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If you’re reading this on a mobile device or if you like to filter the content you read by category, you may enjoy viewing the Azure Newsletter via the custom website version we’ve created.
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Hollywood Software provides studios, theaters, and distributors with software and infrastructure to help manage and control end-to-end processes and equipment for digital cinema exhibition. Offering a suite of robust and scalable applications that connect each end of the theatrical distribution/exhibition supply chain, Hollywood Software used their Microsoft Gold Partnership to move existing infrastructure into Azure so they’d be ready for future growth. Now they can scale up and move faster to incorporate the growing and changing requirements of the movie industry. They are very pleased to pass many benefits through to their customers.
Do you have a story you want to share with your fellow Azure Newsletter readers? Submit your story and you could see it here!
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We’re adding more certification coverage to our Azure portfolio, so regulated customers can take advantage of new services. Microsoft has renewed our Azure Service Organization Controls (SOC) 1 and 2 Reports, expanding service coverage to include 14 new services in SOC and achieved a SOC 3. We have also renewed our Azure Payment Card Industry (PCI) certification, updating PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) 3.0 to PCI DSS 3.1 and expanding service coverage. And finally, Microsoft has achieved Japan Cloud Security Gold Mark (CS Gold Mark) accreditation by Japan Information Security Audit Association (JASA). For more information, please visit the Compliance, SOC 1, 2, and 3 Reports, Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) Level 1, and Cloud Security Mark (Gold) webpages.
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Azure Security Center now has new integrated partner solutions from Check Point, Cisco, Fortinet, Imperva, and Incapsula. New threat-detection features based on advanced analytics and intelligence from Microsoft can help you detect attacks faster. And a new Power BI Dashboard lets you visualize, analyze, and filter information to reveal trends and attack patterns. Learn more.
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Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Identity Protection detects suspicious sign-in activities based on signals like brute-force attacks, leaked credentials, and sign-ins from unfamiliar locations and infected devices. It provides a consolidated view to protect against these activities in real time. A user risk severity is calculated, and risk-based policies can be configured to automatically protect your organization from future threats.
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Azure SQL Database Query Store collects detailed historical information about all queries, helping to significantly reduce the time to diagnose and resolve performance issues. For example, Query Store can identify queries that used to perform well, but now perform poorly. You can use Query Store to analyze query plan changes for possible performance degradation or force the system to use a particular plan for your query. Over the course of the next couple of months, Query Store will be enabled as the main workload data recorder by default for all Azure SQL databases (existing and new). Data collected within Query Store helps improve the quality of your SQL Database by providing a foundation for performance analysis and tuning features, such as Index Advisor and Query Performance Insight. For more information, watch the Query Store in SQL Server 2016 video.
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| | Upcoming Events | Strata + Hadoop World
March 29, 2016
San Jose, California
Build 2016
March 30, 2016
San Francisco, California
Hadoop Summit
April 13, 2016
Dublin, Ireland
OpenStack Summit
April 25, 2016
Austin, Texas
PyCon 2016
May 28, 2016
Portland, Oregon | Microsoft Developer Camps
events.msdn.microsoft.com |
| Careers | | | | Bring your vision to ours and help shape the future of the cloud. |
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Azure SQL Database Index Advisor helps you improve the performance of your databases by providing index recommendations based on your historical database usage. As your application and database workload evolve over time, recommendations from Index Advisor adapt and evolve as well. Index Advisor helps make it easy to implement and validate recommended tuning actions. You can choose to review and apply recommended actions yourself or have the service implement recommended actions automatically as they are published.
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Azure SQL Database Query Performance Insight helps you understand the impact of your query workload on database resource consumption. In minutes, you can monitor how your apps utilize your database’s resources and implement actions to tune your database or application. Getting started is easy and fast—it only takes a few clicks. Query Performance Insight shows you the CPU consumption of your top queries over time, with drilldowns to the level of query text. This helps you discover potential performance issues quickly and resolve them before your customers are affected.
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On-premises StorSimple Virtual Array is a version of the StorSimple solution in a virtual machine (VM) form installed in a remote or branch office. This provides a cost-effective, lightweight solution that still delivers the value of StorSimple hybrid cloud storage. This includes nearly seamless cloud integration with automated tiering to manage data growth; simplified data protection with cloud-based snapshots; and location-independent recovery of data from the cloud.
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Based on customer feedback, Azure Search is introducing a new Basic tier into public preview that fits between the existing Free and Standard tiers. The new Basic tier can search up to 1 million documents or 2 GB of data and delivers the predictable performance available in the Standard tier. Azure Search helps make it easy to set up and manage your own production-ready search index.
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HockeyApp is now available for purchase through Visual Studio Marketplace, with billing via your Azure subscription. HockeyApp provides mobile app distribution, crash reporting, and in-app user feedback so you can build the world’s best mobile apps. Start today to make data-driven investments in your mobile apps.
