Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Azure.Source – Volume 72

Now in preview

Announcing Azure Spatial Anchors for collaborative, cross-platform mixed reality apps

Azure Spatial Anchors, a mixed reality service that enables you to build a new generation of mixed reality applications that are collaborative, cross-platform, and spatially aware, is now in public preview. Across industries, developers and businesses are using mixed reality in their daily workflows and giving us feedback on what they’d like to see next. When we look across all the mixed reality solutions that customers have built, two things stand out: they want to easily share their mixed reality experiences and place applications in the context of the real world. Learn about two application patterns gaining momentum across industries, and how Azure Spatial Anchors can help you deliver them with greater ease and speed.

Introducing Microsoft Azure Sentinel, intelligent security analytics for your entire enterprise

Microsoft Azure Sentinel is available in preview in the Azure portal. Security can be a never-ending saga—a chronicle of increasingly sophisticated attacks, volumes of alerts, and long resolution timeframes where today’s Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) products can’t keep pace. We’ve reimagined a new cloud-native SIEM tool called Microsoft Azure Sentinel to provide intelligent security analytics at cloud scale while making it easy to collect security data across your entire hybrid organization; from devices, to users, to apps, to servers on any cloud.

Announcing Azure Monitor AIOps Alerts with Dynamic Thresholds

Metric Alerts with Dynamic Thresholds is now available in public preview. Dynamic Thresholds significantly enhance Azure Monitor Metric Alerts so you no longer need to manually identify and set thresholds. The alert rule now leverages advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities to learn metrics' historical behavior while identifying patterns and anomalies that indicate possible service issues. Metric Alerts with Dynamic Threshold is currently available for free during the public preview.

Working with AZCopy 10 and Azure Storage Blob Access Tiers

AzCopy v10 is now available in public preview. Azure Blob Storage offers three different access tiers for saving money depending on storage requirements. Get high-performance, reliable data transfers that work with mixed access tiers inside an Azure storage account using the latest AzCopy, a console tool to help with uploading blobs to Azure Storage.

Announcing Azure Integration Service Environment for Logic Apps

Integrated Service Environment is now available in every region for which Logic Apps is currently available. In critical business scenarios, you need to have the confidence that your data is flowing between all the moving parts. The core Logic Apps offering is a multi-faceted service for integrating between data sources and services, but sometimes you also need to have a dedicated service to ensure that your integration processes are as performant as can be. That’s why we developed the Integration Service Environment (ISE), a fully isolated and dedicated environment for all enterprise-scale integration needs. Integration Service Environments are available in every region that Logic Apps is currently available in except for West Central US, Brazil South and Canada East.

Also available in preview

Public preview: Azure Log Analytics is available in new regions in Australia
Azure Container Registry firewall rules and Virtual Network (in preview)
Azure App Service – WildFly on Linux is in preview
Code-free data transformation at scale using Azure Data Factory
Data Migration Assistant support for Cassandra to Azure Cosmos DB assessment
Azure Maps events in Azure Event Grid
Azure SQL DB as reference data input
Machine learning-based anomaly detection functions in Azure Stream Analytics (preview)
Azure DevOps CLI preview and feature updates in Pipelines – Sprint 148 Update

Now generally available

 

Announcing the general availability of Java support in Azure Functions

Announcing the general availability of Java support in Azure Functions 2.0; enabling a wide range of options for you to build and run your Java apps in the 50+ regions offered by Azure around the world. Azure Functions provides a productive programming model based on triggers and bindings for accelerated development and serverless hosting of event-driven applications. It enables developers to build apps using the platform (Windows, Mac, or Linux), programming languages, and tools of their choice; with an end-to-end developer experience that spans from building and debugging locally, to deploying and monitoring in the cloud.

Announcing the general availability of Azure Lab Services

Announcing the general availability of Azure Lab Services – computer labs in the cloud. Provisioning and managing a lab’s underlying infrastructure makes preparing the right lab experience for your users difficult. With Azure Lab Services, you can easily set up and provide on-demand access to preconfigured virtual machines (VMs) to teach a class, train professionals, run hackathons or hands-on labs, and more. Azure Lab Services GA pricing goes into effect on May 1, 2019. Learn more about using Azure Lab Services in this post from the Premier Developer blog: Azure Lab services scheduling now Available.

Running Cognitive Services on Azure IoT Edge

Announcing support for running Azure Cognitive Services containers for Text Analytics and Language Understanding containers on edge devices with Azure IoT Edge so you can run workloads locally. Whether you don’t have a reliable internet connection, or want to save on bandwidth cost, have super low latency requirements, or are dealing with sensitive data that needs to be analyzed on-site, Azure IoT Edge with the Cognitive Services containers gives you consistency with the cloud. These container images are directly available to try as IoT Edge modules on the Azure Marketplace.

Also generally available

Azure Database for MySQL: Read replica now generally available
Virtual network service endpoints for Azure Database for MariaDB are now generally available
New features are now generally available in Event Grid

General availability: Azure Availability Zones in East US
General availability: Global VNet Peering in Azure Government regions

Events

MWC 2019: Azure IoT customers, partners accelerate innovation from cloud to edge

The Internet of Things (IoT) has expanded the world of computing far beyond mobile and PC, bringing a new and ever-growing class of cloud-connected devices that is on track to reach 20 billion devices by 2020. Announcing new IoT partnerships for global-scale IoT solutions with new devices and cloud services that further increase the strategic value of IoT.

