Microsoft Azure obtains Korea-Information Security Management System (K-ISMS) certification

Microsoft helps organizations all over the world comply with national, regional, and industry-specific regulatory requirements. These requirements are aimed at securing and protecting the data of individuals, establishments, and critical technology infrastructures. Azure meets the broadest set of international and industry-specific compliance standards, and we’ve added another country-specific compliance offering to our extensive portfolio with the K-ISMS.

The K-ISMS certification was introduced by the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA) and is designed to ensure the security and privacy of data in the region through a stringent set of control requirements. Achieving this certification means Azure customers in South Korea can more easily demonstrate adherence to local legal requirements for protection of key digital information assets and meet KISA compliance standards more easily.

KISA established the K-ISMS to safeguard the information technology infrastructure within Korea. This helps organizations implement and operate information security management systems that facilitate effective risk management and enable them to apply best practice security measures.

This framework is built on successful information security strategies and policies, as well as security counter measures and threat response procedures to minimize the impact of any security breaches. These requirements have a significant overlap with ISO27001/2 control objectives but are not identical.

The K-ISMS certification is overseen by the Korean Ministry of Science and Information Technology (MSIT) and is authorized and governed by Article 47 of the country’s Network Act. To obtain it, a company must undergo an assessment by an auditor that covers both management processes and data security procedures which includes one hundred and four criteria that are evaluated. Some of these include examination of the organization’s security management responsibilities, security policies, security training, incident response, risk management, and more. A special committee examines the results of the audit and grants the certification.

Microsoft is the industry leader in proactively pursuing international, national, and industry certifications and attestations. As a result the Azure is uniquely positioned to help you meet your compliance obligations, regardless of the industry or geographic location in which your organization does business.

Learn more about Microsoft’s compliance offerings by visiting the Microsoft Trust Center.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 29

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. From December 1 to December 15, 2018, 60 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below:

Virtual machines

ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM): Using thousands of device and application connectors, ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager by Micro Focus collects, correlates, and reports on security event data, providing a central point for analysis of business operations.

Aviatrix Secure Networking Platform Bundle – PAYG: Quickly build use case-driven solutions for multi-cloud encrypted peering, inter-region encrypted peering, next-generation global transit networks, and more.

Aviatrix Secure Networking Platform SSLVPN – PAYG: Quickly build use case-driven solutions for SSL VPNs with multi-factor authentication and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) for user access to the cloud.

FatPipe SD-WAN for Azure: FatPipe for Azure allows you to connect your Azure virtual private cloud to your FatPipe SD-WAN overlay and run any of your licensed FatPipe features inside Azure.

GigaSECURE Cloud 5.5,00: GigaSECURE Cloud delivers intelligent network traffic visibility for workloads running in Azure and enables increased security, operational efficiency, and scale across virtual networks.

GigaSECURE Cloud 5.5.00 – Hourly (100 pack): GigaSECURE Cloud delivers intelligent network traffic visibility for workloads running in Azure and enables increased security, operational efficiency, and scale across virtual networks.

IBM Business Process Manager Express Edition 8.5: IBM Business Process Manager is ideal for development, test, and production infrastructure, and installs in just a few minutes. You also gain access to a dedicated support team from MidVision to help you get up and running.

IBM Business Process Manager Express Edition 8.6: IBM Business Process Manager is ideal for development, test, and production infrastructure, and installs in just a few minutes. You also gain access to a dedicated support team from MidVision to help you get up and running.

IBM Business Process Manager Standard Edition 8.5: IBM Business Process Manager is ideal for development, test, and production infrastructure, and installs in just a few minutes. You also gain access to a dedicated support team from MidVision to help you get up and running.

IBM Business Process Manager Standard Edition 8.6: IBM Business Process Manager is ideal for development, test, and production infrastructure, and installs in just a few minutes. You also gain access to a dedicated support team from MidVision to help you get up and running.

IBM Security Access Manager: IBM Security Access Manager enforces risk-based access policies that provide minimal friction during authentication when the user is known and stronger, multi-factor authentication if the risk is elevated.

Resource Central – Meeting Room Booking System: This meeting scheduling software for Outlook and Office 365 lets you search for suitable meeting rooms. Find the right rooms based on categories such as video conferencing or room capacity.

Web applications

Ansible: This solution template will install a Red Hat Ansible instance on a Linux virtual machine, along with tools configured to work with Azure.

Glasswall FileTrust™ for Email: Glasswall FileTrust for Email offers deep-file inspection, remediation, and sanitization technology (d-FIRST™), which reverses legacy methodologies of blocking "known bad" items by ensuring all files follow a standard of "known good."

