All news with #microsoft azure tag

🛠️ AWS Systems Manager now connects to Azure Virtual Machines without manual agent installs or per-node advanced tier fees. Create a Cloud Connector to deploy the SSM Agent at scale so Azure VMs appear alongside EC2 in a unified console. Manage them with Session Manager, Automation, Run Command, State Manager, Patch Manager, and Inventory from a single workflow. Advanced Instances Tier is removed; pay-as-you-go for non-EC2 session and command usage begins Sept 30, 2026.

🔎 Brain is Azure’s centralized AIOps cloud health intelligence system that forms a real-time digital twin with Azure Resource Graph. It fuses telemetry, AI/ML models, service topology, and customer impact into unified health determinations that drive notifications, deployment safeguards, and outage declarations. This post introduces Brain’s design, inputs and outputs, and how it enables faster, more consistent reliability actions across Azure.

🔍 This third post in the Azure IaaS series outlines best practices to design, build, and optimize cloud infrastructure for sustained cost efficiency. It explains how compounded architectural choices across compute, storage, and networking drive costs and offers Azure capabilities—such as VM families, automated tiering, and resilient networking—to align resources with workload needs and reduce TCO.

🔒 AWS Security Hub now monitors Microsoft Azure resources, extending risk analytics, cloud security posture management, vulnerability management, and security response across both clouds. The service auto-discovers Azure VMs, ACR images, Function Apps, and identities, evaluating misconfigurations, internet exposure, and software vulnerabilities. Findings from AWS and Azure appear in a single prioritized view with consistent formats and automation workflows, and a 30-day free trial for Azure monitoring is available.

🛠️ Claude in Microsoft Foundry is now GA on Azure, offering enterprises an integrated path from experimentation to production. Hosted on Azure and running on NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra systems, Claude provides frontier model capabilities while integrating with enterprise controls like Entra ID, RBAC, governance, and data residency. Developers can use the Messages API, prompt caching, extended thinking, and tool streaming, and teams can opt for zero data retention for high-sensitivity workloads. Billing is consolidated as Claude Consumption Units (CCU) on the Azure bill for simplified procurement.

🔒 Unit 42 researchers describe a bucket hijacking technique that exploits globally unique storage bucket names across major cloud providers. By deleting a target bucket and recreating it under an attacker-controlled account with the same name, data streams (logs, Pub/Sub, replication, transfer jobs, etc.) can be silently rerouted to an adversary. The team validated the attack across Google Cloud, AWS and demonstrated cross-subscription scenarios in Azure, and has shared findings with the affected vendors.

📌 This blog explains a structured approach to enterprise storage migration using Microsoft tools. It emphasizes planning, assessment, and choosing the right migration path based on data volume, connectivity, and downtime tolerance. Key solutions covered include Azure Migrate, Azure Storage Mover, Azure Data Box, and a preview Azure Copilot Migration Agent. The post illustrates phased strategies, real customer examples, and guidance for regulated and AI use cases.

🔌 AWS now offers a free 500 Mbps Interconnect - multicloud tier to simplify private connectivity between AWS and other public clouds. The open specification behind Interconnect is already adopted by Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with Microsoft Azure planned later in 2026. The free tier provides a fully managed, resilient path (one local Tier 1 Interconnect per customer per region) and includes an Amazon CloudWatch Network Synthetic Monitor at no additional cost. Other CSPs set their own charges for their side of the link, so customers should review third-party pricing before creating an Interconnect.

🚀 Microsoft announces the public preview of cross-cluster networking for Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager, bringing transparent east‑west multi-cluster connectivity powered by Advanced Container Networking Services. Built on Cilium and Kubefleet, this managed capability extends the Kubernetes networking model across clusters to enable direct pod-to-pod communication, policy enforcement, and observability while preserving cluster isolation. The managed approach reduces operational overhead for multi-cluster fleets and supports resilient, global, and shared‑services architectures.

🚀 Azure NetApp Files extends cloud storage performance for Electronic Design Automation (EDA) by delivering predictable, high-throughput shared storage at massive concurrency. New capabilities like large volumes and breakthrough mode enable thousands of parallel jobs with consistent latency, validated by SPECstorage® Solution 2020 EDA_BLENDED benchmarking. Leading semiconductor firms are adopting ANF for production EDA workloads.

