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How Managed Security Service Providers can accelerate their business with Google Cloud Security’s Partner Program using Google Chronicle

Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) can deliver high-value security services for customers, helping to drive efficiencies in security operations across people, product, and processes. In an environment where the threat landscape continues to be challenging, MSSPs can allow customers to scale their security teams driving enhanced security outcomes. At the same time, MSSPs operating their own SOC team can face challenges – from core operating capabilities around an increasing number of alerts, to the shortage of skilled security professionals, to the highly manual and “tribal knowledge” investigation and response approach. MSSPs are generally constantly looking at opportunities to enhance customer satisfaction, while providing advanced security operations capability. To help, we are excited to announce our new Chronicle MSSP Program, which will offer MSSPs around the world the ability to provide scalable, differentiated, and effective detection and response capabilities with our cloud-native SIEM product, Chronicle. In a highly competitive environment where customers have little to differentiate between various MSSP providers, we are helping to turbocharge our MSSP partners with specialized services offerings, enabling branded portals and advanced threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities. “We are proud to partner with Google Cloud Security to solve functional challenges that exist in security for our customers. As a major partner and a distributor/MSSP, we are excited to leverage this new  program, helping our customers and delivering security outcomes”—Robert Herjavec, CEO, Herjavec Group and Fishtech GroupOur partners can help drive success for their business with: Google-scale partnership support to help grow your business – Go-to-market with a team that are incentivized to sell your solution. Help unlock greenfield accounts and expand into new territories quickly.   More controls over margins, and easy, straight-forward pricing – The modern licensing model gives MSSPs advanced control over their margins.  Building differentiated solutions that demonstrate your expertise – Chronicle MSSPs can add their solution on Chronicle to help make their solution both unique in the market and easier to sell. MSSPs can drive additional leverage with branded reporting, unique solutions, and advanced threat intelligence.Additionally, our partners are able to utilize key technical differentiators in Chronicle to help drive value for customers: API driven multi-tenancy – We can make it easier for you by helping to streamline and automate customer management workflows and enable the delivery of fully featured instances in a few API calls.Ingest everything, helping to ensure no more blindspots – Chronicle is designed to ingest data from any cloud – even the voluminous datasets (e.g. EDR, NDR, Cloud). This ability can enable security data to exist in one place, and perhaps more importantly, aliased and correlated into a timeline of events. This capability can enable SOCs to begin to operationalize their data into meaningful signals.Help prioritize threats and quickly respond to alerts  with context-aware detections – With context-aware detections in Chronicle, the supporting information from authoritative sources (e.g. CMDB, IAM, and DLP) including telemetry, context, relationships, and vulnerabilities are available as a “single” detection event. Our partners can use this capability to write context-driven detections, prioritize existing alerts, and drive fast investigation.Simply put, Google Chronicle will help reduce the MTTR (mean time to respond) for our partners by helping to minimize the need to wait for contextual understanding before making a decision and taking an investigatory action, which can lead to greater customer and cost benefits. We have partners already using the Chronicle MSSP program. Our partners like  CYDERES, Netenrich, and Novacoast, among others, have used this program to help accelerate customers’ security operations modernization journeys. We at Google Cloud are helping to drive innovations that are foundational to security operations and helping our partners support customers effectively. The Chronicle MSSP Program builds on the momentum of our MSSP program for VirusTotal, which can provide our partners with world-class crowdsourced threat intelligence. To learn more about the Chronicle and VirusTotal MSSP programs, register for our MSSP webinar.  For more information about the Chronicle MSSP Program, contact us at gcsecurity-mssp@google.com. Additionally, learn more about our VirusTotal MSSP programRelated ArticleIntroducing Community Security AnalyticsIntroducing Community Security Analytics, an open-source repository of queries for self-service security analytics to help you get starte…Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Now in preview: Azure Virtual Machines with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors

Up to 50 percent better price-performance than comparable x86-based virtual machines (VMs) for scale-out workloads.

The demand for compute capacity to sustain business modernization and digital transformation initiatives continues to grow. Organizations are facing a complex set of challenges as they deploy a broad range of workloads globally, from the edge to the cloud. There is also a need for a new breed of operationally efficient cloud-native computing solutions that can meet this demand without a massive growth in infrastructure footprint and energy consumption.

