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Over 100 Azure services support PROTECTED Australian government data

Today Microsoft published an independent security assessment of 113 Microsoft Azure services for their suitability to handle official and PROTECTED Australian government information. This assessment, carried out under the Information Security Registered Assessor Program (IRAP), is now available for customers and partners to review and use as they plan for increasing the use of cloud in government.

This milestone significantly expands the ability of the Australian government to leverage Microsoft Azure to drive digital transformation. The expanded scope of this IRAP assessment includes cognitive services, machine learning, IoT, advanced cybersecurity, open source database management, and serverless and application development technologies. This enables the full range of innovation within Azure Australia to be utilized for government applications, further reinforcing our commitment to achieving the broadest range of accreditations and assurances to meet the needs of government customers.

This assurance is critical for customers such as the Victorian Government, using ICT shared services provider Cenitex in partnership with Canberra-based OOBE to deploy VicCloud Protect, a ground-breaking and highly secure service that enables its government customers to safely manage applications and data rated up to PROTECTED level.

“VicCloud Protect is a first for the Victorian Government and our customers can now confidently store their classified data in the cloud with peace of mind that the platform meets both the Australian Cyber Security Centre guidelines and the Victorian Protection Data Security Framework to handle Protected level information.” – Nigel Cadywould, Cenitex Service Delivery Director

This is just one of many examples of Australian governments and partners building on the secure foundations of Azure to build transformative solutions for government. Microsoft is one of the only global cloud providers to operate cloud regions in Canberra specifically designed and secured to meet the strict security compliance requirements of Australian government and national critical infrastructure, including:

Data center facilities within CDC, a datacenter provider based in Canberra that specializes in government and national critical infrastructure and meets the stringent sovereignty and transparent ownership controls required by the Australian government’s hosting policy.
Leading physical and personnel security within the Canberra facilities designed for the even higher requirements of handling secret government data.
Direct connection within the data center to the federal government’s intragovernment communications network (ICON) for enhanced security and performance.
Unmatched flexibility for colocation of critical systems in the same facilities as Microsoft Azure in Canberra and access to the ecosystem of solution providers deployed within CDC.

Microsoft delivers the Azure Australia Central regions in Canberra as the first and best home of Australian government data and applications. The assessment released today covers not just the Central regions , but addresses all regions of Microsoft Azure in Australia, including Australia East (Sydney) and Australia Southeast (Melbourne). Also, as Microsoft has introduced further capacity and capabilities into the Australia Central regions, we have streamlined the process for customers to deploy services into our Canberra regions. Customers no longer need to manually request access to deploy services to the Australia Central region and can now directly deploy from the portal.

Because the Australian Government has designed the IRAP program to follow a risk-based approach, each customer decides whether to operate that service at the PROTECTED level or lower. To assist customers with their authorization decision, Microsoft makes the IRAP assessment report and supporting documents available to customers and partners on an Australia-specific page of the Microsoft Service Trust Portal.

For government customers who want to get started building solutions for PROTECTED level data, we’ve published Australia PROTECTED Blueprint guidance with reference architectures for IaaS and PaaS web applications along with threat model and control implementation guidance. This Blueprint enables customers to more easily deploy Azure solutions suitable for processing, storage, and transmission of sensitive and official information classified up to and including PROTECTED.

Learn more about our latest IRAP assessment

Our IRAP assessment report and supporting documents are available on the Australia-specific page of the Microsoft Service Trust Portal
Find additional documents and configuration guidance for operating at PROTECTED on the Azure Australia Microsoft Docs page and the AU-PROTECTED Blueprints on the Service Trust Portal
Learn more about the Australia Central and Australia Central 2 regions and CDC Data Centres

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Azure Cost Management updates – September 2019

Whether you're a new student, thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints and you need to know what you're spending, where, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when it comes to the bill, and this is where Azure Cost Management comes in!

We're always looking for ways to learn more about your challenges and how Cost Management can help you better understand where you're accruing costs in the cloud, identify and prevent bad spending patterns, and optimize costs to empower you to do more with less. Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates based on your feedback:

Reconcile invoiced charges with the new invoice details view
Automate reporting across subscriptions with management group exports
What's new in Cost Management Labs
Download charts to share views outside the Azure portal
New ways to save money with Azure!
Documentation updates

Let's dig into the details.

