new business models. And with a projected 41.6 billion IoT connected devices by 2025, momentum continues to build. While IoT creates new opportunities, it also brings new cybersecurity challenges that could potentially … Read more Accelerating innovation: Start with Azure Sphere to secure IoT solutions

IoT is reaching mainstream adoption across businesses in all market segments. Our vision is to enable Azure to be the world’s computer, giving businesses real-time visibility into every aspect of their operations, assets, and products. Businesses are harnessing signals from IoT devices of all shapes and sizes, from the very smallest microcontroller units (MCUs) to … Read more New Azure RTOS collaborations with leaders in the semiconductor industry

Today, we’re announcing the general availability for server-side encryption (SSE) with customer-managed keys (CMK) for Azure Managed Disks. Azure customers already benefit from SSE with platform-managed keys for Managed Disks enabled by default. SSE with CMK improves on platform-managed keys by giving you control of the encryption keys to meet your compliance need. Today, customers can … Read more Announcing server-side encryption with customer-managed keys for Azure Managed Disks

Today marks the general availability of new Azure disk sizes, including 4, 8, and 16 GiB on both Premium and Standard SSDs, as well as bursting support on Azure Premium SSD Disks. To provide the best performance and cost balance for your production workloads, we are making significant improvements to our portfolio of Azure Premium … Read more General availability of new Azure disk sizes and bursting

Cloud, edge computing, and IoT are making strides to transform whole industries and create opportunities that weren’t possible just a few years ago. With the rise of 5G mobile connectivity, there are even more possibilities to deliver immersive, real-time experiences that have demanding, ultra-low latency, and connectivity requirements. 5G opens new frontiers with enhanced mobile … Read more Microsoft partners with the industry to unlock new 5G scenarios with Azure Edge Zones

Today, Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President of Modern Life and Devices, announced the availability of new Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions. In his blog, he shared a few examples of how Microsoft 365 is innovating to deliver experiences powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to billions of users every day. Whether through familiar products like … Read more Extending the power of Azure AI to Microsoft 365 users

Since last week’s update, the global health pandemic continues to impact every organization—large or small—their employees, and the customers they serve. Everyone is working tirelessly to support all our customers, especially critical health and safety organizations across the globe, with the cloud services needed to sustain their operations during this unprecedented time. Equally, we are … Read more Update #2 on Microsoft cloud services continuity

If you use Office 365, you have likely seen the Microsoft PowerPoint Designer appear to offer helpful ideas when you insert a picture into a PowerPoint slide. You may also have found it under the Home tab in the ribbon. In either case, Designer provides users with redesigned slides to maximize their engagement and visual … Read more How Azure Machine Learning enables PowerPoint Designer

We’re announcing the general availability of incremental snapshots of Azure Managed Disks. Incremental snapshots are a cost-effective, point-in-time backup of managed disks. Unlike current snapshots, which are billed for the full size, incremental snapshots are billed for the delta changes to disks since the last snapshot and are always stored on the most cost-effective storage, … Read more Announcing general availability of incremental snapshots of Managed Disks

Azure Container Registry announces preview support for Azure Private Link, a means to limit network traffic of resources within the Azure network. With Private Link, the registry endpoints are assigned private IP addresses, routing traffic within a customer-defined virtual network. Private network support has been one of the top customer asks, allowing customers to benefit … Read more Azure Container Registry Private Link support preview for virtual networks

Accelerate classified missions with unparalleled connectivity, high availability, and resiliency across three regions with more than 35 services Azure Government Secret recently achieved Provisional Authorization (PA) at Department of Defense Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 503 with facilities at ICD 705. We’re also announcing a third region to enable even higher … Read more Azure Government Secret accredited at DoD IL6, ICD 503 with IaaS and PaaS

