Cloud Platform roadmap

Share resources with your partners with B2B collaboration

Azure Active Directory B2B collaboration provides external user accounts with secure access to documents, resources, and applications—while maintaining control over internal data. There’s no need to add external users to your directory; IT can invite collaborators to use any email address—Office 365, on-premises Microsoft Exchange, or even a personal address (Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.)—and even set up multi-factor authentication or conditional access policies. Your developers can use the Azure AD B2B collaboration APIs to write applications that bring together different organizations in a secure way—and deliver a seamless and intuitive user experience.

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Azure Active Directory B2C is a comprehensive, identity management solution for your consumer-facing applications that can be easily integrated to any platform, and accessible from any device. It is a highly available global service that can support hundreds of millions of consumer identities.

Azure Active Directory conditional access policies are now generally available and let you apply access rules to any Azure Active Directory connected application such as Office 365, Salesforce.com, Box, ServiceNow, and other SaaS and custom or on-premises web applications. More sensitive apps can be assigned stricter policies for all or specific groups of users, such as requiring Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) or even blocking access outside of the corporate network while less sensitive apps can have more open policies. Conditional access policies are available through Azure Active Directory Premium P1.

Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure AD DS) provide scalable, high-performance, managed domain services such as domain-join, LDAP, Kerberos, Windows Integrated Authentication, and Group Policy support. With the click of a button, administrators can enable managed domain services for Linux and Windows Server virtual machines and directory-aware applications deployed in Azure Infrastructure Services. By maintaining compatibility with Windows Server Active Directory, Azure AD Domain Services provide an easy way to migrate traditional on-premises applications to the cloud.

Microsoft Azure Information Protection (AIP) helps you classify and label your data at the time of creation or modification. Protection (encryption + authentication + use rights) can then be applied to sensitive data. Classification labels and protection are persistent, traveling with the data so that data is identifiable and protected at all times – regardless of where it’s stored or with whom it’s shared. The interface is simple and intuitive, and does not interrupt your normal working experience. You also have deep visibility and control over shared data.

The PowerShell commands installed with the unified Azure Information Protection (AIP) client allow administrators and data owners to label and protect data in bulk on file stores. They can also use these commands to query for labels and protection attributes of files.

The unified Azure Information Protection (AIP) client application enables manual classification and protection of non-Office files. A user can label and protect any file through the Windows shell-explorer; select either one file, multiple files or a folder, and apply a label.

Scoped policies allow organizations to build sets of data classification labels that are only visible and usable to specific employees or groups of employees such as teams, business units, or projects. Each set of scoped policies allows for customization including labels, sub-labels, and settings that include mandatory labeling, default labeling, and justifications.

The unified Azure Information Protection (AIP) client application for Windows allows users to classify, label, and protect using a single tool. It also includes the ability to set custom permissions, share data in a protected way, track and revoke files, and view protected files including non-Office files.

Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA) is an on-premises cybersecurity product to help IT teams protect their enterprise from advanced targeted attacks by automatically analyzing, learning, and identifying normal and abnormal entity (user, devices and resources) behavior. ATA also helps to identify known malicious attacks, security issues and risks, and presents all of this information in an easy to consume, and simple to drill-down, social media-like feed. Leveraging user and entity behavioral analytics (UEBA), this innovative technology is designed to help enterprises focus on what is important and to identify security breaches before they cause damage.

Microsoft Authenticator is the new mobile application that will replace Azure Authenticator, Microsoft account app and all other enterprise and consumer authenticator apps for Android, IOS and Windows mobiles, published by Microsoft. This new app can quickly and securely verify your identity online, for all of your accounts. It provides Multi-Factor authentication for your personal, work, or school Microsoft accounts with notifications or one-time-passwords. Additionally, you can use this app to register your device with your company’s Azure Active Directory and get seamless single-sign-on to mobile applications. Later this year you’ll also be able to use the app to sign in to devices and web sites without a password.

