During Microsoft Ignite 2022, the leading vendors announced many Azure features that align with the latest VMware vSphere updates. Mix and match both worlds to suit your business and technology needs.

Azure Arc enables users to extend the functionality of Azure Resource Manager to on-premises environments (including VMware vSphere) or other clouds. It brings better visibility, control, and management. This is a great tool as managing hybrid or multi-cloud is daunting, as well as it can cause security compromises.

Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) being a software as a service (SaaS) leads to organizations having multiple AKS clusters. Managing these diverse and multiple containerized environments is tricky and inefficient at this point in the game. Having a new management solution from Microsoft will surely help the process.

Microsoft recently announced Windows Hello for Business Hybrid Cloud Kerberos Trust to help with the complexity of passwordless authentication. It is commonly thought passwords are the weakest link in a company’s cybersecurity posture. While Azure has seen various aspects of passwordless authentication, Windows has been lacking.

For some time now, Microsoft has made a single-node configuration available for its cloud service Azure Stack HCI. The name is somewhat misleading since a cluster requires two or more servers to form a group for high availability. Nonetheless, this version is good for dev, test, proof of concept, or initial setup tweaking for further scaling.

Microsoft Defender SmartScreen provides a host of new cybersecurity features in Windows 11 22H2, including better protection against phishing. Enterprises often overlook the threat of phishing, which is unfortunate because it’s a matter of human error, i.e. users lacking cybersecurity awareness. Windows 11 now helps tackle that.

Containers and containerized applications are becoming more and more popular by the day, which is why they are part of the latest Windows Server operating system release. Moreover, Microsoft has also included several modifications designed to improve customer experience working with containerized apps.

VMware recently announced a new way to enhance cybersecurity for Amazon Web Services cloud-based infrastructure — Advanced Workload Security for AWS. This new offer is based on the Carbon Black portfolio developed by VMware. It presents cloud-native endpoint security options that make cloud environments just as secure as on-prem ones.

Windows Update for Business recently introduced safeguard holds, which prevents a user from updating until an issue likely to happen is fixed. Previously, admins would deter from performing regular updates for various issues. Now, the manager uses machine learning to monitor millions of unmanaged PCs for rollback during upgrading for context. It pauses updates for users at potential issue risk and offers it again once the issue is dealt with.