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Monthly Industry Roundup: Cloud Technology News from March 2021

By WatServ

March 31, 2021

Here is a list of our top cloud technology news stories from the industry. 

Announcing preview of Azure Trusted Launch for virtual machines

March 8, 2021 | Mark Russinovich, Chief Technology Officer and Technical Fellow, Microsoft Azure

Bootkits and rootkits are sophisticated malware types that can hide themselves from diagnostic tools and antimalware. To address this challenge, Microsoft announced that Azure customers can now enable Azure Trusted Launch for their virtual machines. This allows admins to deploy virtual machines with verified and signed bootloaders, OS kernels and a boot policy that uses the Trusted Launch Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) to see if the boot was compromised.

Whatever ‘normal’ is, global CEOs don’t expect to see it return before 2022 and are ploughing funds into security
March 24, 2021 | Matthew Hughes

Remote working is the trend for now and no one quite knows when it will end. As a result, CEOs are focusing on data protection and resilience, with a recent survey showing that 52% described data security measures as their primary area of investment. This is a measurable increase from the numbers seen at the start of the pandemic.

Prevent exceeding Azure budget with forecasted cost alerts
March 15, 2021 | Adam Wise Program Manager II, Microsoft Azure

Microsoft announced that Azure Cost Management and Billing is now generally available, providing forecasted cost alerts within budgets. This means customers will be served advanced notifications when their spending trends are likely to exceed their allocated budget, so they can forecast accurately and never get caught off guard again with larger than expected spend.

Black Kingdom Ransomware Hunting Unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers
March 25, 2021 | Ravie Lakshmanan

After a whirlwind series of espionage and malware campaigns, Microsoft released a one-click mitigation tool in mid-March to mitigate cyberattacks targeting on-premises Exchange servers. So far, patches have been applied to over 90% of all internet-facing servers affected by the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities. That means there are roughly 29,966 instances of Microsoft Exchange servers still exposed to attacks, down from 92,072 on March 10.

Perform at-scale, agentless SQL Server discovery and assessment with Azure Migrate
March 23, 2021 | Abhishek A. Hemrajani, Principal PM Manager, Azure Compute

Moving on-premises infrastructure, databases and applications to Azure can be a complex component of the cloud journey. To help simplify the process, Microsoft has released a preview of at-scale, agentless discovery and migration-readiness assessments for SQL Server. That means customers will now be able to use Azure Migrate to create a unified view of their entire datacenter, across Windows Server, Linux and SQL Server.

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