Learn more in this post by Julia White, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure on the Official Microsoft Blog: Microsoft at MWC Barcelona: Introducing Microsoft HoloLens 2.

News and updates

Instantly restore your Azure Virtual Machines using Azure Backup

Azure Backup Instant Restore capability for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) is now available. If you use Azure Backup, Instant Restore helps you quickly recover VMs from the snapshots stored together with the disks. In addition, you get complete flexibility in configuring the retention range of snapshots at the backup policy level depending on the requirements and criticality of the virtual machines associated; giving users more granular control over their resources. We are enabling and rolling out this experience on a region-by-region basis.

Cognitive Services Speech SDK 1.3 – February update

Developers can now access the latest Cognitive Services Speech SDK which now supports: selection of the input microphone through the AudioConfig class, expanded support for Debian 9, Unity in C# (beta) on Windows x86 and x64 (desktop or Universal Windows Platform applications), and Android (ARM32/64, x86), and more. Read about all the updates made to the Cognitive Services Speech SDK made in February.

Improving the TypeScript support in Azure Functions

TypeScript is becoming increasingly popular in the JavaScript community. Announcing a set of tooling improvements for TypeScript support in Azure Functions so you can more easily develop with TypeScript when building your event-driven applications. With this set of changes to the Azure Functions Core Tools and the Azure Functions Extension for Visual Studio Code, Azure Functions now supports TypeScript out of the box. Included with these changes are a set of templates for TypeScript, type definitions, and npm scripts.

New device modeling experience in Azure IoT Central

Optimize your device workflow for easier management and clarity. Introducing a new “Device Templates” navigation tab that replaces the existing “Application Builder” tab, as well as updated patterns for viewing or editing device templates. We've begun a flighted rollout of a new the device modeling.

Azure Data Factory updates

Monitor Azure Data Factory pipelines by using Azure Monitor and Log Analytics

Azure Data Factory visual tools integrated with GitHub
Self-hosted IR sharing across multiple data factories
Parameterize connections to your data stores in Azure Data Factory
Linked Resource Manager template support available for CI/CD in your data factories
Azure Functions now supported as a step in Azure Data Factory pipelines
Create alerts to proactively monitor your data factory pipelines
Enhanced monitoring capabilities and tags/annotations in Azure Data Factory
Support for Enterprise Security Package–enabled HDInsight clusters in Azure Data Factory

Additional news and updates

FastTrack for Azure
Global VNet Peering now supports Standard Load Balancer
Database rename is now supported in Azure SQL Database Managed Instance
Remove Application Insights connections via PowerShell
Instantly provision GraphQL on Azure with Hasura and Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL: New compute options are now available
Azure Policy non-compliance reasoning and change history features
Azure Blockchain: Updated Hyperledger Fabric template 1.3 now available
M-series virtual machines (VMs) are now available in the Korea South region
Azure Event Grid Availability in Azure US Gov regions

Technical content

Five tips for securing your IaaS workloads

Implementing IaaS security best practices is an essential step to securing your IaaS resources. Get specific recommendations for improving your IaaS security posture, focus on data protection, strengthen network security, and streamline security management including threat protection. Read the Azure Government Security documentation to understand features and variations for Azure Government.

Azure Stack laaS – part two

Every organization has a unique journey to the cloud, based on the organization’s history, business specifics, culture, and maybe most importantly, their starting point. Typically in your migration journey, you use a mixture of tools, so you need to understand the options available in order to select the right tool for the specific workloads. The Azure migration center provides a good model and helpful resources to get you started on your migration to the cloud and to make sure you can create the proper frame for your migration.

AZX.ms – A Collection of Azure CLI Recipes

Simplify your Azure development with a collection of Azure CLI scripts accessible right at your fingertips.

 

Latest enhancements now available for Cognitive Services' Computer Vision

With the latest enhancements to Cognitive Services’ Computer Vision service, you can extract insights, unlock new workflows, and easily customize and deploy your model without requiring machine-learning expertise.

Creating IoT applications with Azure Database for PostgreSQL

There are numerous IoT use cases in different industries with common categories like predictive maintenance, connected vehicles, anomaly detection, asset monitoring, and many others. Azure IoT is a complete stack of IoT solutions; a collection of Microsoft managed cloud services that connect, monitor, and control billions of IoT assets. See how to implement an end-to-end Azure IoT solution and use Azure Database for PostgreSQL to store IoT event data in the JSONB format.

3 Reasons To Add Deep Learning to Your Time-Series Toolkit

In this article, Francesca shares 3-5 lessons learned while building neural networks for time series (leading up to 2-day trainings at AI Conference NYC and Strata Data Conference in San Francisco). With clear explanations, standard Python libraries, readers discovers tips and tricks to develop deep learning models for their own time series forecasting projects.

Understanding routing in istio

This is the first in a series of blog posts that will go into depth on how to use popular OSS on top of Azure Kubernetes service.  In this post, Scott Coulton runs through how to install istio with Helm and how to deploy two versions of the same application and route traffic on weight (percentage). The post also contains all of the source code and a demo application so you can go and test the topic out for yourself.

