All news with #azure tag

🔬 Microsoft Discovery is an extensible platform that brings agentic orchestration, advanced reasoning, a graph-based knowledge foundation, and high-performance computing to enterprise R&D. It equips specialized agents to reason across proprietary data and external literature, generate hypotheses, and validate them through simulation and lab integrations under centralized governance. Built on Azure, the platform emphasizes security, compliance, partner interoperability, and enterprise-grade controls while remaining in preview.

🚀 Azure Accelerate for Databases is a Microsoft program that helps organizations modernize database estates to become AI-ready. It bundles a Savings Plan (up to 35% vs. pay-as-you-go), delivery funding, Azure credits, zero-cost Cloud Accelerate Factory support, partner services, AI-enhanced assessments, and role-based skilling. The offering aims to reduce friction and speed migrations at scale. Microsoft highlights Thomson Reuters’ migration of over 18,000 databases as a customer example.

🛡️ Microsoft awarded $2.3 million to security researchers after receiving nearly 700 submissions during this year’s Zero Day Quest hacking contest, compensating teams for high‑impact cloud and AI vulnerabilities uncovered at the live event. Participants from more than 20 countries tested within authorized environments under Microsoft’s Rules of Engagement and demonstrated issues such as credential exposure, SSRF chains, and cross‑tenant access without accessing customer data. The contest is part of the Secure Future Initiative, and Microsoft said findings will be shared through the CVE program to strengthen cloud and AI security.

🔍 This article outlines durable principles for cloud cost optimization and explains why ongoing cost management remains essential as workloads scale. It highlights how AI workloads add unpredictability, iteration-driven spikes, and specialized infrastructure needs that amplify cost risk. The post recommends core practices—visibility, governance guardrails, rightsizing, and continuous review—while distinguishing cost management from action-oriented cost optimization. It concludes by urging measurement of value alongside cost and pointing to Azure guidance such as FinOps and AI ROI resources.

🏆 Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Sovereign Cloud Platforms, Q2 2026, reflecting strong scores for current offering and strategy. The recognition highlights Microsoft’s platform approach that applies consistent sovereign controls across public cloud, private cloud, and partner-operated national clouds using technologies such as Azure Arc, Azure Local, and region-specific residency controls like EU Data Boundary. It underscores Microsoft’s commitment to help organizations adopt cloud and AI while maintaining control, compliance, and operational independence.

💡 This Azure blog launches a multi‑part Cloud Cost Optimization series that guides organizations on maximizing ROI from AI while controlling consumption‑based expenses. It identifies primary cost drivers—variable usage patterns, specialized infrastructure, and cross‑team lifecycle activities—and explains why AI cost optimization differs from conventional cloud cost control. The post urges linking cost decisions to measurable business outcomes and adopting continuous governance to sustain long‑term value.

🔁 Azure IaaS delivers an enterprise-grade platform with built-in capabilities across compute, storage, and networking to help keep mission-critical applications available during hardware issues, maintenance, zonal disruptions, and regional incidents. The platform emphasizes isolation, redundancy, failover, and recovery through features like Virtual Machine Scale Sets, availability zones, and multiple storage redundancy tiers. Networking services such as Azure Load Balancer, Application Gateway, Traffic Manager, and Azure Front Door help maintain reachability and reroute traffic when paths fail. Customers are encouraged to combine these primitives with IaC, testing, and operational practices to meet workload-specific RTO/RPO objectives.

⚠️ Microsoft Azure Monitor alerts are being abused to distribute callback phishing messages that impersonate billing and security notices. Attackers create alert rules with custom descriptions and configure them to send emails to lists they control, causing legitimate azure-noreply@microsoft.com messages to reach targets and pass SPF/DKIM/DMARC checks. Recipients are urged to call listed numbers, a tactic that can lead to credential theft, payment fraud, or remote access compromise.

🚀 At SQLCon 2026 in Atlanta, Microsoft detailed enhancements that position its database portfolio as a foundation for agentic AI and unified analytics across edge, PaaS, and SaaS. Key announcements include Azure SQL innovations such as GitHub Copilot in SSMS, a one‑year Savings Plan for databases, and Hyperscale advances (vector index performance, SQL MCP Server, and larger vCore options). The new Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric (early access) and enterprise security features for SQL in Fabric aim to simplify migration, governance, and AI‑driven app development.

🚀 Microsoft outlines how moving from legacy on-prem Oracle to Azure Database for PostgreSQL and the new Azure HorizonDB can reduce costs, boost performance, and improve agility. The post highlights an Apollo Hospitals migration that cut operational costs by 60%, improved uptime to 99.95%, and delivered a 3x performance gain. It also describes an AI-assisted Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migration tool integrated into VS Code that automates schema and application conversion, testing, and validation to reduce risk and accelerate adoption.