Late last year, we’ve announced the general availability of Azure Dedicated Hosts. This blog provides an update regarding the new and recently added capabilities since we introduced Azure Dedicated Hosts in preview. Azure Dedicated Host provides a single-tenant physical server to run your Azure Virtual Machines for Windows Server and Linux. With Azure Dedicated Host, … Read more Azure Dedicated Host: New capabilities and benefits

We’re expanding the Microsoft Azure Stack Edge with NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU preview during the GPU Technology Conference (GTC Digital). Azure Stack Edge is a cloud-managed appliance that brings Azure’s compute, storage, and machine learning capabilities to the edge for fast local analysis and insights. With the included NVIDIA GPU, you can bring hardware … Read more Microsoft is expanding the Azure Stack Edge with NVIDIA GPU preview

Microsoft 365 applications are so commonplace that it’s easy to overlook some of the amazing capabilities that are enabled with breakthrough technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft Outlook is an email client that helps you work efficiently with email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and more in a single place. To help users be more productive and … Read more How Azure Machine Learning service powers suggested replies in Outlook

Over the past several weeks, all of us have come together to battle the global health pandemic. During this time, organizations around the world are adjusting the way they manage their daily work and how their workforce continues in the face of extraordinary changes to their professional and personal lives. With this blog we wanted … Read more Our commitment to customers and Microsoft cloud services continuity

Since the general availability of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 in Feb 2019, customers have been getting insights for their big data analytics workloads at cloud scale. 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 … Read more Filesystem SDKs for Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 now generally available

Organizations and teams that adopt DevOps methodologies are consistently seeing improvements in their ability to deliver high-quality code, with faster release cycles, and ultimately achieve higher level of satisfaction for their own customers, whether they’re internal or external. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is one of the pillars of DevOps, consisting in automatically building, … Read more New Deploy to Azure extension for Visual Studio Code

Azure Network Watcher’s new and improved Connection Monitor now provides unified end-to-end connection monitoring capabilities for hybrid and Azure deployments. Users can now use the same solution to monitor connectivity for on-premises, Azure, and multi-cloud setups. In this preview phase, the solution brings together the best of two key capabilities—Network Watcher’s Connection Monitor and Network … Read more Unified network monitoring with Connection Monitor now in preview

Extracting text and structure information from documents is a core enabling technology for robotic process automation and workflow automation. Since its preview release in May 2019, Azure Form Recognizer has attracted thousands of customers to extract text, key and value pairs, and tables from documents to accelerate their business processes. Today, we’re sharing the new … Read more New features for Form Recognizer now available

IT environments are becoming more complex as organizations are combining on-premises, cloud, and edge infrastructures. There are some major benefits to having a flexible, hybrid IT environment, such as the ability to create new business value while also meeting local and industry compliance requirements, but the headaches of managing and securing these environments are hard … Read more Learn new strategies and technologies to optimize your hybrid cloud

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Monitor for virtual machines (VMs), which provides an in-depth view of VM performance trends and dependencies. You can access Azure Monitor for VMs from the Azure VM resource blade to view details about a single VM, from the Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) resource blade to … Read more Announcing the general availability of Azure Monitor for virtual machines

We’re excited to share that Forrester has named Microsoft as a leader in the inaugural report, The Forrester New Wave™: Function-As-A-Service Platforms, Q1 2020 based on their evaluation of Azure Functions and integrated development tooling. We believe Forrester’s findings reflect the strong momentum of event-driven applications in Azure and our vision, crediting Azure Functions with“robust … Read more Microsoft named a leader in The Forrester New Wave: Functions-as-a-Service Platforms

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced new Microsoft Azure Migrate assessment capabilities that further simplify migration planning. In this post, I will talk about how you can plan migration of physical servers. Using this feature, you can also plan migration of virtual machines of any hypervisor or cloud. You can get started right away with these … Read more Plan migration of physical servers using Azure Migrate