How to Lock Azure Resources to Prevent Modification or Deletion

This article demonstrates how to configure Azure Resource Locking using Azure Role Based Access Control (RBAC) enables us to restrict access to resources and resource actions, which helps prevent inadvertent resource deletion and modification.

Running Micro Focus Enterprise Server 4.0 in a Docker Container in Azure

Running a Docker container in Micro Focus Enterprise Server 4.0 is new and provides portability, performance, agility, and isolation. See how to effectively run and manage a mainframe CICS application in a Docker Container using the Windows 2016 Datacenter and the Containers VM now available from the Azure Marketplace.

Exploring Feature Weights using R and Azure Machine Learning Studio

Suppose we have to design a black box that displays a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” depending on hundreds of different combinations of inputs. This post describes how to conduct exploratory data analysis using R and Azure Machine Learning Studio to train a “black-box” model in a case when it is difficult to explain how the model characterizes the relationship between the features and the target variable.

Intro to Microsoft Azure Resource Manager Templates

Cloud Advocate, Jay Gordon gives you an introduction to Azure Resource Manager Templates and how to begin using them with Azure Cloud Shell. You'll see the number of options available to quickly create Azure resources.

Additional technical content

Introduction to DevOps for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement using YAML Based Azure Pipelines
How to Lock Azure Resources to Prevent Modification or Deletion
Xamarin and Azure Office Hours Recap from December 2018 and January 2019
Azure Development Community – Same Great Blog… NEW HOME!
Lesson Learned #73: Azure Database for MySQL – CONVERT_TZ returns null

Azure shows

Episode 268 – ExpressRoute Roadmap | The Azure Podcast

Paresh Mundade, a Senior PM in the Azure ExpressRoute team, gives the guys an update on the service and a glimpse into the roadmap of planned features.

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Azure Cosmos DB update: SDKs, CORS, multi-region strong consistency, and more | Azure Friday

Learn about the new SDKs for Azure Cosmos DB with the JavaScript SDK used as an example as well as learn about CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) via a simple JavaScript app for demonstration. See a new, low-cost database offer in the Azure portal, watch an Azure DevOps build task setup, get some cost saving tips, and learn about support for multi-region strong consistency.

An intro to Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK 3.0 | Azure Friday

Learn about the new improvements for Azure Cosmos DB SDKs, including the new, idiomatic .NET SDK with a friendlier, more intuitive programming model, better testability, better performance, .NET Standard 2.0 support. Plus, it is now open sourced.

Azure Maps – The Microsoft Azure Enterprise Location Platform | Internet of Things Show

Azure Maps is the de facto location intelligence platform natively hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Chris Pendleton, PM Lead for the service, gives us an overview of what Azure Maps is, who uses Azure Maps, how Azure Maps is being used across our customer base, and how you can start using Azure Maps today.

How to get started with Azure Front Door | Azure Tips and Tricks

learn how to get started with Azure Front Door. Azure Front Door easily makes your applications globally available and secure.

How to create, share, and use Azure Portal dashboards | Azure Portal Series

In this video of the Azure Portal "How To" series, learn how to easily create, share, and use dashboards in the Azure Portal. Learn more about the series: Introducing the Azure portal “how to” video series

What is Identity Protection? | Azure Active Directory

In this video, get a high-level overview of Identity Protection, a feature of Azure Active Directory. You’ll learn about different types of detections, risks and risk policies that exist in Identity Protection. It explains the benefits of the risk policies, recent UX enhancements, powerful APIs, improved risk assessment and overall alignment along risky users and risky sign-ins. In addition, this series also videos on How to deploy Identity Protection & How to use Identity Protection.

Martin Woodward on Azure DevOps With GitHub – Episode 25 | Azure DevOps Podcast

In this episode, Martin Woodward and Jeffrey Palermo dive right into the topic of Azure DevOps with GitHub; discussing some of the changes since Microsoft acquired GitHub, whether you should choose to work with Azure Repos or GitHub, and how to use Azure DevOps Services with GitHub.

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Customers, partners, and industries

Microsoft and SAP extend partnership to Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming mainstream as companies see market-making benefits from IoT and deploying at scale – from transforming operations and logistics, remote monitoring, and predictive maintenance at the edge, to new consumer experiences powered by connected devices. In all of these solutions, IoT data and AI are producing powerful insights that lead to new opportunities. Microsoft and SAP have announced an expansion of their partnership to include physical devices and assets with a new collaboration in the IoT space. SAP Leonardo IoT will integrate with Azure IoT services, providing customers with the ability to contextualize and enrich their IoT data with SAP business data and to seamlessly extend their SAP solution-based business processes to the Azure IoT Edge platform.

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 32

The Azure Marketplace is the premier destination for all your software needs – certified and optimized to run on Azure. Find, try, purchase, and provision applications & services from hundreds of leading software providers. You can also connect with Gold and Silver Microsoft Cloud Competency partners to help your adoption of Azure. In the second half of January we published 70 new offers.

Azure This Week – 1 March 2019 | A Cloud Guru – Azure This Week

This time on Azure This Week, Lars talks with JT from Microsoft about the brand new HoloLens 2 and how it will be cloud connected, Azure DevOps Projects Kubernetes support gets new features, and you can now protect Azure VMs by using Storage Spaces Direct with Azure Site Recovery.