To address some of these challenges Microsoft is announcing the preview of Azure Virtual Machines series featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor. The new VMs are engineered to efficiently run scale-out workloads, web servers, application servers, open-source databases, cloud-native as well as rich .NET applications, Java applications, gaming servers, media servers, and more. The new VM series include general-purpose Dpsv5 and memory-optimized Epsv5 VMs, which can deliver up to 50 percent better price-performance than comparable x86-based VMs. You can request access to the preview by filling out this form.

The new Azure Virtual Machines, featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor, further extend our portfolio of compute solutions to help customers manage complexity and seamlessly run modern, dynamic, and scalable applications. Azure customers will benefit from the improvements the new VMs provide in terms of scalability, performance, and operational efficiency.

One customer is Amadeus, the leading IT provider for the global travel industry. Their research and development team gained early access to the preview and is excited about the potential of the offering.

“We power better journeys through travel technology. To achieve that, we design and deliver the most complex, trusted, and critical systems that our customers need”, said Denis Lacroix, SVP Cloud Transformation Program at Amadeus. “Travelers demand that their needs are met efficiently and quickly, and that they receive a consistent, personalized experience through every step of their journeys, from inspiration to search and booking, to ticketing, check-in, and arriving home. With Azure Arm64 VMs, we will be able to deliver higher throughput and even better experiences than the x86 VM that we’ve used in the past. Azure Arm64 VM series have proven to be a reliable platform for our applications, and we’ve accelerated our plans to deploy Arm64-based Azure solutions.”

A growing solution ecosystem

The Dpsv5 and Epsv5 Azure VM-series feature the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor operating at up to 3.0GHz. The new VMs provide up to 64 vCPUs and include VM sizes with 2GiB, 4GiB, and 8GiB per vCPU memory configurations, up to 40 Gbps networking, and optional high-performance local SSD storage.

The VMs currently in preview support Canonical Ubuntu Linux, CentOS, and Windows 11 Professional and Enterprise Edition on Arm. Support for additional operating systems including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Debian, AlmaLinux, and Flatcar is on the way.

"We see companies using Arm based architectures as a way of reducing both cost and energy consumption. It's a huge step forward for those looking to develop with Linux on Azure and we are pleased to partner with Microsoft to offer Ubuntu images."—Alexander Gallagher, Vice President of Public Cloud, Canonical

"Red Hat was one of the early leaders in creating common standards around Arm-based platforms, helping to ultimately bring Arm processors to the datacenter and beyond. This aligns with Red Hat’s long-standing commitment to giving our customers a broad set of choices to meet their unique enterprise computing needs, which extends to choice of architecture on-premises and in public clouds. We look forward to supporting Ampere Arm instances on Microsoft Azure as well as continuing our collaboration around the evolution of these platforms with key partners like Microsoft.”—Maryam Zand, Vice President, Cloud Partners, Red Hat

“SUSE has played a significant and active role in the Arm ecosystem, supporting the Arm 64-bit architecture and the Ampere Altra server instances.  SUSE is excited to partner with Microsoft Azure in supporting the Dpsv5 and Epsv5 Azure VM-series based on the Ampere Altra Arm-based server instances in our upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4 release.  Arm-optimized solutions in the cloud offer significant market potential as enterprises improve time to value and scale-out cloud environments with Azure Virtual Machines.  We look forward to continued collaboration with Microsoft Azure.”—Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo, Chief Technology and Product Officer, SUSE

We are also excited about the collaboration with Ampere and Arm. We have been working together to help Azure customers build and manage modern applications at cloud scale.

“Microsoft’s preview of their new Ampere Altra Azure Virtual Machines will provide customers with a first-hand look at its leadership performance across cloud workloads of all types. We have seen rapid growth in the adoption of our Ampere Cloud Native Processors, and this further expands their global scale and availability. Not only do Ampere Altra processors deliver new levels of performance to the cloud, but they are also the efficient and sustainable choice.”—Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer Ampere

“Organizations are shifting to a cloud-first approach as modern scale-out workloads diversify, emphasizing the importance of price-performance and power efficiency. The new Microsoft Azure VMs, powered by the Arm Neoverse™-based Ampere Altra platform, highlight our deep collaboration with industry change-makers, and deliver on the power of choice to the cloud computing market.”—Chris Bergey, SVP and GM, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm.

