Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

The future of healthcare is data-driven

As analytics tools and machine learning capabilities mature, healthcare innovators are speeding up the development of enhanced treatments supported by Azure’s GPU-accelerated AI infrastructure powered by NVIDIA.

Improving diagnosis and elevating patient care

Man’s search for cures and treatments for common ailments has driven millennia of healthcare innovation. From the use of traditional medicine in early history to the rapid medical advances of the past few centuries, healthcare providers are locked in a constant search for effective solutions to old and emerging diseases and conditions.

The pace of healthcare innovation has increased exponentially over the past few decades, with the industry absorbing radical changes as it transitions from a health care to a health cure society. From telemedicine, personalized wellbeing, and precision medicine to genomics and proteomics, all powered by AI and advanced analytics, modern medical researchers can access more supercomputing capabilities than ever before. This quantum leap in computational capability, powered by AI, enables healthcare services dissemination and consumption in ways, and at a pace, that were previously unimaginable.

Today, health and life sciences leaders leverage Microsoft Azure high-performance computing (HPC) and purpose-built AI infrastructure to accelerate insights into genomics, precision medicine, medical imaging, and clinical trials, with virtually no limits to the computing power they have at their disposal. These advanced computing capabilities are allowing healthcare providers to gain deeper insights into medical data by deploying analytics and machine learning tools on top of clinical simulation data, increasing the accuracy of mathematical formulas used for molecular dynamics and enhancing clinical trial simulation.

By utilizing the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capabilities of Azure HPC and AI, healthcare innovators can overcome the challenges of scale, collaboration, and compliance without adding complexity. And with access to the latest GPU-enabled virtual machines, researchers can fuel innovation through high-end remote visualization, deep learning, and predictive analytics.

Data scalability powers rapid testing capabilities

Take the example of the National Health Service, where the use of Azure HPC and AI led to the development of an app that could analyze COVID-19 tests at scale, with a level of accuracy and speed that is simply unattainable for human readers. This drastically improved the efficiency and scalability of analysis as well as capacity management.

Another advance worth noting, is that with Dragon Ambient Experience (DAX), an AI-based clinical solution offered by Nuance, doctor-patient experiences are optimized through the digitization of patient conversations into highly accurate medical notes, helping ensure high-quality care. By freeing up time for doctors to engage with their patients in a more direct and personalized manner, DAX improves the patient experience, reducing patient stress and saving time for doctors.

“With support from Azure and PyTorch, our solution can fundamentally change how doctors and patients engage and how doctors deliver healthcare.”—Guido Gallopyn, Vice President of Healthcare Research at Nuance.

Another exciting partnership between Nuance and NVIDIA brings directly into clinical settings medical imaging AI models developed with MONAI, a domain-specific framework for building and deploying imaging AI. By providing healthcare professionals with much needed AI-based diagnostic tools, across modalities and at scale, medical centers can optimize patient care at fractions of the cost compared to traditional health care solutions.

“Adoption of medical imaging AI at scale has traditionally been constrained by the complexity of clinical workflows and the lack of standards, applications, and deployment platforms. Our partnership with Nuance clears those barriers, enabling the extraordinary capabilities of AI to be delivered at the point of care, faster than ever.”—David Niewolny, Director of Healthcare Business Development at NVIDIA.

GPU-accelerated virtual machines are a healthcare game changer

In the field of medical imaging, progress relies heavily on the use of the latest tools and technologies to enable rapid iterations. For example, when Microsoft scientists sought to improve on a state-of-the-art algorithm used to screen blinding retinal diseases, they leveraged the power of the latest NVIDIA GPUs running on Azure virtual machines.

Using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning for computer vision, scientists reduced misclassification by more than 90 percent from 3.9 percent to a mere 0.3 percent. Deep learning model training was completed in 10 minutes over 83,484 images, achieving better performance than a state-of-the-art AI system. These are the types of improvements that can assist doctors in making more robust and objective decisions, leading to improved patient outcomes for patients.

For radiotherapy innovator Elekta, the use of AI could help expand access to life-saving treatments for people around the world. Elekta believes AI technology can help physicians by freeing them up to focus on higher-value activities such as adapting and personalizing treatments. The company accelerates the overall treatment planning process for patients undergoing radiotherapy by automating time-consuming tasks such as advanced analysis services, contouring targets, and optimizing the dose given to patients. In addition, they rely heavily on the agility and power of on-demand infrastructure and services from Microsoft Azure to develop solutions that help empower their clinicians, facilitating the provision of the next generation of personalized cancer treatments.

Elekta uses Azure HPC powered by NVIDIA GPUs to train its machine learning models with the agility to scale storage and compute resources as its research requires. Through Azure’s scalability, Elekta can easily launch experiments in parallel and initiate its entire AI project without any investment in on-premises hardware.

“We rely heavily on Azure cloud infrastructure. With Azure, we can create virtual machines on the fly with specific GPUs, and then scale up as the project demands.”—Silvain Beriault, Lead Research Scientist at Elekta.

With Azure high-performance AI infrastructure, Elekta can dramatically increase the efficiency and effectiveness of its services, helping to reduce the disparity between the many who need radiotherapy treatment and the few who can access it.

Learn more

Leverage Azure HPC and AI infrastructure today or request an Azure HPC demo.

Read more about Azure Machine Learning:

Multimodal 3D Brain Tumor Segmentation with Azure ML and MONAI.
Practical Federated Learning with Azure Machine Learning.

