Microsoft Azure

Better scale and more power for IT professionals and developers! We’re excited to announce the general availability of larger, more powerful standard file shares for Azure Files. Azure Files is a secure, fully managed public cloud file storage with full range of data redundancy options and hybrid capabilities using Azure File Sync. Here is a … Read moreAnnouncing the general availability of larger, more powerful standard file shares for Azure Files

This is the final blog in our four-part series on Designing A Great SAP on Azure Architecture. Robust SAP on Azure Architectures are built on the pillars of Security, Performance and Scalability, Availability and Recoverability, and Efficiency and Operations. Within this blog we will a cover a range of Azure services and a new GitHub … Read moreSAP on Azure–Designing for Efficiency and Operations

Can you trust your cloud provider? That’s a question being asked a lot of these days, and with the newest version of our popular white paper Trusted Cloud: Microsoft Azure security, privacy, compliance, resiliency, and protected IP we’ve worked to provide you answers. When we first published Trusted Cloud in 2015, the paper was 13 … Read moreTrusted Cloud: security, privacy, compliance, resiliency, and IP

We are excited to share the winners of the first Microsoft Azure AI Hackathon, hosted on Devpost. Developers of all backgrounds and skill levels were welcome to join and submit any form of AI project, whether using Azure AI to enhance existing apps with pre-trained machine learning (ML) models or by building ML models from … Read moreMicrosoft Azure AI hackathon’s winning projects

Application Insights from Azure Monitor empowers developers and IT professionals to observe, debug, diagnose, and improve their distributed services hosted on the cloud, on-premises, and through hybrid solutions. The release of the Application Insights for ASP.NET Core 2.8.0 for web applications and the Application Insights for .NET Core Worker Service 2.8.0 for non-web applications delivers new value to developers including: … Read moreAzure Monitor adds Worker Service SDK, new ASP.NET core metrics

One of the best ways to speed up securing your cloud deployments is to focus on the most impactful security best practices. Best practices for securing any service begins with a fundamental understanding of cybersecurity risk and how to manage it. As an Azure customer, you can leverage this understanding by using security recommendations from … Read moreCIS Azure Security Foundations Benchmark open for comment

Who spends their summer at the Microsoft Garage New England Research & Development Center (or “NERD”)? The Microsoft Garage internship seeks out students who are hungry to learn, not afraid to try new things, and able to step out of their comfort zones when faced with ambiguous situations. The program brought together Grace Hsu from … Read moreLeveraging Cognitive Services to simplify inventory tracking

As customers have moved their workloads to the cloud, we’ve seen a growth in the use of cloud-native architectures, particularly microservices. Microservice-based architectures help improve scalability and velocity but implementing them can pose challenges. For many Java developers, Spring Boot and Spring Cloud have helped address these challenges, providing a robust platform with well-established patterns … Read moreIntroducing Azure Spring Cloud: fully managed service for Spring Boot microservices

This is the third in a four-part blog series on Designing a great SAP on Azure Architecture. Robust SAP on Azure Architectures are built on the pillars of security, performance and scalability, availability and recoverability, efficiency and operations. We covered designing for performance and scalability previously and within this blog we will focus on availability … Read moreSAP on Azure–Designing for availability and recoverability

Azure storage offers several options to encrypt data at rest. With client-side encryption you can encrypt data prior to uploading it to Azure Storage. You can also choose to have Azure storage manage encryption operations with storage service encryption using Microsoft managed keys or using customer managed keys in Azure Key Vault. Today, we present … Read moreCustomer Provided Keys with Azure Storage Service Encryption

Today we’re pleased to introduce the release of Microsoft Azure is Helping Organizations Manage Regulatory Challenges More Effectively, a new International Data Corporation (IDC) white paper based on original research by IDC and sponsored by Microsoft. IDC studied Azure customers who are using Azure as a platform to meet regulatory compliance needs, with a special … Read moreMeasuring your return on investment of Azure as a compliance platform

In today’s data-driven world, big data processing is a critical task for every organization. To unlock transformational insights and embrace a data-driven culture, companies need tools to help them easily integrate and transform data at scale, without requiring specialized skills. Today we’re announcing the general availability of the Mapping Data Flows feature of Azure Data … Read moreAzure Data Factory Mapping Data Flows are now generally available

