With all the changes in Azure, it is sometimes hard to keep track, that's why I thought I would give you a quick update on a couple of exciting things I learned this week. In this update, I want to share a couple of things around updates on Azure Storage and Azure Security Center as well as some great blogs on migrating servers to Azure and the difference between Azure AD Identity Protection and Conditional Access. Also, tune in for our live stream later today.

Enhanced features in Azure Archive Storage now generally available

Since launching Azure Archive Storage, we've seen unprecedented interest and innovative usage from a variety of industries. Archive Storage is built as a scalable service for cost-effectively storing rarely accessed data for long periods of time. Cold data, including application backups, healthcare records, autonomous driving recordings, and other data sets that might have been previously deleted could be stored in Azure Storage’s Archive tier in an offline state, then rehydrated to an online tier when needed.

With the feedback we got form our customers, the Azure Storage team made the archive improvements generally available:

Priority retrieval from Azure Archive

Upload blob direct to access tier of choice (hot, cool, or archive)

Copy Blob enhanced capabilities

You can read the full blog post on the Microsoft Azure blog.

Identity recommendations now included in Azure Security Center free tier

Microsoft has now added security recommendations on identity and access in the free tier offering of Azure Security Center. Recommendations include Multifactor authentication use, owner subscription designation and removal of deprecated accounts. These recommendations were only offered on the standard pricing tier prior to this change. If you want to learn more check out the new update here.

Three things to remember when migrating servers to Azure

Three things to remember when migrating servers to Azure

Over the last few years, I have spoken to customers who are either looking to expand their datacenter into Azure or move their workloads into Azure instead of hosting them on prem. Often the workloads they are looking to host in Azure are virtual machines (VMs) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) VMs.

Lifting and Shifting workloads into Azure is often the best way forward for some workloads, however there are some things that you need to think about before going down that road and make sure it really is the best fit for your organization and workload. Sarah Lean shares three things to remember when migrating servers to Microsoft Azure.

What’s the difference between Azure Active Directory Identity Protection and Conditional Access?

Sonia Cuff shares details on the differences of two Cloud Identity capabilities: Azure AD Identity Protection and Azure AD Conditional Access. While Azure AD Identity Protection focuses on the risks of compromise of user accounts, including suspicious sign-on attempts, Azure AD Conditional Access provides the ability to enforce extra security restrictions that don’t wait for a risk to be detected, like enforcing that someone is prompted for MFA only if they are outside of the company network (via IP address range or country). You can find the full blog post here on ITOpsTalk.com.

Conclusion

I wish you a good weekend, and I hope this short blog post provided you with some news from this week. I know there is much more than just the things I listed here. I recommend that you follow the Azure announcements blog. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Also, check out last week's Az Update here.