On Monday, September 25, multinational tech company Microsoft announced its plans to implement a security update to the company’s public cloud, Azure. Azure Active Directory, or AAD, serves as Microsoft’s access management system.
Through Azure, Microsoft manages up to 450 billion authentications every month. To protect these authentications, one of Microsoft’s many new updates includes privacy and security protections for greater confidentiality for customers.
Among Azure’s security protections is the active monitoring of public IP addresses and the monitoring of traffic patterns to easily identify abnormalities. Azure will also offer the automatic detection of cyber attacks while they’re happening and finally the encryption of a user’s data to prevent information theft while the data is being used. This last protection update is especially beneficial considering the enormous amounts of data created every second. By 2020, the digital universe will include up to 40 ZB of data, according to the IDC.
Additionally, Microsoft’s newest security benefits make the technology company’s cloud a respectable challenge to the public cloud of Amazon Web Services. Up to 55% of businesses both medium and small have fallen victim to cyber attacks over the course of the past year. And, in the shadow of the Equifax hacking, many businesses will more than likely invest in software that guarantees them greater security.
Amazon’s cloud, known as Amazon Drive, works like many other clouds. The management system offers secure information and data storage, file sharing, and file backup. Only recently did the marketing leader announce that it would be taking Amazon Drive to the Middle East, which is considered one of the largest world markets.
Yet, despite this marketing advancement on Amazon’s end, Microsoft’s management systems aren’t only expanding to protect its off-site customers via cloud protections. It’s also expanding to monitor on-premises systems for optimal threat protection, security management, and cyber monitoring using artificial intelligence.
“Today’s announcements and the entire Azure team’s work over the past year is focused on ensuring Azure is the cloud that can meet the most rigorous and mission-critical requirements of governments and enterprise customers,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group.
Microsoft Office 365 is also seeing an update meant to improve communications between both individuals and businesses. Through AI and machine learning via the Microsoft Graph, video-chat will soon be capable of using speech recognition and translation. This could make it possible for global organizations and corporate businesses to speak to one another through Skype’s technology, but with translation services in real time.
