All news with #azure tag

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.

Microsoft and Oracle Expand Oracle Database@Azure Reach

🚀 Microsoft and Oracle have expanded Oracle Database@Azure with broader regional coverage and support for Oracle Database 19c and 23ai, plus full support for Base Database, Exadata (Dedicated and Exascale), and Autonomous Database. The update introduces continuous zero-ETL mirroring into OneLake via Oracle GoldenGate and native integrations with Microsoft Fabric, enabling real-time analytics with Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, and Power BI. Security and operational management are strengthened through Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, Entra ID, and Azure Arc, while Azure Accelerate for Oracle and marketplace programs streamline migrations and partner engagement.

October 2025 Patch Tuesday: 172 CVEs, 3 Zero-Days, 8 Critical

🔒 Microsoft’s October 2025 Patch Tuesday addresses 172 vulnerabilities, including two publicly disclosed issues, three zero‑day flaws and eight Critical CVEs. The bulk of fixes target Windows (134 patches), Microsoft Office (18) and Azure (6), with elevation-of-privilege and remote code execution as the primary risks. Windows 10 reaches end of life on October 14, 2025; hosts must be on 22H2 to receive Extended Security Updates. CrowdStrike recommends prioritizing patches for actively exploited zero‑days and using Falcon Exposure Management dashboards to track and remediate affected systems.

Microsoft Advances Open Standards for Frontier AI Scale

🔧 Microsoft details OCP contributions to accelerate open-source infrastructure for frontier-scale AI, focusing on power, cooling, networking, security, and sustainability. It highlights innovations such as solid-state transformers, a power-stabilization paper with OpenAI and NVIDIA, and a next-generation HXU for liquid cooling. Networking efforts include ESUN and scale-up Ethernet workstreams, while security contributions introduce Caliptra 2.1, Adams Bridge 2.0, and L.O.C.K. The post also advances fleet lifecycle management, carbon accounting, and waste-heat reuse for globally deployable AI datacenters.

Buyer’s Guide — Data Protection Platforms for Hybrid Clouds

🔒 This buyer’s guide explains why organizations need comprehensive data protection platforms for hybrid cloud environments and which capabilities to prioritize. It highlights core requirements such as data discovery and classification, layered protections (encryption, DLP, immutability), continuous monitoring, and automated recovery to address ransomware, misconfigurations, outages and compliance. The guide also surveys market trends and leading vendors to help IT teams evaluate DPaaS, cloud-native and on-premises options.

Microsoft Azure Debuts Large-Scale NVIDIA GB300 Cluster

🚀 Microsoft Azure announced the first production-scale cluster using more than 4,600 NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 (Blackwell Ultra) GPUs, co-engineered with NVIDIA to support OpenAI and other frontier AI workloads. The new ND GB300 v6 VMs are optimized for reasoning models, agentic systems, and multimodal generative AI, delivered on rack-scale systems with 72 GPUs per rack and 36 NVIDIA Grace CPUs. Microsoft says this infrastructure will shorten training from months to weeks and will scale to hundreds of thousands of Blackwell Ultra GPUs globally.

Microsoft Expands Azure Datacenters and AI in Asia

☁️ Microsoft is expanding its Azure footprint across Asia, launching new datacenter regions in Malaysia and Indonesia in 2025 and announcing planned expansions in India and Taiwan for 2026. The company is investing billions to deliver AI-ready hyperscale infrastructure, next‑generation networking, scalable storage, and multi‑zone availability to support low-latency, compliant services. Microsoft also plans a second Malaysia region (Southeast Asia 3) and recommends multi-region architectures along with the Cloud Adoption and Well‑Architected Frameworks to improve resilience, performance, and cost optimization.

Azure Front Door Outage Disrupts Microsoft 365 Access

⚠️ Microsoft is addressing an outage in its Azure Front Door CDN that is blocking access to some Microsoft 365 services and admin portals across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The incident began around 07:40 UTC and produced delays and timeouts when connecting to the Azure and Entra portals. Engineering teams have been restarting Kubernetes instances that caused capacity loss across AFD instances and have initiated failover for the Microsoft 365 Portal while monitoring telemetry to confirm full recovery.

Avnet Confirms Breach; Stolen EMEA Sales Data Unreadable

🔒 Avnet confirmed unauthorized access to externally hosted cloud storage that supported an internal sales tool used in the EMEA region. The company says most stolen files are not easily readable without access to Avnet's proprietary sales tool, which it says was not impacted, while attackers claim they exfiltrated 1.3TB of compressed (7–12TB raw) data. Avnet detected the activity on September 26, rotated secrets across Azure/Databricks, notified authorities, and will contact affected customers and suppliers; the number of potentially impacted individuals remains unknown.

Azure AI Foundry Brings Multimodal OpenAI Models at Scale

🚀 Azure AI Foundry now integrates new OpenAI models—GPT-image-1-mini, GPT-realtime-mini, and GPT-audio-mini—alongside safety upgrades to GPT-5. The rollout, with most customers able to get started on October 7, 2025, targets efficient, low-latency multimodal workloads for developers and enterprises. Microsoft also highlighted the open-source Microsoft Agent Framework, multi-agent workflows, unified observability, Voice Live API GA, and Responsible AI enhancements to accelerate production-grade agentic solutions.

Microsoft Agent Framework Brings Multi-Agent Tooling

🤖 The Microsoft Agent Framework is now in public preview inside Azure AI Foundry, offering an open-source SDK and runtime to simplify orchestration of multi-agent systems. Developers can prototype locally and deploy with built-in observability, durability, and compliance while integrating tools via OpenAPI, Agent2Agent (A2A), and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Microsoft also previews stateful multi-agent workflows and has contributed multi-agent tracing standards to OpenTelemetry. Responsible AI controls and a generally available Voice Live API add governance and real-time voice capabilities for enterprise scenarios.

Microsoft Sentinel: Agentic Platform for Defenders Now

🛡️ Microsoft announced expanded agentic security capabilities in Microsoft Sentinel, including the general availability of the Sentinel data lake and public preview of Sentinel Graph and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to enable AI agents to reason over unified security data. Sentinel ingests structured and semi-structured signals, builds vectorized, graph-based context, and integrates with Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. Security Copilot now offers a no-code agent builder and developer workflows via VS Code/GitHub Copilot, while enhanced governance controls (Entra Agent ID, PII guardrails, prompt shields) aim to secure agent lifecycles.

Microsoft Expands Sentinel into Agentic Security Platform

🔒 Microsoft announced the general availability of the Sentinel data lake and public previews of Sentinel Graph and the Sentinel Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. The release broadens Sentinel from a traditional SIEM into a unified, agentic security platform designed to ingest and correlate structured and semi-structured signals at scale. It is intended to give AI agents such as Security Copilot and developer tools in VS Code with GitHub Copilot richer contextual access for detection, retroactive hunting, and automated response while integrating with Defender and Purview.