 

Reconcile invoiced charges with the new invoice details view

Have you ever had to compare your PDF invoice with raw cost and usage details? The process can be a bit daunting. Detailed usage data is critical for analysis and reporting, but can be overkill for invoice reconciliation. You need a summary of your usage with the same granularity as the invoice. This is exactly what you get with the new Invoice details view.

With the new Invoice details view, you can also view and filter by part number for Enterprise Agreement (EA) accounts and use publisher and charge type to identify Marketplace purchases. What would you like to see next?

 

Automate reporting across subscriptions with management group exports

You already know you can dig into your cost and usage data from the Azure portal. You may even know you can get rich reporting from the Cost Management Query API or get the full details, in all its glory, from the UsageDetails API. These are both great for ad-hoc queries, but you may be looking for a simpler solution. This is where Cost Management exports come in!

Cost Management exports automatically publish your cost and usage data to a storage account on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Up to this month, you've been able to schedule exports for billing accounts, subscriptions, and resource groups. Now, you can also schedule exports across subscriptions using management groups. If you manage pay-as-you-go (PAYG) subscriptions, this will be even more powerful because, for the first time, you'll be able to export all cost and usage data for your account from a single place.

If you do start using management groups, don't forget they also allow you to analyze and drill into costs and get notified before they go over predefined limits.

Learn more about exports in the Create and manage exported data tutorial.

 

What's new in Cost Management Labs

With Cost Management Labs, you get a sneak peek at what's coming in Azure Cost Management and can engage directly with us to share feedback and help us better understand how you use the service, so we can deliver more tuned and optimized experiences. Here are a few features you can see in Cost Management Labs:

Download charts as an image – This is now available in the public portal.
Open the desired view, then click the Export command at the top, select the PNG option, and click the Download charts button.
Dark theme support in cost analysis – This is now available in the public portal.
Support for the Azure portal dark theme was added to cost analysis in early August. We're making the last few final touches and expect this to be available from the full portal in early September.
New: Get started quicker with the cost analysis Home view
Cost Management offers 5 built-in views to get started with understanding and drilling into your costs. The Home view gives you quicker access to those views so you get to what you need faster!

Of course, that's not all! Every change in Cost Management is available in Cost Management Labs a week before it's in the full Azure portal, like the new Invoice details view and scheduling management group exports. We're eager to hear your thoughts and understand what you'd like to see next. What are you waiting for? Try Cost Management Labs today!

 

Save and share customized views in cost analysis

You built a custom view, saved it, and even shared it with your team. But now you need to share that view outside the portal. Whether you need to present it as part of a larger PowerPoint deck or simply share it over email, you can now download charts in cost analysis as an image to share it with others. You'll see a slightly redesigned Export menu which now offers a PNG option when viewing charts.

 

New ways to save money with Azure

Lots of cost optimization improvements have been introduced over the past month! Here are a few you might be interested in:

Lower your upfront reservation costs with monthly payment options.
SQL Data Warehouse reservations are now available in 18 more regions.
App Service Premium plan costs an average 35 percent less. Consider switching from the Standard plan to get more for less.
Azure Archive Storage costs up to 50 percent less in some regions.
Data transfer to Azure CDN from Microsoft sourced from Azure services like Azure Storage and Media Services is free, starting October 2019.
Azure SQL Database instance pools (new preview) offer a new, cost-effective way to migrate smaller databases to the cloud.

 

Documentation updates

We added a clarification in the budgets tutorial about when to expect email alerts. In general, new cost and usage data is available in Cost Management within 8-12 hours, depending on the service. Budget alerts are processed within the next 4 hours. You can generally expect to receive budget alerts via email or action group within 12-16 hours. Keep in mind this time is based on when services emit usage data. Learn more about Cost Management data in the Understanding Cost Management data documentation.

Want to keep an eye on all documentation updates? Check out the Cost Management doc change history in the azure-docs repository on GitHub. If you see something missing, select Edit at the top of the document and submit a quick pull request.

 

What's next?

These are just a few of the big updates from last month. We're always listening and making constant improvements based on your feedback, so please keep the feedback coming!

