All news with #azure tag

Microsoft unveils Fairwater AI datacenter in Atlanta

🚀 Microsoft announced the new Fairwater Azure AI datacenter in Atlanta, Georgia, expanding its planet-scale AI superfactory. The purpose-built facility integrates massive NVIDIA Blackwell GPU clusters on a single flat network and uses rack-level direct liquid cooling plus a two-story layout to maximize compute density and reduce latency. It also connects via a dedicated AI WAN to enable cross-site fungibility and dynamic workload allocation.

Microsoft Secure Future Initiative — November 2025 Report

🔐 Microsoft’s November 2025 progress report on the Secure Future Initiative outlines governance expansion, engineering milestones, and product hardening across Azure, Microsoft 365, Windows, Surface, and Microsoft Security. The update highlights measurable gains — a nine-point rise in security sentiment, 95% employee completion of AI-attack training, 99.6% phishing-resistant MFA enforcement, and 99.5% live-secrets detection and remediation. It also introduces AI-first security capabilities, new detections, and 10 actionable SFI patterns to help customers improve posture.

Why Enterprises Still Struggle with Cloud Misconfigurations

🔒 Enterprises continue to struggle with cloud misconfigurations that expose sensitive data, according to recent industry reporting and a Qualys study. The report cites a 28% breach rate tied to cloud or SaaS services over the past year and high misconfiguration rates across AWS (45%), GCP (63%) and Azure (70%). Experts blame permissive provider defaults, shadow IT and rapid business-driven deployments, and recommend controls such as MFA everywhere, private networking, encryption, least-privilege and infrastructure-as-code.

Azure Ultra Disk: Performance, Cost, Instant Access

🚀Microsoft refreshed Azure Ultra Disk to deliver substantially lower tail latency, finer provisioning granularity, and faster snapshot-driven recovery for mission-critical workloads. Platform changes target an 80% reduction in P99.9 and outlier latency and a ~30% improvement in average latency. The update raises the IOPS/GiB ceiling to 1,000, introduces 1 GiB billing granularity, and sets minimums of 100 IOPS and 1 MB/s per disk to improve cost optimization. Instant Access Snapshot (public preview) enables disks from snapshots to hydrate up to 10x faster for rapid recovery and scale-out.

Microsoft Expands Sovereign Cloud Capabilities, EU Focus

🛡️ Microsoft announced expanded sovereign cloud offerings aimed at helping governments and enterprises meet regulatory and resilience requirements across Europe and beyond. The update includes end-to-end AI data processing within an EU Data Boundary, expanded Microsoft 365 Copilot in-country processing to 15 countries and additional rollouts through 2026, plus a refreshed Sovereign Landing Zone for simplified deployment of sovereign controls. Azure Local gains increased scale, external SAN support, and NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPUs for high-performance on-prem AI, along with planned disconnected operations. A new Digital Sovereignty specialization gives partners a way to validate and badge their sovereign-cloud expertise.

Anyscale's Managed Ray on Azure for Distributed AI

🚀 Microsoft and Anyscale announced a private preview bringing Anyscale’s managed Ray to Azure, enabling developers to run distributed Python AI/ML workloads with native Azure integration. The service leverages the RayTurbo runtime and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to provide elastic scaling, GPU packing, spot VM support, and enhanced observability. It aims to simplify scaling from prototype to production and reduce operational overhead.

Identity Failures Now Top Source of Cloud Risk in 2025

🔒 ReliaQuest's Q3 2025 telemetry found identity-related weaknesses were responsible for 44% of true‑positive cloud alerts, including excessive permissions, misconfigured roles and credential abuse. The report warns credentials and cloud keys often appear on crime markets — sometimes for as little as $2 — while 99% of cloud identities are reportedly over‑privileged, enabling stealthy access. It also highlights how rapid DevOps deployments can replicate legacy vulnerabilities and urges adoption of short‑lived credentials, strict least‑privilege controls and CI/CD security automation.

OAuth Device Code Phishing: Azure vs Google Compared

🔐 Matt Kiely of Huntress examines how the OAuth 2.0 device code flow enables phishing and highlights stark differences between Microsoft and Google. He walks through the device-code attack chain — generating a device code, social-engineering a user to enter it on a legitimate site, and polling the token endpoint to harvest access and refresh tokens. The analysis shows Azure’s implementation lets attackers control client_id and resource parameters to obtain powerful tokens, while Google’s implementation restricts device-code scopes and requires app controls that significantly limit abuse. Practical examples, cURL/Python snippets, and mitigation advice are included for defenders.

Resiliency in the Cloud: Shared Responsibility & Azure

☁️ Microsoft positions resiliency as a shared responsibility, combining its global infrastructure, SLAs, and platform capabilities with customer-owned architecture, configuration, and recovery planning. Azure Essentials packages blueprints, assessments, and validation tools like Azure Chaos Studio and Azure Monitor to enable zone-redundant and multi-region designs. The guidance stresses continuous validation, automated remediation, and governance to reduce downtime and accelerate recovery.

GitHub Universe 2025: Agents, AI, and Developer Tools

🚀 At GitHub Universe 2025, Microsoft and GitHub presented a vision for agentic development that lets developers see, steer, and build across autonomous agents. The event introduced platform capabilities like Agent HQ, a prompt-first AI Toolkit for VS Code, and the GA release of Azure MCP Server. Announcements focused on enterprise-grade security, standards-based integration, and faster, more intuitive agent creation and governance.