Every day, more and more business activity takes place in the cloud. And even if your company doesn’t use cloud-based solutions, your employees probably do. In fact, more than 80 percent of employees admit to using non-approved SaaS applications at work. These apps are essential to today’s connected workforce, but they also introduce a unique set of security concerns, which legacy security solutions simply aren’t designed to manage. We want to help.

Microsoft Cloud App Security is a comprehensive solution providing IT teams deeper visibility, stronger controls, and enhanced protection over cloud applications. Customers can get the benefits of cloud applications, while gaining insight into user activity, detection of anomalous behavior and compromised accounts, and increased protection over critical company data. Cloud App Security not only supports Microsoft cloud apps like Office 365 but also third party cloud apps such as Box, Dropbox, ServiceNow, and others.

Azure DocumentDB is a NoSQL document database-as-a-service that provides the benefits of a NoSQL document database but also adds the query processing and transaction semantics common to relational database systems. Built for the cloud, Azure DocumentDB natively supports JSON documents enabling easy object mapping and iteration of data models for application development. Azure DocumentDB offers programming libraries for several popular languages and platforms, including .Net, Node.js, JavaScript, Java and Python.

DocumentDB: API for MongoDB is now generally available, inheriting the same 99.99 percent SLA as Azure DocumentDB. Users can now achieve limitless scale with support for managing sharded collections. Users can also replicate data globally across any number of Azure datacenters in a couple clicks with global databases.

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• Read the announcement

Azure Machine Learning makes it dramatically easier and faster to create and deploy advanced analytic solutions in the cloud. Azure ML is a cloud service and web-based authoring environment with best of breed ML algorignms from Microsoft Research and open source components such as R. Azure ML allows developers and data scientists to quickly build and test machine learning models not available through traditional business intelligence platforms and deploy them as production quality web service APIs in minutes. New users benefit from the intuitive drag and drop interface to build and test sophisticated models while advanced users can plug in their existing R and Python code to deploy in the cloud.

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• See how Pier 1 Imports uses Azure ML to build a better relationship with their customers

Azure Machine Learning marketplace connects Advanced Analytics developers, startups and ISVs with Azure customers around the world. Data scientists can publish, brand and monetize their Machine Learning models via the marketplace while app developers can easily leverageAPIs to build ML powered applications such as recommendation engines, anomaly detection and sentiment analysis.

• View full list of Machine Learning services
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Azure SQL Database elastic pools are now generally available.

If you’re a SaaS app developer writing a multi-tenant app that services many customers, you often make tradeoffs in customer performance, management, and security. With SQL Database elastic pools, you no longer have to make that compromise. Create elastic database pools to help you manage and monitor multi-tenant apps and gain isolation benefits of one customer per database.

Azure SQL Database will now support AAD Authentication. Active Directory authentication enables a comprehensive identity and access management solution for Azure SQL Database.

Azure Stream Analytics is a cost-effective event processing engine that helps uncover real-time insights from devices, sensors, infrastructure, applications and data. It will enable various opportunities including Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios such as real-time fleet management or gaining insights from devices such as mobile phones and connected cars. Deployed in the Azure cloud, Stream Analytics has elastic scale where resources are efficiently allocated and paid for as requested. Developers are given a rapid development experience where they describe their desired transformations in SQL and the system abstracts the complexities of the parallelization, distributed computing and error handling from them.

Script Action allows customers to customize Azure HDInsight clusters with projects available from the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. This ecosystem is a portfolio of fast-moving open source projects that are evolving quickly. With this new feature, you can now experiment and deploy Hadoop projects to Azure HDInsight that were not possible before. This is enabled through the Script Action feature that can modify Hadoop clusters in arbitrary ways using custom scripts. Microsoft provides documentation on how to do this for Spark, R, Giraph and Solr.

Cortana Intelligence Suite is a fully-managed big-data and advanced analytics suite that enables you to transform your data into intelligent action. It is a comprehensive suite that brings together technologies throughout Microsoft, and provides fast and flexible deployment with a simple monthly subscription to reduce the time and cost. It includes information management, data storage, analytics and visualization.

