Microsoft Azure News, Entwicklungen, Updates, HowTos - Seite 180 von 261

Over the past months, we have aggressively added innovative new capabilities in Azure to enable content owners and partners to prepare, store, protect, distribute and monetize media in the cloud. We are thrilled to see media & cable organizations choosing Microsoft Azure for their digital transformation needs. Whether helping organizations move their focus away from infrastructure to content, distributing content with digital era velocity, or providing reliable and relevant content, Microsoft Azure is the trusted and global-scale cloud for the media industry’s needs.

Azure Media Services

In response to enthusiastic customer feedback, we have added the following new capabilities to Azure Media Services.

Democratizing AI for Media Industry: Video Indexer a powerful new capability which brings AI to life for media industry was introduced a few months back at BUILD 2017, as a unique integrated bundling of Microsoft's cloud-based artificial intelligence and cognitive capabilities applied specifically for video content. Its brings capabilities like face detection, sentiment extraction, object dectection, audio transcripts and more. Enhancements to this service include support for Egyptian Arabic language for speech analysis, playback at multiple speeds, and many more.
Azure Media Redactor is a powerful cloud video processing service leveraging word-class artificial intelligence, which is capable of automatically detecting and blurring faces in your videos, for use in cases such as public safety and news media. This is a new addition to the broad set of already existing capabilities of Azure Media Analytics.
HEVC Encoding support: The improved encoding efficiency of HEVC helps video service operators deliver higher resolution and higher quality video to their viewers, while saving on storage and CDN costs. Apple’s iOS11 release will support this codec, which will ensure a large addressable market for operators who adopt this codec. HEVC encoding is now generally available in Azure Media Services via the Premium Encoder. Further, HEVC encoding is priced the same as H.264 – we believe this to be critical to the success of our customers.

Azure CDN

The following new capabilities to optimize performance for media streaming and dynamic content were added since NAB for Azure CDN.

Media streaming optimized delivery With Azure CDN: We have added the ability to easily optimize the delivery of streaming media. With a single click, media streaming optimizations are automatically applied. This results in fast and efficient delivery of media assets to users and optimized requests to origins.

Dynamic content acceleration: Azure CDN now supports Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA) to optimize the delivery of dynamically served content. When DSA is enabled the performance of web pages with dynamic content is significantly improved as a result of route/network optimizations, resource prefetching and smart image compression.

One Click Integration with Storage and Web Apps: Pursuant to our goals of simplifying & making CDN capability transparent to our users we have enabled “One Click” enablement for assets in Azure storage as well a simple on click enablement of CDN for Websites & Web apps built on Azure.

Azure Storage

Azure Storage has made substantial improvements in 2017 to address the needs of Media & Entertainment customers. This includes:

Azure Archive Blob Storage – Azure Archive Blob storage is designed to provide Media organizations with a low cost means of delivering durable, highly available, secure cloud storage for rarely accessed data with flexible latency requirements. This is in addition to the existing Hot & Cool tiers which provide instantaneous high throughput object storage.
Blob-Level Tiering – To simplify data lifecycle management, we now allow customers to tier their data at the blob level. Customers can easily change the access tier of a blob among the Hot, Cool, or Archive tiers as usage patterns change, without having to move data between accounts. Blobs in all three access tiers can co-exist within the same account.
Larger Object Sizes – Azure Blob Storage now supports up to 5TB objects to address the needs of 4K and 8K media.
Higher performance – Azure Blob Storage now supports significantly higher throughput for object reads, up to gigabytes per second for a single object to support post production, transcoding and other workloads. Write throughput has also improved to support large media ingestion including Media Archival.
Encryption at rest (including customer managed keys)– Azure Blob Storage has support for Encryption at rest to meet the security needs of our media customers. Azure is the only public cloud compliant with the MPAA certification. This summer, we launched a preview for customer managed keys, which allows customers to further enhance security by encrypting the data with their own keys.

Growing Partner Ecosystem

At IBC this year, we are excited to announce that our partner ecosystem is growing at a rapid pace, enabling our customers with solutions that span the length and breadth of digital workflows.