Quelle: Azure

Azure Space technologies advance digital transformation across government agencies

Since its launch, Microsoft Azure Space has been committed to enabling people to achieve more, both on and off the planet. This mission has transcended various industries, including agriculture, finance, insurance, and healthcare.

The announcements we’ve made thus far have helped showcase how our mission encompasses not only commercial industries but also empowers government missions through recent contract wins. By bringing new commercial technologies, such as Microsoft 365, Azure Government Cloud, and Azure Orbital, government agencies are increasing the speed, flexibility, and agility of their missions. Today, we are announcing additional momentum on this motion, including:

Viasat RTE integration with Azure Orbital Ground Station, bringing high rate, low latency data streaming downlink from spacecraft directly to Azure.
A partnership with Ball Aerospace and Loft Federal on the Space Development Agency’s (SDA) National Defense Space Architecture Experimental Testbed (NeXT) program, which will bring 10 satellites with experimental payloads into orbit and provide the associated ground infrastructure.
Advancements on the Hybrid Space Architecture for the Defense Innovation Unit, U.S. Space Force and Air Force Research Lab, with new partners and demonstrations that showcase the power, flexibility, and agility of commercial hybrid systems that work across multi-path, multi-orbit, and multi-vendor cloud enabled resilient capabilities.
Azure powers Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to deliver Space cybersecurity and threat intelligence operating capabilities. The watch center’s collaborative environment provides visualization of environmental conditions and threat information to rapidly detect, assess and respond to space weather events, vulnerabilities, incidents, and threats to space systems.

Viasat Real-Time Earth general availability on Azure Orbital Ground Station

Microsoft has partnered with Viasat Real-Time Earth (RTE) to offer customers new real-time capabilities to manage spacecraft and missions with Azure Orbital Ground Station as a service. This includes the ability to view, schedule, and modify passes at Viasat RTE sites for downlinking data to Azure and bring real-time streaming directly to Azure across secure Microsoft WAN.

As commercial satellite operators require increasingly higher downlink rates to bring mission data such as hyperspectral or synthetic aperture radar into Azure—this partnership with Viasat increases the opportunity to access an established global network on KA-band antennas. This unlocks new business opportunities for missions that require fast time to insight whilst also maintaining a high level of security.

“Viasat Real-Time Earth is enabling remote sensing satellite operators who are pushing the envelope of high-rate downlinks. Our strong relationship with Azure Orbital enables those same customers, through increased access to our ground service over the Azure Orbital marketplace and a dependable, high-speed terrestrial network, to reduce the time it takes to downlink and deliver massive amounts of data.”—John Williams, Vice President Viasat Real-Time Earth.

Learn more about the power of Azure Orbital Ground Station and how it can unlock new missions by bringing real time date from space to earth, read more here.

True Anomaly

True Anomaly delivers a fully integrated technology platform that combines training and simulation tools, advanced spacecraft manufacturing infrastructure and autonomy systems to revolutionize space security and sustainability.

True Anomaly is using the Viasat RTE integration with Azure Orbital Ground Station via Microsoft APIs today to advance their business with the government.

"Together, True Anomaly, Viasat, and Microsoft will employ cutting-edge modeling, simulation, and visualization tools available to train Space Force guardians and other operators. Our partnership will extend to satellite control, leveraging Microsoft Azure Orbital to provide seamless and efficient satellite management solutions for our fleet of Autonomous Orbital Vehicles. By joining forces, we unlock a path to disrupt space operations and training for years to come."— Even Rogers, Co-founder and CEO of True Anomaly.

This partnership combines True Anomaly's innovative Mission Control System with Microsoft’s Azure Orbital and Viasat, offering a seamless satellite management solution for space security operations and training.

Microsoft, Loft Federal, and Ball Aerospace partner on Space Development Agency NExT

The Space Development Agency is charged to create and sustain effective and affordable military space capabilities that provide persistent, resilient, global, low-latency surveillance. The National Defense Space Architecture Experimental Testbed (NExT) program will carry 10 satellites with experimental payloads into orbit.

SDA NExT builds upon Microsoft’s Azure Space products and partnerships. Central to Microsoft’s solution for NExT is the combination of Azure Orbital Ground Station and Azure Government air-gapped clouds which will allow SDA to do their mission work in a secure cloud environment. 

Through NExT, together the SDA and US Space Force will securely operate a government-owned satellite constellation with Azure Orbital Ground Station’s global network for the first time. Additionally, Microsoft 365 will also provide them with productivity tools to enable personnel to share information, which will help ensure a coordinated response.

Microsoft Azure Government cloud will enable SDA to extract spaceborne data insights from the cloud to the ultimate edge and to scale innovation faster and better meet the critical needs of the Guardians and strengthen national security.

New advancements and partnerships for Hybrid Space Architecture

Last year, we announced our contract supporting the Department of Defense's (DoD) Defense Innovation Unit (in partnership with United States Space Force and Air Force Research Lab) on the Hybrid Space Architecture (HSA). The goal of the program is to bring our advanced, trusted cloud, and innovative Azure Space capabilities, alongside a space partner ecosystem, to serve as a foundation to realize their Hybrid Space Architecture vision.

This year, Microsoft completed the first demonstration for the program focused on resilient communication and data paths which showcased:

Multi-orbit, multi-vendor, resilient, edge-to-cloud connectivity including use of Azure Orbital Cloud Access through satellite communications partner SpaceX and SES.
SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STAC) standards for operating a private Planetary Computer to efficiently manage large geospatial datasets and enable space vehicle tasking across multiple providers.
AI-enabled field user application to allow users to rapidly and easily discover and task satellite collection through an intuitive chat interface.

