As we referenced several times, security is one of the main topics for cloud providers looking to guarantee privacy for their customers’ data and information. Microsoft just announced the public availability for Storage Service Encryption (SSE) for Azure Managed Disks, with no additional cost.

We all already know the two biggest Public Cloud providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and, unless a catastrophic event occurs, these two will be leading the market in the next couple of years. A recent study between 550 companies showed some interesting results: AWS is the most preferred vendor in SMBs; Microsoft the “most known” in enterprises; AWS has been reviewed the most between all companies but Azure is the most used.

Microsoft is transforming the Azure Backup platform into a reliable solution for managing the virtual machines protection after all Azure Backup is one of the “low-hanging fruits” available for IT admins that want to start trying cloud solutions. Now they are previewing the Azure Backup pre-checks to guarantee a clean and straightforward process when you are protecting your workloads.

Microsoft is always looking to offer newer and faster ways for their customers to embrace cloud services, even if you are not moving any of your workloads to Azure, MS wants for your company to integrate with the cloud. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms are a simple way to start, even for Internet-of-Things (IoT), that’s why the Redmond company is announcing: IoT Central.

Linux virtual machines in a cloud service like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure have become a very common practice. You can find pretty much anything that you need regarding Linux applications, including appliances or even PaaS technologies that actually work with Linux in the backend. Now Ubuntu has decided to go a bit further than that and offers an OS version with a customized kernel for AWS.

Microsoft has just released to the public, and with a stable version (preview was announced in September 2016), Azure Monitor. This platform represents a set of features and capabilities within Azure to provide detail logs, metrics and diagnostic about the workloads in the Microsoft public cloud.

On this blog, we reviewed a couple of times Azure Backup capabilities and integration with, what Microsoft considered a while back, strong rival: VMware (“Azure Offers Backing Up VMware VMs with a Freeware Tool”). And now they added one more interesting and highly valuable feature, Azure Backup will be able to support backing up applications in Linux.

Microsoft continues the expansion of its services for Azure in Europe, this time with new capabilities related to Big Data: Azure Data Lake Analytics and Data Lake Store. These new services appear as server-less options for companies that already have resources in Azure and a large amount of data, allowing them to transform that data into valuable information.

We’ve talked before in this blog about Microsoft Project Olympus and the Open Compute Project (OCP): “Microsoft, the Open Source Cloud Hardware and Why is it Important to You”. This time, Microsoft is expanding the Olympus ideal by adding NVIDIA support with their GPU capabilities into their Open Source Hardware.