Earlier this year, we announced that Avid has selected Microsoft Azure as their preferred partner to power their business in the cloud. Visitors to the Microsoft booth at IBC can see a demonstration showcasing an integrated Microsoft Azure and Avid offering.

In late July, it was announced that Ooyala’s Flex platform, which runs on Microsoft Azure, will now be utilized by Zone TV for its end-to-end workflow needs. Also, other notable customers who are driving value from Ooyala's solution are National Rugby League (NRL), SiriusXM and Zoomin.TV (Netherlands). We are pleased to announce that visitors to Hall 15 at IBC can also see a joint demo between Ooyala’s Flex and Azure Media Services.

We are also pleased to announce our new partners – Amagi and axle Video. Amagi, which provides cloud-managed broadcast services and targeted advertising solutions, announced that their CLOUDPORT product, a cloud playout platform, can now be deployed on Microsoft Azure. axle Video, which provides Media Management solution, announced a deep integration with Microsoft Video Indexer to enhance their axle ai product.

We have also expanded the partnership with LiveArena as it launches LiveArena Broadcast Room, an end-to-end service allowing production and broadcast of Live and on-demand TV to any device, built entirely on Microsoft Azure.

Additionally, Levels Beyond, makers of Reach Engine, has announced the release of Reach Engine Media Services, which is built on Microsoft Azure and integrates with Microsoft Azure Storage. XenData, provider of high capacity data storage solutions, announced the launch of its managed hybrid cloud service by integrating with Microsoft Azure Storage.

Stay tuned for more Azure blog posts that will dive deeper into these announcements.

We’re continually innovating and forming new partnerships when it comes to enabling media workflows on the cloud, and invite you to take advantage by building on Microsoft Azure.

Come see us at IBC 2017

Learn more about Azure Media Services and Azure Storage, and visit us at our IBC Booth in Hall 15 to meet the Azure Media Services and Azure Storage team and see these services in action. We would also like to invite you to the Microsoft Hall to speak with our partners – Amagi, GameOn Technology, GrayMeta, IPV Limited, LiveArena, Make.TV, Oceaneering, Oooyala, Ownzones, StreamingBuzz, Veritone Media, and x.news information technology.

If you are not attending the conference but would like to learn more about our services for the media industry, follow the Azure Blog to say up to date on new announcements.
Quelle: Azure

15. September 2017

da Agency

Keep credentials out of code: Introducing Azure AD Managed Service Identity

A common challenge in cloud development is managing the credentials used to authenticate to cloud services. Today, I am happy to announce the Azure Active Directory Managed Service Identity (MSI) preview. MSI gives your code an automatically managed identity for authenticating to Azure services, so that you can keep credentials out of your code. What is Managed Service Identity and how do I use it? Your code needs credentials to authenticate to cloud services, but you want to limit the visibility of those credentials as much as possible. Ideally, they never appear on a developer’s workstation or get checked-in to source control. Azure Key Vault can store credentials securely so they aren’t in your code, but to retrieve them you need to authenticate to Azure Key Vault. To authenticate to Key Vault, you need a credential! A classic bootstrap problem. Through the magic of Azure and Azure AD, MSI provides a “bootstrap identity” that makes it much simpler to get things started. Here’s how it works! When you enable MSI for an Azure service such as Virtual Machines, App Service, or Functions, Azure creates a Service Principal for the instance of the service in Azure AD, and injects the credentials (client ID and certificate) for the Service Principal into the instance of the service. Next, Your code calls a local MSI endpoint to get an access token MSI uses the locally injected credentials to get an access token from Azure AD Your code uses this access token to authenticate to an Azure service And that’s it! The access token can be used directly with a service that supports Azure AD authentication, such as Azure Resource Manager. If you need to authenticate to a service that doesn’t natively support Azure AD, you can use the token to authenticate to Key Vault and retrieve credentials from there. Azure and Azure AD take care of rolling the Service Principal’s credentials. Your code and your developers will never see or manage them. Try it Today we are announcing previews of Managed Service Identity for: Azure Virtual Machines (Windows) Azure Virtual Machines (Linux) Azure App Service Azure Functions Click the links to try a tutorial! Managed Service Identity is a feature of Azure AD Free, which comes with every Azure subscription. There is no additional charge for using Managed Service Identity. We would love to hear from you! You can ask how-to questions on Stack Overflow using the tag “azure-msi”, or post feature feedback or suggestions to the Azure AD developer feedback forum.
Quelle: Azure