Microsoft is committed to a strong, and growing, partner ecosystem. As part of this first demonstration, the Hybrid Space Architecture ecosystem included the capabilities from Umbra and BlackSky.

Future demonstrations will incorporate all Azure Space capabilities including Azure Orbital Cloud Access, Azure Orbital Ground Station, Azure Orbital Space SDK, our leading security solutions, and vast threat intelligence, as well as multiple leading space partners.

Azure powers ISAC to deliver Space cybersecurity and threat intelligence operating capabilities

As a society, our increased reliance of space-based systems for commercial, government, and critical infrastructure sectors underscores the importance of sharing threat intelligence to safeguard space infrastructure, which supports billions of people globally.

The Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) was established several years ago, with Microsoft as a founding member, to facilitate timely collaboration across the global space industry to enhance the ability to prepare for and respond to vulnerabilities, incidents, and cybersecurity threats.

On March 30, 2023 the Space ISAC’s Operational Watch Center reached its initial operational capability hosted in Azure. The watch center’s collaborative environment provides visualization of environmental conditions and threat information to rapidly detect, assess and respond to space weather events, vulnerabilities, incidents, and threats to space systems. The Watch Center is supported by a dedicated team of 10 in-person analysts with additional virtual support enabled by Azure cloud architecture.

As the largest cloud architecture in the world, Microsoft has gained an exceptional vantage point and garnered unique experience on what it takes to secure cloud workloads and containers. Microsoft has a unique view into emerging threats based on analysis of over 65 trillion threat signals daily across over 200 global consumer and commercial services and shares this insight with the Space ISAC community.

Working with the Space ISAC Watch Center, we can rapidly share threat intelligence with the space community. In addition, the new Microsoft Security Copilot capability will be available to our Space ISAC partners, to enable cyber defense at machine speed and scale.

What's next

As the world grows more complex regarding global security, climate change, sustainability, and more, the imperative to partner across public and private sector has become even more clear. Government agencies have the most demanding missions and need to effectively manage massive and growing datasets, resiliently connect across the globe, respond quickly to changing events, and provide a secure and trusted platform for varied users. With the rapid advancements in space technologies and cloud computing, Azure Space is proud to work with an industry ecosystem team and committed to support these government agencies to innovate and address their hardest missions.
Quelle: Azure

Boost your data and AI skills with Microsoft Azure CLX

We’re excited to announce that the Microsoft Azure Connected Learning Experience (CLX) program now has three new Data and AI tracks designed for data professionals.

Personalized, self-paced, and culminating in a certificate of completion, these courses help you boost your data and AI skills your way—allowing you to maximize your learning in minimal time.

New courses

Who should attend?

Course content

AI-102: Designing and implementing a Microsoft Azure AI Solution

Azure AI Engineer, AI Developer, AI Specialist

This course boosts your understanding of building, managing, and deploying AI solutions that leverage Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Applied AI services. It’s designed for learners who are experienced in all phases of AI solutions development.

DP-300: Administering Microsoft Azure SQL Solutions

Database Management Specialists, Database Administrators

In this course, you’ll learn to build and manage cloud-native and hybrid data platform solutions based on SQL Server and SQL database services. The track is designed for Database Administrators who are familiar with database design and management for on-premises and cloud databases developed using SQL Server and SQL database services.

DP-420: Designing and Implementing Cloud-Native Applications Using Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB Developer, Database Developer, Data Developer Specialist

This track covers the design and implementation of data models, data distribution, data loading, and integration within Azure Cosmos DB and various Azure services. It’s designed for learners with expertise in designing, implementing, and monitoring of cloud-native applications that store and manage data.

What is the CLX program?

CLX is a four-step learning program that helps aspiring learners and IT professionals build skills on the latest topics in cloud services by providing learners with a mix of self-paced, interactive labs and virtual sessions led by Microsoft tech experts. CLX enables learners to minimize their time invested while maximizing their learning through its unique design, which includes four steps:

A knowledge assessment test
A Microsoft Learn study materials review
A virtual cram session
A practice test

At the start of the program, you’ll take a 20-question Knowledge Assessment to test your skills. Based on your results, you’ll receive customized course content that fits your experience—so you can focus only on the information that’s useful for you. If you’re a cloud computing pro, for example, you won’t need to study topics on the fundamentals of cloud computing, even if they’re a part of the course.

You’ll then dive into learning modules and hands-on, interactive online labs that mirror what you’ll experience in the professional world—helping you learn efficiently and effectively. The interactive labs are available on-demand and can be used as many times as needed.

What happens next?

After finishing the interactive labs, you can choose to attend a virtual cram session led by Microsoft-certified trainers that dives deeply into the course syllabus. You can use these sessions to ask any follow-up questions from the course content and get real-time help from Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs). To make sure you get the skills you need wherever you’re located, the two-to-four-hour sessions are held regularly in three time zones—Australian Easter Daylight Time (AEST), Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and Pacific Daylight Time (PDT).

As the final step, you can choose to take an 80-question practice test that takes approximately two hours and mimics the final Microsoft Azure Certification Exam, ensuring you’re well-prepared to pass with ease.

Once you’ve finished your practice test, you’ll receive your certificate of completion and a 50 percent discount off the cost of the Microsoft Azure Certification Exam—and you’ll walk away with the skills to excel in the world of data and AI.