Jumbune Enterprise-Accelerating BigData Analytics: Jumbune is an enterprise-class Big Data application performance accelerator and data quality tool for HDInsight. It offers proactive cluster monitoring, which complements distribution-specific monitoring tools.

Meridix Live Streaming Platform: Meridix makes it easy to broadcast like the pros. Stream your live sports and events from anywhere, complete with HD video, audio, scores, and stats. Get started with a smartphone or tablet, or up your game using laptops, camcorders, and more.

Nubeva Prisms: Nubeva Prisms is an advanced, easy-to-use, and affordable solution to get cloud packets to monitoring tools and services, enabling greater visibility and control for cloud operations.

Refinitiv Deployed TRIT: Get Refinitiv Deployed TRIT by Thomson Reuters in the Azure Marketplace.

SARA: The servicing assessment and repair appraisal calculator (SARA) by Avtopro is a web service aimed at insurance companies, service stations, and businesses with a large car fleet. SARA makes it quick to calculate the cost of auto parts.

Container solutions

Elasticsearch 5 Alpine Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Elasticsearch 5 on Alpine. Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library.

Gosu Secured Ubuntu Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Gosu on Ubuntu. Gosu is a general-purpose programming language built on top of a Java virtual machine. Gosu’s syntax will allow you to write fewer lines of code to accomplish the same task.

MySQL 5.5 Secured Ubuntu Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for MySQL 5.5 on Ubuntu. MySQL is a popular open-source relational SQL database management system.

MySQL 5.7 Secured Ubuntu Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for MySQL 5.7 on Ubuntu. MySQL is a popular open-source relational SQL database management system.

Node 6 Secured Alpine Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Node 6 on Alpine. Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment for developing a variety of tools and applications.

Node 10 Secured Alpine Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Node 10 on Alpine. Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment for developing a variety of tools and applications.

Node 10 Secured Ubuntu Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Node 10 on Ubuntu Bionic. Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment for developing a variety of tools and applications.

OpenJDK Secured Alpine 3.7 Container – Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for OpenJDK on Alpine 3.7. OpenJDK is an open-source implementation of the Java Standard Edition platform with contributions from Oracle and the open Java community.

OpenJDK Secured Alpine3.8 Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for OpenJDK on Alpine 3.8. OpenJDK is an open-source implementation of the Java Standard Edition platform with contributions from Oracle and the open Java community.

Redis 3.2 Secured Alpine Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Redis 3.2 on Alpine. Redis is an open-source, networked, and in-memory data structure server used as a database, cache, and message broker.

Redis 4.0 Secured Alpine Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Redis 4.0 on Alpine. Redis is an open-source, networked, and in-memory data structure server used as a database, cache, and message broker.

Redis 4.0 Secured Ubuntu Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Redis 4.0 on Ubuntu. Redis is an open-source, networked, and in-memory data structure server used as a database, cache, and message broker.

Redis 5.0 RC Secured Alpine Container – Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Redis 5.0 RC on Alpine. Redis is an open-source, networked, and in-memory data structure server used as a database, cache, and message broker.

Ruby 2.3 Secured Alpine 3.7 Container – Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Ruby 2.3 on Alpine 3.7. Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented general-purpose programming language that supports multiple programming paradigms.

Ruby 2.3 Secured Alpine 3.8 Container – Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Ruby 2.3 on Alpine 3.8. Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented general-purpose programming language that supports multiple programming paradigms.

Ruby 2.4 Secured Alpine Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Ruby 2.4 on Alpine. Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented general-purpose programming language that supports multiple programming paradigms.

Ruby 2.6RC Secured alpine 3.7 Container-Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Ruby 2.6RC on Alpine 3.7. Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented general-purpose programming language that supports multiple programming paradigms.

Ruby 2.6RC Secured alpine 3.8 Container-Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Ruby 2.6RC on Alpine 3.8. Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented general-purpose programming language that supports multiple programming paradigms.

Secured Alpine 3.7 Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Alpine 3.7 on Ubuntu. Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution based on musl and Busybox, primarily designed for power users who appreciate security, simplicity, and resource efficiency.

Secured Alpine 3.8 Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Alpine 3.8 on Ubuntu. Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution based on musl and Busybox, primarily designed for power users who appreciate security, simplicity, and resource efficiency.

Secured OpenJDK on Ubu jre8 Container – Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for OpenJDK on Ubuntu JRE 8. OpenJDK is an open-source implementation of the Java Standard Edition platform with contributions from Oracle and the open Java community.

Secured Python on Ubuntu Container with Antivirus: Deploy an enterprise-ready container for Python on Ubuntu. Python's built-in data structures, combined with dynamic typing and dynamic binding, make it attractive for rapid application development.

Consulting services

App Innovation: 1 Day Assessment: In this assessment, you'll work with Dootrix's expert team to build a customized road map to deliver a modern app experience. We will help you utilize the power and groundbreaking services of Microsoft Azure.

