The Instabase platform uses deep learning and low-code tools to unlock unstructured data by digitizing, classifying, extracting, and validating the content trapped in documents, and then enabling the end-to-end automation of mission-critical processes. Many of the world’s largest financial institutions, insurance companies, governments, and enterprises rely on Instabase to extract value from their unstructured data to improve customer, employee and risk management outcomes. The net result is that Instabase customers can free up capacity, reduce operating costs, reduce the risk of human error and cut their customer response times down to just seconds.  

“We are proud to now be available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace to bring the transformational benefits of the Instabase platform to a wider market of users. Our shared customers now have a simplified procurement process, in addition to a faster time to value of Instabase’s industry-leading artificial intelligence capabilities and automation platform,” says Joe Ramieri, vice president of growth at Instabase. 

Instabase can ingest any document format from any source, be that SharePoint, Azure Files, or a Microsoft Outlook email inbox. The Instabase platform runs safely and securely in the customer’s Azure instance with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and provides enterprise-grade governance and control. Instabase is designed for scale and throughput, and to give users the lowest total cost of ownership.

“Microsoft Azure Marketplace lets customers worldwide discover, try, and deploy software solutions that are certified and optimized to run on Azure,” says Jake Zborowski, general manager, Microsoft Azure platform at Microsoft. “Azure Marketplace helps solutions like the Instabase Platform reach more customers and markets.”

The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud solutions certified to run on Azure. The Azure Marketplace helps connect companies seeking innovative, cloud-based solutions with partners who have developed solutions that are ready to use.

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The Redmond, Wash. IT giant says each Azure network security service is fully integrated with Sentinel, Microsoft’s cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) solution, which also collects security signals from each Azure security service.

That data is then analyzed to create a centralized view of the attack landscape, and Sentinel correlates events and related incidents when anomalies are detected. Sentinel then automates the response to mitigate sophisticated attacks.

For example, when cybercriminals use a DDoS attack to act as a smokescreen to more harmful activity such as data theft, Sentinel will detect the DDoS attack and use the information it gathers on attack sources to prevent the next phases of the attack.

By using remediation capabilities in Azure Firewall and other network security services in the future, the attacking DDoS sources are blocked, according to Microsoft.

“This cross-product detection and remediation magnifies the security posture of the organization, where Sentinel is the orchestrator,” the company says in a blog.

According to Microsoft, the Azure DDoS Protection Solution for Sentinel is being released as a single solution package that includes:

• Azure DDoS Protection data connector and workbook.
• Alert rules that help retrieve the source DDoS attackers. These are new rules Microsoft created specifically for this solution. These rules may be utilized by customers to achieve other objectives for their security strategy.
• A Remediation IP Playbook that automatically creates remediation in Azure Firewall to block the source DDoS attackers. Although Microsoft documents and demonstrate how to use Azure Firewall for remediation, any 3rd party firewall that has a Sentinel Playbook can be used for remediation. This provides the flexibility for customers to use this new DDoS solution with any firewall.

The solution is initially released for Azure Firewall (or any third-party firewall), and Microsoft plans to enhance it to support Azure WAF soon.

Read the blog for use cases, or read this guidance to learn about how to deploy the solution.

The post Microsoft Releases Azure DDoS Protection for Sentinel appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) gives enterprises a virtual general store of applications and or desktops, whether running multi-session Windows 11, Windows 10 or Windows Server. It enables Microsoft 365 applications for multi-user virtual scenarios, though, single-user scenarios are also supported. By virtualizing both desktops and applications, AVD enables IT to unify the management of desktops and apps from different Windows and Windows servers.

The end-to-end virtualization approach in Azure offers benefits in efficiency and integration. However, before an enterprise decides to use AVD it is important to carefully consider the business strategy behind adoption, as well as the architectural context, and what needs to be thought through before implementation and deployment.

