Business Software for Microsoft Azure

Introducing a compact, edge-optimized SQL database engine that integrates artificial intelligence: Azure SQL Edge. This powerful Internet of Things (IoT) database is specifically designed for edge computing, offering features like data streaming and time series analysis alongside in-database machine learning and graph capabilities. By extending the highly regarded Microsoft SQL engine to edge devices, it ensures uniform performance and security across your entire data infrastructure, whether in the cloud or at the edge. You can create your applications once and deploy them seamlessly across various environments, including edge locations, on-premises data centers, or Azure. With integrated data streaming and time series functionalities, along with advanced analytics powered by machine learning and graph features, users benefit from low-latency performance. It enables efficient data processing at the edge, accommodating online, offline, or hybrid scenarios to address challenges related to latency and bandwidth. Updates and deployments can be managed easily via the Azure portal or your organization’s portal, ensuring consistent security and streamlined operations. Furthermore, leverage the built-in machine learning capabilities to detect anomalies and implement business logic directly at the edge, enhancing real-time decision-making and operational efficiency. This comprehensive solution empowers organizations to harness the full potential of their data, regardless of its location.

SQL Managed Instance, a member of the Azure SQL family, is a sophisticated cloud database solution that offers extensive compatibility with the SQL Server engine, dating back to SQL Server 2008, while providing the advantages of a fully managed platform as a service. By utilizing tools such as Azure Migrate or Azure Data Studio, you can confidently transition your custom and vendor applications to Azure, alleviating concerns about software updates, upgrades, or end-of-support scenarios. Since SQL Managed Instance operates on the SQL Server engine, it consistently incorporates the latest features and functionalities, ensuring your database remains current. Remarkably, it can fulfill your mission-critical needs up to five times faster and at a cost savings of up to 93 percent compared to AWS RDS. In various benchmarks covering both transactional and analytics workloads, SQL Managed Instance has demonstrated superior performance. Embrace the opportunity to accelerate your application modernization by leveraging the advanced capabilities of managed SQL Server in the cloud, empowering your organization to thrive in a competitive landscape.

Efficiently manage mission-critical workloads at scale using Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, ensuring a cost-effective solution. Adapt seamlessly to fluctuating demands through a variety of resource and data replication choices. Maintain business continuity by enabling zero downtime scalability for both hybrid and cloud environments. Accelerate application development with the use of familiar and fully compatible Cassandra tools and programming languages. Eliminate the burden of infrastructure management while upholding security standards. Operate your workloads on a managed and secure service that simplifies processes with automated repairs, updates, and patches. Enhance your database's durability and resilience through automatic backups and comprehensive disaster recovery plans. Enjoy the flexibility and control of your hardware setup with turnkey scaling services and hybrid deployment alternatives. With an instance-based pricing model, you can specify your requirements for CPU cores, virtual machine SKU, and memory/disk space needs, allowing for tailored resource allocation. This approach ensures that you can scale your operations effectively while only paying for what you need.

A secure and unalterable data repository is established within trusted execution environments (TEEs), further reinforced by cryptographic evidence. Azure Confidential Ledger offers a decentralized and managed ledger system for data entries that utilises blockchain technology. Safeguard your information whether it is stored, transmitted, or actively in use through the implementation of hardware-backed secure enclaves found in Azure's confidential computing services. This ensures that your sensitive data remains unchanged over time. The blockchain’s decentralized framework employs consensus-driven replicas and cryptographically secured blocks to guarantee the perpetual integrity of the information recorded in the Confidential Ledger. A forthcoming enhancement will allow the inclusion of multiple participants to engage in decentralized ledger operations through the consortium model, an essential aspect of blockchain technology. You can have confidence that your data is immutable by conducting your own verification processes. Tamper evidence can be exhibited across server nodes, the recorded blocks on the ledger, and all transactions carried out by users, thereby enhancing trust in the system's integrity. Furthermore, this robust framework fosters a collaborative environment where stakeholders can work together while ensuring data security and accountability.