Azure Active Directory 3 Day Security Assessment: FMT Consultants will provide a thorough security assessment of your Office 365 environment by evaluating your business’s security controls and identifying gaps that may be prone to cyber threats.

Azure back-up and DR workshop – 2.5 days: Acora's team will review your on-premises or cloud environment in order to provide a recommended approach for migrating to Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery.

Azure Migration: 2.5 day Workshop: Acora will review your technical capability and readiness for a migration to Azure, then provide recommendations on the cost, resources, and time needed to move with minimal downtime.

Azure Onboarding Services: 1-Day Implementation: In this implementation, CDW will provide initial Azure tenant configuration and best-practice approaches to deploying virtual machines.

Azure PaaS: 1 Hour Briefing: After this briefing by Dootrix, you will come away with a deeper understanding of the benefits of utilizing Azure Platform-as-a-Service for your business and how to implement a PaaS strategy within your organization.

Azure Readiness: 1 Day Assessment: This one-day review by Atech Support, either on-site or via a video call, will cover Azure readiness, machine properties, virtual machine Azure sizing, an estimate of monthly costs, and a recommendations document for migration.

Cloud Accelerator (Cloudamize): 4 Week Assessment: BUI’s Cloud Accelerator Assessment provides high-precision, data-driven analytics combined with powerful automation, enabling clients to make accurate cloud decisions faster and easier.

Cognitive Services: 1 Hour Briefing: This briefing by Dootrix focuses on Azure Cognitive Services and the practical applications of AI technology in a range of high-performance apps.

DC Migration Solution: 1-Week Implementation: The Cloud Factory will help you move the right areas of your IT infrastructure into Microsoft Azure, creating either a public-cloud footprint or a hybrid-cloud footprint based on your goals and requirements.

DevOps In Azure : 1 Hour Briefing: This DevOps masterclass briefing by Dootrix focuses on our approach of implementing Azure DevOps services for your business. The range of developer tools will allow you to plan smarter, collaborate better, and ship faster.

End-to-End Core Insurance System: 2-hours Briefing: The Faktor-Zehn suite is your end-to-end core insurance solution in the cloud, running on Azure Web Apps as well as on an Azure Kubernetes cluster. Model your products centrally and make them available to all modules.

FastStart | App Innovation: 6 – Wk Workshop: Marquam has developed this program to support organizations that want to maximize productivity by leveraging the latest Microsoft technologies, including Azure Bot Service and Azure Cognitive Services.

Finance & Optimisation Azure: 3 Day Assessment: Atech Support will conduct a comprehensive analysis of your current spending on cloud infrastructure and provide a report detailing optimization recommendations.

Innovation Sprint: 5 Day Workshop: Sprints are useful starting points when kicking off a new feature, workflow, product, or business, or when solving problems with an existing product. This sprint by Dootrix allows us to tackle business issues in a short, focused time frame.

Protera FlexBridge: 1-Day Self-Service Assessment: Plan for your SAP migration to Azure with Protera’s self-service custom migration assessment. The Protera FlexBridge Migration Platform helps customers migrate by reducing costs and complexity.

Stortech BaaS/DR-4week Implementation: The backup archive disaster recovery solution that StorTech offers customers is a full implementation of Azure services. The engagement involves an on-site consultation, cloud reference architecture design, migration, and testing.

Windows 08 SQL Database Migration 1 Day Assessment: Atech Support will perform an on-premises SQL workload assessment, provide a plan for a phased approach to the migration, identify compatibility issues, and provide recommendations for storage, security, and more.

Zerto to Azure: 10-Week Implementation: The Zerto to Azure integration provides protection from disasters by publishing data to Azure and ensuring processes are restored with tight recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) configurations.

Quelle: Azure

Azure Site Recovery team is hosting an Ask Me Anything session

You can start asking your questions with #ASR_AMA soon!

The Azure Site Recovery (ASR) team will host a special Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Twitter, Tuesday, January 22, 2019 from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM Pacific Standard Time. You can tweet to @AzSiteRecovery or @AzureSupport with #ASR_AMA.

What’s an AMA session?

We'll have folks from across the ASR product team available to answer any questions you have. You can ask us anything about our products, services, or even our team!

Why are you doing an AMA?

We like reaching out and learning from our customers and the community. We want to know how you use ASR and how your experience has been. Your questions provide insights into how we can make the service better.

How do I ask questions on Twitter?

You can ask us your questions by mentioning #ASR_AMA in your tweet. Your question can span multiple tweets by replying to first tweet you post with this hashtag. You can also directly message @AzSiteRecovery or @AzureSupport if you want to keep your questions private. For our customers in different time zones who may not be able to attend the event at the specified time, you can start posting your questions one day before the scheduled time of AMA (Monday, January 21) and we will answer them during the event time. You can catch us for a live conversation during the scheduled hours. If there are further follow-ups, we will continue the conversation post event time. Go ahead and tweet us!

