Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Cost Details API now generally available for EA and MCA customers

The Cost Details API is now generally available for use by Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) customers. This API provides on-demand download of the granular cost details (formerly referred to as usage details) associated with your Microsoft charges. The API replaces all existing Usage Details APIs and provides data for charges in your invoice. For customers with an MCA agreement this includes Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Azure charges. This API is the go-to solution, along with Exports, for ingesting the raw cost data needed to build any custom reporting solution. To learn more about how to call the Cost Details API, please see our documentation on how to get small cost datasets on demand.

Customers that are not using Exports or the Cost Details API should migrate to one of these solutions moving forward. To learn more about which solution is best for your scenario, see our picking a cost details solution best practices.

Benefits of the new solutions

Both the Cost Details API and Exports provide extensive benefits on top of existing solutions today.

Security and stability—New solutions require Service Principal and/or user tokens in order to access data. For EA customers, keys used in the EA Reporting APIs are valid for six months. Going forward it is recommended to use token-based solutions through Service Principal or User authentication, consistent with Azure REST APIs.
Scalability—The EA Reporting APIs (available only for EA customers) and the Consumption Usage Details (available for both EA and MCA customers) aren't built to scale well as your Microsoft and Azure costs increase. The number of Azure cost records in your cost details dataset can get exceedingly large as you deploy more resources into the cloud. The new solutions are asynchronous and have extensive infrastructure enhancements behind them to ensure successful downloads for any size dataset.
Single dataset for all usage details—For EA customers, the existing EA Reporting APIs have separate endpoints for Azure usage charges versus Azure Marketplace charges. These datasets have been merged in the new solutions. A single dataset reduces the number of APIs that you need to call to see all your charges.
Purchase amortization—Customers who purchase Reservations can see an amortized view of their costs using the new solutions. You can request for amortized or actual cost datasets as part of report configuration. Learn more about using amortized cost details datasets.
Schema consistency—The Cost Details API and Exports provide files with matching fields. This allows you to easily move between solutions based on your scenario. Learn more about the fields available and understand cost details data fields.
Cost allocation integration—EA and MCA customers can use the new solutions to view charges in relation to the cost allocation rules that have been configured. Learn more about creating and managing Azure cost allocation rules.
Go forward improvements—The new solutions are being actively developed moving forward. They'll receive all new features as they're released.

Migrating to the new solutions

The EA Reporting APIs and the Consumption Usage Details API are no longer actively being developed. We strongly recommend migrating off these APIs as soon as possible. A retirement announcement will be made in the future with formal timelines for when the APIs will be turned off. However, the APIs will be fully supported from a reliability standpoint until the formal retirement date is reached.

When assessing the migration off existing usage details solutions, please use the documents below as a reference point:

Migrate from the Enterprise Reporting Usage Details API
Migrate from the Consumption Usage Details API

Please note that pay-as-you-go, MSDN, and Visual Studio customers who are not a part of either an Enterprise Agreement (EA) or Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) should continue using the Consumption Usage Details API.

Next steps

Learn more about automation with our Cost Management automation overview.
Assign permissions to SPN to call the APIs.
Understand the basics of how to work with cost details data.
Pick the cost details solution that is right for you.
Get small cost datasets on demand with the Cost Details API.

Follow us on Twitter @MSCostMgmt for more exciting Cost Management updates.
Quelle: Azure

Migrate and modernize with Azure to power innovation across the entire digital estate

Cloud adoption increased significantly during COVID-19 and continues for many companies. However, an enormous migration and modernization opportunity remains as organizations continue their digital transformation. In fact, 72 percent of organizations reported their industry’s pace of digital transformation accelerated because of COVID-19, according to a survey sponsored by Microsoft in The Economist1. And we don’t expect that to slow down anytime soon.