How do I get started with CLX?

To learn more and to register for CLX, visit the Microsoft Cloud Events Portal or check out our Microsoft Azure CLX introductory video.

You can also explore our suite of six additional CLX program courses that are designed to quickly strengthen the Azure skills of IT professionals and beyond.

These courses—which you can read more about in our previous blog here—will help you exceed your Azure learning goals and equip you with the skills to advance your career, now and beyond.
Quelle: Azure

New Azure App Service plans fuel greater choice and savings

This blog is co-authored with Mayunk Jain, Stefan Schackow, Mads Damgård, and Jordan Selig.

In times of economic uncertainty, organizations need flexible options to achieve their business outcomes. To meet this need, we are excited to announce new plans for Microsoft Azure App Service customers with two new offerings in the Premium v3 (Pv3) service tier, and expansion in the Isolated v2 tier, which powers the high-security App Service Environment v3.

The rise in App Modernization projects is driven by companies of all sizes and digital maturity levels seeking powerful cost efficiencies as they continue to innovate and unlock competitive advantages with a leaner workforce and limited budgets. A brand new cost-effective P0v3 plan and a new series of memory-optimized (P*mv3) plans is designed to help more customers thrive and grow with Azure platform as a service (PaaS).

The P0v3 plan provides one of the most compelling price-to-performance ratios for organizations looking to get started with Azure App Service. As part of the modern Premium v3 tier, these plans include access to environments with faster processors, Azure Virtual Network support, and higher scale via increased vCPU, memory, and instance counts. The P0v3 and P*mv3 plans help you achieve more—with more options than before and greater flexibility to support your organization’s workload and free your development team to focus on innovation.

Reduce your app modernization costs without compromising on performance

The P0v3 plan gives you access to all the modern features that you expect from our most popular Premium v3 service plan at an extremely competitive price point. If you’re currently using or considering the Standard plan or Premium v2 (Pv2) plan, the new P0v3 plan delivers significantly higher performance at a similar monthly cost. What’s more, the P0v3 plan allows you to take advantage of Azure savings plans and reserved instance (RI) pricing—only available on the Premium v3 tier—for up to 55 percent more savings compared to the pay-as-you-go plan. Start planning your deployments today; app modernization has never been more compelling.

More diverse offerings meet your memory-intensive workload needs

Not all workloads in the cloud need the same resources, which is why organizations regularly optimize their architecture with a mix of technologies and service plans that best meet their current needs. To meet this need for varied workload sizes, we’ve developed the new memory-optimized series of P*mv3 plans, labeled as P1mv3, P2mv3, P3mv3, and so on.

These offerings provide the flexibility to scale your memory configuration without having to pay for additional cores. They also complement our existing line-up by creating more cost-effective options for workloads that need more memory to cache data or render a large page quickly, while working well using existing compute horsepower. They range from two virtual cores with 16 GB RAM in P1mv3 (compared to two cores, 8 GB RAM in P1v3) to 32 virtual cores with 256 GB RAM in the P5mv3.

As an example of how the memory-optimized plans can drive greater value for your organization, consider that the Linux pay as you go (PAYG) price for the East US region for the 16 GB P1mv3 plan with two virtual cores costs 54 percent less than the current four core, or 14 GB P3v2 offering and 40 percent less than the four virtual core and 16 GB P2v3 offering—while offering equivalent or more memory. Now, when you consider the savings plan discount for one and three years for P1mv3 as compared to P3v2, the savings jump to 65 percent and 75 percent respectively.

To learn more about the new Pv3 plans and pricing—for both Windows and Linux—visit the App Service pricing page. Then model how much you could save in your own environment using the Azure pricing calculator.

Premium v3 is your one-stop-shop for savings and scalability

Whether your organization is looking for entry-level plans to get started with app modernization or ready to expand its footprint with larger, more demanding workloads, the Premium v3 tier has you covered. With cost-effective instances as low as one virtual core with four GB RAM on the one hand, to the largest workloads running on 32 virtual core with 256 GB RAM on the other—and everything in between—Premium v3 plans give you the peace of mind to scale up or down within the same modern and dynamic environment as needed, and adapt your platform spending to your current needs.

If you’re using a different tier for your existing workloads, we recommend adding new workloads using Pv3 plans as they can easily coexist. Going forward, rather than adding another instance to a Pv2 or lower tier plan, consider the Premium v3 tier for greater savings and performance. As a fully managed application platform service, Azure App Service will ensure your workloads are configured to perform and scale at the highest levels no matter what plan you choose.

Announcing larger instances for App Service Environment

Customers with high security and compliance needs can also choose the App Service Environment which provides fine-grained control over inbound and outbound application network traffic. Unlike the shared, multi-tenant service, an App Service Environment hosts applications from only one customer and is powered by the Isolated v2 (Iv2) plans. We are excited to announce three new Isolated v2 offerings which expand the ability for organizations to run applications at high scale and with higher memory utilization in an isolated and secure environment. These new offerings are the I4v2, I5v2, and I6v2, providing new compute options ranging from 16 virtual cores with 64 GB memory to as much as 64 virtual cores with 256 GB memory.

These new offerings also provide additional reasons for customers currently using earlier versions of App Service Environment to migrate to Isolated v2. This blog describes the benefits of moving to Isolated v2.

Achieve more on the next step of your modernization journey

Availability of the new plans is rolling out in H1 2023 across the Azure regions. Check back regularly as availability expands in the coming weeks. For more details on the technical specifications of these plans, as well as information on the complete range of tiers and plans for Microsfot Azure App Service, please visit our pricing page.