Some of these considerations include aligning on responsibilities, understanding how applications and data will be handled in the new environment, and determining which outcomes you want to see from your move to AVD. Here are five key areas to consider for a successful AVD rollout:

1. Determine Responsibilities and Resource Availability. Putting together an AVD team, clearly delineating responsibilities and making sure adequate resources are in place, are the basic building blocks for AVD deployment and company onboarding. These are questions to ask:

• Who is in charge of building the new environment and/or writing proper documentation, technically and functionally?
• Who is responsible for creating the overall deployment plan, setting timelines. milestones, and deliverables?
• Who is responsible for testing and is there a plan is place? Are there any success criteria that need to be considered?
• Who will be educating, onboarding, and supporting users when their new workspace is ready for production? What does the process look like?
• Is there sufficient staff already on board to execute or does IT see this pushing other initiatives to the side?
• These processes can be time consuming. How will communication take place throughout the project?

By making sure people have time allocated to the actions they will be expected to incorporate into their role, it takes a lot of uncertainty away and will greatly enhance your chances of completing your AVD integration on time.

2. Set Goals and Success Criteria. Once the team is in place it’s time to identify desired outcomes from using AVD and set timelines and milestones to work towards. Usually this starts with a proof of concept (PoC). In other words, when are we successful? AVD is the virtual engine that supports all types of applications, including legacy, cloud-native, web-based, and more, delivering them directly to your endpoint of choice. Bringing in AVD to your enterprise should be aligned with business strategy, i.e., plans for additional cloud storage, expectations of remote worker needs, whether you plan to move to Windows 365, your plans for scaling up or down, and when. Looking at deployment from a 360-degree perspective will help create a critical priorities list to map to when AVD is up and running.
3. Determine Application Integration and Access. AVD’s core value centers on virtualizing desktops and applications to help your hybrid/remote workforce have the most productive workday. A common sticking point here is application compatibility. Switching platforms often means a change of the underlying operating system. While moving from Windows 10 to Windows 11 (Multi-Session), for example, shouldn’t create any major issues, you still want to make sure you do not run into any surprises once users go live. Certain applications can also behave differently when they are run on a cloud-based VM. Planning for adequate compute resources needs to be on your list. All this would be part of your test plan as well.

Other factors to consider are:

• The number and types of applications that will be delivered by AVD. Some applications can be retired or replaced by a more modern cloud/web based alternative. Make sure to inventory with care and consider the 6 R’s: Rehost, Refactor, Revise, Rebuild, and Replace.
• Allowing adequate time to test the applications. Consider tools like Rimo3 that utilize intelligent automation to streamline and expedite the testing process.
• Controlling application access by using tools like FSLogix App Masking which enables IT to ‘mask’ applications from a user when apps are on a host pool (image).
• Simplifying the application update process by using solutions like FlexApp One from Liquidware or MSIX AppAttach offered by Microsoft. These solutions can separate applications from the underlying operating system, making updates faster and more efficient.

Finally, you need to develop a strategy for ongoing application and patch lifecycle management. Your base images will need to be updated from time to time; application and security updates will be factors; new applications may be added, and security may need to be enhanced. And since the cloud is not free, dynamically scaling your session host VMs up or down according to usage (this applies to storage as well) will help keep your budget in check.

4. Critically Examine Data Considerations. Take a critical look at your data use and decide early on how much you will move to Azure. Cloud storage is often a budget issue so determine which data really needs to be housed in Azure and is tied to workforce productivity. This might also be a good time to archive certain data and clean things up a bit. Azure also offers various archiving data options, for example, which are cheaper than traditional storage. Also decide if you will be using traditional file servers or a more flexible and scalable approach like Azure Files.

As with applications, you want to make sure that the data used is as close to your hosts (where the actual work is done) and users as possible. This helps to eliminate latency issues and ensure users will have quick access to files and folders.

5. Educate and Involve Your Users. Moving to Azure and AVD can set your company on the right path for the future and do a better job of supporting your remote workforce while upgrading from legacy technology, but it has to come with buy-in from the hundreds or thousands of people who will use the services every day. Working across the company, with managers, HR and IT, devise a strategy for communicating this change and for continual training and engagement with your workforce.

Getting your users involved early and hearing their concerns or suggestions will help smooth the transition to AVD.

Preparation Counts

Azure Virtual Desktop is a powerful tool and can help you move your business to the next level of virtualization. However, making the switch to it can be complicated without the right advance preparation. Take time to plan and define scope of deployment, responsibility, level of data migration and application compatibility, early on, to promote a successful AVD move.

Bas van Kaam is the field CTO, EMEA at Nerdio.