14. September 2017

da Agency

Introducing Azure confidential computing

Microsoft spends one billion dollars per year on cybersecurity and much of that goes to making Microsoft Azure the most trusted cloud platform. From strict physical datacenter security, ensuring data privacy, encrypting data at rest and in transit, novel uses of machine learning for threat detection, and the use of stringent operational software development lifecycle controls, Azure represents the cutting edge of cloud security and privacy.

Today, I’m excited to announce that Microsoft Azure is the first cloud to offer new data security capabilities with a collection of features and services called Azure confidential computing. Put simply, confidential computing offers a protection that to date has been missing from public clouds, encryption of data while in use. This means that data can be processed in the cloud with the assurance that it is always under customer control. The Azure team, along with Microsoft Research, Intel, Windows, and our Developer Tools group, have been working on confidential computing software and hardware technologies for over four years. The bottom of this post includes a list of Microsoft Research papers related to confidential computing. Today we take that cutting edge one step further by now making it available to customers via an Early Access program.

Data breaches are virtually daily news events, with attackers gaining access to personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, and corporate intellectual property. While many breaches are the result of poorly configured access control, most can be traced to data that is accessed while in use, either through administrative accounts, or by leveraging compromised keys to access encrypted data. Despite advanced cybersecurity controls and mitigations, some customers are reluctant to move their most sensitive data to the cloud for fear of attacks against their data when it is in-use. With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also in use from the following threats:

Malicious insiders with administrative privilege or direct access to hardware on which it is being processed
Hackers and malware that exploit bugs in the operating system, application, or hypervisor
Third parties accessing it without their consent

Confidential computing ensures that when data is “in the clear,” which is required for efficient processing, the data is protected inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE – also known as an enclave), an example of which is shown in the figure below. TEEs ensure there is no way to view data or the operations inside from the outside, even with a debugger. They even ensure that only authorized code is permitted to access data. If the code is altered or tampered, the operations are denied and the environment disabled. The TEE enforces these protections throughout the execution of code within it.

With Azure confidential computing, we’re developing a platform that enable developers to take advantage of different TEEs without having to change their code. Initially we support two TEEs, Virtual Secure Mode and Intel SGX. Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) is a software-based TEE that’s implemented by Hyper-V in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. Hyper-V prevents administrator code running on the computer or server, as well as local administrators and cloud service administrators from viewing the contents of the VSM enclave or modifying its execution. We’re also offering hardware-based Intel SGX TEE with the first SGX-capable servers in the public cloud. Customers that want their trust model to not include Azure or Microsoft at all can leverage SGX TEEs. We’re working with Intel and other hardware and software partners to develop additional TEEs and will support them as they become available.

Microsoft already uses enclaves to protect everything from blockchain financial operations, to data stored in SQL Server, and our own infrastructure within Azure. While we’ve previously spoken about our confidential computing blockchain efforts, known as the Coco Framework, today we are announcing the use of the same technology to implement encryption-in-use for Azure SQL Database and SQL Server. This is an enhancement of our Always Encrypted capability, which ensures that sensitive data within a SQL database can be encrypted at all times without compromising the functionality of SQL queries. Always Encrypted achieves that this by delegating computations on sensitive data to an enclave, where the data is safely decrypted and processed. We continue to use enclaves inside Microsoft products and services to ensure that wherever sensitive information needs to be processed, it can be secured while in use.

In addition to SQL Server, we see broad application of Azure confidential computing across many industries including finance, healthcare, AI, and beyond. In finance, for example, personal portfolio data and wealth management strategies would no longer be visible outside of a TEE. Healthcare organizations can collaborate by sharing their private patient data, like genomic sequences, to gain deeper insights from machine learning across multiple data sets without risk of data being leaked to other organizations. In oil and gas, and IoT scenarios, sensitive seismic data that represents the core intellectual property of a corporation can be moved to the cloud for processing, but with the protections of encrypted-in-use technology.

