Azure News November 2020

by N4StackNov 3, 2020

Optimise your Azure workloads with the new Azure Advisor Score

Azure Advisor Score helps you understand how well your Azure workloads are following best practices, assess how much you stand to gain by remediating issues, and prioritise the most impactful recommendations you can take to optimise your deployments.

The capability enables you to get the most out of your Azure investment using a centralised dashboard to monitor and work towards optimising the cost, security, reliability, operational excellence, and performance of your Azure resources by helping you:

Assess how well you’re following the best practices defined by Azure Advisor and the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework
Optimise your deployments by taking the most impactful actions first
Report on your well-architected progress over time

Azure Advisor Score. Source: Microsoft

Lower prices and more flexible purchase options for Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Back in 2019 Microsoft and Red Hat launched Azure Red Hat OpenShift, designed to help users build, deploy and scale apps on OpenShift with confidence. In October Microsoft, in collaboration with Red Hat, announced they are:

Dropping the price of Red Hat OpenShift licenses on Azure Red Hat OpenShift worker nodes by up to 77%
Adding the choice of a three-year term for Reserved Instances (RIs) on top of the existing one-year RI and pay as you go options, with a reduction in the minimum number of virtual machines required
Increasing the Service Level Agreement (SLA) to 99.95%

Keen to find out more about the improvements, plus how Red Hat OpenShift helps developers and IT operators? Have a read of the announcement here.

Microsoft announces the public preview of Watchlist feature in Azure Sentinel

Azure Sentinel watchlists enable the collection of data from external data sources for correlation against the events in your Azure Sentinel environment. Once created, leverage watchlist in your search, detection rules, threat hunting and response playbooks. Common scenarios for using watchlists include

Investigating threats and responding to incidents quickly
Importing business data
Reducing alert fatigue
Enriching event data

Keen to find out more, get a taste for what additional features are coming, or create a new watchlist? Click here.

Azure Cost Management + Billing updates

No matter the size of your business it’s important to know what you’re spending, where, and how you can reduce those costs. This is where Azure Cost Management + Billing comes in. Here are some of the latest improvements and updates based on user feedback:

Assess how well you’re doing, optimise your deployments and report on your progress with Azure Advisor Score
Create subscriptions with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates
Minimise cost with Azure Disk Storage performance tiers
Azure Machine Learning Enterprise Edition capabilities now available at no extra charge
Save up to 77% with lower prices for Azure Red Hat OpenShift

And that’s not all. Head over to the blog for all the new updates.

An example of an ARM template. Source: Microsoft

Microsoft Azure AD gains machine learning hooks to detect password spray attacks

In October Microsoft introduced us to their latest credential compromise detection capability which uses machine learning technology and global signal to create accurate detection of a nuanced attack called “password spray.” Azure Active Directory (AD) Identity Protection customers will see this new risk detection in the portal and APIs for Identity Protection.