The company also demonstrated how AI, IoT and edge computing
have become the foundation of the enterprise for a more secure,
productive and intelligent workplace
ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 24, 2018 /CNW/ -- Monday at Ignite 2018,
Microsoft Corp.'s annual IT event, the company underscored the need
for increased IT security and released an array of security
programs and products. Among them are Microsoft Secure Score, a
dynamic report card that assesses Microsoft 365 customer
environments and makes recommendations that can reduce breaches up
to thirtyfold, and Microsoft Authenticator, which helps make secure
sign-on easier for workers with features like password-free login.
The company also advanced its commitment to democratize access to
AI through a new AI for Humanitarian Action program aimed at
harnessing the power of AI for disaster recovery, helping children,
protecting refugees and displaced people, and promoting respect for
human rights.
"In this era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge,
businesses in every industry are looking for a trusted partner to
help them transform," said Satya
Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. "We are pushing the bounds in AI,
edge computing and IoT, while providing end-to-end security to
empower every organization to build its own digital capability and
thrive in this new era."
Cybersecurity is the central challenge of the digital
age
Every day organizations take precious time and
resources away from their core business mission to defend against,
and recover from, cyberattacks. They operate dozens of complex,
disconnected tools, yet the gaps between those tools remain and
threats get through. As the nature of the threats and the profile
of the attackers continue to evolve, security teams struggle to
keep up, and skilled expertise is scarce.
Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help, and today the company
shared ways it is empowering IT to unlock the security capabilities
of the intelligent cloud. To tip the scales in the cyberwar,
Microsoft has a unique focus on three things: security operations
at global scale that work not just for us but also for our
customers, enterprise-class technology, and broad cybersecurity
partnerships for a heterogeneous world.
Security operations at a global scale that work for our
customers: At Microsoft, more than 3,500 full-time
security professionals work with leading AI tools to analyze more
than 6.5 trillion global signals each day. The company's global
security infrastructure protects customers by securing datacenters,
running a Cyber Defense Operations Center, hacking its own defenses
(red-teaming), hunting down attackers, and blocking more than 5
billion distinct malware threats each month. Just recently,
Microsoft's cloud-based machine learning models detected — with
only 200 discrete targets — a stealthy and highly targeted attack
aimed at small businesses across the
United States. The company neutralized the threat, called
Ursnif, in seconds. Also, Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, focused
on advanced disruption and deterrence, has worked with global law
enforcement agencies to take down 18 criminal bot-nets and rescue
nearly 500 million devices from secret bot-net control.
Enterprise-class security technology: Microsoft is using
the cloud to secure organizations broadly with new security
features in its products that protect against a wide range of
threats, secure the network and protect sensitive information:
- Nearly all data breaches start with compromised passwords.
Today, Microsoft declared an end to the era of passwords,
delivering new support for passwordless login via the Microsoft
Authenticator app for the hundreds of thousands of Azure
AD connected apps that businesses use every day. No company
lets enterprises eliminate more passwords than Microsoft.
- Microsoft Secure Score, the only enterprise-class
dynamic report card for cybersecurity, now includes EMS and Azure
Security Center. By using Secure Score, organizations get
assessments and recommendations that typically reduce their chance
of a breach up to thirtyfold with steps like enforcing multifactor
authentication for both administrators and end users and ensuring
trusted access to the right applications. The Secure Score
expansion also includes a broader set of controls from products
like Microsoft Cloud App Security and Azure Active Directory to
further harden defenses and help IT understand and improve their
organization's security position.
- Microsoft Threat Protection, announced today, is a
comprehensive end-to-end solution that can help protect, detect and
remediate cyberthreats, bringing together advanced threat
protection and auto-remediation across email, PCs, identities and
infrastructure into a single integrated experience in Microsoft
365. The service uses AI and human research to speed up
investigations to eliminate threats faster, saving thousands of
hours for overstretched security teams.
- Data breaches often stem from cybercriminals accessing data in
use for computation, analysis and other functions. This deters many
organizations from putting sensitive data into cloud workloads.
Microsoft announced its public preview of Azure confidential
computing, making Azure the first cloud service to provide a
secure platform for protecting the confidentiality and integrity of
data in use.