The increased use of renewables, resiliency challenges, and sustainability concerns are all disrupting the energy industry today. New technologies are accelerating the way we source, store, and distribute energy. With IoT, we can gain new insights about the physical world that enables us to optimize and create more efficient processes, reduce energy waste, and track … Read more IoT Signals energy report: Embracing transparent, affordable, and sustainable energy

Data agility in healthcare; it sounds fantastic, but there are few data ecosystems as sophisticated and complex as healthcare. The path to data agility can often be elusive. Leaders in health are prioritizing and demanding cloud technology that works on open standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to transform how we manage data. Open … Read more Data agility and open standards in health: FHIR fueling interoperability in Azure

Providers, payors, pharmaceuticals, and life sciences companies are leading the next wave of healthcare innovation by utilizing connected devices. From continuous patient monitoring, to optimizing operations for manufacturers and cold-chain supply tracking for the pharmaceutical industry, the healthcare industry has embraced IoT technology to improve patient outcomes and operations. In our latest IoT Signals for … Read more Reimagining healthcare with Azure IoT

The cost of healthcare is rising globally and to tackle this, medical providers, from hospitals to your local doctor’s office, are looking to IoT to streamline processes and minimize costs. Few industries stand to gain more from emerging technology. And in few industries the stakes are higher because, in healthcare, incremental efficiencies can make the … Read more IoT Signals healthcare report: Key opportunities to unlock IoT’s promise

We recently announced a new solution, Backup Explorer, to enable you as a backup administrator to perform real-time monitoring of your backups, helping you achieve increased efficiency in your day-to-day operations. But what if you could also be proactive in the way you manage your backup estate? What if there was a way to unlock … Read more Announcing preview of Backup Reports

The pace of technological change is relentless across all markets. Edge computing continues to play an essential role in allowing data to be managed closer to its source, where workloads can range from basic services like data filtering and de-duplication to advanced capabilities like event-driven processing. Gartner estimates that by 2025 75 percent of Enterprise … Read more Azure IoT Introduces seamless integration with Cisco IoT

I’ve been committed to open source software for over a decade because it fosters a deep collaboration across the developer community, resulting in ground-breaking innovation. At the heart of open source is the freedom to learn from each other and share ideas, empowering the brightest minds to work together on the cutting edge of software … Read more Azure HDInsight and Azure Database for PostgreSQL news

Connectivity has gone through a fundamental shift as more workloads and services have moved to the Cloud. Traditional enterprise Wide Area Networks (WAN) have been fixed in nature, without the ability to dynamically scale to meet modern customer demands. For customers seeking to increasingly apply a cloud-first approach as the basis for their app and … Read more ExpressRoute Global Reach: Building your own cloud-based global backbone

HPC-optimized virtual machines now available Azure HBv2-series Virtual Machines (VMs) are now generally available in the South Central US region. HBv2 VMs will also be available in West Europe, East US, West US 2, North Central US, Japan East soon. HBv2 VMs deliver supercomputer-class performance, message passing interface (MPI) scalability, and cost efficiency for a … Read more Azure HBv2 Virtual Machines eclipse 80,000 cores for MPI HPC

Azure is the best cloud for existing Microsoft workloads, and we want to ensure all of our customers can take full advantage of Azure services. We work hard to understand the needs of those customers running Microsoft workloads on premises, including Windows Server, and help them to navigate a path to the cloud. But not … Read more Accelerate Your cloud strategy with Skytap on Azure

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 Azure Cost Management + Billing comes in. We’re always looking … Read more Azure Cost Management + Billing updates – February 2020

This blog post was co-authored by Aditya Joshi, Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise Protection and Detection. Attackers are increasingly employing stealthier methods to avoid detection. Fileless attacks exploit software vulnerabilities, inject malicious payloads into benign system processes, and hide in memory. These techniques minimize or eliminate traces of malware on disk, and greatly reduce the chances … Read more Fileless attack detection for Linux in preview