Who will be there?

You, of course! We'll also have Program Managers from the ASR team participating.

Have any questions about the following topics? Bring them to the AMA.

Disaster Recovery of VMs from a primary Azure region to a secondary Azure region
Disaster Recovery of VMs from VMware to Azure
Disaster Recovery of VMs from Hyper-V to Azure
Disaster Recovery of physical servers to Azure

Why should I ask questions here instead of StackOverflow or MSDN? Can I really ask anything?

An AMA is a great place to ask us anything. StackOverflow and MSDN have restrictions on which questions can be asked. With an AMA, you’ll get answers directly from the team and have a conversation with the people who build these products and services.

Here are some question ideas:

What is ASR?
How is ASR priced?
Can I perform Disaster Recovery of Azure VMs with managed disks?
Does ASR encrypt replication?
How often can data be replicated with ASR?

Go ahead, ask us anything about our public products or the team. Please note, we cannot comment on unreleased features, future plans, and issues which require deep level debugging.

We're looking forward to having a conversation with you!
Quelle: Azure

Pix2Story: Neural storyteller which creates machine-generated story in several literature genre

Storytelling is at the heart of human nature. We were storytellers long before we were able to write, we shared our values and created our societies mostly through oral storytelling. Then, we managed to find the way to record and share our stories, and certainly more advanced ways to broadly share our stories; from Gutenberg’s printing press to television, and the internet. Writing stories is not easy, especially if one must write a story just by looking at a picture in different literary genres.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field that is driving a revolution in the computer-human interaction. We have seen the amazing accuracy we have today with computer vision, but we wanted to see if we could create a more natural and cohesive narrative showcasing NLP. We developed Pix2Story a neural-storyteller web application on Azure that allows users to upload a picture and get a machine-generated story based on several literature genres. We based our work on several papers “Skip-Thought Vectors,” “Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention,” “Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books,” and some repositories neural storyteller. The idea is to obtain the captions from the uploaded picture and feed them to the Recurrent Neural Network model to generate the narrative based on the genre and the picture.

The solution

Part of the process we have trained a visual semantic embedding model on the MS COCO captions dataset of 300.000 images to make sense of the visual input by analyzing the uploaded image and generating captions. We also transformed the captions and generate a narrative based on the selected genre: adventure, Sci-Fi, or thriller. For this, we trained for two weeks an encoder-decoder model on more than 2,000 novels. This training allows each passage of the novels to be mapped to a skip-thought vector, a way of embedding thoughts in vector space. This allowed us to understand not only words but the meaning of those words in context to reconstruct the surrounding sentences of an encoded passage. We used the new Azure Machine Learning Service as well as the Azure model management SDK with Python 3 to create the docker image with these models and deploy it using Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) with GPU capability making the project ready to production. Let’s see the process flow in detail.

Visual semantic embedding

The first part of the project is the one that transforms the input picture into captions. Captions briefly describe the picture as is shown in the example below.

A white dog that is looking at a Frisbee Small white dog with green and white bow tie on A white dog with black spots is sitting on the grass.

The model employed to generate this caption is composed by two different networks. First, one is a convolutional neural network to extract a set of feature vectors referred to as annotation vectors.

The second part of the model is a long short-term memory (LSTM) network that produces a caption by generating one word at every time step conditioned on a context vector, the previously hidden state, and the previously generated words.

Skipthought Vectors

Skipthought Vectors by R. Kiros is a model that generates generic sentences representations that can be used in the different task. For this project, the idea is to train an encoder-decoder model that tries to reconstruct the surrounding sentences of an encoded passage using the continuity of text from books.

The model is an encoder-decoder model. The encoder is used to map a sentence into a vector. The decoder then conditions on this vector to generate a translation for the source sentence.

The vocabulary used has been expanded using google news pre-trained vectors by generating a linear regressor that maps words in the founded in books vocabulary to words in this vector.

Style shifting

Attending to skipthoughts functioning if the sentences given to the encoder from the VSE are short descriptive sentences the final output will be a short sentence. For that reason, if the desired output is a more literary passage, we need to make a style shifting. That means to operate with skipthought vectors representations to set the input to the characteristics we want to induce in the output. The operation is the following:

Skipthoughts Decoder Input = Encoded Captions of the picture – Average All Captions Encoded + Encoded Passages with similar length and features as the output we expect.