Synadia offers a comprehensive, globally accessible service that operates across multiple clouds and geographic locations, fully managed for your convenience. This service encompasses everything you appreciate about NATS.io, enhanced with features suitable for enterprise needs. With Synadia Cloud, you can rely on them to manage all aspects of infrastructure, monitoring, and maintenance, allowing you to dedicate your time to developing outstanding distributed applications. You can easily structure NATS accounts into teams, as well as create and oversee user accounts and permissions. The platform enables you to implement access controls and effortlessly import and export subjects across accounts. Additionally, you can keep an eye on your NATS systems, utilizing default alert rules for typical problems while also having the freedom to establish custom alerts tailored to your specific application requirements. Each subscription plan provides a designated pool of resources for your NATS accounts, ensuring transparency with no unexpected charges or overages. Resource allocation is simplified with usage charts, which allow you to quickly identify where your resources are being utilized, leading to more efficient management of your distributed applications. In this way, Synadia empowers developers to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management.

Batch facilitates the execution of applications across workstations and clusters, making it simple to enable your executable files and scripts for cloud scalability. It operates a queue system designed to handle tasks you wish to run, effectively executing your applications as needed. To leverage Batch effectively, consider the data that must be uploaded to the cloud for processing, how that data should be allocated across various tasks, the necessary parameters for each job, and the commands required to initiate the processes. Visualize this as an assembly line where different applications interact seamlessly. With Batch, you can efficiently share data across different stages and oversee the entire execution process. It operates on a demand-driven basis rather than adhering to a fixed schedule, allowing customers to run their cloud jobs whenever necessary. Additionally, it's vital to manage user access to Batch and regulate resource utilization while ensuring compliance with requirements like data encryption. Comprehensive monitoring features are in place to provide insight into the system's status and to help quickly identify any issues that may arise, ensuring smooth operation and optimal performance. Furthermore, the flexibility in resource scaling allows for efficient handling of varying workloads, making Batch an essential tool for cloud-enabled applications.

Assist developers and testers in creating extensive load simulations and executing tests with a completely managed load-testing solution designed for Azure. You can quickly set up tests without needing expertise in load-testing tools or simply upload your pre-existing Apache JMeter scripts. This service provides valuable insights into performance, scalability, and capacity, facilitating ongoing enhancements through automated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes. By monitoring how a significant load impacts your application's performance, you can fine-tune its scalability and capacity. Obtain in-depth, actionable insights and suggestions from a well-rounded perspective of tailored client and server metrics, allowing you to comprehend and enhance app performance on a large scale—all available on one unified dashboard. Additionally, you can visually compare different load tests to evaluate the impact of application and environmental modifications, alongside how these tests influence every component of your app. This comprehensive approach ensures that your application is not only resilient but also primed for future growth and efficiency.

Azure Managed Grafana offers a comprehensive, fully managed platform for monitoring and analytics needs. Backed by Grafana Enterprise, it delivers customizable and extensible data visualizations. Users can swiftly deploy Grafana dashboards with inherent high availability while managing access through Azure's security features. It supports a broad array of data sources, enabling connections to various data repositories both within Azure and beyond. By integrating charts, logs, and alerts, users can achieve a unified overview of their applications and infrastructure. Additionally, it allows for the correlation of data across different datasets, enhancing analysis capabilities. Users can easily share Grafana dashboards with colleagues and external partners, fostering collaboration in monitoring and troubleshooting solutions. This makes Azure Managed Grafana an invaluable tool for teams seeking to improve their operational efficiency and data-driven decision-making.

GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps is a service designed for application security testing that seamlessly integrates with the developer workflow. It enables DevSecOps teams—comprising Development, Security, and Operations professionals—to foster innovation while simultaneously boosting the security of developers without hindering their productivity. The service includes secret scanning, which helps identify and prevent secret leaks throughout the application development lifecycle. Users can access a partner program featuring over 100 service providers and scan for more than 200 types of tokens. Implementing secret scanning is quick and straightforward, requiring no additional tools beyond the Azure DevOps interface. Furthermore, it safeguards your software supply chain by detecting vulnerable open-source components you may rely on through dependency scanning. Additionally, the platform provides clear instructions on updating component references, allowing for rapid resolution of any identified issues. This holistic approach ensures that security is ingrained in every aspect of the development process.