Cybersecurity partnerships in a heterogeneous world: It
takes more than the right technology and operations to make the
world as secure as possible. It takes work to strengthen the broad
ecosystem, bring the entire tech sector together, and partner
directly with governments and democratic institutions. In close
partnership with others, Microsoft recently made significant
advances in this work.
Microsoft is working with tech companies, policymakers and
institutions critical to the democratic process on strategies to
protect our midterm elections. The company's Defending Democracy
program aims to protect political campaigns from hacking, increase
security of the electoral process, defend against disinformation
and bring greater transparency to political advertising online.
Part of this program is the AccountGuard initiative, which provides
state-of-the-art cybersecurity protection at no extra cost to all
candidates and campaign offices at the federal, state and local
level, and other organizations critical to the democratic process.
In the first month, Microsoft has onboarded more than 30
organizations into AccountGuard, focusing initially on large
national party operations, and the initiative now includes
committees representing both major U.S. parties, as well as
high-profile campaigns and think tanks. Microsoft is developing
plans to extend the Defending Democracy program to democracies
around the world.
Since the establishment of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, an
agreement to bring the entire technology sector together in
defending all customers everywhere from malicious attacks by
cybercriminal enterprises and nation-states, the group has nearly
doubled in size. With 27 new organizations joining from around the
globe since its launch, including Panasonic, Swisscom and Rockwell
Automation, to name a few, the total number of signatories is now
61 companies, strengthening the broad ecosystem needed to keep the
world secure.
In partnership with security teams across the company, the DCU
has also combatted nation-state hackers. Using innovative legal
approaches 12 times in two years, the DCU has shut down 84 fake
websites often used in phishing attacks that were set up by a group
known as Strontium, which is widely associated with the Russian
government.
Around the world, the company is advocating for effective public
policy by governments including stronger international rules,
accountability through attribution, and the adoption of concepts
like the Digital Geneva Convention.
Data and AI transform the intelligent enterprise
Furthering the company's commitment to democratizing access to AI
and ensuring that the benefits are widely shared, the company today
launched AI for Humanitarian Action, a new $40-million, five-year program aimed at
harnessing the power of AI to aid efforts such as disaster
recovery, protecting children, refugees, and displaced people, and
promoting respect for human rights. The company will do this by
working deeply with select nongovernmental and humanitarian
organizations through grants, investment of technology and shared
expertise. This is the third program in Microsoft's AI for Good
initiative, launched in July
2017.
Microsoft is also continuing to deliver AI-infused products and
services that will be available to billions of people through the
next generation of applications, experiences and personal
assistants. Today, Microsoft is announcing new products and
services to help enterprises get the most value from their
data:
- Azure Machine Learning helps data scientists and
developers build and train AI models faster, then easily deploy to
the cloud or the edge. Significant new updates to the service
include automated machine learning to identify the most
efficient algorithms and optimize model performance, additional
hardware-accelerated models for FPGAs, and a Python SDK that makes
Azure Machine Learning services accessible from popular IDEs and
notebooks.
- SQL Server 2019 preview redefines the relational
database with new big data capabilities that enable users to take
on any data project — from OLTP, Data Warehousing and Business
Intelligence (BI) to AI and advanced analytics. With these
enhancements, SQL Server becomes a hub for data insights that
breaks down silos between database management systems, providing
faster insights without moving or copying data. Spark and Hadoop
Distributed File System (HDFS), now built-in, enable data
scientists to ingest, store and analyze vast amounts of data. New
connectors enable the query of other databases like Oracle,
Teradata and MongoDB directly from SQL Server, removing barriers to
insights everywhere.
- Azure SQL DB hyper scale is a new, highly scalable
service tier that adapts to your workload's needs, auto-scaling up
to 100 TB per database. Available Oct.
1, it provides a high-performance storage system that
expands the potential for app growth without being limited by
storage size.
- Azure Data Explorer public preview accelerates discovery
and insight from large volumes of event data. It enables users to
interactively explore and analyze the data in near real time to
quickly spot patterns and anomalies, determine the root causes,
diagnose issues, and analyze performance for improved business
insights and outcomes. Azure Data Explorer is a lightning-fast
indexing and querying service optimized for ad-hoc data exploration
and analytics of log and telemetry data from websites, applications
and IoT devices.
