Combating Corporate Security Threats: Getting Started with Log Analytics

With the increase in cyber attacks over the past two years, organizations need intelligence based threat detection tools to assist them in protecting their enterprise.  Microsoft is in the forefront of delivering this new generation of security tools.  This video will demonstrate how to get started with the Log Analytics Security and Audit solution, a management as a service application that delivers intelligence based threat detection to your enterprise without requiring infrastructure.  Future videos in the series will provide deeper information on the solution and how to use it to protect against cyber threats.

Azure Security Center, now generally available, proven to improve security

Maintaining visibility and control of cybersecurity is a constant challenge. And as attackers innovate, keeping up with them can be an overwhelming task. On average, it takes more than 200 days for an organization to detect a breach. With the average cost of a breach reaching into the millions of dollars, the stakes have never been higher… https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-security-center-now-generally-available-proven-to-improve-security/

Create the roadmap for your enterprise cloud strategy

IT efficiency. Business innovation. Sometimes these two goals seem mutually opposing. What if you could, by taking advantage of the cloud, drive both: improve the cost effectiveness of your IT portfolio and apply innovation to drive new revenue for your business?  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/create-the-roadmap-for-your-enterprise-cloud-strategy/

Introducing OMS Network Performance Monitor

OMS Network Performance Monitor helps you perform near real-time monitoring of network performance parameters (such as packet loss and network latency) and localize network faults. It not only detects network performance issues, but it also localizes the source of the problem to a particular network segment or device to make it easy for you to locate and fix a network performance issue. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msoms/2016/07/27/introducing-oms-network-performance-monitor/

Check out all the Azure sessions planned for Microsoft Ignite

Ready to join the Azure team at Microsoft Ignite? Now you can start planning exactly which topics, issues, and ideas you want to dive into! The full session catalog is live, with 440+ sessions to choose from, including more than 75 sessions devoted to Azure topics. And it’s easy to search and filter so you can find just the courses that fit your needs. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/check-out-all-the-azure-sessions-planned-for-microsoft-ignite/

We’ve been hearing from a lot of customers about all kinds of challenges they’ve been facing in their Dev/Test environments. With the power of cloud, some problems have started being solved such as the hardware maintenance cost. On the other hand, there are still a few problems many customers have to deal with day to day, especially:

• The delays in delivering environments to developers/testers that are introduced by the traditional environments request model;
• Time-consuming environment configuration;
• Production fidelity issues;
• And the high cost of the cloud resource management in order to optimize the resource usage.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devtestlab/2016/05/25/announcing-general-availability-of-azure-devtest-labs/

The Windows Server 2016 Application Platform – Nano Server, Containers and DevOps

There has been a lot of press on Nano Server and Containers as new technologies coming in Windows Server 2016. In this blog post we’ll discuss how these two technologies are core pieces of the Windows Server 2016 developer/DevOps solution, discuss the full inbox stack, and provide links to additional resources to get you started. In addition to this post, at Build 2016, Taylor Brown and I presented a session with demos on this topic. The recording is available on Channel9.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2016/06/21/the-windows-server-2016-application-platform-nano-server-containers-and-devops/?wt.mc_id=WW_CE_WS_OO_SCL_TW&Ocid=C+E%20Social%20FY16_Social_TW_windowsserver_20160625_502150471

Build, Ship, Run with Docker and Microsoft

Microsoft and Docker aim to provide a modern platform for developers and IT pros to build, ship and run distributed applications on-premise, in the cloud or through service providers across both Windows and Linux operating systems. Together we are bringing container applications across platforms - integrating across our developer tools, the operating system and cloud infrastructure to provide a seamless experience across the application environment from development to test and production.

https://www.docker.com/microsoft

Azure Hybrid Cloud: Cost Reduction, Increased Agility and Improved Scalability

Want consistent management across your on-premises and cloud resources and to quickly deploy new scalable solutions? This session will focus on how you can leverage the hypercloud to extend and modernize your database infrastructure.

In this session, Kevin Orbaker (MTC Architect) shares his experience leveraging the cloud and discusses:

• Hybrid Cloud Services
• How to increase the scale of your database with automatic response
• How to write once and deploy anywhere, on-premises or in the cloud
• How to scale operations while reducing application and OS footprint

https://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/MTCStudio/2016-04-28-Azure-Hybrid-Cloud-Cost-Reduction-Increased-Agility-and-Improved-Scalability

SQL 2016 Stretch Databases On Azure

Stretch Database leverages the resources in Microsoft Azure to offload archival data storage and query processing.

When you enable Stretch Database on a database, it creates a secure linked server definition in the on-premises SQL Server. This linked server definition has the remote endpoint as the target. When you enable Stretch Database on a table in the database, it provisions remote resources and begins to migrate eligible data, if migration is enabled.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn935011.aspx

Prerequisites:

Windows 10 – 64Bit

Hyper-V role enabled

Hyper-V Powershell module enabled

Install:

https://download.docker.com/win/beta/InstallDocker.msi

So let’s start by talking about what Azure Automation is and the value it can provide. Azure Automation is a platform service within Azure that provides a way for users to automate the manual, long-running, error-prone, and frequently repeated tasks that are commonly performed in a cloud and on-premises environment. It saves time and increases the reliability of regular administrative tasks and even schedules them to be automatically performed at regular intervals. You can automate processes using runbooks or automate configuration management using Desired State Configuration.

Stay tuned for Part 1 on “Setting Up Azure Automation”….