If you are new to this journey, learn more about Azure App Modernization and get started with free Azure credits. If you are ready to start, check out our partner portal to find Microsoft partners with advanced specialization in app modernization to help speed up your deployments.

Bookmark the Apps on Azure blog to keep up with our expert coverage and product announcements and follow Microsoft Azure on Twitter for the latest news and updates. As always, we would love to hear your feedback and experiences in the comments below. Let us know how these new Azure PaaS offerings help in your app strategy for 2023 and beyond.
Quelle: Azure

Defend against DDoS attacks with Azure DDoS IP Protection

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks continue to rise as new threats and attack techniques emerge. With DDoS attacks becoming more frequent, it’s important for organizations of all sizes to be proactive and stay protected all year round. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) face the same risks as larger organizations though are more vulnerable as they often lack resources and specialized expertise.

We are committed to providing security solutions to all our customers. We are announcing the general availability of Azure DDoS IP Protection SKU, a new SKU of Azure DDoS Protection designed to meet the needs of SMBs.

Enterprise-grade DDoS protection at an affordable price point

Azure DDoS IP Protection provides enterprise-grade DDoS protection at an affordable price point. It offers the same essential capabilities as Azure DDoS Network Protection (previously known as Azure DDoS Protection Standard) to protect your resources and applications against evolving DDoS attacks. Customers also have the flexibility to enable protection on individual public IP addresses.

“DDoS protection is a must have today for critical websites. Azure DDoS Protection provides comprehensive protection though the existing DDoS Network Protection SKU did not fit the price point for smaller organizations. We are happy that the DDoS IP Protection SKU provides the same level of protection as the Network Protection SKU at an affordable price point and the flexibility to protect individual public IPs.”—Derk van der Woude, CTO, Nedscaper.

“We are excited that the DDoS IP Protection SKU provides enterprise-grade, cost effective DDoS protection for customers with smaller cloud environments with only a few public IP endpoints in the cloud.”—Markus Lintuala, Senior Technical Consultant, Elisa.

Key features of Azure DDoS IP Protection

Massive mitigation capacity and scale– Defend your workloads against the largest and most sophisticated attacks with cloud scale DDoS protection backed by Azure’s global network. This ensures that we can mitigate the largest attacks reported in history and thousands of attacks daily.
Protection against attack vectors– DDoS IP Protection mitigates volumetric attacks that flood the network with a substantial amount of seemingly legitimate traffic. They include UDP floods, amplification floods, and other spoofed-packet floods. DDoS IP Protection mitigates these potential multi-gigabyte attacks by absorbing and scrubbing them, with Azure's global network scale, automatically. It also protects against protocol attacks that may render a target inaccessible, by exploiting a weakness in the layer 3 and layer 4 protocol stack. They include SYN flood attacks, reflection attacks, and other protocol attacks. DDoS IP Protection mitigates these attacks, differentiating between malicious and legitimate traffic, by interacting with the client, and blocking malicious traffic. Resource (application) layer attacks target web applications and include HTTP/S floods and low and slow attacks. Use Azure Web Application Firewall to defend against these attacks.
Native integration into Azure portal– DDoS IP Protection is natively integrated into the Azure portal for easy setup and deployment. This level of integration enables DDoS IP Protection to identify your Azure resources and their configuration automatically.
Seamless protection– DDoS IP Protection seamlessly safeguards your resources. There’s no need to deploy anything in your Azure Virtual Network (VNet), or to change your current networking architecture. DDoS is deployed as an overlay on top of your current networking services.
Adaptive tuning– Protect your apps and resources while minimizing false-negatives with adaptive tuning tuned to the scale and actual traffic patterns of your application. Applications running in Azure are inherently protected by the default infrastructure-level DDoS protection. However, the protection that safeguards the infrastructure has a much higher threshold than most applications have the capacity to handle, so while a traffic volume may be perceived as harmless by the Azure platform, it can be devastating to the application that receives it. Adaptive tuning guarantees your applications are protected when application-targeted attacks are undetected by Azure’s DDoS infrastructure-level protection offered to all Azure customers.
Attack analytics, metrics, and logging– Monitor DDoS attacks near real-time and respond quickly to attacks with visibility into attack lifecycle, vectors, and mitigation. With DDoS IP Protection, customers can monitor when the attack is taking place, collect statistics on mitigation, and view the detection thresholds assigned by the adaptive tuning engine to make sure they align with expected traffic baselines. Diagnostic logs offer a deep-dive view on attack insights, allowing customers to investigate attack vectors, traffic flows, and mitigations to support them in their DDoS response strategy.
Integration with Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud– Strengthen your security posture with rich attack analytics and telemetry integrated with Microsoft Sentinel. We offer a Sentinel solution that includes comprehensive analytics and alert rules to support customers in their Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) strategy. Customers can setup and view security alerts and recommendations provided by Defender for Cloud.

Choosing the right Azure DDoS protection SKU for your needs

Azure DDoS protection is available in two SKUs:

DDoS IP Protection is recommended for SMB customers with a few public IP resources who need a comprehensive DDoS protection solution that is fully managed, easy to deploy, and monitor.
DDoS Network Protection is recommended for larger enterprises and organizations looking to protect their entire deployment that spans multiple virtual networks and includes many public IP addresses. It also offers additional features like cost protection, DDoS Rapid Response, and discounts on Azure Web Application Firewall.