As a component of the Azure Stack suite, Azure Stack Hub extends Azure capabilities by enabling the execution of applications within an on-premises setting, thereby allowing the provision of Azure services directly from your data center. In the rush toward digital transformation, many organizations discover that leveraging public cloud services accelerates their ability to adopt modern architectures and modernize their legacy applications. Nonetheless, certain workloads must remain on-site due to various technological and compliance-related challenges. To address this, Microsoft provides extensive hybrid cloud solutions and innovative cloud services to support all your workloads, regardless of their location. By processing data locally within Azure Stack Hub, you can meet latency and connectivity demands, subsequently aggregating that data in Azure for deeper analytics while maintaining consistent application logic across both platforms. Additionally, Azure Stack Hub can be deployed in a disconnected mode, allowing it to function independently of the internet and Azure, providing even greater flexibility for organizations with specific needs. This versatility ensures that businesses can tailor their cloud strategy effectively, optimizing both performance and compliance.

Execute your workloads and gain immediate actionable insights at the source of data generation with Azure Stack Edge, which offers specialized hardware-as-a-service. You can effortlessly procure your appliance through the Azure portal, adopting a hardware-as-a-service approach that is billed monthly through your Azure subscription. Experience a fluid cloud-to-edge integration as you set up, oversee, and upgrade your Azure Stack Edge using the same management interface and development tools familiar from Azure. Deploy your containerized applications and virtual machines directly at the data creation point for optimal efficiency. Process, transform, and filter your data on the edge, transmitting only the essential information to the cloud for additional processing or storage requirements. Additionally, you can design and train machine learning models in Azure or leverage Azure Cognitive Services, utilizing the integrated NVIDIA T4 GPU or Intel VPU in the Mini R to enhance local processing speeds. This enables businesses to make data-driven decisions faster than ever, significantly improving operational effectiveness.

Azure Health Data Services represents a collection of specialized technologies designed for managing protected health information (PHI) in a cloud environment. This service is founded on widely accepted global standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)® and Digital Imaging Communications in Medicine (DICOM). It ensures the protection of data privacy while adhering to compliance regulations, allows for the de-identification of data to facilitate secondary uses, and enables the generation of valuable insights through analytics and AI capabilities. As an upgraded version of the Azure API for FHIR, it introduces enhanced technologies and services. Current users can maintain their experience without any service interruptions or modifications to pricing. By unifying healthcare data within the cloud, it simplifies the exchange of PHI throughout the entire care continuum. Additionally, it standardizes a variety of data sources, including clinical, imaging, device, and unstructured data, by utilizing FHIR, DICOM, and MedTech services, thereby enhancing interoperability and efficiency in healthcare delivery. This comprehensive approach aims to improve patient outcomes and streamline healthcare operations.

Azure Data Manager for Energy empowers energy firms to derive actionable insights, enhance operational efficiency, and speed up market readiness through the robust, cloud-based OSDU® Data Platform service. By offering a versatile and open energy platform, it enables developers to create and tailor solutions that drive innovation. This open platform not only fosters decision-making but also facilitates the rapid development of cutting-edge digital solutions. Organizations can effortlessly implement strategies that boost agility while optimizing workflows related to seismic activities, wellbores, and reservoirs. Transitioning to a high-grade cloud environment allows companies to maintain their competitive edge in a global market. Furthermore, the integration process is streamlined, reducing implementation costs and expediting time to market with the help of built-in tools that ensure compliance and simplify development within the OSDU data platform. This approach not only supports operational growth but also encourages continuous innovation within the energy sector.

Create and provide comprehensive, ready-to-use applications tailored for your enterprise IT clientele. The service catalog empowers organizations to establish a collection of sanctioned solutions for Azure, simplifying the process of obtaining new offerings and enhancing the overall user experience. By offering Azure Managed Applications within this service catalog, managed service providers (MSPs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) can effortlessly construct and deliver fully managed, turnkey applications to their customers. This approach allows you to present a seamless solution, eliminating the need for your clients to invest time in understanding cloud infrastructure to benefit from your applications. Moreover, you can ensure that your clients utilize solutions that align with their organizational standards, ultimately reinforcing their trust in your offerings. This method not only streamlines deployment but also fosters a sense of security and compliance among your customer base.