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This is a follow-up reminder for our earlier announcement about the retirement plan. Azure Managed Cache Service and Azure In-Role Cache service will remain available until November 30, 2016. After that date, Managed Cache Service will be shut down, and In-Role Cache service will no longer be supported. We'll remove support for creating new in-role caches in the first Azure SDK release after February 1, 2016.
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Pay-As-You-Go subscriptions can now be switched to the 12-Month Commitment Offer or any of the Monthly Azure Credit offers for Visual Studio subscribers. Learn more.
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Advanced Support for Partners provides cloud-focused support that sits squarely between MPN Technical Services and Premier Support for Partners. Benefits include: one-hour response time (or less) for critical support issues; Services Account Managers as advisors; and proactive guidance and training to accelerate your cloud business, at an affordable monthly subscription price. Find out more or contact us.
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Ready to sharpen your Azure skills without interruptions or distractions? You'll get focused training sessions, hands-on labs, and direct access to experts—plus you can add a full-day Azure training session before the conference even starts to deepen your skills with Microsoft Azure Stack or DEV immersion. So join us in Atlanta! Register now.
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Azure Friday’s Scott Hanselman finds out how Azure Media Services can use AES encryption to help protect media content. From AES-128 Clear Key, Microsoft PlayReady, and Google Widevine you can help protect your content on any platform—and it’s a lot easier than you'd think! Watch now.
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Managing data and services requires us to keep data security top of mind at all times. Tune in as Kevin Remde, Yuri Diogenes, and Tom Shinder walk us through the Azure Security Center, from what it is to why you should use it and how to get started. Watch TechNet Radio.
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Mobility isn’t a novelty—it’s a business necessity. Employees must be able to access corporate email, documents, and productivity tools from their devices to stay productive while on the go. However, protecting email and other corporate data on mobile devices is one of IT’s biggest challenges. So, how do you bridge the divide and give employees an enriched mobile productivity experience without risking data security? Don’t miss this chance to learn more about becoming a more secure mobile workforce with Microsoft. Watch in-depth demos and participate in a live Q&A. Register now.
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Get an inside look at how Microsoft goes on the offense and defense to help protect its customers and help fight cybercrime. Learn more about the Digital Crimes Unit and our collaboration with law enforcement to take down cybercriminals. Watch now.
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Extended support for SQL Server 2005 ends April 12, 2016. We recommend that you learn about the benefits of upgrading your database technology and get a migration plan in place. Our SQL Server 2005 Upgrade webinar is a great place to start. Find out about the risks of continuing to rely on aging technology and the benefits of migrating to SQL Server 2014 and Azure SQL Database. In addition to detailing the performance benefits of upgrading, this webinar offers migration strategies and scenarios, a practical three-step approach to the upgrade process, and important tools and resources to get you started.
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On April 16, 2016, Global Azure Bootcamp will happen all around the globe at hundreds of locations, with thousands of attendees gathering to learn about Azure. It’ll be a day of interacting through the Global Science Lab with technology friends everywhere under the hashtag #GlobalAzure. Sponsor, help out at a location near you, or simply attend, share, and learn! Join the fun.
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Did you miss the TechNet Virtual Conference? You can now watch all of the sessions on demand. Event sessions presented by industry experts covered topics such as cloud infrastructure, virtualization, nano services, Windows 10, security, enterprise mobility management, and more. Watch the on-demand sessions now.
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The Microsoft IT Innovation Series offers free, hands-on opportunities to discover how Azure infrastructure services help you embrace a wide range of computing solutions in an agile way, helping to enable you to deploy any workload and any language on nearly any operating system. Find an event near you!
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Data represents a competitive advantage and provides new market opportunities. At the same time, data growth creates a number of concerns. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to tackle five of the top data challenges organizations face today. Register now.
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Check out this course to learn how to design and implement Microsoft cloud data platform solutions. Explore capabilities and find out about security features, options for high availability, techniques for monitoring and managing cloud data, and much more.
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In this session, you’ll learn to use Azure Machine Learning to make predictions. Technical Evangelist Jennifer Marsman demonstrates how to upload a dataset into Azure Machine Learning Studio, explore the data, and decide how to modify it. She’ll also show you how to use data cleaning modules to implement these changes. Then, join us for Part 2, and see how we train a model with a machine learning algorithm, deploy it, and call our published model to get results.
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Technical Evangelist David Crook uses a whiteboard to diagram and discuss a very common architecture for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. He addresses some audience questions at the end of the talk. Watch the video.
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In this episode, learn about Azure Container Service, beginning with a discussion about what Docker is. Next we demonstrate running the Hello World container and move on to running 20 web servers in containers in a matter of seconds. This video includes an explanation of Docker Swarm and Apache Mesos and how they work with the new Azure Container Service.