Deployment

This project has been deployed using Azure Machine Learning Services Workspaces to generate the Docker image with the files and all models involved in prediction. The deployment for consumption has been made using AKS to automatically scale the solution.

rain your own model

For training new models:

Create conda environment:

conda env create –file environment.yml

Activate conda env:

activate storytelling

Set paths to your books or texts and your training settings in config.py.
Run training.py to train an encoder, generate necessary files and train a decoder based on your texts.
Generate bias: Mean of encoded sentences and mean of encoded captions.
To generate stories run the following on a python console:

>import generate
>story_generator = generate.StoryGenerator()
>story_generator.story(image_loc='path/to/your/image')

Congratulations! You should now have a fully working application to get started. Have fun testing the project and thank you for your contribution!

"Pix2Story- Neural Storyteller"-A web app that allows users to upload a picture and get an AI generated story based on several literary genres.

Additional resources

AI Lab
Playground

You can find the code, solution development process and all other details on GitHub.

We hope this post helps you get started with AI and motivates you to become an AI developer.
Quelle: Azure

Azure Monitor logs in Grafana – now in public preview

We’re happy to introduce the new Grafana integration with Microsoft Azure Monitor logs. This integration is achieved through the new Log Analytics plugin, now available as part of the Azure Monitor data source.

The new plugin continues our promise to make Azure’s monitoring data available and easy to consume. Last year, in the v1 of this data source we exposed Azure Monitor metric data in Grafana. While you can natively consume all logs in Azure Monitor Log Analytics, our customers also requested to make logs available in Grafana. We have heard this request and partnered with Grafana to enable you to use OSS tools more on Azure.

The new plugin allows you to display any data available in Log Analytics, such as logs related to virtual machine performance, security, Azure Active Directory which has recently integrated with Log Analytics, and many other log types including custom logs.

How can I use it?

The new plugin requires Grafana version 5.3 or newer. After the initial data source configuration, you can start embedding Azure Monitor logs in your dashboards and panels easily, simply select the service Azure Log Analytics and your workspace, then provide a query. You can reuse any existing queries you already have in Azure or write a new query. Writing queries in Grafana is made simple with the familiar IntelliSense auto-complete options you’ve already seen in the Azure Log Analytics query editor.

The plugin will run the query through the Log Analytics API, which means data is available to query as soon as it’s ingested to Log Analytics and is not copied to a separate store. In addition to the standard query language, Grafana supports specific macros such a $__timeFilter, which enables features like zooming-in on charts or using variables.

Added value

Grafana offers great dashboarding capabilities, rich visualizations, and integrations with over 40 data sources. If you’re already using Grafana for your dashboards, this new plugin can help you create a single pane of glass for your various monitoring needs. In result, covering both Azure metrics data as well as logs data.

Additionally, the plugin utilizes the powerful query language so you can do a lot more than display raw data.

Calculate data that’s meaningful, such as your resources’ 95th percentile versus your SLA.
Combine data from multiple workspaces and even from Application Insights using cross-workspace and cross-app queries.
Correlate data with joins.
Apply machine learning algorithms. The query language offers operators that perform smart analytics, so you can run advanced analytics, such as detect service disruptions based on trace logs or run a cohort analysis.

To learn more about the Grafana Azure Log Analytics plugin review the documentation, “Monitor your Azure services in Grafana.”
Quelle: Azure

Cloud Commercial Communities webinar and podcast newsletter – January 2019

Welcome to the Cloud Commercial Communities monthly webinar and podcast update. Each month the team focuses on core programs, updates, trends, and technologies that Microsoft partners and customers need to know so that they can increase success in using Microsoft Azure and Dynamics. Make sure you catch a live webinar and participate in a live Q&A. If you miss a session, you can review it on demand. Also consider subscribing to the industry podcasts to keep up to date with industry news.

Upcoming in January

Webinars

Grow, Build, and Connect with Microsoft for Startups – January 23, 2019 at 11:00 AM PST
Microsoft for Startups is a unique program designed to help startups become a Microsoft business partner through access to technology, channels, markets and customers. Tune into this session to learn more about the Microsoft for Startups program, a $500 million initiative to provide startups access to both the technology and customer base needed to build and grow their business.
Transform Data into Dollars by Enabling Intelligent Retail with Microsoft – January 29, 2019 at 10:00 AM PST
Microsoft is enabling retailers to deliver personalized customer experiences by empowering employees, driving digital transformation, and capturing data-based insights to accelerate growth for our partners and customers. This 30-minute session will arm partners with real case studies and actionable solutions for each intelligent retail scenario with an opportunity for live Q&A with our retail expert.
Azure Marketplace and AppSource Publisher Payouts and Seller Insights – January 30, 2019 at 11:00 AM PST
Azure Marketplace and AppSource is your launchpad to go-to-market with Microsoft and promote your offerings to customers. Join this exciting session to learn more about how Azure Marketplace and AppSource Publisher payouts work and gain exposure to the seller insights tool within Cloud Partner Portal.