Quelle: Azure

New device modeling experience in Azure IoT Central

On the Azure IoT Central team, we are constantly talking with our customers to understand how we can continue to provide more value. One of our top pieces of product feedback has been for a clearer device modeling experience that separates the device instance from the device template. Previously, viewing the device and editing the device template took place on the same page through an “Edit Template” button. This caused a lack of clarity between when you were making a change that applied to the device or if your changes were getting applied to all devices in that template. Recently we've begun a flighted rollout of a new device modeling experience that begins to directly address this feedback.

For app builder roles, we have introduced a new “Device Templates” navigation tab that replaces the existing “Application Builder” tab, as well as updated the pattern in which you view or edit your device templates. To edit your device templates, you can visit the “Device Templates” tab to make changes. To view or interact with your device instance, you can still find this under the “Explorer” tab. We’re excited to get the first set of changes in your hands so that device templates and device explorer can continue to evolve independently from one another in order to best support how our users interact with their devices. These changes will both optimize the operator experience of viewing or interacting with devices, as well as streamline the builder workflow of creating or modifying a template.

These changes are an important first step towards continuing to optimize your device workflow for easier management and clarity. Please leave us feedback at Azure IoT Central UserVoice, as we continue to invest in understanding and solving our customer needs.

To learn more, please visit our documentation, “Set up a device template.”
Quelle: Azure

Creating IoT applications with Azure Database for PostgreSQL

There are numerous IoT use cases in different industries, with common categories like predictive maintenance, connected vehicles, anomaly detection, asset monitoring, and many others. For example, in water treatment facilities in the state of California, IoT devices can be installed in water pumps to measure horse power, flow rate, and electric usage of the water pumps. The events emitted from these devices get sent to an IoT hub every 30 seconds for aggregation and processing. A water treatment facility company could build a dashboard to monitor the water pumps and build notifications to alert the maintenance team when the event data is beyond a certain threshold. They could then alert the maintenance team to repair the water pump if the flow rate is dangerously low. This is a very typical proactive maintenance IoT use case.

Azure IoT is a complete stack of IoT solutions. It’s a collection of Microsoft managed cloud services that connect, monitor, and control billions of IoT assets. The common set of components in the Azure IoT core subsystem include:

IoT devices that stream the events
Cloud gateway, where Azure IoT is most often used to enable communication to and from devices and edge devices
Stream processing that ingests events from the device and triggers actions based on the output of the analysis. A common workflow is the input telemetry encoded in Avro that may return output telemetry encoded in JSON for storage
Storage, that’s usually a database used to store IoT event data for reporting and visualization purposes

Let’s take a look at how we implement an end to end Azure IoT solution and use Azure Database for PostgreSQL to store IoT event data in the JSONB format. Using PostgreSQL as the NoSQL data store has its own advantages with its strong native JSON processing, indexing capabilities, and plv8 extension that further enhances it by integrating the JavaScript v8 engine with SQL. Besides the managed services capabilities and lower cost, one of the key advantages of using Azure Database for PostgreSQL is its native integration with the Azure ecosystem that enables modern applications with improved developer productivity.

In this implementation, we use Azure Database for PostgreSQL with the plv8 extension as a persistent layer for IoT telemetry stream for storage, analytics, and reporting. The high-speed streaming data is first loaded into the PostgreSQL database (master server) as a persistent layer. The master server is used for high speed data ingestion and the read replicas are leveraged for reporting and downstream data processing to take data-driven actions. You can leverage the Azure IoT Hub as the event processing hub and Azure Function to trigger the processing steps and extract what’s needed from emitted events to store them in Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

 

In this post, we’ll walk through the high-level implementation to get you started. Our GitHub repository has sample applications and a detailed QuickStart tutorial with step-by-step instructions for implementing the solution below. The QuickStart uses Node.js applications to send telemetry to the IoT Hub.

Step 1: Create an Azure IoT Hub and register a device with the Hub

In this implementation, the IoT sensor simulators are constantly emitting temperature and humidity data back to the cloud. The first step would be creating an Azure IoT Hub in the Azure portal using these instructions. Next, you’ll want to register the device name in the IoT Hub so that the IoT Hub can receive and process the telemetry from the registered devices.

In GitHub, you will see sample scripts to register the device using CLI and export the IoT Hub service connection string.

Step 2: Create an Azure Database for PostgreSQL server and a database IoT demo to store the telemetry data stream

Provision an Azure Database for PostgreSQL with the appropriate size. You can use the Azure portal or the Azure CLI to provision the Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

In the database, you will enable the plv8 extension and create a sample plv8 function that’s useful for querying to extract a temperature column from the JSON documents. You can use the JSON table to store the IoT telemetry data. You can locate the script to create a database and table and enable the plv8 extension in GitHub.

Step 3: Create an Azure Function Event Hub and extract message and store in PostgreSQL

Next you will create a JavaScript Azure Function with Event Hub trigger bindings to Azure IoT Hub created in step 1. Use the JavaScript index.js sample to create this function. The function is triggered for each incoming message stream in the IoT Hub. It extracts the JSON message stream and inserts the data into the PostgreSQL database created in Step 2.