The next generation of computing technology needs to be designed from the ground up for cloud-native software technologies like microservices, containers, and serverless. To that end, customers will be able to deploy and manage containerized applications with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) running on Ampere Altra Arm-based processors.

“As we continue to see customers adopting AKS as their Cloud Native compute platform, providing the price performance of the Ampere Arm-based processor through a consistent managed Kubernetes API gives them the ability to migrate their workloads to drive further efficiencies as they scale up their cloud footprint.”—Sean McKenna, Group Product Manager AKS, Microsoft

Developer platforms and tools

Most major developer platforms and languages are gearing up to, or already provide Arm support and the inherent benefits that this processor architecture brings.

The modern .NET platform introduced native support for the Arm architecture on Linux starting with .NET 5 and has built upon that with the recent .NET 6 release. With C# 10 and F# 6, .NET 6 delivers language improvements that simplify your code. Additionally, a new dynamic profile-guided optimization (PGO) system delivers deep optimizations that are only possible at runtime, driving significant gains in performance that can reduce the cost of running cloud services in Azure, improved cloud diagnostics, and access to many new APIs. With the introduction of native support for Arm in the .NET Framework 4.8.1 (currently in preview and available as part of the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview builds), investments in the vast ecosystem of .NET Framework apps can also now leverage the benefits of running these workloads on Arm.

The latest Microsoft Visual C++ tools (currently in preview and available as part of Visual Studio 17.2 previews) allow you to not just run your apps, but also build natively for Arm, on Arm.

Java has played a critical role in democratizing cross-platform development. With Microsoft's recent JEP 388 contribution to OpenJDK, Java applications can now run on a wider range of Arm systems with no additional changes.

Java developers can enjoy the development experience they are familiar with while building and running their applications with the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK. Microsoft provides binaries for Windows, Linux, and macOS on compatible Arm hardware, for Java 11 and Java 17.

Last, but not least, the totally free Visual Studio Code editor running natively on Arm enables you to harness the power of the cloud for not just your production environment, but now also for your development environment.

General purpose and memory intensive workloads

The new Dpsv5 VM-series are engineered to run several Linux enterprise workloads such as web servers, application servers, open-source databases, .NET applications, Java applications, gaming servers, media servers, and more.

We are also introducing the Dpldsv5 VM-series, which provide 2GiBs per vCPU and offer a combination of vCPUs, memory, and local storage able to cost-effectively run workloads that do not require larger amounts of RAM per vCPU.

Finally, the new Epsv5 VM sizes can meet the requirements associated with memory-intensive Linux-based workloads including open-source databases, in-memory caching applications, gaming, and data analytics engines.

Series

vCPUs

Memory (GiBs)

Local Disk (GiBs)

Max Data Disks

Max NICs

Dpsv5-series

2 – 64

8 – 208

n/a

4 – 32

2 – 8

Dpdsv5-series

2 – 64

8 – 208

75 – 2,400

4 – 32

2 – 8

Dplsv5-series

2 – 64

4 – 128

n/a

4 – 32

2 – 8

Dpldsv5-series

2 – 64

4 – 128

75 – 2,400

4 – 32

2 – 8

Epsv5-series

2 – 32

16 – 208

n/a

4 – 32

2 – 8

Epdsv5-series

2 – 32

16 – 208

75 – 2,400

4 – 32

2 – 8

The Dpsv5, Dplsv5, and Epsv5 VM-series also offer options with no temporary storage at lower price points. You can attach Standard SSDs, Standard HDDs, and Premium SSDs to any of the VMs currently in preview, with Ultra Disk storage support coming soon. Virtual Machine Scale Sets are also supported.

Spot Virtual Machines are available; however, Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances pricing will be offered only after the VMs become generally available. Prices vary by region.

Learn more about the new Azure Virtual Machines and request access to the preview

The preview is initially available in the West US 2, West Central US, and West Europe Azure regions.

To learn more register for the upcoming webinar, and to request access to the preview, fill out this form.