Utilize Network Watcher to monitor and troubleshoot networking problems without the need to access your virtual machines (VMs) directly. You can initiate packet captures by configuring alerts and obtain real-time performance insights at the packet level. Upon detecting an issue, you have the opportunity to conduct a thorough investigation to enhance your diagnosis. Additionally, delve into your network traffic patterns with the aid of network security group flow logs and virtual network flow logs. The insights garnered from these flow logs are invaluable for collecting data related to compliance, auditing, and overseeing your network security posture. Network Watcher also empowers you to identify and analyze common VPN gateway and connection issues, enabling not only the pinpointing of the problem but also utilizing the comprehensive logs generated for deeper analysis. This comprehensive approach allows you to maintain a robust and secure networking environment.

The Azure Web Application Firewall is a cloud-based solution designed to safeguard web applications against prevalent hacking methods, including SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. You can set up this service in minutes, enabling you to gain full visibility into your environment while effectively blocking malicious attacks. With the latest managed and preconfigured rule sets, you can protect your web applications quickly and efficiently. The detection engine of Azure Web Application Firewall, coupled with continuously updated rule sets, enhances security measures, minimizes false positives, and optimizes performance. Additionally, Azure Policy can be utilized to enforce organizational standards and assess compliance across Web Application Firewall resources on a large scale. By utilizing these tools, you can achieve a comprehensive overview of your environment's security posture. Ultimately, this proactive approach helps ensure your web applications remain secure and resilient against evolving threats.

Azure Orbital Ground Station facilitates a rapid connection between your satellites and the Azure cloud platform. Enhance your satellite communication reach by utilizing a worldwide network of ground station partners, cloud modems, and essential telemetry, tracking, and control services. Besides utilizing Microsoft's own ground stations, you can benefit from a diverse array of partner solutions from prominent industry players like KSAT, which enables you to efficiently schedule communications with your satellite systems. Additionally, you can process your signals through high-speed integrated software modems or explore partner products available on Azure Marketplace for advanced signal, image processing, and calibration solutions, allowing for a more comprehensive operational capability. This interconnected approach ensures that you have the flexibility and resources needed to optimize satellite communication and data management effectively.

Azure Route Server facilitates the dynamic exchange of routing information between network appliances and Azure virtual networks. By setting up your network appliances along with Azure ExpressRoute and VPN gateways, you can automatically receive the most current route information from Azure Route Server, eliminating the need for manual configuration of each connection. This tool allows for dynamic routing between your network appliances and Azure gateways, replacing the traditional static routing method. Azure Route Server operates using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) endpoints, which utilize standard routing protocols for effective route exchanges. Furthermore, it seamlessly integrates with both existing and new deployments, accommodating various network architectures like hub and spoke, full mesh, or flat virtual networks, ensuring flexibility and efficiency in network management. This capability enhances the overall performance and reliability of your network infrastructure.

Azure Network Function Manager delivers a standardized management interface for pre-validated mobile network functions, facilitating the implementation of private LTE and 5G solutions. This service also supports a smooth cloud-to-edge integration for Azure Marketplace network functions, including SD-WAN. You can deploy secure private 5G and LTE mobile networks on-site, with the ability to quickly set them up from various mobile packet core network function partners directly through the Azure portal. These networks are designed to provide extremely low latency, making them ideal for real-time edge applications, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and industrial robotics. Managing and deploying SD-WAN and VPN solutions at the edge is made simple, thanks to a diverse ecosystem of partners. Additionally, for a comprehensive hybrid experience, Azure Marketplace allows you to select from a list of pre-validated network functions, ensuring compatibility with the network functions utilized in Azure and Azure Virtual WAN, which further enhances the operational reliability with Azure Stack Edge. This integration not only streamlines deployment but also enhances the performance of critical applications in various industries.

Streamline your operational costs with Azure Virtual Network Manager, a comprehensive management tool designed for your virtual network assets. This service allows for seamless administration of your virtual network framework while efficiently scaling your cloud workloads. With this centralized platform, you can effortlessly design and oversee intricate network architectures and implement security protocols on a global scale across various subscriptions. It enables you to set security measures and connectivity settings for all your virtual networks, regardless of their geographical locations or subscriptions. You will have the ability to control the configurations of your entire ecosystem from a unified interface. In just a few clicks, you can establish complex virtual network designs like hub and spoke or mesh. Furthermore, Azure Virtual Network Manager autonomously adjusts to any modifications you make, ensuring that your virtual network topology remains consistent and effective. This adaptability enhances your overall network management experience.