Podcasts

Evolving actuarial risk compute and modeling on Azure – Nick Leimer shares changes occurring in the insurance industry and how companies are dealing with it. Specifically, we look at computing risk for regulatory compliance and how it might be a good match for Azure services, like Azure Batch or Azure High-Performance Computing.
Reduce healthcare costs with digital transformation: security, compliance, and backup on Azure – Healthcare IT veteran, David Houlding, chats with us about reducing costs in healthcare as part of an organization’s digital transformation and specifically outlines the tools and techniques needed for these transformations to succeed.
Adopting Azure for real-time payments – In this episode, Howard Bush talks with us about enabling real-time transactions instead of the customary batch transactions that financial institutions use today.
The full lifecycle of implementing IoT with PTC – From planning to streaming analytics, this episode looks at all phases of introducing IoT to a company. Just having the data is often not enough to make decisions. Insights must be gleaned from that data.
Live now – Joel Neidig of SIMBA Chain talks with us about blockchain as a service –  The podcast focuses on blockchain as a service and how it can be leveraged in manufacturing. With very real use cases and stories of success, we'll see how blockchain is affecting manufacturing in various ways today.
Live now – Using Cognitive Services with containers – Container support in Azure Cognitive Services allows developers to use the same rich APIs that are available in Azure and enables flexibility in where to deploy and host the services that come with Docker containers.

Recap for December

Webinars

Transform Your Business with AI at Microsoft – Explore AI industry trends, how the Microsoft AI platform can empower your business processes, Azure AI Services including bots, cognitive services, and Azure machine learning.
Azure Marketplace and AppSource Publisher Onboarding and Support – Learn the publisher onboarding process, best practices around common blockers, plus support resources available.
Build Scalable Cloud Applications with Containers on Azure – Overview of Azure Container Registry, Azure Container Instances (ACI), Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), and release automation tools with live demos.

Podcasts

Blockchain, artificial intelligence, and machine learning what does it mean for healthcare – David Houlding, a Microsoft Principal Healthcare Program Manager, discusses topics such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning as they impact healthcare.
Real world insights working with machine learning projects – Jess Panni and David Starr share insights learned from machine learning projects and the use of Machine Learning Studio to get actionable insights from the data produced.

Check out recent podcast episodes at the Microsoft industry experiences team podcast page.
Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Azure portal January 2019 update

This month we’re bringing you updates that improve the ease of navigation of the landing page, add to dashboard tile features, and increase functionality in Azure Container Instances.

Sign in to the Azure portal now and see for yourself everything that’s new. Download the Azure mobile app.

Here’s the list of January updates to the Azure portal:

Landing page

New Azure portal home page

Dashboard

Shared time range for tiles on dashboards

Azure Container Instances (ACI)

New start functionality

Let’s look at each of these updates in detail.

Landing page

New Azure portal home page

The new Azure portal home page is a quick and easy entry point into Azure. From there, you can find recently visited resources, navigate to commonly used services, and discover how to use specialized services to learn, monitor, secure, and optimize your applications and infrastructure.

The landing page has been designed with the following goals:

Improve discoverability of our services. We start by highlighting some of the most popular services in the “Azure services” section at the top, but we also provide access to the entire list.
Help you to make better use of Azure. All the services in the “Make the most out of Azure” section are either free or have free offerings so you can start using them right away!
Provide quick access to recently used resources. We display up to 12 resources, but if you have more, we provide access to the full list of recently used resources.  
Offer immediate access to important resources. The useful links section points to resources to learn about the platform, such as technical docs and product information and to stay informed about what is going on like Azure updates and news.
Provide easy access to the Azure mobile app. Download the Azure mobile app so you can stay connected, informed, and in control when you are on the go.

The new home page is an addition to the user experience and does not need to replace your previously customized dashboard. You can choose to keep the new home page as your default, or you can change the default landing page back to your customized dashboard by following these steps:

Select Settings in the upper right corner.
Under “Choose your default view,” select Dashboard.

Dashboard

Shared time range for tiles on dashboards

Previously, the time range would need to be set individually for each tile on Azure dashboards, but you can now globally specify the time range for supported tiles. Not all tiles support the globally shared time range, but those that do will show a filter icon in the top left and will light up when the shared time range dialog is open as shown in the screenshot below.

Tiles for Log Analytics queries and Azure Monitor metrics do support shared time range, but if you have a metric chart that was pinned a long time ago, it might not support the shared time range. In that case, you will have to go to Azure Monitor and re-pin that chart.