🗂️ Microsoft will add granular file- and folder-level restore to Microsoft 365 Backup, allowing administrators to browse, search and recover individual files from SharePoint and OneDrive restore points rather than restoring entire sites or drives. The capability is limited to tenants with the backup service enabled and requires the SharePoint Backup Administrator role; end users will not see restore operations. Public preview began in early March 2026 and Microsoft expects general availability between late April and early May 2026. Customers are advised to review coverage, train backup administrators, and update recovery runbooks to incorporate file- and folder-level restores.

⚙️ The Azure IaaS Resource Center centralizes guidance, demos, architectures, and best practices to help teams design, optimize, and operate cloud infrastructure across compute, storage, and networking. It advocates a system-level approach that unifies hardware, intelligent software, networking, and orchestration to deliver consistent performance and resiliency. The center highlights built-in security, AI-ready VM families, scalability options, and cost-optimization tools to align infrastructure decisions with business outcomes.

🚀 Azure now supports instant access for incremental snapshots of Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra Disk, enabling immediate restores and near-full performance from creation. Restored disks hydrate rapidly and deliver single-digit millisecond reads and sub-millisecond writes without waiting for background copy. This reduces recovery time for rollbacks, maintenance, and rapid scale-out of stateful applications. Enable the feature via the existing snapshot API by adding the InstantAccessDurationMins parameter.

💡Budget Bytes is a new video series that shows developers how to build production-quality AI applications on Azure for under $25. Each episode walks through end-to-end scenarios using the Azure SQL Database Free Offer, with live cost tallies, authentic debugging, and complete GitHub repos you can deploy yourself. Expect practical patterns and demonstrations of tools like Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio, and the Model Context Protocol, plus links to Microsoft Learn for deeper dives.

🛡️ Azure positions reliability as the primary objective and distinguishes it from resiliency and recoverability. Resiliency keeps workloads operational during faults through architecture, traffic management, and failure-domain choices, while recoverability restores service when disruptions exceed those boundaries. The post maps these concepts to the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework, the Azure Well‑Architected Framework, and specific Azure tools and guidance to help teams measure, validate, and govern continuity.

🔐 Non-human identities — service accounts, API keys, automation credentials and AI agents — are proliferating across cloud environments and often sit outside governance, creating high-risk blind spots. The author recounts finding a dormant Azure service account with owner-level access and dozens of similar accounts, and cites industry data showing machine-to-human ratios of up to 500:1. He recommends continuous discovery, strict least-privilege defaults, elimination of static credentials and automated rotation to reduce this primary breach vector.

🔐 Amazon Cognito introduces inbound federation Lambda triggers that let you transform and customize federated user attributes during authentication. You can modify responses from external SAML and OIDC providers — adding, overriding, or suppressing attributes — before they are stored in your user pool to avoid issues such as Cognito's 2,048-character limit per attribute. The trigger is available via hosted UI (classic) and managed login in all AWS Regions and is configurable through the Console, CLI, SDKs, CDK, or CloudFormation.

🚀 Azure Storage outlines strategic investments for 2026 focused on accelerating AI and agentic workloads. The post highlights expanded scale for model training and inference, including Blob scaled accounts, Azure Managed Lustre (AMLFS) with Preview support for 25 PiB and high throughput, and deeper integrations with frameworks like Foundry, Ray, and LangChain. It also emphasizes block storage advances such as Elastic SAN, the Kubernetes-native ACStor operator and open sourcing, plus performance and availability improvements for mission‑critical SAP and trading platforms. The roadmap stresses energy and supply-aware efficiency, curated AI dataset experiences, and partner co‑engineering to lower TCO and accelerate customer adoption.

⚠️ Recent analysis highlights that major DevOps SaaS platforms (e.g., GitHub, Jira, Azure DevOps) experienced widespread incidents in 2024–2025, with critical outages and degraded-service hours increasing sharply year‑over‑year. The piece argues the Shared Responsibility model leaves customers ultimately accountable for their data, and that native provider backups often create single points of failure with limited restore flexibility. It recommends multi‑layered, immutable backups, cross‑restore capability, defined RTO/RPOs, and continuous recovery testing to reduce financial, operational, and compliance risk.

⚠️ Microsoft confirmed a recent Windows 365 update is preventing some customers from signing in to their Cloud PC sessions. The disruption began Tuesday at 19:00 UTC after automated monitoring detected a spike in failed connection attempts, and engineers traced the problem to the update. Microsoft says the change was intended to improve security and is now analyzing it to determine mitigation and a permanent fix. As temporary workarounds, affected users can connect via the Windows App Web Client or use the Remote Desktop client to reach Azure Virtual Desktop.