Cortana Intelligence helps you take action ahead of your competitors by going beyond looking in the rear-view mirror to predicting what’s next. Enhance your business applications with machine intelligence to evolve from simple descriptive analytics to prescriptive recommendations.

HBase is an Apache open source NoSQL database built on Hadoop that provides random access and strong consistency for large amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data. HBase for HDInsight is offered as a managed cluster integrated into the Azure environment. The clusters are configured to store data directly in Azure Blob storage, which provides low latency and increased elasticity in performance/cost choices. This enables customers to build interactive websites that work with large datasets, build services that store sensor and telemetry data from millions of end points, and analyze this data with Hadoop jobs.

Microsoft R Server addresses key needs our clients experience when they use advanced analytics solutions. The combined abilities to run the analytics where the data resides, and the ability to write once and deploy across multiple platforms, makes a compelling choice. Data scientists and application developers can work with the data and tools they are familiar with, and can obtain insights faster and more efficiently. In the past year, we have delivered a number of innovations in the R eco-system by extending R analytics to SQL Server 2016, Hadoop/Spark, Linux, and Teradata appliances. R Server for HDInsight GA’d in mid-November, and we are now announcing another milestone with the release of R Server 9.0 on all platforms.

With the latest release of R Server, we’re doubling down on our two main goals:

• To empower data scientists to do more with their R skills
• To enable enterprises to operationalize new insights at scale with enterprise grade support

With R Server 9.0, we are now closer to our goal of providing the one operationalization engine that you will need for all your analytics needs.

Power BI is a business analytics service that enables you to see all of your data through a single pane of glass. Live Power BI dashboards and reports include visualizations and KPIs from data residing both on-premises and in the cloud, offering a consolidated view across your business, regardless of where your data lives.

Power BI Desktop is a powerful new visual data exploration and interactive reporting tool. It provides a free-form canvas for drag-and-drop exploration of your data and an extensive library of interactive visualizations, while streamlining report creation and publishing to the Power BI service.

The Office Store has introduced Power BI custom visuals to download for use in Power BI service reports and Power BI Desktop. Users are now able to easily discover and quickly download BI visualizations that interact with data to find key insights and drive important business decisions. Power BI custom visuals provide compelling data visualizations created by members of the community and by Microsoft. They behave just like the native rich visualizations already included with Power BI but can also be filtered, highlighted, edited, and shared.

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Apache Spark is an open source processing framework that runs large-scale data analytics applications in-memory. This allows Spark to deliver queries up to 100 times faster than traditional big data solutions, along with a common execution model for various tasks like extract-transform-load (ETL) processes, batch queries, interactive queries, real-time streaming, machine learning, and graph processing on data stored.

Azure HDInsight, Microsoft’s managed Hadoop and Spark made Spark generally available. Spark for Azure HDInsight offers customers an enterprise-ready Spark solution that’s fully managed, secured, and highly available and made simpler for users with compelling and interactive experiences.

SQL Server 2014 SP1 contains fixes provided in SQL Server 2014 CU 1 up to and including CU 5, as well as a rollup of fixes previously shipped in SQL Server 2012 SP2. This upgrade is available to all customers with existing SQL Server 2014 deployments, and the Service Pack is available for download on the Microsoft Download Center. For highlights of the release, see the Knowledge Base Article below for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP1.

SQL Server 2016 delivers breakthrough mission-critical capabilities with in-memory performance and operational analytics built in. Comprehensive security features like new Always Encrypted technology help protect customers’ data at rest and in motion, while enhancements to AlwaysOn enable world class high availability and disaster recovery, all backed by enterprise-grade, mission-critical support.

Organizations will gain deeper insights into all of their data with new capabilities that go beyond insights to perform advanced analytics directly within the database and present rich visualizations on mobile devices.

A consistent database platform across on-premises and cloud enables customers to easily build, deploy, and manage hybrid solutions that complement their existing on-premises investments.