To set time ranges:

Select Monitor from the left navigation pane or from the All services menu.
From Monitor, select the Metrics menu item.
From Metrics, configure a metric and then select Pin to dashboard.
Go back to the dashboard. You should see your tile with the filter icon in the top left. You should also see a time filter widget appear under the dashboard name.
Select the time filter widget to expose the time range dialog. You should see your new tile light up. Tiles that don't support the shared time range will be dimmed.
Modify the time range and select the Apply button. All tiles that support shared time range should reload their data scoped to the desired range.

Azure Container Instances

New start functionality

ACI allows you to quickly and easily run containers on Azure without managing servers or having to learn new tools. It is now possible to easily start and restart your containers in ACI via the portal. If you have any stopped containers, a new "Start" command will be available on the ACI overview page that will let you start all of your containers quickly and easily.

 

Did you know?

With the Azure portal, you can test features in preview by visiting preview.portal.azure.com.

Let us know what you think

Thank you for all your terrific feedback. The Azure portal is built by a large team of engineers who are always interested in hearing from you. If you’d like to learn how we streamlined resource creation in Microsoft Azure to improve usability, consistency, and accessibility, read the new Medium article “Creation at Cloud Scale.” If you’re curious to learn more about how the Azure portal is built, be sure to watch the Microsoft Ignite 2018 session, “Building a scalable solution to millions of users.”

We will soon be introducing Azure portal “how to” videos on YouTube on the Azure channel where you can learn about specific features in order to become more productive using the portal. Stay tuned for more details!

Don’t forget to sign in to the Azure portal and download the Azure mobile app today to see everything that’s new, and let us know your feedback in the comments section or on Twitter. See you next month!
Quelle: Azure

Azure IoT automatic device management helps deploying firmware updates at scale

Automatic device management in Azure IoT Hub automates many of the repetitive and complex tasks of managing large device fleets over the entirety of their lifecycles. Since the feature shipped in June 2018, there has been a lot of interest in the firmware update use case. This blog article highlights some of the ways you can kickstart your own implementation.

Update the Azure IoT DevKit firmware over-the-air using automatic device management

The Azure IoT DevKit over-the-air (OTA) firmware update project is a great implementation of automatic device management. With automatic device management, you can target a set of devices based on their properties, define a desired configuration, and let IoT Hub update devices whenever they come into scope. This is performed using an automatic device configuration, which will also allow you to summarize completion and compliance, handle merging and conflicts, and roll out configurations in a phased approach. The Azure IoT DevKit implementation defines an automatic device configuration that specifies a collection of device twin desired properties related to the firmware version and image. It also specifies a set of useful metrics that are important for monitoring a deployment across a device fleet. The target condition can be specified based on device twin tags or device twin reported properties. The latter is particularly useful as it allows devices to self-report any prerequisites for the update.

OTA with Mongoose OS, an open source IoT Firmware Development Framework

In October 2018, our partner Cesanta announced support for automatic device management in Mongoose OS. Mongoose OS is an open source IoT Firmware Development Framework that is cross-platform and supports a variety of microcontrollers from top semiconductor companies. Mongoose OS provides reliable OTA updates, built-in flash encryption, and crypto chip support. It allows developers to have a quick and easy start with ready to go starter kits, solutions, libraries, and the option to code either in C or JavaScript.

“Mongoose OS is designed to simplify IoT firmware development for microcontrollers by helping developers to concentrate only the specific device logic while taking care of all the heavy lifting: security, networking, device control and remote management, including over-the-air updates. By working with Microsoft Azure IoT, Mongoose OS streamlines connected product development and provides a ready-to-go integration,” says CTO and Co-Founder at Cesanta Sergey Lyubka.

Firmware update deployment for operators using Azure IoT Remote Monitoring

Most recently, we released support for automatic device management in Azure IoT Remote Monitoring. Expanding on the firmware update implementation for the Azure IoT DevKit, this solution accelerator shows how automatic device management can be utilized by an operator role, in particular how a group of devices can be targeted for deployment and how the deployment can be monitored through metrics.

More resources

Learn more about automatic device management in IoT Hub.
Learn more about the Azure IoT DevKit.
Learn more about Mongoose OS.
Learn more about automatic device management in Azure IoT Remote Monitoring.

Quelle: Azure

Create alerts to proactively monitor your data factory pipelines

Data integration is complex and helps organizations combine data and business processes in hybrid data environments. The increase in volume, variety, and velocity of data has led to delays in monitoring and reacting to issues. Organizations want to reduce the risk of data integration activity failures and the impact it cause to other downstream processes. Manual approaches to monitoring data integration projects are inefficient and time consuming. As a result, organizations want to have automated processes to monitor and manage data integration projects to remove inefficiencies and catch issues before they affect the entire system. Organizations can now improve operational productivity by creating alerts on data integration events (success/failure) and proactively monitor with Azure Data Factory.

