This week Microsoft is holding its annual TechEd Europe conference in Barcelona Spain. During the keynote which was held today Microsoft made several announcements. This posts gives an overview of those announcements including links to more information where applicable.
Windows Azure announcements:
- System Center Advisor will be rebranded to Microsoft Azure Operational Insights, still in preview for free at the moment. Microsoft Azure Operational Insights will provide Log Management, Change Tracking, Capacity Planning and Update Assessment offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) from Microsoft.
- Microsoft announced Azure Batch, in public preview. Azure Batch allows customers to run large-scale parallel and HPC workloads in Azure. Use Batch to scale-out parallel workloads, manage the execution of tasks in a queue, and enable applications to offload compute jobs in the cloud.
- Azure Automation is now generally available, released in April this year as a preview is now GA. Azure Automation supports the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of resources in your Microsoft Azure environment
- Microsoft also announced that the following features are now generally available:
- Support for multiple network interface cards for Azure VMs
- Network Security Groups, for greater control over traffic flow
- Microsoft Anti-mailware for VMs and Cloud Services, provided as a free service providing real-time threat protection.
For mobility Microsoft made the following announcements:
- Windows Intune which will be rebranded to Microsoft Intune will be able to manage Office mobile apps, customers can now wrap mangement technology around their own applictions.
- Office 365 will be enhanced with Intune Mobile Device Management (MDM) capabilities adding policy-driven device management and wiping of corporate data. (Q1 2015)
- Updates for Azure Active Directory Premium, adding Azure AD Application Proxy allowing customers to publish on-premises applications to external users and Azure AD Connect allowing to connect on-premises assets to the cloud and synchronization of directories
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities will be added to SharePoint Online and OneDrive
More information can be found in the official press release. More detailed information about announced and released Azure services can also be found in the following blog article from Scott Guthrie: “Azure: New Marketplace, Network Improvements, New Batch Service, Automation Service, more“