SQL Server Stretch Database is now generally available. With Stretch Database, customers can dynamically stretch warm and cold transactional data from Microsoft SQL Server 2016 to Azure. Unlike typical cold data storage, the data is always at hand. Stretch Database lets you retain data longer and more affordably than typical enterprise storage. Depending on how often the data will be accessed, customers can choose the appropriate level of service, then scale up or down as needed. Using Stretch Database doesn’t require any application changes. Customers can also use Stretch Database with new Always Encrypted technology, which helps protect data at rest and in motion—extending data in a more secure manner for greater peace of mind.

.NET Core and ASP.NET Core give you a blazing fast and modular development platform for creating applications that run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 1.1 is GA and available 11/16 while .NET Core SDK (tooling) is Preview 3 and included in Visual Studio 2017 RC.

.NET Foundation Technical Steering Group innovation update – Google Joins the .NET Foundation Technical Steering Group (TSG). Samsung collaborates through the TSG with Microsoft to bring .NET to Tizen running on 50 million Samsung devices around the world.

.NET Foundation new projects – Nancy and xUnit join .NET Foundation

Azure Active Directory B2C is now generally available in Europe

Azure Active Directory B2C, now available in Europe, is a highly available, global identity and access management service that enables organizations to securely connect with their customers at scale. Your customers can use existing social media accounts or create new credentials for single sign-on access to consumer facing applications through a fully customizable experience.

Organizations have now the option to use Azure AD B2C tenants that operate and store data only in European datacenters. For all other regions, Azure AD B2C is available through the North American or European datacenters.

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Azure CDN is a scalable, easy-to-add Azure service that facilitates high performance and fast, efficient delivery of Azure workloads to end users. Azure CDN is powered by technology from our platform partners – Verizon and Akamai – and available through the Azure portal. The choice of two leading CDN platforms, along with the simplicity of acquisition through the Azure portal, are two major differentiators and benefits of Azure CDN.

Here are the newly available capabilities:

• HTTP/2.0: Now available for all customers, this feature is on by default for Akamai SKU, and all existing and new standard profiles (enabled from the Azure portal) can benefit from it with no additional cost. HTTP/2 is designed to improve webpage loading speed and optimize user experience.
• Real time alerts: Available as part of the Premium tier, this feature lets you set up real time alerts to get notified on delivery anomalies, such as bandwidth, cache statuses, and concurrent connections to your content. This enables continuous monitoring of the health of your CDN service at any time.
• Mobile rules engine: You can customize content delivery and experience for your mobile users. Rules and features targeted for mobile devices, such as device model, device operating system, and mobile browsers can be set using the rules engine feature in the Content Delivery Network Premium offering.

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Azure Container Service is the fastest way to realize the benefits of running containers in production, using customers’ preferred choice of proven open source technology, tools and skills, and with the confidence of a thriving community support and ecosystem. It provides simplified configurations of proven open source container orchestration technology, optimized to run in the Azure cloud. In just a few clicks customers can deploy container-based applications on a framework designed to help manage the complexity of containers deployed at scale, in production. Unlike other container services, the Azure Container Service is built on 100% open source software and offers a choice among popular orchestration engines: open source DC/OS or Docker Swarm.

Azure Dev/Test Labs gives developers on-demand self-service for Azure-based test environments while helping IT efficiency by controlling costs with the required governance in place. With Dev/Test Labs you can:

• Quickly provision development and test environments
• Minimize waste with quotas and policies
• Set automated shutdowns to minimize costs
• Create a VM in a few clicks with reusable templates
• Get going quickly using VMs from pre-created pools
• Build Windows and Linux environments
• Integrate directly with your preferred CI tool, IDE, or automated release pipeline.

In March 2016 Azure Functions was announced in Preview. After an extremely successful preview, we are announcing the general availability of Azure Functions. Azure Functions is a serverless compute experience to accelerate your development. It can scale based on demand and you pay only for the resources you consume. The integrated tooling support, out of the box Azure and 3rd party service bindings, and integrated continuous deployment capability makes it stand apart from the serverless competition.

