Expanding the Azure Data Box Family

In a previous blog I introduced Azure Data Box. Today I’d like to talk about how Microsoft is expanding the Azure Data Box family by introducing you to the Azure Data Box Gateway and the Azure Data Box Edge devices.

Until now the Data Box Family has been the disc, the box and the heavy. Each have their own limits for storage but are designed to improve your way of uploading massive amounts of data into Azure, without having to wait for it to travel across the wire or saturate your bandwidth (consider that the offline method).

Microsoft learned from customers that they want a better way to sync their local storage directly with Azure storage for operations like archival and disaster recovery. Here’s where Azure Data Box Gateway comes in.

The Data Box Gateway is a cloud storage gateway device that resides on premises and sends your image, media and other data directly to Azure.

  • The Gateway is a virtual machine provisioned in your Hypervisor (VMware or Hyper V) where you write the data directly to this virtual device using the NFS or SMB protocols, which it then sends to Azure.
  • One use case for the Data Box Gateway is for things like continuously ingesting massive amounts of data. So, we have a local data source that requires large data amounts and capacities and we can stream those and sync them directly with our Azure storage.
  • Another use case would be for a cloud archival of data in a secure and efficient way. If you then think about the incremental data transfer over the network after the initial bulk transfer is done using the Data Box of your choice for direct tie in to the same Azure storage container that you’re using for your Data Box.

Azure Data Box Edge is a storage solution that allows you to process data and send it over the network to Azure.

  • Data Box Edge uses a physical device supplied by Microsoft to accelerate the secure data transfer.
  • The device resides on premises in your network stack and you write data to it (also using NFS or SMB.)
  • It is additionally equipped with AI enabled Edge computing capabilities which help to analyze, process or filter data as it moves to Azure block blob, page blob or Azure files.
  • It has the appropriate chips to process intelligent learning (artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning and such).
  • Use cases are for things like pre-processing data. So, we can analyze data from on premises or IOT devices to get faster information about the data. That pre-processing will allow us to do things like aggregating your data before it gets sent to Azure or modifying data, such as taking out PII.
  • You can also subset and transfer the data needed for deeper analytics in the cloud.
  • Additionally, you can analyze and react to IOT events. So, if you’re running IOT devices on prem and you want the ability to be quicker to respond when those events occur, this is a great way to handle that.
  • Another great use case is you can run machine learning models to get quick results that can be acted on before the data is sent to the cloud.
  • With these IOT use cases, you don’t have to wait for the data to be transmitted over the wire, do any of the munging happening up in Azure and then return results. You can return those results on the fly in real time and react more quickly.
  • Eventually the full data set is transferred to continue and help you to retain and improve any of your machine learning models. You can continually feed it data and have those models trained repeatedly, thus learning to be more concise over time.

The Data Box family is a very cool technology by having an online version to further extend its capabilities.

5 Ways Azure Makes Your Enterprise More Secure

Security is, or should be, a top priority; nothing is more important than making your enterprise secure. In this post I’ll tell you 5 ways Azure makes your enterprise more secure.

First off, Azure is a Microsoft product. When you’re one of the world’s largest companies, there are an enormous amount of threats that need to be evaluated every second of the day. So, obviously Microsoft is aware of these challenges.

With that in mind, Microsoft developed centers of excellence over the past ten years in order to be ready for these attacks. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center processed over 6.5 trillion signals so they could better understand what kind of information and what types of attack vendors there are.

Each month they block over 5 billion distinct malware threats. And they staff over 3500 security professionals in their defense operations centers to help thwart these attacks. Since Active Directory is a standard for user authentication control, they introduced Azure Active Directory years ago to extend that to their Azure platform.

All that being said, here are 5 ways that Azure makes your enterprise more secure:

1. Minimize the requirement for password use – By using Microsoft Authenticator and connecting to Software as a Service applications (like Drop Box, Salesforce, etc.) The authenticator replaces your password with a multi-factor sign in using something like your phone and your fingerprint, face ID or a pin based on the Windows device that you’re using.