Customers can try out Azure confidential computing through our Early Access program, which includes access to Azure VSM and SGX-enabled virtual machines, as well as tools, SDKs, and Windows and Linux support to enable any application in the cloud to protect its data while in use.

I look forward to seeing you at Ignite, where I’ll demonstrate enclaves in Azure. There’s so many opportunities and use cases we can secure together using the Azure cloud, Intel hardware, along with Microsoft technologies, services, and products.

Today is the exciting beginning of a new era of secure computing. Join us in Azure as we create this future.

– Mark

Microsoft Research papers related to confidential computing:

Shielding applications from an untrusted cloud with Haven
VC3: Trustworthy Data Analytics in the Cloud using SGX
Oblivious Multi-Party Machine Learning on Trusted Processors
A Design and Verification Methodology for Secure Isolated Regions

See how confidential computing fits within Microsoft’s broader cloud security strategy in the Microsoft Story Labs feature: Securing the Cloud.
Quelle: Azure

14. September 2017

da Agency

Protecting applications and data on Azure Stack

Azure provides global scale cloud computing running in Microsoft Datacenters in over 40 regions. Azure Stack extends the value of Azure to a wider range of customers and scenarios by making a core set of services available to run on integrated systems running in customer’s or service provider datacenters. Many companies and service providers are evaluating Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) to learn more. Many of these companies are going beyond evaluation and thinking through strategy, design, and implementation of a hybrid cloud for modern apps and on-premises cloud services. Business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) planning is an important part of a comprehensive strategy.

Have you downloaded and installed ASDK? Download it now.

Business continuity and disaster recovery planning are closely related processes that a company uses to prepare for unforeseen risks. In this post, we’ll go through the protection objectives for different application types and recovery objectives so you can think about solutions that meet your business needs. These objectives will have a direct impact on the BC/DR strategy that you choose.

Azure Stack BC/DR Areas

There are four main areas to consider for a BC/DR strategy:

Protect the underlying infrastructure that hosts IaaS virtual machines, PaaS services, and tenant applications and data.
Protect IaaS-based applications and data.
Protect PaaS-based applications and data.
Archive PaaS data for long-term retention.

This blog focuses on the second point: protecting IaaS virtual machine-based applications and data using Microsoft and partner products for backup and restore, and replication and failover. The Azure Stack team is engaged with multiple partners to ensure that their third-party solutions work on Azure Stack. Expect additional blog posts covering the other three areas in the near future.

Backup and restore IaaS virtual machine-based applications

Azure Stack supports Windows- and Linux-based applications deployed on virtual machines that are provisioned as IaaS Azure Resource Manager virtual machines. Backup products with access to the guest operating system (OS) can easily protect file, folder, OS state, and application data using similar policies you use today for near-line and long-term retention. You have the flexibility to use Microsoft products like Azure Backup and System Center Data Center Protection Manager, and third-party products to back up data on-premises, to a service provider, or directly to Azure. This approach gives you the flexibility of choice for protecting your applications and data using products you are familiar with and trust.

Replication and failover for IaaS virtual machine-based applications

Applications that require minimal downtime and minimal data loss need additional protection. Backup and restore is ideal for customers that can tolerate application downtime for an extended period. However, to achieve minimal downtime, you need to replicate data to a secondary location and orchestrate failover of the application in the event of a disaster. With Azure Stack, you have the flexibility to use Azure Site Recovery to replicate data directly to Azure and failover your application to run in Azure. Applications deployed on Azure Stack that support native replication, like Microsoft SQL, can replicate data to another location where the application is running. You can also use third-party replication and orchestration products to failover applications to another location. Like backup and restore, this approach gives you the flexibility and choice for protecting your applications and data.

Azure Stack partners and deployment scenarios

Important considerations for general availability

In-guest protection—Azure Stack only supports protection technologies at the guest level of an IaaS virtual machine. Azure Stack does not support installing agents on underlying infrastructure servers and does not rely on hypervisor-based technologies.
Azure Site Recovery—Upon general availability, Azure Site Recovery will support failover to Azure, and test failover in Azure. Azure Site Recovery will support re-protection of the IaaS virtual machine to your Azure Stack instance using a manual process, with automation forthcoming. To get failover from Azure to Azure Stack, you will need to shut down the IaaS virtual machines, manually copy the data to your Azure Stack instance, and then recreate the IaaS virtual machine. At that point, you can enable protection for the IaaS virtual machine as a new instance.
Site to site protection—Protecting IaaS VM resources across two Azure Stack clouds is supported using the Azure Backup Server or a third-party product from one of our partners.