You may also be interested in learning about Barracuda’s next generation firewall for the cloud, or Azure Resource Manager tooling.
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The Microsoft Linux on Azure certification demonstrates your ability to design, architect, implement, and maintain complex cloud-enabled Linux solutions that leverage Azure open-source capabilities. Find out more about the certification, the steps required to achieve it, and the training available to help you prepare.
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Continuing the TechNet Radio “Building Your Hybrid Cloud” series, Keith Mayer and Andy Syrewicze walk us through an in-depth description of one of the newest features in Windows Server 2016: nested virtualization. Find out what it is, why you should use it, and how you can use it in your organization. Watch the video.
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Microsoft Visual Studio offers a cross-platform approach to building apps, allowing developers to build from a single code base and deploy to any iOS, Android, or Windows platform for a native-application look and feel. Learn how Visual Studio works with Xamarin and Apache Cordova; why sharing code and business logic increases productivity; the benefits of platform-specific IntelliSense; and how Visual Studio employs a holistic or mix-and-match approach to supporting developers. Register now to view on demand!
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The Azure cloud-computing platform played a vital role in storing, managing, and reporting election results. Learn how this cross-platform app was developed, from planning to testing and execution. This app helped to more securely and accurately capture more than 90 percent of the caucus results within just three hours. Watch TechNet Radio.
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During this webinar with in-depth demonstrations, you’ll learn what’s available in Azure Marketplace; how to use Azure Resource Manager to simplify complex open-source solutions; what Azure offers to monitor, manage, and enhance your Linux experience; how your team can start exploring technologies in the open-source space such as Docker; how customers are harnessing the power of open source in the cloud; and why customers have chosen Azure. Register now to view on demand.
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Are you interested in becoming certified in architecting Microsoft Azure solutions? If so, join us for this new TechNet Radio three-part series hosted by Technical Evangelists Dan Stolts and Brian Lewis and learn about the prerequisites to becoming Azure certified. Part 1 starts with Azure basics and will help you understand what’s possible with cloud computing, as well as get you started on your journey in becoming a cloud architect. Watch the video.
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In a market flooded with competition, the Absolut brand has always found a way to stand out. Recognized around the world for its iconic bottle and glossy print ads, Absolut has created a distinctively avant-garde image and become one of the best-known names in the spirits industry.
Learn more
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The electrical grid—and the energy industry that feeds it—grows more complex all the time. In the twentieth century, the electrical grid carried power from a few centralized generators outward to many users. Today’s grid uses two-way flows of electricity and information to create a network made up of both distributed energy producers and distributed energy consumers.
Learn more
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| |  | | | Use real-time insights to power mission-critical applications | |
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Elastic provides a software stack for developers to make massive amounts of data available and to utilize real-time insights to power mission-critical applications for search, logging, analytics, and more. By focusing on scalability, ease of use, and ease of integration, Elastic’s products power many of the world’s leading mobile, social, consumer, and business applications.
Visit Marketplace page | |
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| |  | | | Realize your potential with Microsoft and PROS | |
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Intense global competition, unprecedented market volatility, and rising costs put pressure on companies to drive both top- and bottom-line results. PROS revenue and profit-realization solutions deliver the perfect blend of simplicity and data science to offer a holistic approach to improving revenue and profit performance, aligning product, demand, and availability with exceptional clarity. PROS cloud-based solutions, powered by Azure and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, help leverage prescriptive analytics to accelerate the process of converting prospects to customers; confidently scale winning pricing strategies to increase margins; and streamline smart decision making so organizations can realize their true revenue and profit potential.
Watch video | Visit www.pros.com | |
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OutSystems provides one of the world’s leading Rapid Application Delivery (RAD) platforms for the enterprise. It is a fast and comprehensive way to create, deploy, change, and manage custom mobile and web applications, delivered seamlessly across all devices. Available as a cloud or on-premises solution, OutSystems manages the complete application lifecycle of large portfolios.
Visit Marketplace page
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With standards-based connectivity options, simplified application connectors, and a fully scalable elastic cloud platform, the Jitterbit Harmony integration platform is fast and easy to design, deploy, and manage. Jitterbit helps enable integrations across common scenarios such as data integration, process integration, and real-time API management.
Visit Marketplace page
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| | Hi,
Spring has arrived in Redmond, Washington! As you can see in the Be Informed section, the Azure team is busy releasing new services and features. In addition, we’ve used your feedback to improve the web version of our newsletter. Check it out and let us know what you think! Also, keep submitting those customer stories; the February customer story was one of the top clicks. Thank you, Ohad, for submitting your story!
Miwa | |
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| | | | Build 2016
March 30, 2016 - San Francisco, California | |
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