🔐 Microsoft has reached general availability for Entra-Only identities for Azure Files SMB, enabling native Microsoft Entra ID authentication for SMB file shares using cloud-only identities. This eliminates the need for on-premises Active Directory, Entra Connect, or managed domain controllers, simplifying architecture and reducing operational overhead. Entra acts as the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC), issuing Kerberos tickets while preserving SMB protocol compatibility, and supports VDI scenarios with FSLogix, Managed Identities, macOS clients, and NTFS ACL editing. The capability is supported across HDD and SSD shares, available at no extra cost, and is being extended to sovereign cloud regions.

🔧Microsoft outlines its sustained investment in PostgreSQL through upstream contributions, managed services, developer tools, and community programs. The post highlights 345 commits to the latest PostgreSQL release, active Microsoft committers working upstream, and service offerings such as Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure HorizonDB. It also emphasizes AI integrations like vector search and model invocation alongside IDE tooling and community engagement.

🚀 At SAP Sapphire 2026, Microsoft and SAP announced expanded integrations to embed AI across SAP applications on Azure, emphasizing Microsoft IQ as a shared intelligence layer and agent-to-agent capabilities between Copilot and Joule. The updates include bi-directional, zero-copy delta sharing with SAP Business Data Cloud and Microsoft Fabric, sovereign cloud expansions, and an enlarged RISE with SAP acceleration program. These developments aim to move enterprises from experimentation to production-ready, governed AI at scale.

🔐 Modern DDoS attacks have evolved from simple volumetric floods to multi-vector, application-layer abuse amplified by AI-enabled tooling and expansive botnets. Microsoft reports a sharp rise in attack volume since mid‑March 2024 and urges a system-level, defense-in-depth approach that combines fingerprinting (JA4), layered controls, and operational visibility. Cloud-native protections such as Azure DDoS Protection and Azure WAF help when integrated with resilient application design and pretested graceful-degradation plans.

🔷 Microsoft is expanding Azure capacity across Europe to meet surging cloud and AI demand. Azure regions and sovereign offerings enable organizations to run sensitive workloads with control over data residency, compliance, and performance. The investments cover new regions and upgrades across Northern, Southern, and Central Europe to support multi-region architectures, digital transformation, and sector-specific AI initiatives.

🔐 ConsentFix v3 is an automated evolution of prior OAuth consent phishing techniques that targets Microsoft Azure environments by abusing pre-trusted first-party apps and the OAuth2 authorization code flow. Attackers conduct reconnaissance to harvest employee names, roles, and emails, host convincing phishing pages on Cloudflare Pages and DocSend, and use Pipedream webhooks to collect and immediately exchange authorization codes for refresh tokens. Phishing is often highly personalized and delivered via PDFs to evade filters. Captured tokens are imported into post-exploitation tools to access mail, files, and other resources permitted by the token.

🏆 Microsoft has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide API Management 2026 Vendor Assessment, reflecting its emphasis on scaling APIs and AI together. Built on a decade-old foundation, Azure API Management governs over 38,000 customers, nearly 3 million APIs, and 3 trillion monthly requests while extending to AI gateway capabilities used by 2,000+ enterprises. The platform provides a single, Azure-native control plane to enforce policy, observability, and cost controls for both APIs and AI workloads.

🔒 Microsoft announced that Azure Local now supports deployments of up to thousands of servers within a single sovereign environment. The platform extends the Azure operating model to customer-owned datacenters, edge sites and industrial facilities with local policy enforcement, role-based access control, auditing and compliance capabilities even when disconnected. Validated compute and storage partners, plus Intel® Xeon® 6 and GPU support, let organizations run large-scale, latency-sensitive AI and regulated workloads entirely within their sovereign boundary while retaining lifecycle management through Azure.

🔒 A high-severity authentication flaw in Azure SRE Agent exposed agent activity streams to unauthorized tenants, researcher Yanir Tsarimi of Enclave AI reported. Tracked as CVE-2026-32173 with a CVSS score of 8.6, the vulnerability stemmed from an Entra ID app registration configured as multi-tenant and a WebSocket hub that accepted tokens without tenant authorization checks. The hub broadcast agent prompts, internal reasoning, commands and outputs to all connected clients. Microsoft applied a server-side fix and says no customer action is required, but organizations that ran the agent during preview should review any credentials or sensitive data that may have traversed agent interactions.

☁️ Azure announces the general availability of smart tier for Blob and Data Lake Storage, a fully managed automated tiering service that continuously optimizes object placement across hot, cool, and cold tiers. It evaluates last-access timestamps—objects idle 30 days move to cool and after 60 more days move to cold—and promotes data back to hot on access. Enable during account creation or switch existing zonal accounts to start optimizing automatically.