Recovering from a catastrophic data loss

Your BC/DR planning must prepare your company to recover from a disaster that permanently takes your entire Azure Stack cloud offline and results in complete and unrecoverable data loss. Deploying your Azure Stack cloud will require you to engage your hardware vendor. If you have a secondary site, consider deploying an Azure Stack instance there, which will allow you to recover tenant applications and data without having to wait for a new cloud to be deployed.

Next steps

Download and install ASDK today and get familiar with hosting your applications in a hybrid cloud. As you gain insight into the applications that you plan to deploy into Azure Stack, think through the recovery objectives for your applications. Identify the different protection schemes that make sense, and consider the technologies and products that will help you achieve these objectives.

Reach out to your vendor to discuss how they will support BC/DR scenarios on Azure Stack. Start testing application and data protection on ASDK. As we get closer to general availability, you will see updated documentation about Azure Stack. If you want to talk to the Azure Stack product group about BC/DR, fill out this survey so we can reach out to you.

More information

Attending Microsoft Ignite this year in Orlando? Check out these two sessions for information about Azure Stack BC/DR:

Microsoft Azure Stack business continuity and disaster recovery
Recovering Azure Stack infrastructure from a catastrophic data loss

We always want feedback—please sign up to talk to us.
Quelle: Azure

14. September 2017

da Agency

Microsoft Tech Summit is back – register for a free event near you!

Announcing the 2017–2018 Microsoft Tech Summit global tour! Build your skills with the latest in cloud technologies at a free, technical learning event for IT professionals and developers, coming to a city near you. We’re hitting the road with our top engineers to bring you two days of in-depth sessions, networking opportunities, industry insights, and hands-on skill-building with the experts behind Microsoft’s cloud services.

The cloud is changing expectations and transforming the way we live and work. Whether you’re developing innovative apps or delivering optimized solutions, Microsoft Tech Summit can help you evolve your skills, deepen your expertise, and grow your career.

Discover the latest trends, tools, and product roadmaps at more than 70 sessions, covering a range of topics across Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, which includes Windows 10, Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility + Security. From beginner sessions that will help you develop core cloud skills, to advanced, 400-level training that will take your expertise to the next level, there is something for everyone.

This year, we’re adding a new event Hub, the primary gathering place where you can learn, network, meet partners, and visit the community theater. You’ll also have direct access to Microsoft experts who bring you Azure and Microsoft 365 – ask your toughest questions, learn best practices, provide feedback, and share strategies to optimize operations and deliver more value to your organization.

Microsoft Tech Summit Tour Schedule

November 16 – 17, 2017
Sydney

November 29 – 30, 2017
Tel Aviv

December 6 – 7, 2017
São Paulo

December 13 – 14, 2017
Toronto

January 17 – 18, 2018
Singapore

January 24 – 25, 2018
Birmingham (UK)

February 13 – 14, 2018
Cape Town

February 21 – 22, 2018
Frankfurt

March 5 – 6, 2018
Washington, D.C.

March 14 – 15, 2018
Paris

March 19 – 20, 2018
San Francisco

March 28 – 29, 2018
Amsterdam

April 17 – 18, 2018
Stockholm

April 25 – 26, 2018
Warsaw

Join us for the Microsoft Tech Summit, and learn how Microsoft’s cloud platform can help you lead your organization through real digital transformation, and shape your future. Registration is now open – find a city near you and reserve your free seat today.

Don’t miss out, register now!
Quelle: Azure

13. September 2017

da Agency

Microsoft Video Indexer expands functionality unlocking more video insights

In May 2017, we announced the global public preview of the Video Indexer service at the Microsoft Build Developers Conference in Seattle. As part of Microsoft Cognitive Services, Video Indexer was introduced as a unique integrated bundling of Microsoft's cloud-based artificial intelligence and cognitive capabilities applied specifically for video content. It has since become the industry's most comprehensive Video AI service available, making it easy to extract insights from videos. For the last four months, we have received a tremendous, enthusiastic response from our global customers and partners who began using Video Indexer within their own in-house workflows and video solutions. With the International Broadcasters Conference (IBC) just around the corner, we are excited to share significant feature updates to the Video Indexer service.