Follow @AzureCostMgmt on Twitter and subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates, tips, and tricks! And, as always, share your ideas and vote up others in the Cost Management feedback forum.
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Azure Cosmos DB recommendations keep you on the right track

The tech world is fast-paced, and cloud services like Azure Cosmos DB get frequent updates with new features, capabilities, and improvements. It’s important—but also challenging—to keep up with the latest performance and security updates and assess whether they apply to your applications. To make it easier, we’ve introduced automatic and tailored recommendations for all Azure Cosmos DB users. A large spectrum of personalized recommendations now show up in the Azure portal when you browse your Azure Cosmos DB accounts.

Some of the recommendations we’re currently dispatching cover the following topics

SDK upgrades: When we detect the usage of an old version of our SDKs, we recommend upgrading to a newer version to benefit from our latest bug fixes and performance improvements.
Fixed to partitioned collections: To fully leverage Azure Cosmos DB’s massive scalability, we encourage users of legacy, fixed-sized containers that are approaching the limit of their storage quota to migrate these containers to partitioned ones.
Query page size: We recommend using a query page size of -1 for users that define a specific value instead.
Composite indexes: Composite indexes can dramatically improve the performance and RU consumption of some queries, so we suggest their usage whenever our telemetry detects queries that can benefit from them.
Incorrect SDK usage: It’s possible for us to detect when our SDKs are incorrectly used, like when a client instance is created for each request instead of being used as a singleton throughout the application; corresponding recommendations are provided in these cases.
Lazy indexing: The purpose of Azure Cosmos DB’s lazy indexing mode is rather limited and can impact the freshness of query results in some situations. We advise using the (default) consistent indexing mode instead of lazy indexing.
Transient errors: In rare occurrences, some transient errors can happen when a database or collection gets created. SDKs usually retry operations whenever a transient error occurs, but if that’s not the case, we notify our users that they can safely retry the corresponding operation.

Each of our recommendations includes a link that brings you directly to the relevant section of our documentation, so it’s easy for you to take action.

3 ways to find your Azure Cosmos DB recommendations

1.    Click on this message at the top of the Azure Cosmos DB blade:

2.    Head directly to the new “Notifications” section of your Cosmos DB accounts:

3.    Or even find them through Azure Advisor, making it easier to receive our recommendations for users who don’t routinely visit the Azure portal.

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll expand the coverage of these notifications to include topics like partitioning, indexing, network security, and more. We also plan to surface general best practices to ensure you’re making the most out of Azure Cosmos DB.

Have ideas or suggestions for more recommendations? Email us or leave feedback using the smiley on the top-right corner of the Azure portal!
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Built-in Jupyter notebooks in Azure Cosmos DB are now available

Earlier this year, we announced a preview of built-in Jupyter notebooks for Azure Cosmos DB. These notebooks, running inside Azure Cosmos DB, are now available.

Cosmic notebooks are available for all data models and APIs including Cassandra, MongoDB, SQL (Core), Gremlin, and Spark to enhance the developer experience in Azure Cosmos DB. These notebooks are directly integrated into the Azure Portal and your Cosmos accounts, making them convenient and easy to use. Developers, data scientists, engineers and analysts can use the familiar Jupyter notebooks experience to:

Interactively run queries
Explore and analyze data
Visualize data
Build, train, and run machine learning and AI models

In this blog post, we’ll explore how notebooks make it easy for you to work with and visualize your Azure Cosmos DB data.

Easily query your data

With notebooks, we’ve included built-in commands to make it easy to query your data for ad-hoc or exploratory analysis. From the Portal, you can use the %%sql magic command to run a SQL query against any container in your account, no configuration needed. The results are returned immediately in the notebook.

Improved developer productivity

We’ve also bundled in version 4 of our Azure Cosmos DB Python SDK for SQL API, which has our latest performance and usability improvements. The SDK can be used directly from notebooks without having to install any packages. You can perform any SDK operation including creating new databases, containers, importing data, and more.

Visualize your data

Azure Cosmos DB notebooks comes with a built-in set of packages, including Pandas, a popular Python data analysis library, Matplotlib, a Python plotting library, and more. You can customize your environment by installing any package you need.

For example, to build interactive visualizations, we can install bokeh and use it to build an interactive chart of our data.

Users with geospatial data in Azure Cosmos DB can also use the built-in GeoPandas library, along with their visualization library of choice to more easily visualize their data.