We are hearing key themes from our customers that reinforce this, including:

Cloud has become the catalyst for innovation. Customers are moving beyond operational efficiency to create new products and offerings, leveraging the unique capabilities of cloud to differentiate themselves.
Customers are not just looking for technology, they’re looking for a trusted partner. They need an expert to help them navigate these tough issues as they move toward hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge environments, facing new complexities and opportunities.
Security, data privacy, and compliance are top of mind for customers in every industry as cyberattacks continue to rise2.

These areas are opportunities for us to strengthen our partnerships and help our mutual customers realize their greatest potential. This is why we are focusing on three key areas of growth for Azure at Microsoft Inspire:

Innovation with new cloud-native experiences.
Modernization of app and data estates.
Migration and modernization of infrastructure and mission-critical workloads.

This week, we are announcing new Microsoft Azure capabilities to help partners increase return on investments, grow leads, and shorten sales cycles. This includes updates to our Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) and announcing the ISV Success Program.

Read on for more details on our latest developments and each of the opportunity areas to see how we can deliver the greatest value to our customers. Our Azure keynote session is also a great resource to learn more.

Key investments to help partners achieve success

Azure Migration and Modernization Program

We now have more than 500 partners enrolled in the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) across apps, data, and infrastructure. AMMP is our hero program to help simplify and accelerate migration and modernization, with the right mix of incentives, best practice guidance, tools, and expert help. AMMP has powered deeper go-to-market connections with partners—and our goal is to ensure every migration and modernization opportunity has a partner attached to it. Partners are at the center of how we execute with customers.

We’re making substantive investments and updates to AMMP to help drive scale and velocity of migrations:

Up to 2.5 times larger incentives for Windows Server and SQL Server migrations. 
Empowerment for Microsoft sales organizations to locally allocate incentives for their areas, providing more opportunity for partners to engage and feed into local plans.
Updated best practice guidance with the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and Azure Well Architected Framework (WAF).
New modernization capabilities in Azure Migrate, including the option for ISVs to integrate their own IP.

Now more than ever, we need partners’ help to scale our customers’ migration and modernization journeys. Sign up or nominate customers for the AMMP.

ISV Success Program

As the cloud becomes the fabric of every business, across every industry, customers need more complete solutions to support their growth and innovation. This creates tremendous opportunity as the demand for software as a service (SaaS) and "anything as a service solutions continue to increase. To help unlock opportunities for software providers we are excited to announce new benefits with the ISV Success Program to help ISVs innovate rapidly, build well architected applications, publish them to our commercial marketplace, and grow their sales. Currently in preview, and broadly available in fall 2022, the program is intended to be the pathway to ISV success in the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program.

Software providers can take advantage of this new program to build across the Microsoft Cloud and get access to cloud sandboxes, developer tooling, technical and business resources, and a dedicated community.

Innovate with new cloud-native experiences

Organizations across industries are looking to deliver highly personalized experiences to their end customers. Cloud-native applications can help meet these needs. For example, Microsoft Azure has helped retailers like Walgreens gain immediate access to rich transactional data and insights, enabling faster decisions and better customer experiences. According to IDC3, 750 million new logical applications will be built by 2025. This is why so many ISVs and enterprises are turning to Azure for their cloud-native applications. Partners can help customers build cloud apps using scalable containerized architectures combined with globally scalable databases infused with intelligence through AI.

Modernize application and data estates

Modernization of applications and data represents a huge partner opportunity where one project will lead to the next. In fact, 59 percent of organizations see modernizing apps to the cloud as a top initiative4. According to Microsoft estimates, the opportunity for data exceeds $42 billion today, and will grow to $85 billion by fiscal year 2025. Our goal is to help partners close deals to modernize the application and data estates even faster. We’ve made this even more seamless with our newly released Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. This end-to-end ecosystem integrates databases, analytics, and governance across the customer estate—enabling organizations to adapt in real-time, add layers of intelligence to their applications, unlock fast and predictive insights, and govern their data—wherever it resides.

