All news with #azure tag

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.

Grok 4 Arrives in Azure AI Foundry for Business Use

🔒 Microsoft and xAI have brought Grok 4 to Azure AI Foundry, combining a 128K-token context window, native tool use, and integrated web search with enterprise safety controls and compliance checks. The release highlights first-principles reasoning and enhanced problem solving across STEM and humanities tasks, plus variants optimized for reasoning, speed, and code. Azure AI Content Safety is enabled by default and Microsoft publishes a model card with safety and evaluation details. Pricing and deployment tiers are available through Azure.

Microsoft Marketplace: Unified Cloud and AI Solutions

🚀 The reimagined Microsoft Marketplace is a unified destination to find, try, buy and deploy cloud solutions, AI apps and agents, combining Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource. It lists tens of thousands of offerings and more than 3,000 AI apps and agents with rapid provisioning into Microsoft environments using Model Context Protocol (MCP). Integrations with CSPs and channel partners support private offers, a resale-enabled preview and governance for enterprise deployment.

Global Harms of Restrictive Cloud Licensing: One Year

⚖️ A year after Google Cloud filed a formal complaint with the European Commission, restrictive cloud licensing by Microsoft remains entrenched and, according to recent disclosures, appears to be intensifying. Microsoft has described efforts to drive customers to Azure as a core growth pillar, while new licensing changes due at the end of September further restrict managed service providers from hosting workloads on competing clouds. Regulators such as the U.K.'s CMA have found these policies harm customers, competition, innovation, and cybersecurity, and multiple global authorities are now scrutinizing the practices.

Agent Factory: Building the Open Agentic Web Stack

🔧This wrap-up of the Agent Factory series lays out a repeatable blueprint for designing and deploying enterprise-grade AI agents and introduces the agentic web stack. It catalogs eight essential components—communication protocols, discovery, identity and trust, tool invocation, orchestration, telemetry, memory, and governance—and positions Azure AI Foundry as an implementation. The post stresses open standards such as MCP and A2A, emphasizes interoperability across organizations, and highlights observability and governance as core operational requirements.

Azure Cobalt 100 VMs Deliver Performance and Efficiency

⚡ Azure's in-house Arm-based Cobalt 100 VMs are now live in 29 regions and designed to deliver higher performance, energy efficiency, and lower costs for a broad set of cloud workloads. Customers and platform vendors — including Databricks, Snowflake, Siemens, and Temenos — report measurable throughput and price-performance gains, while Microsoft services like Teams and Defender for Endpoint show meaningful internal improvements. The post presents these results as validation of an end-to-end systems strategy that couples custom silicon with infrastructure-level optimization.

Nimbus Manticore Intensifies Cyber-Espionage in Europe

🔍 Check Point Research reports that Iranian-linked actor Nimbus Manticore has escalated cyber-espionage operations across Western Europe, with heightened targeting of organizations in Denmark, Sweden and Portugal. Attackers impersonate recruiters and use convincing fake career portals to deliver personalized credentials and malicious archives. The campaign leverages evolved backdoors—first seen as Minibike, now observed as MiniJunk and MiniBrowse—and employs multi-stage DLL sideloading into legitimate Windows binaries, including Microsoft Defender components, alongside valid code-signing certificates and compiler-level obfuscation to evade detection. Infrastructure hosted via Azure App Service and shielded by Cloudflare provides redundancy and rapid command-and-control recovery.

Microsoft accelerates migration and modernization with AI

🔧 Microsoft outlined a set of agentic AI tools to speed migration and modernization across applications and data. GitHub Copilot now automates Java and .NET upgrades and end-to-end app modernization flows, while Azure Migrate adds AI-driven guidance, connected Copilot workflows, and broader application-awareness. The Azure Accelerate program pairs expert deployment support and funding to reduce friction and help teams move projects faster.

npm Supply-Chain Worm 'Shai-Hulud' Compromises Packages

🛡️ CISA released an alert about a widespread software supply chain compromise affecting the npm registry: a self-replicating worm called 'Shai-Hulud' has compromised over 500 packages. The actor harvested GitHub Personal Access Tokens and cloud API keys for AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, exfiltrating them to a public repository and using them to publish malicious package updates. CISA recommends immediate dependency reviews, credential rotation, enforcing phishing-resistant MFA, pinning package versions to releases before Sept. 16, 2025, hardening GitHub settings, and monitoring for anomalous outbound connections.