The post Thinking of Moving to Azure and Azure Virtual Desktop? 5 Actions for Success appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The company’s Azure Space announcement is highlighted by Azure Orbital Cloud Access, a new service launched in preview that Microsoft says brings connectivity from the cloud wherever businesses and public sector organizations need it.

According to Microsoft, Azure Orbital Cloud Access helps meet new connectivity demands and brings a new approach that intelligently prioritizes traffic across fiber, cellular and satellite networks. The company says the service is a “step toward the future of integration 5G and satellite communications” that enables low-latency access to the cloud from anywhere on Earth, allowing enterprises to bring satellite-based communications into their operation.

Microsoft says the preview for Azure Government customers unlocks new scenarios and opportunities in areas with little or no connectivity, or where a failover option is needed. The service delivers prioritized network access through SpaceX’s Starlink connectivity and Azure edge devices to give customers access to Microsoft cloud services where Starlink operates.

In a statement, SpaceX President and CEO Gwynne Shotwell says combining Starlink and Azure will enable users to access fiber-like cloud computing at will.

“We’re excited to offer this solution to both the public and the private sector,” Shotwell says.

In addition, Azure Orbital Cloud Access is entirely managed for customers, operating on a monthly subscription basis and a pay-as-you-go satellite communications consumption model. The service also integrates natively with SD-WAN technology from Jupiter Networks so customers can prioritize connectivity between fiber, cellular and satellite networks.

To start, the service is only available for Azure Government customers.

The company also announced the general availability of Azure Orbital Ground Station, its first fully managed ground station-as-a-service offering that is designed to work with Microsoft’s partner ecosystem to enable satellite operators to focus on their satellites and operate from the cloud more reliably at lower cost and latency, allowing operators to get to market faster and achieve a higher level of security via Azure.

“Through Microsoft’s unique partner-focused approach, we are bringing together a deep integration of ground station partner networks to enable our customers’ data delivery to an Azure region of choice at zero cost, thus reducing their total operational costs and ensuring data is available in the customer’s Azure tenant for further processing,” Microsoft says.

Read Microsoft’s Azure blog to learn more about these offerings and partnerships.

The post Microsoft Adding to Azure Space Connectivity Offerings appeared first on My TechDecisions.

This comes after Microsoft began blocking new downloads of the on-prem MFA Server since July 2019, pushing customers toward Azure MFA, which Microsoft calls its “premier MFA experience.” The company bills Azure MFA as a tool that helps lower total cost of ownership, simplifies deployment and improves security.

The Azure MFA Server Migration Utility is designed to make it easier for admins to modernize their infrastructure by migrating users from on-prem Azure MFA Server to Azure MFA, the company says.

According to Microsoft, the tool includes two pieces:

• The Azure MFA Server Migration Utility facilitates the migration of user authentication data stored on-premises directly into Azure AD, all without requiring any re-registration or action from their end users. It’s included in the latest update of Azure MFA Server.

• Staged Rollout for Azure MFA functionality within Azure AD, which allows admins to selectively test and move users to Azure MFA without requiring any changes to federation settings.

To get started, organizations must first upgrade their primary Azure MFA Server to at least version 6.1.0.

Next, admins should target users for migration, which Microsoft says is as easy as selecting the Azure AD group containing users to be migrated, defining the various registered MFA methods that should be moved to Azure AD.

Lastly, users should be targeted for Azure MFA via the new Migration Utility using the Staged Rollout for Azure MFA to ease migrations by determining which users should use Azure MFA, based on targeted group membership, Microsoft says.

Microsoft says testing should be extremely low risk since no changes to tenants or federation settings are required. Once testing and migrations are complete, organizations can retire their entire MFA Server deployment to reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs.

Read this Tech Community blog for more details.

The post Microsoft Rolls Out New Azure MFA Migration Tool appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The company earlier this year launched the preview of new general purpose Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 and memory optimized Epsv5 Azure Virtual Machine series-— built on the Ampere Altra processor—that are designed to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads.

“Since then, hundreds of customers have tested and experienced firsthand the excellent price-performance that the Arm architecture can provide for web and application servers, open-source databases, microservices, Java and .NET applications, gaming, media servers and more,” writes Paul Nash, vice president of Azure Compute Platform, in a blog.