No matter where our customers are in their modernization journey, Azure offers flexibility between control over managing infrastructure and the level of productivity desired. Partner advisory services and technical expertise is extremely valuable in this estate-level opportunity.

Migrate and modernize infrastructure and mission-critical workloads

Our customers often face time-sensitive decisions with datacenter contract renewals or software end-of-support. As a result, many customers are looking to shift large parts of their IT spend to the cloud with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) seeing the biggest increase. 

This year also brings timely migration opportunities for Windows Server and SQL Server. It’s a great time for partners to advise customers using SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 about End of Support (EOS) timelines and help them take action to stay secure. It’s also an opportunity to talk with customers about their cloud migration and modernization plans. We offer the best value at every stage of cloud migration. To share just two examples, it’s up to 80 percent less expensive to run Windows Server VMs and Azure SQL Managed Instance on Azure than it is with our main competitor.  And it’s not just about costs—we offer unique capabilities like Azure Automanage to simplify VM management and the broadest SQL Server compatibility to ease the move.

Read more about the top workloads with the largest migration opportunity as a key growth and revenue driver this coming year with announcement details, including:

Azure Confidential Computing capabilities, now generally available, allow partners to transition to Azure workloads that handle sensitive data with additional levels of protection.
Azure Center for SAP solutions, now in preview, is an end-to-end solution to deploy and manage SAP workloads on Azure, enabling customers and partners to create and run an SAP system as a unified workload, and providing a more seamless foundation for innovation on the Microsoft Cloud.
A new Azure Arc Boost Program, in partnership with Intel, will drive the deployment of Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI in customer hybrid environments through our Systems Integrator partner ecosystem.
Our most recent release of Azure Stack HCI, in preview, delivers more customer value and partner opportunity with new features by providing increased value on investment, shortened time to value, and improved support experience for Azure Stack HCI.

Get started at Microsoft Inspire

With so much opportunity ahead, where should you get started? Be sure to tune into the keynote and the Azure sessions linked below to hear from partners about how they’re already growing their business through Microsoft Cloud and Azure. Partners can bring tailored industry expertise and solutions to complement the innovation that Azure delivers. Together with our amazing partner community, we are creating opportunities with the most trusted cloud to empower customers to transform today, tomorrow, and build for the future.

Azure sessions

Power innovation across the digital estate
Grow revenue by accelerating customer adoption of Azure infrastructure
New SAP on Azure solutions and GTM offers to accelerate your business
Winning the data estate with Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform
Drive digital and application innovation with Microsoft Azure
Addressing sovereign requirements with Microsoft Cloud
SQL Server 2022: the most Azure-connected SQL Server release ever
Move your Azure hybrid business forward with Azure Arc
Enhance your customers' network security and drive business growth on
Latest Azure Confidential Computing innovations – generally available
How to make money migrating with Azure VMware Solution
Onboard as a HPC partner
Azure migration and modernization – Tools & Programs
Bring AI to Every App, Process and employee with Azure AI
Building industry sustainability solutions together with our partners
Innovate with cloud-scale apps, data, and AI
Winning the toughest analytics workloads on Azure
Advancing enterprise Linux application modernization on Azure
New opportunities to grow your practice with Azure Virtual Desktop

Sources: 

1The transformation imperative: Digital drivers in the covid-19 pandemic, The Economist

2Microsoft Digital Defense Report

3750 Million New Logical Applications: More Background, IDC

4Flexera Releases 2021 State of the Cloud Report Press Release, flexera.com

 
Quelle: Azure

Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage in preview

We are excited to announce the preview of Premium SSD v2, the next generation of Microsoft Azure Premium SSD Disk Storage. This new disk offering provides the most advanced block storage solution designed for a broad range of input/output (IO)-intensive enterprise production workloads that require sub-millisecond disk latencies as well as high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and throughput—at a low cost. With Premium SSD v2, you can now provision up to 64TiBs of storage capacity, 80,000 IOPS, and 1,200 MBPS throughput on a single disk. With best-in-class IOPS and bandwidth, Premium SSD v2 provides the most flexible and scalable general-purpose block storage in the cloud, enabling you to meet the ever-growing demands of your production workloads such as—SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, SAP, Cassandra, Mongo DB, big data, analytics, gaming, on virtual machines, or stateful containers. Moreover, with Premium SSD v2, you can provision granular disk sizes, IOPS, and throughput independently based on your workload needs, providing you more flexibility in managing performance and costs.