We are excited to announce the preview of direct-upload to Azure managed disks. Today, there are two ways you can bring your on-premises VHD files to Azure as managed disks: Stage the VHD into a storage account before converting them into managed disks Attach an empty managed disk to a VM and do copy. Both … Read moreIntroducing the preview of direct-upload to Azure managed disks

A data-driven culture is critical for businesses to thrive in today’s environment. In fact, a brand-new Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey found that companies who embrace a data-driven culture experience a 4x improvement in revenue performance and better customer satisfaction. Foundational to this culture is the ability to deliver timely insights to everyone in … Read moreThe key to a data-driven culture: Timely insights

Today Microsoft published an independent security assessment of 113 Microsoft Azure services for their suitability to handle official and PROTECTED Australian government information. This assessment, carried out under the Information Security Registered Assessor Program (IRAP), is now available for customers and partners to review and use as they plan for increasing the use of cloud … Read moreOver 100 Azure services support PROTECTED Australian government data

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 comes in! We’re always looking for ways … Read moreAzure Cost Management updates – September 2019

The tech world is fast-paced, and cloud services like Azure Cosmos DB get frequent updates with new features, capabilities, and improvements. It’s important—but also challenging—to keep up with the latest performance and security updates and assess whether they apply to your applications. To make it easier, we’ve introduced automatic and tailored recommendations for all Azure … Read moreAzure Cosmos DB recommendations keep you on the right track

Earlier this year, we announced a preview of built-in Jupyter notebooks for Azure Cosmos DB. These notebooks, running inside Azure Cosmos DB, are now available. Cosmic notebooks are available for all data models and APIs including Cassandra, MongoDB, SQL (Core), Gremlin, and Spark to enhance the developer experience in Azure Cosmos DB. These notebooks are … Read moreBuilt-in Jupyter notebooks in Azure Cosmos DB are now available

Since we announced the preview of Windows Virtual Desktop in March, thousands of customers have piloted the service, providing valuable feedback and insights for Microsoft to integrate into the service. Today, we are excited to announce the worldwide general availability of Windows Virtual Desktop. It is the only service that delivers simplified management, a multi-session … Read moreWindows Virtual Desktop is now generally available worldwide

This is the second in a four-part blog series on designing a SAP on Azure Architecture. In the first part of our blog series we have covered the topic of designing for security. Robust SAP on Azure Architectures are built on the pillars of security, performance and scalability, availability and recoverability, and efficiency and operations. … Read moreSAP on Azure Architecture – Designing for performance and scalability

This month we released a new version of Azure Storage Explorer, 1.10.0. This latest version of Storage Explorer introduces several exciting new features and delivers significant updates to existing functionality. These features and changes are all designed to make users more efficient and productive when working with Azure Storage, CosmosDB, ADLS Gen2, and, starting with … Read moreAnnouncing Azure Storage Explorer 1.10.0

To get the most out of your Azure investment and run as efficiently as possible, we recommend that you regularly review and optimize your resources for high availability, security, performance, and cost. That’s why we created Azure Advisor, a free Azure service that helps you quickly and easily optimize your Azure resources with personalized recommendations … Read moreStay on top of best practices with Azure Advisor alerts

Earlier this week, we announced that Azure Sentinel is now generally available. This marks an important milestone in our journey to redefine Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) for the cloud era. With Azure Sentinel, enterprises worldwide can now keep pace with the exponential growth in security data, improve security outcomes without adding analyst resources, … Read moreAzure Sentinel general availability: A modern SIEM reimagined in the cloud

This blog post is co-authored by George Zinn, Corporate VP, Microsoft Treasurer. This week at Sibos, the world’s largest financial services event, Microsoft and SWIFT are showcasing the evolution of the cloud-native proof of concept (POC) announced at last year’s event. Building off the relationship between Microsoft Azure, SWIFT, and the work with Microsoft treasury, … Read moreMicrosoft and SWIFT extend partnership to make cloud native payments a reality

A few months back, at SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW event, we announced the availability of Azure Mv2 Virtual Machines (VMs) with up to 6 TB of memory for SAP HANA. We also reiterated our commitment to making Microsoft Azure the best cloud for SAP HANA. I’m glad to share that Azure Mv2 VMs with 12 TB … Read more12 TB VMs, Expanded SAP partnership on Blockchain, Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions

In the world of cloud database services, few things are more important to customers than having uninterrupted access to their data. In industries like online gaming and financial services that experience high transaction rates, even the smallest interruptions can potentially impact the end-user’s experience. Azure SQL Database is evergreen, meaning that it always has the … Read moreHot patching SQL Server Engine in Azure SQL Database

Today, Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Industry, announced several new AI-driven insights applications for Microsoft Dynamics 365. Powered by Azure AI, these tightly integrated AI capabilities will empower every employee in an organization to make AI real for their business today. Millions of developers and data scientists around the world are … Read moreExtending the power of Azure AI to business users

Composite indexes were introduced in Azure Cosmos DB at Microsoft Build 2019. With our latest service update, additional query types can now leverage composite indexes. In this post, we’ll explore composite indexes and highlight common use cases. Index types in Azure Cosmos DB Azure Cosmos DB currently has the following index types that are used … Read moreThree ways to leverage composite indexes in Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Files premium tier is now zone redundant! We’re excited to announce the general availability of zone redundant storage (ZRS) for Azure Files premium tier. Azure Files premium tier with ZRS replication enables highly performant, highly available file services, that are built on solid-state drives (SSD). Azure Files ZRS premium tier should be considered for … Read moreAzure Files premium tier gets zone redundant storage

We are pleased to share that support for HDInsight in Azure CLI is now generally available. The addition of the az hdinsight command group allows you to easily manage your HDInsight clusters using simple commands while taking advantage of all that Azure CLI has to offer, such as cross-platform support and tab completion. Key Features … Read moreHDInsight support in Azure CLI now out of preview

This blog post was contributed to by Chin Lai The, Technical Specialist, SAP on Azure. This is the first in a four-part blog series on designing a great SAP on Azure Architecture, and will focus on designing for security. Great SAP on Azure Architectures are built on the pillars of security, performance and scalability, availability … Read moreSAP on Azure Architecture – Designing for security

Customers love the scale of Azure that gives them the ability to expand across the globe, while being highly available. Through the rapidly growing adoption of Azure, customers need to access the data and services privately and securely from their networks grow exponentially. To help with this, we’re announcing the preview of Azure Private Link. … Read moreAnnouncing Azure Private Link

Cloud storage often serves as a content source for browser and mobile applications. This is typically achieved using application-issued, pre-authorized URLs which provide time-limited access directly to specific content without requiring a service to proxy this access. Azure Storage supports this pattern through the use of shared access signature tokens (SAS tokens). These tokens grant … Read moreAnnouncing user delegation SAS tokens preview for Azure Storage Blobs

Animated character recognition, multilingual speech transcription and more now available At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. The media industry exemplifies this mission. We live in an age where more content is being created and consumed in more ways and on more devices than ever. … Read moreAzure Media Services’ new AI-powered innovation

This blog post was co-authored by Ricky Brundritt, Principal Technical Program Manager, Azure Maps. Azure Maps services continue to expand our support for Microsoft enterprise customers’ needs in Azure. And, we’ve been busy expanding our capabilities. Today we’re announcing Azure Maps is now available in Argentina, India, Morocco, and Pakistan. We have also launched a … Read moreExpanded Azure Maps coverage, preview of Azure Maps feedback site, and more

Accenture and Avanade won the 2019 Microsoft Internet of Things Partner of the Year award this past spring. At the Microsoft Inspire partner conference in July, Brendan Mislin, Managing Director, Industry X.0 IoT Lead at Accenture, shared some insights and best practices that have helped this award-winning partner unlock the value of Azure IoT for … Read moreFive best practices for unlocking IoT value

With each passing year, more and more developers are building cloud-native applications. As developers build more complex applications they are looking to innovators like Microsoft Azure and HashiCorp to reduce the complexity of building and operating these applications. HashiCorp and Azure have worked together on a myriad of innovations. Examples of this innovation include tools … Read moreBuilding cloud-native applications with Azure and HashiCorp

This is the fourth blog post in a four-part series on monitoring on Azure HDInsight. Monitoring on Azure HDInsight Part 1: An Overview discusses the three main monitoring categories: cluster health and availability, resource utilization and performance, and job status and logs. Part 2 is centered on the first topic, monitoring cluster health and availability. Part … Read moreMonitoring on Azure HDInsight part 4: Workload metrics and logs