Additional resources

•    Ampere blog.
•    Arm blog.
•    Microsoft’s binary distribution of the OpenJDK and related support.
•    Azure Virtual Machines pricing.
Quelle: Azure

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Empowering space development off the planet with Azure

Any developer can be a space developer with Azure. Microsoft has a long history of empowering the software development community. We have the world’s most comprehensive developer tools and platforms from Github to Visual Studio, and we support a wide range of industries and use cases from healthcare, financial services, critical industries, and now space.

As Microsoft expands its focus toward space, we are bringing the power, approachability, and security of our developer story to the next frontier. Microsoft is empowering developers with a platform for on-orbit compute at the ultimate edge, so that spacecraft running AI workloads are connected to the hyperscale Azure cloud.

We are reducing the barriers to entry for space application development and increasing the flexibility and modularity of software solutions. Enabling those building space workloads to easily leverage the productivity of our developer tools and integration with Azure services—to develop, analyze, deploy, and operate space applications in orbit and on the ground.

Today we are bringing new partnerships and capabilities to the development community, including:

NASA and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are testing AI at the ultimate edge for Astronaut Safety.
New partnerships are bringing development capabilities to on-orbit compute.

Unlocking new on-orbit climate data applications with Thales Alenia Space (TAS).
Developing new technologies with Loft Orbital to demonstrate re-taskable satellite functions and seamless connectivity to the terrestrial cloud.
Demonstrating reconfigurable on-orbit compute and AI processing with Ball Aerospace.

Rapidly analyzing spaceborne data with the new reference architecture for Azure Orbital with Azure Synapse.
Empowering analysts with newly integrated Blackshark.ai geospatial models are available with Azure Orbital.

Testing AI for Astronaut Safety at the ultimate edge

Microsoft, NASA, and HPE developed an AI workload test to run on the International Space Station (ISS) that could detect damage to astronaut equipment.

Using Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, NASA and Microsoft created a computer vision application that identifies the condition of the space gloves. Once trained in the cloud, the app was deployed to the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2, an AI-enabled software and hardware platform, aboard the ISS, and then operated at the ultimate edge enabling both local and remote analysis of the glove conditions.

Learn more about this project today.

On-orbit partnerships

Thales Alenia Space unlocks new on-orbit climate data applications with Microsoft to gather unmatched Earth observation insights.

Microsoft is partnering with Thales Alenia Space to demonstrate and validate on-orbit compute technologies with a demonstration onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales (67 percent) and Leonardo (33 percent), is the leader in orbital infrastructures and is developing high-power, edge-computing solutions for space.  Microsoft and Thales Alenia Space will deploy a powerful on-orbit computer, an on-orbit application framework, and high-performance Earth Observation sensors to unlock new on-orbit climate data processing applications for the benefit of our planet's sustainability. In collaboration with Microsoft Research (MSR), Microsoft and Thales Alenia Space will work with research teams in remote sensing, computer vision, and climate science to demonstrate the potential of next-generation on-orbit compute for Earth observation. This space edge computing capacity will allow gathering faster, to-the-point Earth observation insights immediately applicable for our planet’s surveillance, understanding, and protection. This joint collaboration comes a year after the integration of Deeper Vision, an Earth observation data analytics software by Thales Alenia Space, into Azure Space and is a strong milestone towards joint strategic ambitions between Microsoft and Thales Alenia Space which have just signed a Memorandum of Understanding on geospatial solutions, digital ground segment, and space edge computing.

New partnership with Loft Orbital to advance space edge computing and software deployment to orbit.

The Microsoft and Loft Orbital partnership will enable a new way to develop, test, and validate software applications for space systems in Microsoft Azure, and then seamlessly deploy them to satellites in orbit using Loft's space infrastructure tools and platforms. This solution also offers more efficient paths to flight for modern ‘massless’ payloads, where parties needing space capabilities can leverage shared on-orbit hardware rather than having to build and launch their own.

Working together with Loft, we are bringing core satellite capabilities like tasking which has typically been executed on the ground, to a more agile commanding and tasking paradigm executed on-orbit. To do so, we are integrating the Microsoft Azure suite of products, including terrestrial cloud and ground stations services, with Loft software capabilities that provide access to spacecraft, including on-orbit edge computing environment and sensors.