Getting started

Follow our documentation to create a new Cosmos account with notebooks enabled or enable notebooks on an existing account.
Start with one of the notebooks included in the sample gallery in Azure Cosmos Explorer or Data Explorer.
Share your favorite notebooks with the community by sending them to the Azure Cosmos DB notebooks GitHub repo.
Tag your notebooks with #CosmosDB, #CosmicNotebooks, #PoweredByCosmos on social media. We will feature the best and most popular Cosmic notebooks globally!

Stay up-to-date on the latest Azure #CosmosDB news and features by following us on Twitter or LinkedIn. We’d love to hear your feedback and see your best notebooks built with Azure Cosmos DB!
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SAP on Azure Architecture – Designing for performance and scalability

This is the second in a four-part blog series on designing a SAP on Azure Architecture. In the first part of our blog series we have covered the topic of designing for security. Robust SAP on Azure Architectures are built on the pillars of security, performance and scalability, availability and recoverability, and efficiency and operations. This blog will focus on designing for performance and scalability. 

Microsoft support in network and storage for SAP

Microsoft Azure is the eminent public cloud for running SAP applications. Mission critical SAP applications run reliably on Azure, which is a hyperscale, enterprise proven platform offering scale, agility, and cost savings for your SAP estate.

With the largest portfolio of SAP HANA certified IaaS cloud offerings customers can run their SAP HANA Production scale-up applications on certified virtual machines ranging from 192GB to 6TB of memory. Additionally, for SAP HANA scale-out applications such as BW on HANA and BW/4HANA, Azure supports virtual machines of 2TB memory and up to 16 nodes, for a total of up to 32TB. For customers that require extreme scale today, Azure offers bare-metal HANA large instances for SAP HANA scale-up to 20TB (24TB with TDIv5) and SAP HANA scale-out to 60TB (120TB with TDIv5).

Our customers such as CONA Services are running some of the largest SAP HANA workloads of any public cloud with a 28TB SAP HANA scale out implementation. 

Designing for performance

Performance is a key driver for digitizing business processes and accelerating digital transformation. Production SAP applications such as SAP ERP or S/4HANA need to be performant to maximize efficiency and ensure a positive end-user experience. As such, it is essential to perform a detailed sizing exercise on compute, storage and network for your SAP applications on Azure.

Designing compute for performance

In general, there are two ways to determine the proper size of SAP systems to be implemented in Azure, by using reference sizing or through the SAP Quick Sizer.

For existing on-premises systems, you should reference system configuration and resource utilization data. The system utilization information is collected by the SAP OS Collector and can be reported via SAP transaction OS07N as well as the EarlyWatch Alert. Similar information can be retrieved by leveraging any system performance and statistics gathering tools. For new systems, you should use SAP quick sizer.

Within the links below you can also attain the network and storage throughput per Azure Virtual Machines type:

Sizes for Windows Virtual Machines in Azure
Sizes for Linux Virtual Machines in Azure

Designing highly performant storage

In addition to selecting an appropriate database virtual machine based on the SAPS and memory requirements, it is important to ensure that the storage configuration is designed to meet the IOPS and throughput requirements of the SAP database. Be mindful, that the chosen virtual machine has the capability to drive IOPS and throughput requirements. Azure premium managed disks can be striped to aggregate IOPS and throughput values, for example 5 x P30 disks would offer 25K IOPS and 1000 MB/s throughput.

In the case of SAP HANA databases, we have published a storage configuration guideline covering production scenarios and also a cost-conscious non-production variant. Following our recommendation for production will ensure that the storage is configured to successfully pass all SAP HCMT KPIs, it is imperative to enable write accelerator on the disks associated with the /hana/log volume as this facilitates sub millisecond writes latency for 4KB and 16KB blocks sizes.

Ultra Disks is designed to deliver consistent performance and low latency for I/O-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA and any database (SQL, Oracle, etc.) With ultra disk you can reach maximum virtual machine I/O limits with a single Ultra DISKS, without having to stripe multiple disks as is required with premium disks.

At September 2019, Azure Ultra Disk Storage is generally available in East US 2, South East Asia, North Europe regions. and supported on DSv3 and ESv3 VM types. Refer to the FAQ for the latest on supported VM sizes for both Windows and Linux OS hosts. This video demonstrates the leading performance of Ultra Disk Storage.

