Microsoft keeps going big on offering VMware integration, we’ve mentioned in the past that they’ve released a freeware tool to backup VMware virtual machines into Azure: Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS). And now they keep insisting on taking over Enterprise VMware customers into Azure, or at least their Site Recovery solution: Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware.

The network component and the troubleshooting that sometimes we need to do represents a big factor on all cloud customers, not matter if you are using Azure, AWS, Office 365 or any other. If you don’t have control over the network and/or you are not capable of identifying issues root causes, then there’s most likely the cloud experience it’s not going to be a good one. Microsoft has that clear and is now offering a new tool to assist customers: Azure Network Watcher.

We talked about Azure Backup before in this blog, when they recently added the capability to backup VMware virtual machines, now they are introducing a new set of features: Central monitoring, enhanced security and available in new regions.

Amazon released recently the Aurora Storage Engine as a MySQL-compatible relational database service and is highly encouraging to customers to migrate from Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to this new cloud service platform. Amazon Aurora is promising up to five times better performance than MySQL with better security, availability, and reliability of a commercial database and a 10% cost of what organizations are paying. And also announced a short time ago, PostgreSQL compatibility (available as a preview).

The technology giant Microsoft is, as many other big ones in the market, making a statement regarding CyberSecurity: They are maintaining their $1 billion investment on yearly basis for research and development in this field, which does not include any “inorganic investments” (buying other companies). The latter investments will be a separate budget.

Microsoft recently announced new features and updated capabilities within Azure Storage. Some of the new features are Larger blobs, incremental copy, new API capabilities and an updated version for the Storage Emulator.

Microsoft will be “guiding” new customers to use the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program to acquire any of the Azure subscriptions. Even though you won’t see the pay-as-you-go option from Microsoft, don’t panic, there’s an explanation.

AT&T, the Texas-based telecommunications company, has just announced two new Internet of Things (IoT) starter kits at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2017 in Las Vegas, one for Amazon Web Services (AWS) developers, the other for developers that use Raspberry Pi.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be one of the trends in 2017, the two big cloud providers are investing a large amount of money into developing new technologies in this area. Amazon Web Services (AWS) released in December 2016 several new services customers can acquire within their cloud offerings: Polly, Rekognition and Lex.