With the launch of Premium SSD v2, our Azure Disk Storage portfolio now includes one of the most comprehensive sets of disk storage offerings to satisfy workloads ranging from Tier-1 IOPS intensive workloads such as SAP HANA to general purpose workloads such as RDMS and NoSQL databases and cost-sensitive Dev/Test workloads.

Benefits of Premium SSD v2

As customers transition their production workloads to the cloud or deploy new cloud-native applications, balancing performance and cost is top of mind. For example, transaction-intensive database workloads may require high IOPS on a small disk size or a gaming application may need very high IOPS during peak hours. Similarly, big data applications like Cloudera/Hadoop may require very high throughput at a low cost. Hence, customers need the flexibility to scale their IOPS and throughput independent of the disk size. With Premium SSD v2, you can customize disk performance to precisely meet your workload requirements or seasonal demands, without the need to provision additional storage capacity.

Premium SSD v2 also enables you to provision storage capacity ranging from 1 GiB up to 64 TiB with GiB increments. All Premium SSD v2 disks provide a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/sec. If your disk requires higher performance, you can provision the required IOPS and throughput at a low cost, up to the max limits shown below. You can dynamically scale up or scale down the IOPS and throughput as needed without downtime, allowing you to manage disk performance cost-effectively while avoiding the maintenance overhead of striping multiple disks to achieve more performance. Summarizing the key benefits:

Granular disk size in 1 GiB increments.
Independent provisioning of IOPS, throughput, and GiB.
Consistent sub-millisecond latency.
Easier maintenance with scaling performance up and down without downtime.

Premium SSD v2, like all other Azure Disk Storage offerings, will provide our industry-leading data durability and high availability at general availability.

Following is a summary comparing Premium SSD v2 with the current Premium SSD and Ultra Disk.

 

Ultra Disk

Premium SSD v2

Premium SSD

Disk Size

4 GiB – 64 TiB

1 GiB – 64 TiB

4 GiB – 32 TiB

Baseline IOPS

Varies by disk size

3,000 IOPS free

Varies by disk size

Baseline throughput

Varies by disk size

125 MBPS free

Varies by disk size

Peak IOPS

160,000 IOPS

80,000 IOPS

20,000 IOPS

Peak Throughput

4,000 MBPS

1,200 MBPS

900 MBPS

Durability

99.999999999% durability

(~0% annual failure rate)

99.999999999% durability

(~0% annual failure rate)

99.999999999% durability

(~0% annual failure rate)

Supported Azure Virtual Machines

Premium SSD v2 can be used with any premium storage-enabled virtual machines sizes enabling you to leverage a diverse set of virtual machine sizes. Currently, Premium SSD v2 can only be used as data disks. Premium SSDs and Standard SSDs can be used as OS disks for virtual machines using Premium SSD v2 data disks.

Pricing

Premium SSD v2 disks are billed hourly based on the provisioned capacity, IOPS, and MBPS. Let’s take an example of a disk that you provision with 100 GiB capacity, 5000 IOPS, and 150 MB/sec throughput.

The disks are billed per GiB of the provisioned capacity. Hence, you will be charged for 100 GiB of the provisioned capacity.
The disks are billed for any additional IOPS provisioned over the free baseline of 3,000 IOPS. In this case, since you provisioned 5000 IOPS, you will be billed for the additional 2,000 IOPS.
The disks are billed for any additional throughput over the free baseline throughput of 125 MB/s. In this case, since you provisioned 150 MB/sec throughput, you will be billed for the additional 25 MB/s throughput.