Designing network for performance

As the Azure footprint grows, a single availability zone may span multiple physical data centers, which can result in network latency impacting your SAP application performance. A proximity placement group (PPG) is a logical grouping to ensure that Azure compute resources are physically located close to each and achieving the lowest possible network latency i.e. co-location of your SAP Application and Database VMs. For more information, refer to our detailed documentation for deploying your SAP application with PPGs.

We recommend you consider PPGs within your SAP deployment architecture and that you enable Accelerated Networking on your SAP Application and Database VMs. Accelerated Networking enables single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) to your virtual machine which improves networking performance, bypassing the host from the data-path. SAP application server to database server latency can be tested with ABAPMeter report /SSA/CAT.

ExpressRoute Global Reach allows you to link ExpressRoute circuits from on-premise to Azure in different regions together to make a private network between your on-premises networks. Global Reach can be used for your SAP HANA Large Instance deployment to enable direct access from on-premise to your HANA Large Instance units deployed in different regions. Additionally, GlobalReach can enable direct communication between your HANA Large Instance units deployed in different regions

Designing for scalability

With Azure Mv2 VMs, you can scale up to 208 vCPUs/6TB now and 12 TB shortly. For databases that require more than 12 TB, we offer SAP HANA Large Instances (HLI), purpose-built bare metal offering that are dedicated to you. The server hardware is embedded in larger stamps that contains HANA TDI certified compute, network and storage infrastructure, in various sizes from 36 Intel CPU cores/768 GB of memory up to a maximum size of 480 s CPU cores and 24 TB of memory.

Azure global regions at HyperScale

Azure has more global regions than any other cloud provider, offering the scale needed to bring applications closer to users around the world, preserving data residency, and offering comprehensive compliance and resiliency options for customers. As of Q3 2019, Azure spans a total of 54 regions and is available in 140 countries.

Customers like the Carlsberg Group, transformed IT into a platform for innovation through a migration to Azure centered on its essential SAP applications. The Carlsberg migration to Azure encompassed 700 servers and 350 applications—including the essential SAP applications—involving 1.6 petabytes of data, including 8 terabytes for the main SAP database.

Within this blog we have touched upon several topics relating to designing highly performant and scalable architectures for SAP on Azure.
As customers embark on their SAP to Azure journey, in order to methodically deploy highly performant, and scalable architectures, during various phases of the deployment, it is recommended to deep dive into , the SAP on Azure documentation to deepen their understanding of using Azure for hosting and running their SAP applications. The SAP workload on Azure planning and deployment checklist can be used as a compass to navigate through the various phases of a customer’s SAP Greenfield deployment or on-premises to Azure migration project.

In blog #3 in our series we will cover Designing for Availability and Recoverability.
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Announcing Azure Storage Explorer 1.10.0

This month we released a new version of Azure Storage Explorer, 1.10.0. This latest version of Storage Explorer introduces several exciting new features and delivers significant updates to existing functionality. These features and changes are all designed to make users more efficient and productive when working with Azure Storage, CosmosDB, ADLS Gen2, and, starting with 1.10.0, managed disks. If you’ve never used Storage Explorer before, you can download it for Windows, macOS, or Linux on the product page here.

Storage Explorer adds support for managed disks

One of the most challenging parts of migrating on-premises virtual machines (VMs) to Azure is moving the data for these VMs into Azure. Storage Explorer 1.10.0 makes this process much easier by adding support for managed disks. The new features we’ve added for managed disks lets you create and manage VM disks using the easy to use Storage Explorer GUI. Using Storage Explorer also gives you an incredibly performant workflow. When you upload a VHD to a Managed Disk, Storage Explorer is leveraging the power and speed of AzCopy v10 to quickly get your data into Azure. Storage Explorer’s support for managed disks also includes the ability to create snapshots of, copy, download, and delete your managed disks. You can learn more about the latest disk support capabilities on our recent blog.

Storage Explorer introduces new user settings

Ever since Storage Explorer was first released, users have asked for a variety of settings that would allow them to configure how Storage Explorer behaves. As more settings have been added though, managing and discovering these settings has proved increasingly difficult. To help alleviate those problems, we are excited to introduce a centralized settings user interface (UI.) From this UI, you can configure many of Storage Explorer’s existing setting, such as proxy and application theme. We’ve also added settings which allow you to logout on exit and to toggle the refresh mode of the data explorers.