Today we’re previewing the Azure HPC Cache service, a new Azure offering that empowers organizations to more easily run large, complex high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in Azure. Azure HPC Cache reduces latency for applications where data may be tethered to existing data center infrastructure because of dataset sizes and operational scale. Scale your HPC pipeline … Read moreAzure HPC Cache: Reducing latency between Azure and on-premises storage

Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Telekom, SAP, and others trust Microsoft for their digital transformations Today, we’re announcing the availability of Azure in our new cloud regions in Germany. These new regions and our ongoing global expansion are in response to customer demand as more industry leaders choose Microsoft’s cloud services to further their digital transformations. As … Read moreMicrosoft Azure available from new cloud regions in Germany

Staying connected to access and ingest data in today’s highly distributed application environments is paramount for any enterprise. Many businesses need to operate in and across highly unpredictable and challenging conditions. For example, energy, farming, mining, and shipping often need to operate in remote, rural, or other isolated locations with poor network connectivity. With the … Read moreSatellite connectivity expands reach of Azure ExpressRoute across the globe

AZULINK: Get your application fully managed on Azure with a one-stop-shop partner committed to results and centralizing governance and scalability of your Azure services on IaaS and PaaS. BI for Dynamics 365FO: Enable your organization to do more with company data. With Hillstar’s standard BI connector for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, users can … Read moreAzure Marketplace new offers – Volume 43

As cloud growth continues to unlock opportunities for our customers, cloud migration is increasingly important for business’s digital strategy. Today, I am pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired Movere, an innovative technology provider in the cloud migration space. We’re committed to providing our customers with a comprehensive experience for migrating existing applications and infrastructure … Read moreMicrosoft acquires Movere to help customers unlock cloud innovation with seamless migration tools

Artificial intelligence (AI) workloads include megabytes of data and potentially billions of calculations. With advancements in hardware, it is now possible to run time-sensitive AI workloads on the edge while also sending outputs to the cloud for downstream applications. AI scenarios processed on the edge can facilitate important business scenarios, such as verifying if every … Read moreMicrosoft and Qualcomm accelerate AI with Vision AI Developer Kit

Figure 1. Petrofac is a leading oilfield services company Petrofac unlocks value for energy customers Petrofac, designs, builds, operates, and maintains oil, gas, and renewable energy assets. The company is committed to digital transformation. It looks to unlock value for itself and its clients using technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), automation, … Read morePetrofac transforms large-scale construction with Azure IoT

Companies and cloud solutions teams by and large understand the need for a disaster recovery solution. One of the first steps while defining and choosing a disaster recovery plan is to perform a business impact analysis. This process helps in identifying applications that support critical business processes, the impact to the business in case of … Read moreReduce disaster recovery time with Azure Site Recovery

Once you adopt Azure Site Recovery, monitoring of your setup can become a very involved exercise. You’ll need to ensure that the replication for all protected instances continue and that virtual machines are always ready for failover. While Azure Site Recovery solves this need by providing point-in-time health status, active health alerts, and the latest … Read moreTrack the health of your disaster recovery with Log Analytics

360°VR Museum: The 360°VR Museum is a virtual exhibition platform that allows users to view HD 360-degree re-creations of local and international exhibitions where visitors can move around freely using a mouse or touch screen input. This application is available only in Korean. Apache Airflow Helm Chart: Apache Airflow is a tool to express and … Read moreAzure Marketplace new offers – Volume 42

Congratulations to the PyTorch community on the release of PyTorch 1.2! Last fall, as part of our dedication to open source AI, we made PyTorch one of the primary, fully supported training frameworks on Azure. PyTorch is supported across many of our AI platform services and our developers participate in the PyTorch community, contributing key … Read morePyTorch on Azure: Full support for PyTorch 1.2

UBS Group, Swiss Re Group, Swisscom, and others turn to Microsoft for their digital transformations Today, we’re announcing the availability of Azure from our new cloud regions in Switzerland. These new regions and our ongoing global expansion are in response to customer demand as more industry leaders choose Microsoft’s cloud services to further their digital … Read moreMicrosoft Azure available from new cloud regions in Switzerland