Getting started by running the IoT solution end to end

We recommend that you try and implement this solution using the sample application in our GitHub repository. In GitHub, you will find steps on running the node.js application to simulate the generation of event data, creating an IoT Hub with device registration, sending the event data to the IoT Hub, deploying Azure function to extract the data from JSON message, and inserting it in Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

At the end of implementing all the steps in GitHub, you will be able to query and analyze the data using reporting tools like Power BI that allow you to build real-time dashboards as shown below.

We hope that you enjoy working with the latest features and functionality available in our Azure Database Service for PostgreSQL. Be sure to share your feedback via User Voice for PostgreSQL.

If you need any help or have questions, please check out the Azure Database for PostgreSQL documentation.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Qingqing Yuan, Bassu Hiremath, Parikshit Savjani, Anitah Cantele, and Rachel Agyemang for their contributions to this post.
Quelle: Azure

Cognitive Services Speech SDK 1.3 – February update

Developers can now access the latest Cognitive Services Speech SDK which now supports:

Selection of the input microphone through the AudioConfig class
Expanded support for Debian 9
Unity in C# (beta)
Additional sample code

Read the updated Speech Services documentation to get started today.

What’s new

The Speech SDK supports a selection of the input microphone through the AudioConfig class, meaning you can stream audio data to the Speech Service from a non-default microphone. For more details see the documentation and the how-to guide on selecting an audio input device with the Speech SDK. This is not yet available from JavaScript.

The Speech SDK now also supports Unity in a beta version. Since this is new functionality, please provide feedback through the issue section in the GitHub sample repository. This release supports Unity on Windows x86 and x64 (desktop or Universal Windows Platform applications), and Android (ARM32/64, x86). More information is available in our Unity quickstart.

Samples

The following new content is available in our sample repository.

Samples for AudioConfig.FromMicrophoneInput.
Python samples for intent recognition and translation.
Samples for using the Connection object in iOS.
Java samples for translation with audio output.
New sample for use of the Batch Transcription REST API.

Improvements and changes

A number of improvements and changes have been made since our last release including:

Python

Improved parameter verification and error messages in SpeechConfig
AddED support for the Connection object
Support for 32-bit Python (x86) on Windows
The Speech SDK for Python is out of beta

iOS

The SDK is now built against the iOS SDK version 12.1. and supports iOS versions 9.2 and later
Improved reference documentation and fixed several property names

JavaScript

Added support for the Connection object
Added type definition files for bundled JavaScript
Initial support and implementation for phrase hints
Returned properties collection with service JSON for recognition

Windows DLLs now contains a version resource.

Bug fixes

Empty proxy username and proxy password were not handled correctly before. With this release, if you set proxy username and proxy password to an empty string, they will not be submitted when connecting to the proxy.
Session ID's created by the SDK were not always truly random for some languages and environments. Random generator initialization has been added to fix this.
Improved handling of authorization token. If you want to use an authorization token, specify in the SpeechConfig and leave the subscription key empty. Then create the recognizer as usual.
In some cases, the Connection object wasn't released correctly. This has been fixed.

For more details and examples for how your business can benefit from the new functionality for Speech Services, check out release notes and samples in the GitHub sample repository for Speech Services.
Quelle: Azure

Introducing Microsoft Azure Sentinel, intelligent security analytics for your entire enterprise

Security can be a never-ending saga—a chronicle of increasingly sophisticated attacks, volumes of alerts, and long resolution timeframes where today’s Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) products can’t keep pace.

SecOps teams are inundated with a very high volume of alerts and spend far too much time in tasks like infrastructure set up and maintenance. As a result, many legitimate threats go unnoticed. An expected shortfall of 3.5M security professionals by 2021 will further increase the challenges for security operations teams. You need a solution that empowers your existing SecOps team to see the threats clearer and eliminate the distractions.

That’s why we reimagined the SIEM tool as a new cloud-native solution called Microsoft Azure Sentinel. Azure Sentinel provides intelligent security analytics at cloud scale for your entire enterprise. Azure Sentinel makes it easy to collect security data across your entire hybrid organization from devices, to users, to apps, to servers on any cloud.  It uses the power of artificial intelligence to ensure you are identifying real threats quickly and unleashes you from the burden of traditional SIEMs by eliminating the need to spend time on setting up, maintaining, and scaling infrastructure. Since it is built on Azure, it offers nearly limitless cloud scale and speed to address your security needs. Traditional SIEMs have also proven to be expensive to own and operate, often requiring you to commit upfront and incur high cost for infrastructure maintenance and data ingestion. With Azure Sentinel there are no upfront costs, you pay for what you use.

Many enterprises are using Office 365 and are increasingly adopting the advanced security and compliance offerings included in Microsoft 365. There are many cases when you want to combine security data from users and end point applications with information from your infrastructure environment and third-party data to understand a complete attack.

It would be ideal if you could do this all within the compliance boundaries of a single cloud provider. Today we are announcing that you can bring your Office 365 activity data to Azure Sentinel for free. It takes just a few clicks and you retain the data within the Microsoft cloud.

“With Microsoft Azure Sentinel, we can better address the main SIEM landscape challenges for our clients, along with simplifying data residency and GDPR concerns.”

Andrew Winkelmann, Global Security Consulting Practice Lead, Accenture

Let’s look at how Azure Sentinel will help you deliver cloud-native security operations:

Collect data across your enterprise easily – With Azure Sentinel you can aggregate all security data with built-in connectors, native integration of Microsoft signals, and support for industry standard log formats like common event format and syslog. In just a few clicks you can import your Microsoft Office 365 data for free and combine it with other security data for analysis. Azure Sentinel uses Azure Monitor which is built on a proven and scalable log analytics database that ingests more than 10 petabytes every day and provides a very fast query engine that can sort through millions of records in seconds.