We have a long list of user requested settings in our backlog which will make their way to the settings UI in future updates. And if you have a suggestion for a setting you’d like to see, feel free to let us know by opening an issue at our GitHub repo.

Storage Explorer now available on the Snap Store

The last major change we’d like to highlight for 1.10.0 is the addition of Storage Explorer to the Canonical Snap Store. Installing Storage Explorer on Linux has always been a challenge for users, but when you install from the Snap Store things become as easy as installing on any other platform. The Snap platform will install all dependencies for you, and help you keep Storage Explorer up to date and secure. If you’d like to install Storage Explorer from the Snap Store, you can find it listed on the store.

Looking forward

Over the coming months, we have plans to add even more new features and capabilities to Storage Explorer. In the near future, we will be making AzCopy the default transfer engine for all Blob transfers, and we’ll start work on using AzCopy for File Shares. We’ve also been hard at work localizing Storage Explorer into additional languages so more people all over the world can effectively use the product. We’re going to improve on and bring additional features to ADLS Gen 2, including enhanced ACL management and increased parity with Blob features. And of course, we’ll be looking at GitHub for any user requests for new features, so if there’s something you would like to see then we highly encourage you to to open an issue.

Install Storage Explorer now

Download Storage Explorer 1.10.0 today to take advantage of all of these new features. If you have any feedback, please make sure to open a new issue on our GitHub repo. If you are experiencing difficulties using the product, please open a support ticket following these instructions.
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Stay on top of best practices with Azure Advisor alerts

To get the most out of your Azure investment and run as efficiently as possible, we recommend that you regularly review and optimize your resources for high availability, security, performance, and cost. That’s why we created Azure Advisor, a free Azure service that helps you quickly and easily optimize your Azure resources with personalized recommendations based on your usage and configurations.

But with so many priorities vying for your attention, it can be easy to miss remediating your Advisor recommendations. So, what’s a good way to stay on top of these critical optimizations that can save you money, boost performance, strengthen your security posture, and increase uptime?

Get notified about new recommendations with Advisor alerts

Advisor now offers user-configurable alerts so you can get automatically notified as soon as your best practice recommendations become available. Advisor alerts will allow you to act more quickly and efficiently to optimize your Azure resources and stay on top of your new recommendations.

You can configure these alerts to be triggered based on several factors:

Recommendation category – high availability, performance, or cost.
Business impact – high, medium, or low.
Recommendation type – for example, right-size or shutdown underutilized virtual machines (VMs,) enable VM backup, or use availability sets to improve fault tolerance.

You can also choose from a wide range of notification options, including email, SMS, push notification, webhook, IT service management integration with popular tools like ServiceNow, Automation runbooks, and more. Your notification preferences are configured using action groups, so you can repurpose any action groups you’ve already set up, such as those for your custom Azure Monitor alerts or Azure Service Health alerts.

Best practices for your Advisor alerts

As you get started with Advisor alerts, we have three tips for you.

First, start simple by choosing a few high impact recommendations that are important to your organization, based on your business goals and priorities. For example, you might have a leadership mandate to reduce costs by a certain percentage, in which case you might decide that “Right-size or shutdown underutilized VMs” is a critical recommendation for you. Then create an alert for that set of recommendations. You can always change your alert or add more later.
 

Second, consider who is right person to notify about new recommendations and the best way to notify them. It’s best to notify the individual or team who has the permission and authority to remediate the recommendation, to streamline the process. In keeping with the “start simple” principle, you may wish to begin with email notifications, which are the most basic to configure and the least intrusive to receive. Again, you can always modify your preferences later.

Finally, once you’ve tackled the first two tips and are comfortable with Advisor alerts, start to explore automation scenarios. For example, you can automatically route a new best practice recommendation through your ticketing system and assign it to the right team for remediation. In some cases, you can even use a combination of Advisor alerts and Automation runbooks to automatically remediate the recommendation.

Get started with Advisor alerts

Visit Advisor in the Azure portal to review your recommendations and start setting up your Advisor alerts. For more in-depth guidance, visit the Advisor documentation. Let us know if you have a suggestion for Advisor by submitting an idea in our forums here.
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Azure Sentinel general availability: A modern SIEM reimagined in the cloud

Earlier this week, we announced that Azure Sentinel is now generally available. This marks an important milestone in our journey to redefine Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) for the cloud era. With Azure Sentinel, enterprises worldwide can now keep pace with the exponential growth in security data, improve security outcomes without adding analyst resources, and reduce hardware and operational costs.

