This week during Microsoft TechEd North America in Houston, Microsoft announced several innovations that focused on their cloud platform technology, Azure.
Microsoft explained to attendees during the event, a hybrid cloud infrastructure is the gateway to a cloud-first world, but the deployment process can be complex. So Microsoft decided to invest in new services designed to simplify the transition.
To connect on-premises technology with the public cloud, they've introduced the general availability of Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, which enables you to create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure that’s on your premises or in a co-location environment. ExpressRoute connections do not go over the public Internet, and offer more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies and higher security than typical connections over the Internet. In some cases, using ExpressRoute connections to transfer data between on-premises and Azure can also yield significant cost benefits. It uses existing network providers such as AT&T, BT, Equinix, Level3, TelecityGroup, and Verizon.
They also introduced a preview of Azure Files, a new technology that simplifies how files can be shared in the cloud across applications and services. Microsoft wants to make it easier for end users to be able to move legacy applications to the cloud, without running into storage issues. This offering is designed to provide users with a single pool of storage for multiple virtual machines housed within the same datacenter.
Connecting to the cloud is just the first step – it’s equally important to protect your cloud investments. So Microsoft introduced new products like the Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (formerly known as Hyper-V Recovery Manager) preview for disaster recovery. This means end users will have the ability to replicate and recover virtual machines, workloads and services to Azure if their primary datacenter facility goes down, making disaster recovery cheaper and easier for enterprises to take advantage of.
Microsoft is also partnering with Symantec and Trend Micro to integrate their anti-virus technologies on Azure, creating Microsoft Azure Anti-malware to protect VMs and services running on the cloud platform. Trend Micro said its Deep Security and SecureCloud offerings will offer threat and data protection security controls for virtual machines deployed in Microsoft Azure. These controls include anti-malware, intrusion detection, threat prevention and encryption. The company said they will also offer centralized, automated policy management.
The Redmond giant is also looking ahead to enhanced data-loss prevention and encryption technologies for Office 365 customers.
Microsoft also recently announced the Enterprise Mobility Suite, a comprehensive set of cloud services that help customers manage and protect their identity, mobile devices, applications and data. Now, they are including a preview of Microsoft Azure RemoteApp, a set of tools for managing and deploying session virtualization servers on Azure's infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, and a sneak peek into how Intune (one of the components of the Enterprise Mobility Suite) and Office 365 will deliver better protections to mobile productivity for Office for iPad, iPhone and Android phones later this year.