You can learn more on the Azure Managed Disks pricing page.

Getting Started

Premium SSD v2 is currently available in preview in select regions. If you are interested in participating in the preview, you can request access to get started. Once enrolled in the preview program, you will be able to create and manage Premium SSD v2 via the Azure portal, PowerShell, and CLI SDKs. You can refer to the Premium SSD v2 documentation to learn more.

We look forward to hearing your feedback. Please email us at AzureDisks@microsoft.com with any questions.
Quelle: Azure

Modernize with Azure Migrate

With the pandemic mostly behind us, several large economies have opened in some shape or form. This, despite the uneven supply of goods and services and higher than usual energy costs. The higher energy cost and the resulting increase in the cost of doing business, has led to a tighter economic outlook. Coupled with long lead times for required parts and continued remote work, datacenter management is harder and costlier than it has been. However, maintaining and growing any business requires additional information technology (IT) resources. Thus, there is an increased need for IT solutions to maintain business continuity and sustain innovation. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft’s Azure fill this need and are less affected by these constraints due to the economies of scale. Further, the cloud consumption model allows customers to quickly scale resources up or down to support agile businesses. This is why public cloud spend continues to accelerate and the top cloud initiatives for all organizations are migrating more loads, optimizing existing use, and modernizing through platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS)1.

Customer requirements

The customer requirement is to stay competitive, both on the technical and business fronts, to ensure continued success. Technical competency requires an agile and innovative IT platform with data analytics to provide insights that can help differentiate from the competition. It would be ideal if such an innovative platform is available at a lower cost. Incidentally, modernizing existing IT infrastructure, applications, and data to PaaS/SaaS models in the cloud, delivers on all these requirements, leading to a higher return on investment (ROI) for the customer.

The higher efficiency and lower cost due to the adoption of modern cloud-native architectures, such as PaaS and SaaS, also leads to greater levels of flexibility. Thus, setting the stage for the customer to realize greater value as they progress from IaaS to PaaS and onto SaaS models. Please download our analyst report for details on options and value due to application modernization in Azure.

Microsoft’s commitment to modernization

This week at Microsoft Inspire, we are highlighting our commitment to modernization with integrated, at-scale modernization of ASP.NET applications to Azure Application Service. Also, in preview is Azure Migrate’s support of discovery and assessment of SQL Server running in Microsoft Hyper-V and Physical environments and IaaS services of other public clouds. Please see our tech community blog for more details on this, and other Azure Migrate features available for Linux and Windows workloads.

Enabling deeper integration with our ISV partners

Azure Migrate’s extensible framework is ideal for deeper integration of first-party features to drive automation, while also leveraging third-party tools. Here is a brief view of partner capabilities that can be added to this flexible framework:

Over the years, enterprises have built and expanded custom applications, which require modernization to better support fast-changing business needs. See how Microsoft and CAST partner by combining Azure Migrate and software intelligence produced by CAST technology to automate migration and modernization under the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP).
Operability of your cloud infrastructure and workloads is key to cloud adoption success and Azure landing zones provide prescriptive guidance to set a well architected foundation for your Azure infrastructure. In partnership with HashiCorp and our Terraform Azure community, we now have the reference implementation for deploying and managing Azure resources at enterprise scale.

Learn more

Attend this Microsoft Inspire on-demand session to learn more about cloud migration and modernization. Check out this FastTrack link for moving to Azure efficiently and get best practice guidance from the Azure migration and modernization center (AMMC). AMMP is now one comprehensive program for all migration and modernization needs of our customers. Learn more and join AMMP today.