With a 2-factor authentication when using those devices, you have a more simplified method instead of remembering a bunch of different passwords.

2. Security Scorecard – A while back I did a post on the Azure Secure Score and the Secure Score Center. With this, you’re using the Azure portal for having awareness where there are potentials for exposure or for best practices that need to be followed which helps your organization stay better secured.

3. Microsoft Threat Protection Suite – Helps detect, investigate and remediate issues across your organization, including endpoints, email, documents, identity and infrastructure elements. It also helps your security team automate many of those manual, mundane security tasks.

4. Confidentiality – Microsoft was the first cloud vendor to introduce confidential integrity in data while it’s in use. So, consumers don’t worry about their data being put in the wrong hands (like some of those other clouds vendors you may have heard of recently in the news).

Data is always encrypted at rest and in transit. The security will soon extend to the chip level for added security on certain Azure VMs. Intel has built in some security measures inside their chips and now Microsoft is going to interact directly with those chips to keep you more secure.

5. Microsoft Information Protection Service – This enables you to automatically discover, classify, label, protect and monitor data no matter where it lives or travels on your Microsoft devices.

We’re now seeing many more open source capabilities and seeing more of these applications being sent over to Macs and Linux PCs for instance. Essentially this labeling capability is built into office apps and such across all the major platforms and can add protection capability to things like PDF documents, a feature currently in preview.

But the idea is it’s going to help you protect from things such as PII being extended. So, it’s an added level of protection to ensure there are no security leaks.

So, it’s clear from all this that Microsoft not only has a commitment to securing their own services and software, but also enterprises and individuals are of critical importance when talking about security.

If you’re concerned about security, check out some of the things I mentioned here and remember, Microsoft is making the investment and doing all they can to keep things secure.

Microsoft and BlackRock Announce Retirement Planning Partnership

At this point, the state of financial planning is a potential major crisis with current and future generations coming upon retirement age with little or no savings to account for.

As we’ve moved away from pensions of the old, the responsibility held previously by the companies, has now shifted to individuals having to invest and save on their own to ensure they’re set up after they retire.

I wanted to share a recent press release from Microsoft who announced that they created a partnership with BlackRock to help reimagine the way people manage their retirement planning. BlackRock is a world leader in wealth management, including providing solutions to consumers and currently manages approximately 6.5 trillion in assets for investors worldwide.

The goal of this alliance is to find ways for people to interact with their retirement assets more, so they know what kind of contributions they’re making. BlackRock will design and manage a suite of next generation investment tools that aim to provide a ‘lifetime’ of income in retirement. This would be made available to US workers through their employer’s workplace savings plan.

The press release did not share much detail about what exactly the two firms will partner on, but the following is a quote from Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella: “Together with BlackRock, we will apply the power of the cloud and AI to introduce new solutions that address this important challenge and reimagine retirement planning.”

As we know, AI, deep learning and machine learning and all their related technologies, can have a profound impact on information gathering, processing and the intelligence we can extract from it. This helps us make better decisions.

The idea here is to offer technology options to businesses for their employees to consume and promote fiduciary responsibility. There will be more complex options that have been shunned previously by employers because of their complexity and costliness.

BlackRock has shown that they want to move their technology footprint forward with acquisitions and investments in firms in recent years. In 2015, they acquired a robo advisor company, as well as invested in Acorns, a company which helps millennials save their spare change to put it into a savings account.

Last year, BlackRock acquired Investment, a company that gives them more sophisticated online investment tooling. It is also believed that additional partnerships will come along to help support any of these new investment options, the plans and the employees.

When it comes to how the world is changing, AI is thought to be one of the biggest conversations occurring in 2019. At the heart of AI is data—data quality and consistency. These important factors are something we focus on at Pragmatic Works, as well as knowing that this is what our clients need to rely on.

This press release shows where we’re going with some of the AI technology that’s a huge topic of conversations in organizations today.