With the help of customers and partners, including feedback from over 12,000 trials during the preview, we have designed Azure Sentinel to bring together the power of Azure and AI to enable Security Operations Centers to achieve more. There are lots of new capabilities coming online this week. I’ll walk you through several of them here.

Collect and analyze nearly limitless volume of security data

With Azure Sentinel, we are on a mission to improve security for the whole enterprise. Many Microsoft and non-Microsoft data sources are built right in and can be enabled in a single click. New connectors for Microsoft services like Cloud App Security and Information Protection join a growing list of third-party connectors to make it easier than ever to ingest and analyze data from across your digital estate.

Workbooks offer rich visualization options for gaining insights into your data. Use or modify an existing workbook or create your own.

Apply analytics, including Machine Learning, to detect threats

You can now choose from more than 100 built-in alert rules or use the new alert wizard to create your own. Alerts can be triggered by a single event or based on a threshold, or by correlating different datasets (e.g., events that match threat indicators) or by using built-in machine learning algorithms.

We’re previewing two new Machine Learning approaches that offer customers the benefits of AI without the complexity. First, we apply proven off-the-shelf Machine Learning models for identifying suspicious logins across Microsoft identity services to discover malicious SSH accesses. By using transferred learning from existing Machine Learning models, Azure Sentinel can detect anomalies from a single dataset with accuracy. In addition, we use a Machine Learning technique called fusion to connect data from multiple sources, like Azure AD anomalous logins and suspicious Office 365 activities, to detect 35 different threats that span different points on the kill chain.

Expedite threat hunting, incident investigation, and response

Proactive threat hunting is a critical yet time-consuming task for Security Operations Centers. Azure Sentinel makes hunting easier with a rich hunting interface that features a growing collection of hunting queries, exploratory queries, and python libraries for use in Jupyter Notebooks. Use these to identify events of interest and bookmark them for later reference.

Incidents (formerly cases) contain one or more alerts that require further investigation. Incidents now support tagging, comments, and assignments. A new rules wizard allows you to decide which Microsoft alerts trigger the creation of incidents.

Using the new investigation graph preview, you can visualize and traverse the connections between entities like users, assets, applications, or URLs and related activities like logins, data transfers, or application usage to rapidly understand the scope and impact of an incident.

New actions and playbooks simplify the process of incident automation and remediation using Azure Logic Apps. Send an email to validate a user action, enrich an incident with geolocation data, block a suspicious user, and isolate a Windows machine.

Build on the expertise of Microsoft and community members

The Azure Sentinel GitHub repository has grown to over 400 detection, exploratory, and hunting queries, plus Azure Notebooks samples and related Python libraries, playbooks samples, and parsers. The bulk of these were developed by our MSTIC security researchers based on their vast global security experience and threat intelligence.

Support managed Security Services Providers and complex customer instances

Azure Sentinel now works with Azure Lighthouse, empowering customers and managed security services providers (MSSPs) to view Azure Sentinel for multiple tenants without the need to navigate between tenants. We have worked closely with our partners to jointly develop a solution that addresses their requirements for a modern SIEM. 

DXC Technology, one of the largest global MSSPs is a great example of this design partnership:

“Through our strategic partnership with Microsoft, and as a member of the Microsoft Security Partner Advisory Council, DXC will integrate and deploy Azure Sentinel into the cyber defense solutions and intelligent security operations we deliver to our clients.” said Mark Hughes, senior vice president and general manager, Security, DXC. “Our integrated solution leverages the cloud native capabilities and assets of Azure Sentinel to orchestrate and automate large volumes of security incidents, enabling our security experts to focus on the forensic investigation of high priority incidents and threats.”

Get started

It really is easy to get started. We have a lot of information available to help you, from great documentation to connecting with us via Yammer and e-mail.

Start a trial and kick the tires
Watch the overview video
Review the technical documentation

Please join us for a webinar on Thursday, September 26 at 10:00 AM Pacific Time to learn more about these innovations and see real-life examples of how Azure Sentinel helped detect previously undiscovered threats.