To get started, simply navigate to the Monitor tab in your data factory, select Alerts & Metrics, and then select New Alert Rule.

Select the target data factory metric for which you want to be alerted.

Then, configure the alert logic. You can specify various filters such as activity name, pipeline name, activity type, and failure type for the raised alerts. You can also specify the alert logic conditions and the evaluation criteria.

Finally, configure how you want to be alerted. Different mechanisms such email, SMS, voice, and push notifications are supported.

Creating alerts will ensure 24/7 monitoring of your data integration projects and make sure that you are notified of issues before they potentially corrupt your data or affect downstream processes. This helps your organizations to be more agile and increase confidence in your overall data integration processes. This ultimately results in increasing overall productivity in your organizations, and guarantee that you deliver on your SLAs. Learn more about creating alerts in Azure Data Factory.

Our goal is to continue adding features to improve the usability of Data Factory tools. Get started building pipelines easily and quickly using Azure Data Factory. If you have any feature requests or want to provide feedback, please visit the Azure Data Factory forum.
Quelle: Azure

Our 2019 Resolution: Help you transform your 2008 server applications with Azure!

This blog post was co-authored by Erin Chapple, CVP, Microsoft Windows Server, and Rohan Kumar, CVP, Microsoft Data.

The beginning of a new year is always a time to reflect on our plans. At Microsoft, with the end of support for 2008 servers looming, we’ve been thinking about how we can help you with your server refresh journey. How can we enable you to take advantage of all the cutting-edge innovations available in Azure?

And as we take stock, we believe that the 3 reasons why Azure is the best place to transform your 2008 server applications are:

Security: With security threats becoming more and more sophisticated, increasing your organization’s security policies should be top of mind. The good news is that Azure is the most trusted cloud in the market with more certifications than any other public cloud.
Innovation: We have an optimized, low-risk path to help you embrace Azure. And once you are there, you can continue to innovate with fully-managed services such as Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure AI.
Cost savings: By taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit and Extended Security updates, you can save significantly. For example, moving a hundred 2008 servers to Azure can save you more than $300K over 3 years compared to the cost of running them on-premises (check out our Azure TCO calculator to do your own modelling). And you don’t need to think past Azure for Windows Server and SQL Server: AWS is 5x more expensive.    

Get started now – we’re here to help!

The end of support for SQL Server 2008/R2 is now less than six months away on July 9th, 2019 and support ends for Windows Server 2008/R2 on January 14th, 2020. Windows 7, Office 2010 and Exchange Server are also ending their extended support soon. Microsoft and our partners are here to help you in every step of the way. Here are 3 steps to help you make the shift to a modern estate:

Step 1: Assess your environment

The first step is to get a complete inventory of your 2008 server environment. Rank each workload by strategic value to your organization. Answer questions like: How would this workload benefit from running in the cloud? What needs to remain on-premises? What is your strategy for upgrading each server to current versions? By establishing your priorities and objectives at the start, you can ensure a more successful migration.

For detailed guidance, visit the Azure Database Migration Guide, the Windows Server Migration Guide, the Microsoft SQL Server Docs and the Windows Server Docs.

Step 2: Know your options

Microsoft offers a wide range of solutions to modernize your 2008 server applications on your terms:

Azure SQL Database Managed Instance: Get full engine compatibility with existing SQL Server deployments (starting with SQL Server 2008), while enabling PaaS capabilities (automatic patching and version updates, automated backups, high-availability) and AI-based features that drastically reduce management overhead and TCO.

Windows Server and SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines: Get the flexibility of virtualization for a wide range of computing solutions—development and testing, running applications and extending your datacenter.

Windows Server and SQL Server on-premises: Bring innovative security and compliance features, industry-leading performance, mission-critical availability, advanced analytics built-in and new deployment options such as containers. Refresh your hardware and software infrastructure with Windows Server 2016 and 2019 and SQL Server 2017 and 2019.

Step 3: Make the move

Build your cloud migration plan using four widely adopted strategies: rehost, refactor, rearchitect, and rebuild applications. Choose the right mix for your business, considering the new database and OS options. Join our upcoming webinars and events to learn more:

January 15th to March 21st: SQL Server and Azure Data Services Roadshow
January 24th: Webinar: Transform Your Business with a Modern Data Estate
January 29th: Webinar: Transform Windows Server 2008 Apps and Infrastructure

When you add it all up, Microsoft has the most comprehensive and compelling Cloud, Data and AI platform on the planet. Only Microsoft offers expansive programs that deliver unprecedented value for your existing investments and we are here to help on your refresh journey. We are excited to see how you and your organization continue to innovate and transform your world!
Quelle: Azure