• Learn more about the announcement
• Learn more about Azure Functions
• Take the Azure Functions Challenge

The Enterprise Integration Pack feature within Azure Logic Apps is now generally available. Customers can now easily create and manage B2B-related artefacts including XML schemas, maps, agreements, trading partners, and certificates. Electronic data interchange (EDI) has never been easier. With Enterprise Integration Pack, customers can send and receive encoded messages across many formats such as AS2, EDIFACT, X12, and many more. Customers can also leverage out-of-the-box tracking capability to easily view and troubleshoot B2B transactions using Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS).

• Learn more about Logic Apps
• Learn more about Logic Apps pricing

From global distribution of premium video content, to engaging with and educating your employees, to connecting and interacting with your customers, use the power of media to transform your business. Quickly build and deploy video solutions, scale as you need and deliver videos anywhere, anytime, on any device.

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Azure Service Fabric is Microsoft’s microservices application platform that was released last year to help developers build and manage cloud-scale applications. Battle-hardened internally at Microsoft for almost a decade, Service Fabric has been powering highly scalable services such as Cortana, Intune, Azure SQL Database, Azure DocumentDB, and Azure’s infrastructure.

Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server generally available

Azure Service Fabric simplifies building and operating microservice-based applications in Azure, at scale and with always-on 24x7 availability. Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server extends this capability to on-premises datacenters and other clouds, enabling application portability and flexibility by providing a runtime that can be installed on Windows Server instances wherever they run. With the general availability of Azure Service Fabric on Windows Server, customers can now run production workloads with the option to purchase premium support from Microsoft for ultimate confidence.

Azure Service Fabric for Linux available for preview

Service Fabric has long supported Windows servers and .NET applications, but many enterprises today run heterogeneous workloads, including Windows and Linux servers, .Net and Java applications, and SQL and NoSQL databases. Now, the preview of Service Fabric for Linux is publicly available. With this announcement, customers can now provision Service Fabric clusters in Azure using Linux as the host operating system and deploy Java applications to Service Fabric clusters. Service Fabric on Linux will initially be available for Ubuntu, with support for RHEL coming soon.

• Service Fabric for Windows Server
• Service Fabric for Linux
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Content Protection enables content to be securely streamed to end users by securing content access via key (in case of AES Clear Key) or License (in case of DRM). In both of these cases, video players request a key / license from this service and present their authorization credentials to prove their identity before access is provided. We offer AES 128-bit Clearkey Encryption as well as Microsoft PlayReady and Google Modular Widevine DRM in the cloud.

Docker Datacenter commercial offering is now available from Azure Marketplace as an ARM-supported VM template. Docker Datacenter is a platform for developers and IT operations to build, ship, and run applications.

Docker Datacenter is an integrated subscription including:

• Docker Universal Control Plane with embedded Swarm
• Docker Trusted Registry
• Docker Engine
• Integration and API support
• Validated configurations with 3rd party plugins
• Commercial support

• Learn more about Docker Datacenter

The same streaming solution used by more than ten leading international broadcasters to seamlessly deliver coverage of the 2014 World Cup—is generally available and backed by the full support of the Azure Service-Level Agreement (SLA) for all customers.

With the general availability of SAP HANA, customers can get the broadest choice and industry leading performance when running your SAP workloads on Azure. By spanning Azure Virtual Machines and purpose-built hardware, called SAP HANA large instances, you can scale your SAP HANA workloads up to 32 TB on multimode configurations. Azure lets you run the largest SAP HANA workloads, OLTP (up to 3 TB) and OLAP (up to 32 TB), of any global scale cloud provider.

• Get started with deploying an SAP system on Azure Linux VMs
• Visit our SAP solutions page
• For more information, read the recent post on the Azure blog

Microsoft Azure IoT Hub helps you connect, monitor, and control millions of IoT assets running on a broad set of operating systems and protocols to jumpstart your IoT project. Establish reliable and secured bi-directional communication with these assets, even if they are intermittently connected, so you can analyze incoming telemetry data and send commands and notifications as needed. Enhance security of your IoT solutions by leveraging per-device authentication to communicate with devices with the appropriate credentials. Revoke access rights to specific devices, if needed, to maintain the integrity of your system.