What’s next

Azure Sentinel is our SOC platform for the future, and we will continue to evolve it to better meet the security needs of the complex world we live in. Let’s stay in touch:

Keep up to date by following the TechCommunity blog
Join our TechCommunity
Send us an e-mail with feedback and suggestions
Become an Azure Sentinel Threat Hunter

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Microsoft and SWIFT extend partnership to make native payments a reality

This blog post is co-authored by George Zinn, Corporate VP, Microsoft Treasurer.

This week at Sibos, the world’s largest financial services event, Microsoft and SWIFT are showcasing the evolution of the cloud-native proof of concept (POC) announced at last year’s event. Building off the relationship between Microsoft Azure, SWIFT, and the work with Microsoft treasury, the companies are entering a long-term strategic partnership to bring to market SWIFT Cloud Connect on Azure. Together we have built out an end-to-end architecture that utilizes various Azure services to ensure SWIFT Cloud Connect achieves the resilience, security, and compliance demands for material workloads in the financial services industry. Microsoft is the first cloud provider working with SWIFT to build public cloud connectivity and will soon make this solution available to the industry. 

SWIFT is the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services used and trusted by more than 11,000 financial institutions in more than 200 countries and territories. Today, enterprises and banks conduct these transactions by sending payment messages over the highly secure SWIFT network, leveraging on-premises installations of SWIFT technology. SWIFT Cloud Connect creates a bank-like wire transfer experience with the added operational, security, and intelligence benefits the Microsoft cloud offers.

To demonstrate the potential of the production-ready service, Microsoft Treasury has successfully run test payment transactions through the SWIFT production network to their counterparty Bank of New York-Mellon (BNY Mellon) for payment confirmations through SWIFT on Azure. BNY Mellon is a global investments company dedicated to helping its clients manage and service their financial assets throughout the investment lifecycle. The company’s Treasury Services group, which delivers high-quality performance in global payments, trade services and cash management, provides payments services for Microsoft Treasury.

“At BNY Mellon, we focus on delivering world class solutions that exceed our clients’ expectations,” said Bank of New York Mellon Treasury Services CEO Paul Camp. “Together with SWIFT, we continuously work to enhance the payments experience for clients around the world. We’re excited to join now with our Microsoft Treasury client and with SWIFT to help make Cloud Connect real, leveraging Microsoft’s cloud expertise to expand the frontiers of financial technology. Building on the positive experience with Cloud Connect, we look forward to exploring additional opportunities with Microsoft Treasury to advance their digital payments strategy.”

In response to the rapidly increasing cyber threat landscape, SWIFT introduced the customer security program (CSP). This introduces a set of mandatory security controls for which many financial institutions have a significant challenge to implement in their on-premise environment. To simplify and support control implementation and enable continuous monitoring and audit, Microsoft has developed a blueprint for the CSP framework. Azure Blueprint is a free service that enables customers to define a repeatable set of Azure resources and policies that implement and adhere to standards, patterns and control requirements.  Azure Blueprints allow customers to set up governed Azure environments at scale to aid secure and compliant production implementations. The SWIFT CSP Blueprint is now available in preview.

Microsoft treasury has performed their testing with SWIFT by leveraging the Azure Logic Apps service to process payment transactions. Such an implementation used to take months but instead was completed in just a few weeks. Treasury integrated their backend SAP systems via Logic Apps to SWIFT to process payment transactions and business acknowledgments. As part of this processing, the transactions are validated and checked for duplicates or anomalies using the rich capabilities of Logic Apps.

Logic Apps is Microsoft Azure’s integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and now provides native understanding of SWIFT messaging, enabling customers to accelerate the modernization of their payments infrastructure by leveraging the cloud. With hybrid VNet-connected integration capabilities to on-premises applications as well as a wide array of Azure services, Logic Apps provides more than 300 connectors for intelligent automation, integration, data movement, and more to harness the power of Azure.

Microsoft treasury is able to quickly leverage the power of Azure to enable a seamless transfer of payment transactions. With Azure Monitor and Log Analytics they are also able to monitor, manage, and correlate their payment transactions for full end-to-end process visibility.

We are thrilled to extend our partnership with SWIFT as we believe this will become an integral offering for the industry. We thank BNY Mellon for their part in confirming the potential of SWIFT Cloud Connect. To see it in action, stop by the Microsoft booth in the North Event Hall, Z131.
Quelle: Azure