Let’s see a detailed comparison between these two SKUs:

Get started

DDoS IP Protection can be enabled from the public IP address resource Overview blade.

Protection status in the Properties tab shows if the resource is DDoS protected, and what is the protection type (either Network or IP Protection).

For more information on DDoS IP Protection, see Azure DDoS IP Protection documentation.

Azure DDoS IP Protection pricing

With DDoS IP Protection, you only pay for the public IP resources protected. The cost is a fixed monthly amount for each public IP resource protected with no additional variable costs. For more details on pricing, visit the Azure DDoS Protection pricing page.

Next Steps

Azure portal
Configure DDoS telemetry
Configure DDoS diagnostic logging
Monitoring Azure DDoS Protection
Test with simulation partners

Quelle: Azure

Discover an Azure learning community with Microsoft Learn rooms

Microsoft Learn has many options for remote learning—and now we’re expanding our catalogue with even more. We’re excited to announce our newest offering to help connect you with our Azure learning community: Microsoft Learn rooms. Learning rooms are a core part of the Microsoft Learn community, and they’re designed to connect you with other learners and technical experts.

Whether you’re a tenured techie, looking to jumpstart your career, or begin a pathway, learning rooms open the door to a world of opportunities. The Learn community can help you grow your network, meet others in the field, explore topic-specific technologies in the real-world, and sharpen your Microsoft Azure Cloud skills. With learning rooms, you can join peers and experts on your pathway to skill up on Azure at your own pace in a safe and supportive environment—so you can strengthen your knowledge and propel your cloud computing career. 

What are learning rooms?

Learning rooms are free and open to anyone seeking a connected, supportive, and engaging community experience to learn. Designed for cohort learning and guided by a Learn expert, with asynchronous conversations and office hours, a focus for many of the learning rooms will be towards Microsoft Azure. They bring together individuals with a common learning interest—such as the Azure cloud—and unite them with experts in the community who will look to support and guide learners in their journey and foster an engaging and supportive educational environment.  They’re a part of the Microsoft Learn Azure community, a broader space where learners from all over the world can engage directly with technology experts and others who share common Azure interests.

Learning rooms are also connected to Microsoft Tech Community, which is a network of resources that supports the Azure, Windows Server, and SQL Server interest groups. Within the Tech Community are smaller tech communities for specific topics, like Azure infrastructure, and you can visit these smaller forums and browse all learning rooms that connect to it. Once you’ve found a room that you like, joining is easy—you simply request access using a registration form and accept a learner agreement. From there, you’ll be able to bring all your Azure questions, at any time of the day, to your cohort who will guide you through them—giving you the classroom experience right at home. Discover more about learning rooms here.

What will I learn?

Learning rooms focus across several technology areas. They include Microsoft Cloud and Azure subjects, such as Azure Infrastructure, Data and AI, and Digital and Application Innovation, and their small size ensures that you get exactly the support you need. Each room is led by Microsoft Learn experts, who are validated technical subject matter experts present throughout our community resources with experience in technical skilling, community support, and a deep knowledge in the room’s specific topic area. Not just anyone can be an expert—they’re proven community leaders that are selected by invitation only, such as Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs), and Microsoft Technical and Trainers (MTTs).

Besides offering one-on-one support, Microsoft Learn experts are also knowledgeable resources who can direct you to other programs that fit your skillset, such as our Microsoft Azure Connected Learning Experience (CLX), 30 Days to Learn It, and Azure Skills Navigator Guides. They can also give you studying tips, advise you on best learning practices, and they can invite other Microsoft leaders to a room to discuss even the most difficult technical topic areas on your learning path. Finally, experts can help you prep for many Microsoft Certification Exams, ensuring you get the knowledge you need to exceed your professional goals, wherever you are in your learning journey.

What happens in a room?

Once you’ve joined a room, you’ll be immersed in a lively discussion. You can post questions on complex or more straightforward topics, like how to sign up for a Virtual Training Day. If you’re preparing for a Microsoft Certification Exam, you can even use the room for study prep by crowdsourcing study guides and practice tests, learning about which questions are most likely to appear on your upcoming exam, or figuring out if you qualify for an exam discount. Whatever your need may be, you’ll get answers from a peer, pro, or invited Azure authority, giving you a myriad of thoughtful and diverse perspectives.

When you’re not posting something of your own, you can explore past threads from your peers to discover questions you may have never thought to ask. The most recent and popular threads will appear at the top of the room to ensure you’re always in the loop. You can also vote on questions and answers, boosting the most helpful responses directly to the top of forum. If you’re feeling like a pro yourself, you can even answer questions on your own—experts and other Azure authorities, who you’ll recognize by their blue and green nametag icons, will be there to validate your answers and support you every step of the way.

How do I sign up?

If you’re interested in joining a room, check out our Microsoft Learn community. Here, you can explore rooms like Azure infrastructure, data & AI, and digital & application innovation, and you can tap into other Microsoft Learn community resources.

Don’t forget to also explore our infrastructure skilling resources, read about the myriad of other Azure skilling content we’ve launched recently, sign up for a Virtual Training Day, or simply explore our Microsoft Learn Azure community for even more helpful resources.