We continue to collaborate with many partners in the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association. Azure Sentinel connects to popular solutions including Palo Alto Networks, F5, Symantec, Fortinet, and Check Point with many more to come. Azure Sentinel also integrates with Microsoft Graph Security API, enabling you to import your own threat intelligence feeds and customizing threat detection and alert rules. There are custom dashboards that give you a view optimized for your specific use-case.

Adam Geller, Senior Vice President, SaaS, virtualization, and cloud-delivered security of Palo Alto Networks said, “We’re pleased with our ongoing collaboration with Microsoft and the work we’re doing to deliver greater security orchestration for our joint customers. This latest integration allows customers to forward their physical and virtualized next generation firewall logs to Azure Sentinel and use custom dashboards and artificial intelligence to rapidly uncover potential security incidents. Palo Alto Networks customers can also extend AutoFocus and other third-party threat intelligence to Azure Sentinel via our new integration between MineMeld and the Microsoft Graph Security API.”

Analyze and detect threats quickly with AI on your side – Security analysts face a huge burden from triaging as they sift through a sea of alerts, and correlate alerts from different products manually or using a traditional correlation engine. That’s why Azure Sentinel uses state of the art, scalable machine learning algorithms to correlate millions of low fidelity anomalies to present a few high fidelity security incidents to the analyst. ML technologies will help you quickly get value from large amounts of security data you are ingesting and connect the dots for you. For example, you can quickly see a compromised account that was used to deploy ransomware in a cloud application. This helps reduce noise drastically, in fact we have seen an overall reduction of up to 90 percent in alert fatigue during evaluations. Early adopters are seeing the benefits of threat detections with AI. Reed M. Wiedower, CTO of New Signature said, “We see a huge value with Azure Sentinel because of its ability to generate insights across a vast array of different pieces of infrastructure.”

These built-in machine learning models are based on the learnings from the Microsoft security team over many years of defending our customer’s cloud assets. You do not need to be a data scientist to leverage use these benefits you just turn them on. Of course, if you are a data scientist and you want to customize and enrich the detections then you can bring your own models to Azure Sentinel using the built-in Azure Machine Learning service. Additionally, Azure Sentinel can connect to user activity and behavior data from Microsoft 365 security products which can be combined with other sources to provide visibility into an entire attack sequence.

Investigate and hunt for suspicious activities – Graphical and AI-based investigation will reduce the time it takes to understand the full scope of an attack and its impact. You can visualize the attack and take quick actions in the same dashboard.  

Proactive hunting of suspicious activities is another critical task for the security analysts. Often the process by which SecOps collect and analyze the data is a repeatable process which can be automated. Today, Azure Sentinel provides two capabilities that enable you to automate your analysis by building hunting queries and Azure Notebooks that are based on Jupyter notebooks. We have developed a set of queries and Azure Notebooks based on the proactive hunting that Microsoft’s Incident Response and Threat Analysts teams perform. As the threat landscape evolves, so will our queries and Azure Notebooks. We will provide new queries and Azure Notebooks via the Azure Sentinel GitHub community.

Automate common tasks and threat response – While AI sharpens your focus on finding problems, once you have solved the problem you don’t want to keep finding the same problems over and over – rather you want to automate response to these issues. Azure Sentinel provides built-in automation and orchestration with pre-defined or custom playbooks to solve repetitive tasks and to respond to threats quickly. Azure Sentinel will augment existing enterprise defense and investigation tools, including best-of-breed security products, homegrown tools, and other systems like HR management applications and workflow management systems like ServiceNow.

Microsoft’s unparalleled threat intelligence that is informed by analyzing 6.5+ trillions of signals daily and decades of security expertise at cloud scale will help you modernize your security operations.

“Azure Sentinel provides a proactive and responsive cloud-native SIEM that will help customers simplify their security operations and scale as they grow.”

Richard Diver, Cloud Security Architect, Insight Enterprises

Security doesn’t have to be an endless saga. Instead, put the cloud and large-scale intelligence to work. Make your threat protection smarter and faster with artificial intelligence. Import Microsoft Office 365 data for security analytics for free. Get started with Microsoft Azure Sentinel.

Microsoft Azure Sentinel is available in preview today in the Azure portal.
Quelle: Azure

Announcing the general availability of Azure Lab Services

Today, we are very excited to announce the general availability of Azure Lab Services – your computer labs in the cloud.

With Azure Lab Services, you can easily set up and provide on-demand access to preconfigured virtual machines (VMs) to teach a class, train professionals, run hackathons or hands-on labs, and more. Simply input what you need in a lab and let the service roll it out to your audience. Your users go to a single place to access all their VMs across multiple labs, and connect from there to learn, explore, and innovate.

Since our preview announcement, we have had many customers use the service to conduct classes, training sessions, boot camps, hands on labs, and more! For classroom or professional training, you can provide students with a lab of virtual machines configured with exactly what you need for class and give each student a specified number of hours to use the VMs for homework or personal projects. You can run a hackathon or a hands-on lab at conferences or events and scale up to hundreds of virtual machines for your attendees. You can also create an invite-only private lab of virtual machines installed with your prerelease software to give preview customers access to early trials or set up interactive sales demos.