Microsoft DNS Outage Disrupts Azure and Microsoft 365

⚠️ Microsoft is experiencing a global DNS outage that began about an hour ago, causing widespread access problems to Azure and Microsoft 365 services. Customers worldwide report they cannot log into corporate networks or reach portals including Azure, Intune, and the Exchange admin center, and some report the Azure Front Door CDN is also unavailable. Microsoft attributes the interruptions to DNS failures, warns of intermittent request failures and latency, and is reviewing telemetry while working on mitigation; it recommends programmatic access (PowerShell/CLI) when portals are unreachable.

Microsoft and NVIDIA Deepen AI Infrastructure Partnership

🚀 Microsoft and NVIDIA announced expanded AI infrastructure on Azure, bringing NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition to Azure Local, new Nemotron and Cosmos models via Azure AI Foundry, and broader support for Run:ai and GB300 NVL72 supercomputing clusters. These updates enable on-premises and edge AI with cloud-like management, improved GPU utilization, and infrastructure tailored for frontier reasoning, multimodal workloads, and real-time inferencing. Microsoft also highlighted NVIDIA Dynamo optimizations for ND GB200-v6 VMs to boost inference throughput at scale.

Azure Storage Mover: Cloud-to-Cloud S3 to Blob Migrations

🚀 Azure Storage Mover is now generally available for direct cloud-to-cloud migrations from AWS S3 to Azure Blob Storage. The fully managed service performs high-speed, server-to-server parallel transfers without requiring self-hosted agents, preserving file metadata and supporting incremental syncs to minimize downtime. Integrated automation via the Azure portal, CLI, and REST API removes the need for custom scripts or third-party tools, while RBAC, Azure Active Directory, Multicloud Arc connectivity, and encryption in transit address security and compliance. Customers who tested the preview moved petabytes of data and reported reduced infrastructure overhead and faster access to Azure analytics and AI capabilities.

Enterprises Move From Static Secrets to Managed Identities

🔐 Organizations are rapidly replacing embedded API keys and passwords with platform-native managed identities to reduce manual credential management and leakage risk. Enterprises report significant productivity gains—case studies cite up to a 95% reduction in time spent managing credentials and a 75% drop in time learning platform authentication. While major clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP) and CI platforms have built-in solutions, legacy systems and third-party APIs remain the primary obstacles to eliminating static secrets entirely.

CISO Imperative: Building Resilience in Accelerating Threats

🔒 The Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025 warns that cyber threats are accelerating in speed, scale, and sophistication, driven by AI and coordinated, cross-border operations. Attack windows have shrunk—compromises can occur within 48 hours in cloud containers—while AI-powered phishing and credential theft have grown markedly more effective. For CISOs this requires reframing security as a business enabler, prioritizing resilience, automation, and modern identity controls such as phishing-resistant MFA. The Secure Future Initiative provides practitioner-tested patterns to operationalize these priorities.

The Signals Loop: Fine-tuning for AI Apps and Agents

🔁 Microsoft positions the signals loop — continuous capture of user interactions and telemetry with systematic fine‑tuning — as essential for building adaptive, reliable AI apps and agents. The post explains that simple RAG and prompting approaches often lack the accuracy and engagement needed for complex use cases, and that continuous learning drives sustained improvements. It highlights Dragon Copilot and GitHub Copilot as examples where telemetry‑driven fine‑tuning yielded substantial performance and experience gains, and presents Azure AI Foundry as a unified platform to operationalize these feedback loops at scale.

Migration to Azure SQL Drives Operational and AI Gains

🚀 This Microsoft case study showcases how three organizations—Thomson Reuters, Hexure, and CallRevu—jumpstarted modernization by migrating on-premises SQL workloads to Azure SQL Managed Instance and complementary Azure services. The migrations reduced operational overhead, improved resiliency, and enabled faster deployments. Customers reported dramatic performance improvements, shorter migration windows, and a scalable foundation for AI-driven features and insights.

Azure Storage Discovery GA: Enterprise Data Visibility

🔍 Azure Storage Discovery is now generally available as a fully managed service that provides enterprise-wide visibility across Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage. It delivers out-of-the-box dashboards, advanced visualizations, and multi-dimensional reports for capacity, activity, security, configuration, and error trends to help optimize costs and operations. Integrated Copilot in Azure allows users to ask natural-language questions and receive rich charts and tables without coding skills.

Microsoft October 2025 Patch Tuesday: Key Fixes & Rules

🛡️ Microsoft’s October 2025 Patch Tuesday addresses 175 Microsoft CVEs and 21 non‑Microsoft CVEs, including 17 rated critical and 11 marked important, with three already observed exploited in the wild. Talos highlights active exploitation of CVE-2025-24990 (Agere Modem driver), CVE-2025-59230 (Remote Access Connection Manager), and CVE-2025-47827 (IGEL OS Secure Boot bypass) and urges prompt remediation. Cisco Talos also published new Snort rules to detect many of these exploits and recommends updating patches, removing unsupported drivers, and refreshing IDS/IPS signatures.

Microsoft October 2025 Patch Tuesday: 6 Zero-Days Fixed

🔒 Microsoft released its October 2025 Patch Tuesday, addressing 172 vulnerabilities including six zero‑day flaws and eight Critical issues. The updates include five remote code execution and three elevation‑of‑privilege critical bugs, along with numerous information disclosure, denial‑of‑service and security feature bypass fixes. Notable actions include the removal of an Agere modem driver and patches for exploited elevation‑of‑privilege and SMB/SQL Server issues. Windows 10 reaches end of support with this release; Extended Security Updates remain available for organizations and consumers.