If you’re interested in other Azure programs, explore our resources below:

Microsoft Azure CLX
Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge: 30 Days to Learn It
Azure Skills Navigator Guides

With Microsoft Learn, the knowledge is out there—it’s up to you to harness it.
Quelle: Azure

Announcing Azure Firewall enhancements for troubleshooting network performance and traffic visibility

IT security administrators are often called on to troubleshoot network issues. For instance, a critical application may exhibit latency or disconnections, frustrating end users. These issues may be caused by a recent routing update or changes in security. In some cases, the cause may be due to a sudden burst in network traffic—overwhelming the network resources.

Microsoft Azure Firewall now offers new logging and metric enhancements designed to increase visibility and provide more insights into traffic processed by the firewall. IT security administrators may use a combination of the following to root cause application performance issues:

o    Latency Probe metric is now in preview.
o    Flow Trace Log is now in preview.
o    Fat Flows Log is now in preview.

Azure Firewall is a cloud-native firewall as a service offering that enables customers to centrally govern and log all their traffic flows using a DevOps approach. The service supports both application and network-level filtering rules and is integrated with the Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence feed to filter known malicious IP addresses and domains. Azure Firewall is highly available with built-in auto-scaling.

Latency Probe metric—now in preview

In a network infrastructure, one may observe increases in latency depending on various factors. The ability to monitor the latency of the firewall is essential for proactively engaging in any potential issues with traffic or services in the infrastructure.

The Latency Probe metric is designed to measure the overall latency of Azure Firewall and provide insight into the health of the service. IT administrators can use the metric for monitoring and alerting if there is observable latency and diagnosing if the Azure Firewall is the cause of latency in a network.

In the case that Azure Firewall is experiencing latency, this can be due to various reasons, such as high CPU utilization, traffic throughput, or networking issues. As an important note, this tool is powered by Pingmesh technology, which means that the metric measures the average latency of the firewall itself. The metric does not measure end-to-end latency or the latency of individual packets.

Figure 1: Dashboard view of healthy firewall latency measured by the Latency Probe (Preview) metric.

Flow Trace logs—now in preview

Azure Firewall logging provides logs for various traffic—such as network, application, and threat intelligence traffic. Today, these logs show traffic through the firewall in the first attempt at a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection, also known as the SYN packet. However, this fails to show the full journey of the packet in the TCP handshake. The ability to monitor and track every packet through the firewall is paramount for identifying packet drops or asymmetric routes.

To dive further into an asymmetric routing example, Azure Firewall—as a stateful firewall—maintains state connections and automatically and dynamically allows traffic to successfully come back to the firewall. However, asymmetric routing can occur when a packet takes one path to the destination through the firewall and takes a different path when attempting to return to the source. This can be due to user misconfiguration, such as adding an unnecessary route in the path of the firewall.

As a result, one can verify if a packet has successfully flowed through the firewall or if there is asymmetric routing by viewing the additional TCP handshake logs in Flow Trace.

To do so, you can monitor network logs to view the first SYN packet and click "enable Flow Trace" to see the additional flags for verification:

o    SYN-ACK
o    FIN
o    FIN-ACK
o    RST
o    INVALID

By adding these additional flags in Flow Trace logs, IT administrators can now see the return packet, if there was a failed connection, or an unrecognized packet. To enable these logs, please read the documentation linked below.

Figure 2: Flow Trace logs displaying SYN-ACK and FIN packets.

Top Flows—now in preview

Today, Microsoft Azure Firewall Standard can support up to 30 Gbps and Azure Firewall Premium can support up to 100 Gbps of traffic processing. However, in any case, sometimes traffic flows can either be unintentionally or intentionally “heavy” depending on the size, duration, and other factors of the packets. Since these flows can potentially impact other flows and the processing of the firewall, it’s important to monitor these traffic flows, to ensure that the firewall can perform optimally.

The Top Flows log—or industry-known as Fat Flows—log shows the top connections that are contributing to the highest bandwidth in a given time frame through the firewall.

This visibility provides the following benefits for IT administrators:

o    Identifying the top traffic flows traversing through the firewall.
o    Identifying any unexpected or anomaly traffic.
o    Deciding what traffic should be allowed or denied, based on results and goals.

To enable these logs, please read the documentation linked below.

Figure 3: Top Flow logs displaying traffic with the top flow rates.

Next steps

For more information on Azure Firewall and everything we covered in this blog post, see the following resources:

· Azure Firewall documentation.

· Azure Firewall Manager documentation.

· Deploy and configure Azure Firewall logs and metrics.

· Enable Flow Trace and Top Flows Logs Tutorial.
Quelle: Azure

The Net Zero journey: Why digital twins are a powerful ally

Azure Digital Twins leverages IoT for powerful modeling that can ease transition to greater sustainability.

Climate impacts raise stakes for Net Zero transition

Following weeks of vital discussions at COP27 in Egypt, the urgency to bring the world to a more sustainable path has never been greater. Scientists have warned that the world needs to cut global emissions by 5 percent to 7 percent per year to limit the damage caused by climate change. At present, however, emissions are rising by 1 percent to 2 percent per year. Discovering new routes to a Net Zero economy is critical if we are to limit the economic and social damage of a rapidly changing climate. And that means we all have a part to play in ensuring we strike the optimal balance between greenhouse gas production and the amount of greenhouse gas that gets removed from the atmosphere.

A Microsoft and PWC blueprint for the transition to Net Zero highlights the importance of innovation and the harnessing of new technologies that enable organizations to deliver on their Net Zero ambitions, at pace. A key innovation that aims to accelerate organizations’ journey to Net Zero is digital twin technology supported by AI Infrastructure capabilities. A digital twin can be considered as a virtual working representation of assets, products, and production plants. Powered by Microsoft Azure AI-optimized infrastructure that leverages NVIDIA accelerated computing and networking technologies, digital twins allow organizations to visualize, simulate, and predict operations, whether those are at a manufacturing plant, a wind farm, a mining operation, or any other type of operation.