Sources: 

1. Trends in Cloud Computing: 2022 State of the Cloud Report, Flexera.com.
Quelle: Azure

Accelerating capital markets workloads for Murex on Azure

The financial services industry is constantly evolving to meet customer and regulatory demands. It is facing a variety of challenges spanning people, processes, and technology. Financial institutions (FIs) need to continuously accelerate to achieve technology and innovation while maintaining scale, quality, speed, and safety. Simultaneously, they need to handle evolving regulatory frameworks, manage risk, digitally transform, process financial transaction volumes, and accelerate cost reductions and restructuring efforts.

Murex is a leading global software provider of trading, risk management, processing operations, and post-trade solutions for capital markets. FIs around the world deploy Murex’s MX.3 platform to better manage risk, accelerate transformation, and simplify compliance while driving revenue growth.

Murex MX.3 on Azure

Murex MX.3 has been certified for Microsoft Azure since version 3.1.35. We have been collaborating with Murex and global strategic partners like Accenture and DXC to provide Murex customers with a simple way to create and scale MX.3 infrastructure and achieve agility in business transformation. With the recent version 3.1.48, SQL Server is supported and customers can now benefit from the performance, scalability, resilience, and cost savings facilitated by SQL Server. With SQL Server IaaS Extension, Murex customers can run SQL Server virtual machines (VMs) in Azure with PaaS capabilities for Windows OS (with automated patching setting disabled in order to prevent the installation of a cumulative update that may not yet be supported by MX3).

Architecture

Murex customers can now refer to the architecture to implement MX.3 application on Azure. Azure enables a secure, reliable, and efficient environment, significantly reducing the infrastructure cost needed to operate the MX.3 environment and providing scalability and a highly performant environment. Customers running MX.3 on Azure can take advantage of multilayered security provided by Microsoft across physical data centers, infrastructure, and operations in Azure. They can benefit from the Compliance Program that helps accelerate cloud adoption with proactive compliance assurance for highly critical and regulated workloads. Customers can maximize their existing on-premises investments using an effective hybrid approach. Azure provides a holistic, seamless, and more secure approach to innovation across customers’ on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments.

The architecture is designed to provide high availability and disaster recovery. Murex customers can achieve threat intelligence and traffic control using Azure Firewall, cost optimization using Reserved Instances and VM scale sets, and high storage throughout using Azure NetApp Files Ultra Storage.

“With the deployment of large scale—originally specialized platform-based—Murex workloads, Azure NetApp Files has proven to deliver the ideal Azure landing zone for storage-performance intensive, mission-critical enterprise applications and to live up to its promise to Migrate the Un-migratable," says Geert van Teylingen, Azure NetApp Files Principal Product Manager from NetApp.

Customers running Murex on Azure

Customers around the world are migrating the Murex platform from on-premises to Azure.

ABN AMRO has moved their MX.3 trading and treasury front-to-back-to-risk platform to Azure, achieving flexibility, agility, and improved time to market. ABN AMRO’s journey to Azure progressed from proof of concept to production, with the Murex MX.3 platform now entirely operational on Azure.

“The key focus for us was always to make sure that we could automate most processes while preserving its operational excellence and key features,” says Kees van Duin, IT Integrator at ABN AMRO.

“Thanks to Microsoft, we were able to preserve nearly 90 percent of our original design and move our platform to the cloud, while in-production, as efficiently as possible. We couldn’t be happier with the result,” he continues.

For Pavilion Energy, Upskills helped drive implementation for Murex Trading in Azure, helping reduce the risk of errors, increase the volume of trading activities, and optimize the management of their Murex MX.3 platform environments.

“We have been working on the Murex technology for over 10 years. Implementing Murex Trading Platform fully into Azure has proven to be the right decision to reduce the risk of delivery, optimize the environments management, and provide sustainable solutions and support to Pavilion Energy” says Thong Tran, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Upskills.

Strategic partners helping accelerate Murex workloads

Murex customers can modernize MX.3 workloads, reduce time-to-market and operational costs, and increase acceleration, leveraging accelerators, scripts, and blueprints from our partners—Accenture and DXC.