Additionally, we are very pleased that several customers and partners have already integrated Video Indexer within their own video solutions and product offerings. A few examples are as follows:

Ooyala has integrated Video Indexer into their Flex Media Logistics platform to enable auto-transcription, translation, content-aware advertising insertion, and better content monetization and search.
Zone TV is using Video Indexer to automate the curation of a first-of-its-kind customizable suite of linear TV channels.
Axle Video is taking advantage of Video Indexer to automatically tag entire video files and video segments to greatly accelerate the post-production process and efficient search across video libraries.

Overall Service updates since May

Speech-to-text – Video Indexer now supports Egyptian Arabic for speech-to-text.

With the addition of Arabic, Video Indexer portal has been updated to support RTL (right to left) text in the transcript tab as well as the search page.

Captions – You can now start playing captions automatically in the Video Indexer player by adding showCaptions=true to the iframe embed player URL.
Download insights from portal – You can now download the JSON insights extracted by Video Indexer via the portal.
Playback speeds – The Video Indexer player was updated to support different playback speeds.
Inline transcript editing – The transcript panel has been updated to support inline editing.
Editing in insights widget – The insights widget has been updated to support editing in embedded mode (based on an access token).
Keywords editing – The insights widget has been updated to enable the addition and removal of keywords.
Annotations – The insights widget now shows the annotations extracted by the Video Indexer engine.

API updates

The Video Indexer API reference page provides details about the APIs. Some APIs are new, while some have been enhanced with new features.

Upload – The Upload API has been enhanced with the following:

callbackUrl – This enables you to receive a callback when the indexing operation finishes on a video.
indexingPreset – You can specify if you want to use the default preset or only perform audio indexing.
streamingPreset – With this parameter, you can control whether the video gets encoded to multiple bitrates or not. You may want to disable encoding if you are only interested in extracting insights from your videos. This would help improve the turn around on processing the video.

Re-Index Breakdown – This is a new API and will enable you to reprocess a video by re-triggering insights extraction on an existing video in your account.
Re-Index Breakdown by External Id – Similar to the above, but this API will enable you to use the external id versus the id provided by Video Indexer to trigger the re-indexing of the video.
Update Transcript – This API enables you to update the transcript for a video by providing a JSON string containing the full video VTT.
Update Face Name – This is an API for providing a friendly name to the faces detected by Video Indexer.
Get Insights Widget URL – This API has been updated with an optional parameter called “allowEdit” that would allow the user to get an access token for editing in embedded mode.
Get Insights Widget URL by External Id – Similar to the above, but this API will enable you to use the external id versus the id provided by Video Indexer.

Other updates

Logic Apps – With the Video Indexer connector for Logic Apps, you can now setup custom workflows connecting your most used apps with Video Indexer to further automate the process of extracting insights from your video. You can read more about this in the Video Indexer connector for Logic Apps blog.
Microsoft Flow – With the integration between Video Indexer and Microsoft Flow, users can now extract insights from their business videos without writing a single line of code.
UI updates – The Video Indexer web portal UI has been updated with several enhancements based on feedback provided by customers.

Besides all the above listed updates, Video Indexer backend services have been updated to make the service more robust and efficient. Looking ahead, Video Indexer will be making progress along the following dimensions:

More video AI algorithms to extract additional metadata.
Improving accuracy of video AI technologies.
More intelligent correlation among the extracted metadata to provide human friendly insights.
User interface enhancement to showcase the extracted metadata and insights.
Paid offering of Video Indexer.

Please submit your feedback related to Video Indexer on uservoice. Also, you can track updates from Video Indexer team by following us on Twitter (@Video_Indexer). Members of the Video Indexer team will be present at the Microsoft Stand (Hall 15, Stand 1, 35, and 36). Come see us to learn more!
Quelle: Azure