Top three reasons customers use Azure Lab Services

Automatic management of Azure infrastructure and scale

Azure Lab Services is a managed service, which means that provisioning and management of a lab’s underlying infrastructure is handled automatically by the service. You can just focus on preparing the right lab experience for your users. Let the service handle the rest and roll out your lab’s virtual machines to your audience. Scale your lab to hundreds of virtual machines with a single click.

Simple experience for your lab users

Users who are invited to your lab get immediate access to the resources you give them inside your labs. They just need to sign in to see the full list of virtual machines they have access to across multiple labs. They can click on a single button to connect to the virtual machines and start working. Users don’t need Azure subscriptions to use the service.

Cost optimization and tracking 

Keep your budget in check by controlling exactly how many hours your lab users can use the virtual machines. Set up schedules in the lab to allow users to use the virtual machines only during designated time slots or set up reoccurring auto-shutdown and start times. Keep track of individual users’ usage and set limits.

Get started now

Try Azure Lab Services today! Get started by creating a lab account for your organization or team. All labs are managed under a lab account. You can give permissions to people in your organization to create labs in your lab account.

To learn more, visit the Azure Lab Services documentation. Ask any questions you have on Stack Overflow. Last of all, don’t forget to subscribe to our Service Updates and view other Azure Lab Services posts on the Azure blog to get the latest news.

General availability pricing

Azure Lab Services GA pricing goes into effect on May 1, 2019. Until then, you will continue to be billed based on the preview pricing. Please see the Azure Lab Services pricing page for complete details.

What’s next

We continue to listen to our customers to prioritize and ship new features and updates. Several key features will be enabled in the coming months:

Ability to reuse and share custom virtual machine images across labs
Feature to enable connections between a lab and on-premise resources
Ability to create GPU virtual machines inside the labs

We always welcome any feedback and suggestions. You can make suggestions or vote on priorities on our UserVoice feedback forum.
Quelle: Azure

Latest enhancements now available for Cognitive Services' Computer Vision

This blog was co-authored by Lei Zhang, Principal Research Manager, Computer Vision

You can now extract more insights and unlock new workflows from your images with the latest enhancements to Cognitive Services’ Computer Vision service.

1. Enrich insights with expanded tagging vocabulary

Computer Vision has more than doubled the types of objects, situations, and actions it can recognize per image.

Before

Now

2. Automate cropping with new object detection feature

Easily automate cropping and conduct basic counting of what you need from an image with the new object detection feature. Detect thousands of real life or man-made objects in images. Each object is now highlighted by a bounding box denoting its location in the image.

3. Monitor brand presence with new brand detection feature

You can now track logo placement of thousands of global brands from the consumer electronics, retail, manufacturing, entertainment industries.

With these enhancements, you can:

Do at-scale image and video-frame indexing, making your media content searchable. If you’re in media, entertainment, advertising, or stock photography, rich image and video metadata can unlock productivity for your business.
Derive insights from social media and advertising campaigns by understanding the content of images and videos and detecting logos of interest at scale. Businesses like digital agencies have found this capability useful for tracking the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. For example, if your business launches an influencer campaign, you can apply Custom Vision to automatically generate brand inclusion metrics pulling from influencer-generated images and videos.

In some cases, you may need to further customize the image recognition capabilities beyond what the enhanced Computer Vision service now provides by adding specific tagging vocabulary or object types that are relevant to your use case. Custom Vision service allows you to easily customize and deploy your model without requiring machine-learning expertise.

See it in action through the Computer Vision demo. If you’re ready to start building to unlock these insights, visit our documentation pages for image tagging, object detection, and brand detection.
Quelle: Azure

Running Cognitive Services on Azure IoT Edge

This blog post is co-authored by Emmanuel Bertrand, Senior Program Manager, Azure IoT.

We recently announced Azure Cognitive Services in containers for Computer Vision, Face, Text Analytics, and Language Understanding. You can read more about Azure Cognitive Services containers in this blog, “Brining AI to the edge.”

Today, we are happy to announce the support for running Azure Cognitive Services containers for Text Analytics and Language Understanding containers on edge devices with Azure IoT Edge. This means that all your workloads can be run locally where your data is being generated while keeping the simplicity of the cloud to manage them remotely, securely and at scale.

Whether you don’t have a reliable internet connection, or want to save on bandwidth cost, have super low latency requirements, or are dealing with sensitive data that needs to be analyzed on-site, Azure IoT Edge with the Cognitive Services containers gives you consistency with the cloud. This allows you to run your analysis on-site and a single pane of glass to operate all your sites.

These container images are directly available to try as IoT Edge modules on the Azure Marketplace:

Key Phrase Extraction extracts key talking points and highlights in text either from English, German, Spanish, or Japanese.
Language Detection detects the natural language of text with a total of 120 languages supported.
Sentiment Analysis detects the level of positive or negative sentiment for input text using a confidence score across a variety of languages.
Language Understanding applies custom machine learning intelligence to a user’s conversational and natural language text to predict overall meaning and pull out relevant and detailed information.

Please note, the Face and Recognize Text containers are still gated behind a preview, thus are not yet available via the marketplace. However you can deploy them manually by first signing up to for the preview to get access.