Accenture and Microsoft have decades of experience partnering with each other and building joint solutions that help customers achieve their goals. Leveraging our strategic alliance to better serve our customers, Accenture has designed and created specific accelerators, tools, and methodologies for MX.3 on Azure that could help organizations develop richer DevOps and become more agile while controlling costs.

Luxoft, a DXC Technology Company, with Microsoft as a global strategic partner for more than 30 years and Murex as a top-tier alliance partner for more than 13 years, helps modernize solutions to connect people, data, and processes with tangible business results. DXC has developed execution frameworks that adopt market best practices to accelerate and minimize risks of cloud migration of MX.3 to Azure.

Keeping pace with the changing regulatory and compliance constraints, financial innovation, computation complexity, and cyber threats is essential for FIs. FIs around the world are relying on Murex MX.3 to accelerate transformation and drive growth and innovation while complying with complex regulations. Customers are using Azure to enhance business agility and operation efficiency, reduce risk and total cost of ownership, and achieve scalability and robustness.

Additional resources

Microsoft and Murex team to help FIs move to Azure
Murex MX.3 architecture
ABN AMRO digital transformation journey with Murex

Quelle: Azure

Digital transformation for manufacturers requires additional IT/OT security

While every industry is vulnerable to a ransomware attack, manufacturers are at a particular risk. While digitization and automation have helped transform the industry, it has simultaneously opened up new attack vectors within organizations. Now the most targeted industry, the manufacturing industry, has seen a 300 percent increase in cyberattacks in a single year.

Beyond the tremendous growth in attacks, manufacturing companies make an ideal target for hackers due to the high value of the companies themselves, the high costs of unplanned downtime, and the highly visible impact that downtime has on consumers’ daily lives. With the risks so high, an enterprise-level solution that provides visibility and protection like Microsoft Defender for IoT is essential.

Visibility is the first step to network protection

The number of connected industrial control system (ICS)/operational technology (OT) devices in manufacturing facilities continues to grow. The benefits for the operations side of the house are clear, but the lack of visibility into them poses serious security risks for chief information security officers (CISOs).

Manufacturers often have no way to identify and monitor what all their connected devices are doing and with whom or what they are communicating. Worse, all too often they lack even a simple inventory of all the connected devices they have in their facilities. In case of an attack, the lack of visibility means that they have no way of tracing the attack vector the hacker took, making them vulnerable to a second wave and delaying recovery and remediation.

Continuous monitoring without impacting productivity

Microsoft Defender for IoT not only creates asset maps within minutes of being turned on, but it also provides continuous monitoring of every device in every facility around the world. Microsoft’s Section 52 has access to tens of trillions of identity, endpoint, and other signals each day. The threat intelligence from this specialized IoT and ICS research team produces high-impact insights that help keep manufacturers safe from attacks.

The agentless nature of the system protects companies without impacting production, no matter the topology of the network or the regulations governing the industry. And, with round-the-clock protection, Microsoft Defender for IoT can alert the SecOps team about an intrusion any time, any place.

Security for networks in an age of IT and OT convergence

As their digital transformations have progressed, manufacturers have seen their IT and OT environments converge. The air gap between them that ensured production would continue even if IT assets were taken offline is increasingly a thing of the past. With these trendlines, forward-thinking CISOs and their boards are taking proactive steps to protect the entire company from cyber-physical attacks that could have huge costs to safety, production, reputation, and the bottom line.

Fortunately, Microsoft Defender for IoT can usually be deployed in less than a single day per facility and works right out of the box for large enterprises and small, niche facilities. With it, defenders of OT networks have a powerful new tool at their disposal to help keep hackers out and people, production, and profits safe.

For more information on how Microsoft Defender for IoT can help protect your business, visit Microsoft Defender for IoT | Microsoft Azure today.
Quelle: Azure