Starting now, all Azure customers can deploy the new virtual machines using the Azure portal, SDKs, API, PowerShell and the command-line interface.

As customers are building and running workloads on Azure designed to transform and modernize their business, they also want to maximize operational efficiency and take a holistic approach across their application portfolios, Nash says.

“They are also beginning to evaluate sustainability factors and the overall impact of their technological choices,” Nash writes. “Azure’s Ampere Altra Arm–based virtual machines represent a cost-effective and power-efficient option that does not compromise the level of performance that customers require.”

The company says it is collaborating with software and hardware companies—such as Ampere and Arm—to accelerate customer innovation and help customers build solutions and deploy workloads more easily and run them with high performance.

In addition, Microsoft is working with the open-source community and independent software vendors to make several Linux OS distributions—including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian—available on the new Arm-based Azure Virtual Machines.

Microsoft will also add support for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux in the future, Nash writes.

Microsoft is also adding support for the new virtual machines in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) from the start, and the company is actively deploying updates across the Azure fleet to make AKS support for Arm nodes generally available within the next two weeks.

According to Microsoft, the Azure Arm-based virtual machine families include:

• Dpsv5 series, with up to 64 vCPUs and 4GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 208 GiBs,
• Dplsv5 series, with up to 64 vCPUs and 2GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 128 GiBs, and
• Epsv5 series, with up to 32 vCPUs and 8GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 208 GiBs.

According to Microsoft, the new virtual machine sizes support up to 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth; Standard SSDs, Standard HDDs, Premium SSDs, and Ultra Disk Storage can be attached to the virtual machines Dpdv5, Dpldv5, and Epdv5 virtual machine series also include fast local-SSD storage. Virtual Machine Scale Sets are also supported.

Organizations can monitor virtual machines and protect their data with Azure Monitor and Azure Backup and collect key metrics to track the performance of their resources using the Azure Monitor agent. IT professionals can correlate infrastructure issues for Arm-based virtual machines with VM insights, and for Arm-based Kubernetes clusters with container insights. Both VM insights and container insights for Arm-based offerings are in preview.

The Ampere Altra Arm–based Azure virtual machines are now available in the U.S. (West U.S. 2, West Central U.S., Central U.S., East U.S., East U.S. 2), Europe (West Europe, North Europe), Asia (East Asia, Southeast Asia), and Australia (Australia East) Azure regions. The company plans to expand Azure regional availability after September 1.

Spot Virtual Machines are also available today. Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances pricing will be offered when the Virtual Machines become generally available on September 1.

Read Microsoft’s Azure blog to learn more.

The post Microsoft’s Azure VMs with Arm-Based Processes Now Generally Available appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Microsoft, organizations can use Grafana to bring together logs, traces, metrics and other disparate data from across an organization and visualize all its telemetry data in a single user interface, including across on-premises, Azure and multi-cloud environments.

With the new offering, the experience is optimized for Azure-native data stores such as Azure Monitor and Data Explorer, making it easier for customers to connect any resources in their subscription and view all resulting telemetry in a familiar Grafana dashboard, Microsoft says.

Microsoft says customers can preserve existing charges in the Azure portal used for monitoring and via a service-to-service integration, can bring any chart into the Azure portal over to their Azure Managed Grafana instance with a one-click to pin function to automate the migration process.

The tool offers dashboards for various Azure Monitor features to help customers build new visualizations. Some features with built-in dashboards include Azure Monitor applications insights, Azure Monitor container insights, Azure Monitor virtual machines insights and Azure Monitor alerts.

Customers can also customize user permissions with specific roles and assignments stored in Azure Active Directory (AD), with definitions mapped transparently to Grafana’s internal roles, enforcing the actual access control.

“This integration enables both simplicity and consistency by allowing customers to manage users in their teams and authorize their use of a Grafana instance centrally through Azure Active Directory,” Microsoft says in an Azure blog.

Azure Managed Grafana can also be configured to access Azure Monitor through a managed identity set up as part of the Grafana instance creation, eliminating the need to deal with another credential separately.

Microsoft also announced new Grafana integrations with Azure Monitor, including the ability to pin Azure Monitor visualizations from Azure Portal to Grafana dashboards and new out-of-the-box Azure Monitor dashboards.