This strategic partnership will provide government and commercial users with a scalable and simplified capability to deploy software in space, enabling new paradigms in remote sensing, edge compute, on-orbit autonomy, and other areas. This groundbreaking capability will be brought to market first on a jointly used satellite launching in 2023 that will provide a host environment for third-party software applications, enabling users to deploy and operate their applications in orbit.

Demonstrating reconfigurable on-orbit compute processing with Ball Aerospace.

Ball Aerospace, a systems integrator with a heritage of designing and building government satellite programs and mission applications, is planning a series of on-orbit testbed satellites that target the agile implementation of new software and hardware for the US Government. Together, Ball Aerospace and Microsoft are collaborating on the execution of these spacecraft missions to demonstrate reconfigurable on-orbit processing technologies, leveraging the Azure Cloud. This includes the use of containerization and cloud on the edge to enable a software-defined mission approach that embraces standards such as Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA), Universal Command and Control Interface (UCI), and Open Mission Systems (OMS). Modular and reconfigurable on-orbit compute will support multiple complex missions for the United States Government and grant the ability to support future concepts for smaller, agile, multi-mission capabilities across all federal space programs.

Analytics for spaceborne data using Azure Orbital

Satellite imagery is a valuable asset; using AI with satellite imagery is a value multiplier. Using geospatial AI over the same area of interest with regularly refreshed satellite imagery, analysts can monitor change detection for their respective areas of interest.

The use of AI with satellite imagery is a powerful, cost-effective tool spanning all industries that monitor, measure, and/or monetize large areas of the Earth. Extracting this value is hard work as satellite imagery consists of unstructured, big data that requires significant resources to transform and analyze in order to access information and store and use it as structured data.

The Azure Space team released a reference architecture articulating how to apply AI to satellite imagery at scale using Azure resources. This reference architecture makes use of Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake Store Gen 2, Apache Spark Pool, Azure Data Share, Azure Batch, and Azure Container Registry. This Azure workflow reduces the complexity of extracting insights from remote sensing data by articulating how to group Azure resources to ingest, store, transform, and apply AI over satellite imagery then use the results for various applications. Azure resources allow for flexibility in the workflow, management of storage options, parallelization of workload, and (re)use of containerized models.

Given Azure’s orchestration flexibility, customers can bring their own imagery. Alternatively, if a customer needs imagery, they can call another imagery provider API specifying the respective area of interest, resolution, and vintage of their choosing through Microsoft’s partner Airbus Defense and Space or Microsoft’s Planetary Computer as an option. Customers can also bring their own trained models into the orchestration. If a customer needs geospatial intelligence and remote sensing AI, Microsoft has partnerships with Blackshark.ai, Orbital Insight, and Esri. For those customers looking to build AI, Microsoft offers tools like Azure Machine Learning and Azure Custom Vision.

Blackshark.ai geospatial models are available for analytics on Azure

Blackshark.ai is offering an end-to-end geospatial platform. Part of this platform is the geospatial analytics service called Orca, which detects objects, and extracts attributes about buildings, vegetation, and a growing number of other detection classes, such as roads or infrastructure in the future. This service is now available through Azure Synapse Analytics.

The containerized Orca service–fully integrated into Azure Synapse Analytics provides fast, global-scale, and accurate insights based on satellite or aerial imagery data sets that are available via Azure or provided by customers. Whenever fresh input data is available, the Orca service can provide precise insights for object and change detection, enabling applications such as efficient 3D mapping services, logistic planning, risk analysis, telecom signal propagation planning, or disaster relief planning. More detailed information about the Orca service is available on the Orca support page.

Learn more

Through our announcements today we are continuing our mission to reduce the barriers to entry to space. We are working closely with our partners to empower and enable developers that are building space workloads to easily leverage the best of Azure services and capabilities to transform their approach to development for space. We’re also working closely with an expanding partner ecosystem to help drive innovation on and off the planet.

Through the combination of cloud and on-orbit space capabilities, new applications are being created and iterated upon even faster which in turn provides original approaches to challenging problems. We look forward to meeting our industry peers to continue this discussion at this week’s Space Symposium.

Learn more about Azure Space today.
Quelle: Azure