In this blog, we describe how to provision Language Detection container on your edge device locally and how you manage it through Azure IoT.

Set up an IoT Edge device and its IoT Hub

Follow the first steps in this quick-start for setting up your IoT Edge device and your IoT Hub.

It first walks your through creating an IoT Hub and then registering an IoT Edge device to your IoT hub. Here is a screenshot of a newly created edge device called “LanguageDetection" under the IoT Hub called “CSContainers". Select the device, copy its primary connection string, and save it for later.

Next, it guides you through setting up the IoT Edge device. If you don’t have a physical edge device, it is recommended to deploy the Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS and Azure IoT Edge runtime virtual machine (VM) which is available on the Azure Marketplace. It is an Azure Virtual Machine that comes with IoT Edge pre-installed.

The last step is to connect your IoT Edge device to your IoT Hub by giving it its connection string created above. To do that, edit the device configuration file under /etc/iotedge/config.yaml file and update the connection string. After the connection string is update, restart the edge device with sudo systemctl restart iotedge.

Provisioning a Cognitive Service (Language Detection IoT Edge module)

The images are directly available as IoT edge modules from the Iot Hub marketplace.

Here we’re using the Language Detection image as an example, however other images work the same way. To download the image, search for the image and select Get it now, this will take you to the Azure portal “Target Devices for IoT Edge Module” page. Select your subscription with your IoT Hub, select Find Device and your IoT Edge device, then click the Select and Create buttons.

Configuring your Cognitive Service

Now you’re almost ready to deploy the Cognitive Service to your IoT Edge device. But in order to run a container you need to get a valid API key and billing endpoints, then pass them as environment variables in the module details.

Go to the Azure portal and open the Cognitive Services blade. If you don’t have a Cognitive Service that matches the container, in this case a Text Analytics service, then select add and create one. Once you have a Cognitive Service get the endpoint and API key, you’ll need this to fire up the container:

The endpoint is strictly used for billing only, no customer data ever flows that way. Copy your billing endpoint value to the “billing” environment variable and copy your API key value to the “apikey” environment variable.

Deploy the container

All required info is now filled in and you only need to complete the IoT Edge deployment. Select Next and then Submit. Verify that the deployment is happening properly by refreshing the IoT Edge device details section.

Verify that the deployment is happening properly by refreshing the IoT Edge device details section.

Trying it out

To try things out, we’ll make an HTTP call to the IoT Edge device that has the Cognitive Service container running.

For that, we’ll first need to make sure that the port 5000 of the edge device is open. If you’re using the pre-built Ubuntu with IoT Edge Azure VM as an edge device, first go to VM details, then Settings, Networking, and Outbound port rule to add an outbound security rule to open port 5000. Also copy the Public IP address of your device.

Now you should be able to query the Cognitive Service running on your IoT Edge device from any machine with a browser. Open your favorite browser and go to http://your-iot-edge-device-ip-address:5000.

Now, select Service API Description or jump directly to http://your-iot-edge-device-ip-address:5000/swagger. This will give you a detailed description of the API.

Select Try it out and then Execute, you can change the input value as you like.

The result will show up further down on the page and should look something like the following image:

Next steps

You are now up and running! You are running the Cognitive Services on your own IoT Edge device, remotely managed via your central IoT Hub. You can use this setup to manage millions of devices in a secure way.

You can play around with the various Cognitive Services already available in the Azure Marketplace and try out various scenarios. Have fun!
Quelle: Azure

Instantly restore your Azure Virtual Machines using Azure Backup

Today, we are delighted to share the release of Azure Backup Instant Restore capability for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). Instant Restore helps Azure Backup customers quickly recover VMs from the snapshots stored along with the disks. In addition, users get complete flexibility in configuring the retention range of snapshots at the backup policy level depending on the requirements and criticality of the virtual machines associated, giving users more granular control over their resources.

Key benefits

Instant recovery point: Snapshots taken as a part of the backup job are stored along with the disk and are available for recovery instantly. This eliminates the wait time for snapshots to copy to the vault before a restore can be triggered.
In-place restore capability: With instant restore, users also get a capability to perform in-place restore, thus, overwriting the data in the original disk rather than creating a copy of the disk at an alternate location. It is particularly useful in scenarios where there is a need to rollback a patch. Once the snapshot phase is done, users can go ahead and use the local snapshot to restore if the patch goes bad.
Flexibility to choose retention range for snapshots at backup policy level: Depending on the operational recovery requirements of VMs, the user has the flexibility to configure snapshot retention range at a VM backup policy level. The snapshot retention range will apply to all VMs associated with the policy and can be between one to five days, two days being the default value.

In addition, users get Azure Backup support for Standard SSD disks and disks up to 4TB size.

How to change the snapshot retention period?

We are enabling this experience starting today and rolling it out region by region. You can check the availability in your region today.

Portal:

Users can change the snapshot retention to any value between one and five days from the default value of two days.

Next steps

Learn more about Instant restore capability.
Learn more about Azure Backup.
Want more details? Check out Azure Backup documentation.
Need help? Reach out to Azure Backup forum for support
Tell us how we can improve Azure Backup by contributing new ideas and voting up existing ones.
Follow us on Twitter @AzureBackup for the latest news and updates

Quelle: Azure