The post Azure Managed Grafana, Integrations In Preview appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Microsoft, the core components of an identity security product should work to prevent malicious actions, detect them, investigate and respond accordingly. Defender for Identity offers detection, investigation and assessment capabilities, but the response offering was focused on Azure Active Directory identity, with the ability to confirm user as compromised and disable the user’s cloud account.

It is difficult to disable the user, mark it as compromised, prompt it for multi-factor authentication or reset the password across both the cloud and on-premises, Microsoft says in a Tech Community blog.

“For example, in order to actually apply a reset password on an Azure Active Directory account, that will sync to Active Directory, one would need to go through a process of enabling the password writeback to on-premise environment,” Microsoft says. “Disabling as user on the Azure Active Directory on the other hand, will be overwritten by the next sync between Active Directory and Azure Active Directory, as the on-premises Active Directory will always have a priority, which cannot be changed.”

With the new capabilities in Microsoft Defender for Identity, admins can temporarily prevent a user from logging into the network and prevent compromised users from moving laterally and exfiltrate data, in addition to prompting the user to change their password on their next logon to ensure the account can’t be used for other malicious activities.

In the blog, Microsoft explains that those actions can be taken from several locations in Microsoft 365 Defender, including form the user page, user side panel, advanced hunting and as part of automatic response in custom detections.

However, doing so will require setting up a privileged gMSA account that Defender will use to perform those actions.

“This enriches Microsoft’s XDR experience even further. Empowering security teams to take comprehensive action on all managed identities in Microsoft 365 Defender and being able to link the response actions to detections from other workloads (like endpoint, Office 365 and cloud apps) means that threats can be identified and responded to quicker than ever before,” the company says.

The post Microsoft Releases New Defender for Identity Response Capabilities appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The new Azure environment is built to support the U.S. Federal Civilian, Department of Defense, intelligence community and U.S. government partners working within the secret enclave.

As workloads have shifted from on-premise to the cloud, it requires Microsoft to work closely with the government to write a secure and trusted infrastructure.

“Governments have an increasing demand on security and importance of protecting highly sensitive workloads across an expensive network of government agencies and partners; it becomes increasingly important to provide government employees with secure, productive, and efficient cloud options to help them achieve their missions,” writes Paul Lorimer, VP, Office 365 Enterprise and Cloud Engineering in a blog post.

Office 365 Government Secret will support Impact Level 6 (IL6) to help meet the full spectrum of government data needs. The new environment will also run the latest enterprise-grade Office 365 government productivity, security, compliance and collaboration applications

Microsoft says it has a comprehensive approach to build, test, onboard and audit products to be compliant with government regulations which will help ensure security and compliance for the environment.

If your organization plans to deploy Office 365 Government Secret Cloud, Microsoft encourages customers to engage with their onboarding teams right away to be prepared for when the environment is authorized for use.

IT admins can work with different groups, such as Microsoft FastTrack, Microsoft Consulting Services and deployment partners to plan out remediation activities for identity, networks, devices, on-premise server upgrades and a pilot plan for migrations.

Microsoft encourages organizations to develop plans early to help ensure environment transition challenges can be addressed and mitigated before a comprehensive rollout.

The post Microsoft Office 365 Government Secret Cloud Coming Soon appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Microsoft, the device is compact and comes with flexible mounting options and multiple configurations for organizations running edge workloads.

Among the key benefits of the Azure Stack Edge Pro 2 billed by Microsoft are hardware, software and support provided as a service from Microsoft, the ability to be rack- or wall-mounted (or on a shelf), quiet operation, multiple configurations to match workload needs, a cost-effective price and Azure-grad security and compliance.

To start, there are three configurations, including Model 64G2T, which is available now. Two others — Model 128G4T1GPU and Model 256G6T2GPU, are coming soon.

The 64G2T comes with 51 GB of usable RAM, and 720 GB of usable local storage capacity. The other two models upgrade both of those specs significantly, as high as 204 GB of usable RAM and 2.5TB of local storage capacity in the higher-end 256G6T2GPU.

All three are based on the Intel Xeon 6920U and feature 256-bit data encryption and TPM 2.0.

For more information on the Azure Stack Edge Pro 2, read this Tech Community blog.

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