Azure Private 5G Core facilitates the straightforward, scalable, and secure establishment of private 5G core networks on an Azure Arc–managed edge platform, integrated within the Azure private multi-access edge compute (MEC) framework. Users can deploy and connect swiftly, accommodating a diverse range of indoor and outdoor applications, while also managing private 5G networks from a central point across various locations. The 5G core operates independently at the edge, encompassing User Plane, Control Plane, Subscriber, and Policy functionalities that are implemented on Azure private MEC. With features ensuring high availability and the ability to function offline, the 5G network guarantees continued operation during network disruptions or outages, thereby delivering essential reliability and uptime for businesses. Additionally, the solution offers centralized orchestration and automated installation of 5G core software, which includes multi-slice/data network name (DNN) capabilities, sophisticated policy and quality of service (QoS) management, as well as advanced monitoring of system performance both locally and in the cloud, making it a comprehensive choice for enterprises seeking robust connectivity solutions. This extensive framework ensures that organizations can effectively tailor their private network to meet specific operational demands.

NAT Gateway is a service that manages the secure routing of internet traffic from a private virtual network, offering high performance suitable for enterprise use and ensuring low latency. Its design incorporates built-in high availability through software-defined networking, making it simple to configure, scale, and implement outbound connectivity for evolving workloads. By utilizing a NAT (network address translation) gateway resource, you can initiate secure connections to the internet while maintaining enterprise-level performance. Setting up your NAT gateway is straightforward; with just a few clicks, you can assign it to subnets within one virtual network and connect static public IP addresses. Once linked to a subnet, NAT Gateway automatically takes on the default route to the internet, eliminating the need for any additional traffic routing configurations. This streamlined approach not only enhances connectivity but also simplifies network management for users.

Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management outlines the specific attack surface that is exposed to the internet for your organization while uncovering previously unrecognized resources to effectively enhance your security measures. Through a unified interface, you can analyze your organization’s web applications, dependencies, and infrastructure in one comprehensive view, allowing for a more streamlined approach to security management. This improved visibility empowers both security and IT teams to uncover hidden resources, assess risks more accurately, and mitigate potential threats efficiently. You can monitor your ever-evolving global attack surface in real time, gaining thorough insight into your organization's internet-facing assets. Furthermore, a straightforward and searchable inventory equips network teams, security professionals, and incident responders with validated information regarding vulnerabilities, risks, and exposures, which encompasses everything from hardware to specific application elements. This holistic approach ultimately facilitates a proactive defense strategy against cyber threats.

Notification Hubs offers remarkable adaptability, allowing integration with any backend such as Microsoft .NET, PHP, Java, or Node.js, regardless of whether it's hosted on-premises or in the cloud. This capability simplifies the process of updating mobile applications instantly and helps to foster customer engagement. You can choose to broadcast push notifications to all users simultaneously or utilize the tagging feature to target specific devices effectively. This tagging system enables you to categorize customers based on factors like their activity, interests, location, or preferences, ensuring that the appropriate content reaches each individual at the ideal moment. For applications operating across various markets, Notification Hubs provides a templates feature that facilitates sending localized push notifications, effectively communicating with customers in their native languages. Additionally, this templates feature streamlines the management of localization settings, removing the need to store individual preferences or create numerous tags, thereby enhancing overall efficiency.

Unikernels offer remarkable speed, enhanced security, improved server density, and the potential to eliminate the need for traditional DevOps practices. They can start up two hundred times quicker than Docker and enable applications to run up to twice as fast on Google Cloud Platform and three times as fast on Amazon Web Services. By their very nature, unikernels mitigate various types of remote code execution vulnerabilities, allowing for the deployment of thousands of instances on standard hardware. This capability allows us to provision hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines using the same physical resources. Rather than merely scanning for compromised systems, we take a proactive approach by removing the tools that hackers rely on to carry out their attacks. Furthermore, the efficiency and security benefits make unikernels an increasingly attractive option for modern cloud infrastructures.