Burst encoding in the cloud with Azure and Media Excel HERO platform. Content creation has never been as in demand as it is today. Both professional and user-generated content has increased exponentially over the past years. This puts a lot of stress on media encoding and transcoding platforms. Add the upcoming 4K and even 8K … Read more Burst 4K encoding on Azure Kubernetes Service

Today Microsoft Azure Sphere is generally available. Our mission is to empower every organization on the planet to connect and create secured and trustworthy IoT devices. General availability is an important milestone for our team and for our customers, demonstrating that we are ready to fulfill our promise at scale. For Azure Sphere, this marks … Read more A secure foundation for IoT, Azure Sphere now generally available

We announced the general availability of Azure Security Center for IoT in July 2019. Since then, we have seen a lot of interest from both our customers and partners. Our team has been working on enhancing the capabilities we offer our customers to secure their IoT solutions. As our team gets ready to attend the … Read more Azure Security Center for IoT RSA 2020 announcements

This post was co-authored by Suren Jamiyanaa, Program Manager, Azure Networking We continue to be amazed by the adoption, interest, positive feedback, and the breadth of use cases customers are finding for our service. Today, we are excited to share several new Azure Firewall capabilities based on your top feedback items: ICSA Labs Corporate Firewall … Read more New Azure Firewall certification and features in Q1 CY2020

This post was co-authored by Yair Tor, Principal Program Manager, Azure Networking. Last November we introduced Microsoft Azure Firewall Manager preview for Azure Firewall policy and route management in secured virtual hubs. This also included integration with key Security as a Service partners, Zscaler, iboss, and soon Check Point. These partners support branch to internet … Read more Azure Firewall Manager now supports virtual networks

An ever-increasing number of enterprises, even as they adopt a hybrid IT strategy, continue to retain mission-critical data on-premises and look towards the public cloud as an effective offsite for their backups. Azure Backup—Azure’s built-in data-protection solution, provides a simple, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to backup these data-assets over the network to Azure, while eliminating … Read more Azure Offline Backup with Azure Data Box now in preview

SQL Server customers migrating their databases to the cloud have multiple choices for their cloud destination. To thoroughly assess which cloud is best for SQL Server workloads, two key factors to consider are: Innovations that the cloud provider can uniquely provide. Independent benchmark results. What innovations can the cloud provider bring to your SQL Server … Read more SQL Server runs best on Azure. Here’s why.

Today, we are announcing the limited preview of Azure Shared Disks, the industry’s first shared cloud block storage. Azure Shared Disks enables the next wave of block storage workloads migrating to the cloud including the most demanding enterprise applications, currently running on-premises on Storage Area Networks (SANs). These include clustered databases, parallel file systems, persistent … Read more Announcing the preview of Azure Shared Disks for clustered applications

This post was co-authored by the extended Azure Mobility Team. The past year has been eventful for a lot of reasons. At Microsoft, we’ve expanded our partnerships, including Volkswagen, LG Electronics, Faurecia, TomTom, and more, and taken the wraps off new thinking such as at CES, where we recently demonstrated our approach to in-vehicle compute … Read more Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform: trends and investment areas

“What is the primary cause of service reliability issues that we see in Azure, other than small but common hardware failures? Change. One of the value propositions of the cloud is that it’s continually improving, delivering new capabilities and features, as well as security and reliability enhancements. But since the platform is continuously evolving, change … Read more Advancing safe deployment practices

As organizations continue to expand their use of IT and the cloud, protecting critical enterprise data becomes extremely important. And if you are a backup admin on Microsoft Azure, being able to efficiently monitor backups on a daily basis is a key requirement to ensuring that your organization has no weaknesses in its last line … Read more Backup Explorer now available in preview

Customers exploring blockchain for their applications and solutions typically start with a prototype or proof of concept effort with a blockchain technology before they get to build, pilot, and production rollout. During the latter stages, apart from the ease of deployment, there is an expectation of flexibility in the configuration in terms of the number … Read more Hyperledger Fabric on Azure Kubernetes Service Marketplace template