Adoption of digital twin technology offers early adopters the potential of truly accelerated and differentiated business value realization. Innovative companies can leverage this potent toolset to accelerate their innovation journeys and drive strategic business outcomes powered by technology innovation at scale. A recent study by Microsoft and Intel found that globally, only 28 percent of manufacturers have started rolling out a digital twin solution, and of those, only one in seven have fully deployed it at their manufacturing plants. One of the key findings of this study highlighted that when digital twins are utilized effectively, they can realize huge efficiency, optimization, and cost-saving gains while unlocking mission-critical insights that can drive innovation and improve decision-making for those who adopt the technology.

Maximizing wind energy production with digital twins

Digital twins have emerged as a powerful tool for renewable energy producers seeking optimization gains in their production processes too. Take South Korea's Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction as an example. As a leader in engineering, procurement, heavy manufacturing, power generation and desalination services, Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction was appointed by the South Korean government to help it meet the goals of its Green New Deal plan, which includes a target of generating 20 percent of the country's electricity needs through renewables by 2030.

Seeking improvements in the efficiency of their wind turbines, Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction partnered with Microsoft and Bentley Systems to develop a digital twin of its wind farms that helps it maximize energy production and reduce maintenance costs. The company currently has 16 South Korean wind farms in operation, which generate enough electricity to power as many as 35,000 homes per year. Its innovative digital controls and operations enables Doosan to remotely monitor wind farm operations, predict maintenance before failures occur, and limit the need for maintenance teams to physically inspect the wind turbines.

Leveraging Azure Digital Twins and Azure IoT Hub powered by NVIDIA-accelerated Azure AI Infrastructure capabilities, Doosan can simulate, visualize, and optimize every aspect of its infrastructure planning, deployment, and ongoing monitoring. This has led to greater energy efficiency, boosted employee safety, and improved asset resilience. And with Bentley seeing their Azure-powered digital twin technology reduce operational and maintenance costs by 15 percent at other facilities, Doosan is well-positioned to continue benefiting from their digital twin solution and unlocking new efficiency gains by leveraging the power of cloud-based AI infrastructure capabilities.

Leveraging digital twins to power Net Zero transition

In the oil and gas sector, digital twin technology is helping one of the world's leading carbon-emitting industries to identify opportunities for optimization and carbon reduction. A noteworthy showcase can be found with Tata Consulting Services who delivered a Clever Energy solution to a global consumer goods giant. Using digital twins, real-time data and cognitive intelligence to improve energy savings at this consumer goods customer’s production plants, the solution helped reduce energy use by up to 15 percent as well as an equivalent CO2 emissions reduction. Considering that buildings consume nearly 40 percent of the world’s energy and emit one third of greenhouse gasses, this solution also helps the customer alleviate some of the pressures of significant energy cost increases in Europe.

In another example, a large multinational supplier that aims to achieve Net Zero carbon status by no later than 2050 is today leveraging the power of digital twins to support its sustainability goals.

From the vast global network of complex assets this company manages, a digital twin of one of their facilities was developed to calculate real-time carbon intensity and energy efficiency. Microsoft Azure provided the perfect platform: the IoT Hub receives more than 250 billion data signals per month from the company’s global operating assets, with AI providing key insights into how they could become a safer and more efficient business and Azure AI Infrastructure and High-Performance Computing enabling the seamless processing of huge volumes of data.

With long-term plans in place to scale the digital twin solution to all of the company’s global facilities, Microsoft Azure's security, scalability, and powerful high-performance computing capabilities will be key supporting factors in how successfully they could transition to more carbon-aware operations.

Powering the Next Era of Industrial Digitalization

At NVIDIA GTC, a global AI conference, NVIDIA and Microsoft announced a collaboration to connect the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for developing and operating industrial metaverse applications with Azure Cloud Services. Enterprises of every scale will soon be able to use the Omniverse Cloud platform-as-a-service on Microsoft Azure to fast-track development and deployment of physically accurate, connected, secure, AI-enabled digital twin simulations.

Key takeaways about a Net Zero economy and digital twins

Shifting to a Net Zero economy is one of the defining challenges of our time. As the devastating impact of climate change continues to disrupt global economies, businesses will need novel ways of reducing their carbon footprint and help bring the world to a more sustainable path.

Considering the vast complexity of modern businesses—especially resource-intensive industries such as oil and gas, and manufacturing—finding ways to optimize processes, reduce waste, and accelerate time to value can be extremely cumbersome unless novel technology solutions are found to help provide differentiated strategic capabilities.

Digital twin technology offers organizations a powerful option to run detailed simulations generating vast amounts of data. By integrating that data to the power and scalability of Azure high performance computing (HPC) and leveraging the visualization power of Nvidia’s GPU-accelerated virtual computing capabilities, organizations can discover new opportunities for greater efficiency, optimization, and carbon-neutrality gains.

Read more about how companies are using IoT spatial intelligence to create detailed digital twins of physical assets by downloading the latest IoT Signals Report.

Learn more

To learn more about Azure HPC and AI, read more about Azure HPC solutions https://www.azure.com/hpc or to request a demo, contact HPCdemo@microsoft.com.
Quelle: Azure