- Updates to Azure Cosmos DB Multi-master enable customers
to easily build their mission-critical, globally distributed apps.
Multi-master support in Azure Cosmos DB provides high levels
of availability and single-digit millisecond latency, with built-in
flexible conflict resolution support to significantly simplify
development of globally distributed applications. The Cassandra
API expands Cosmos DB's value prop as a multimodel, multi-API
database, giving customers the flexibility to use the data model
and API of their choice. And Reserved Capacity reduces
barriers to entry, enabling customers to get up to 65 percent off
the cost of their Cosmos DB usage.
Microsoft also unveiled new AI experiences in Microsoft 365 that
make it easier for people to find information, create content,
analyze data and collaborate with others:
- Microsoft introduced a new cohesive search capability,
Microsoft Search, that makes it easier to find a variety of
documents and data from both inside and outside the organization
without leaving the flow of work. The search box is in a
consistent, prominent place throughout Microsoft 365 apps so that
search is always one click away. Under the hood, Microsoft is
pulling together the power of the Microsoft Graph and AI technology
from Bing to deliver experiences that are more relevant to what
people are working on. Customers can preview the Microsoft Search
capability on Sept. 24 as it rolls
out on Bing.com and to Office.com, including app start pages and in
the SharePoint mobile app, with many more endpoints to come
including in Microsoft Edge, Windows and Office.
- Ideas in Office help people tap into the power of AI
with one click of a mouse to launch intelligent recommendations in
Office applications. Rolling out first for Excel and PowerPoint,
the Ideas engine simplifies the user experience and helps people
save time performing everyday tasks. Simply click the lightning
bolt icon in Excel or PowerPoint to launch the Ideas pane, which
provides actionable, app-specific suggestions for designs, layouts
and images customized to what the user is working on.
- Today, new intelligent enhancements in Excel are
generally available, giving users the ability to turn data into
insights. In addition, Insert Data from Picture, a new
feature that's available in public preview on Android, allows users
to take a picture of a table from their phones and quickly convert
those pictures into an Excel file that can be edited, analyzed and
shared. Enhancements also include major improvements to the
performance of existing Excel functionality. For instance,
lookup-type functions will now take seconds instead of
minutes.
- With the ability to connect Office 365 and LinkedIn
accounts, users can send emails and share documents with
LinkedIn first-degree connections directly from Outlook, Word,
Excel and PowerPoint. Microsoft also announced that, later this
year, customers will be able to see LinkedIn information about the
people they're meeting with directly in meeting invites.
- New AI-powered capabilities in Microsoft Teams are now
generally available, showcasing Microsoft's ongoing commitment to
transform business meetings. Background blur uses facial
detection to blur your background during video meetings, and
meeting recording provides speech-to-text transcription
generating a searchable transcript and automatically applying
captions to the recording. And with generally availability of the
new live event capabilities beginning to roll out worldwide in
Microsoft 365 later this year, customers will be able to
create and stream live and on-demand events in Teams, Microsoft
Stream and Yammer.
- Microsoft is bringing customizable Cortana experiences and
skills with the new Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise. The
end-to-end solution allows enterprises to build custom skills and
agents, test them with users, and fully manage deployment to their
organization. Developed with the Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure
Cognitive Services Language Understanding service, the platform
will help enterprises effectively use Cortana to improve workforce
productivity. This is currently available by invite only and more
broadly in the near future where companies and developers will be
able to request an invitation.
Capturing value from IoT and edge computing
Computing
is becoming more ubiquitous and simultaneously more distributed
across the edge — connected devices, endpoints and geographies.
With the power of AI, these devices can predict, learn, speak and
more. This is all driving the next wave of innovation at the
intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. Microsoft is delivering
powerful IoT and edge solutions that unlock new opportunities for
customers to bring cloud intelligence to new scenarios and to areas
where connectivity is unreliable:
- Azure Digital Twins, announced today, is a new offering
in our IoT platform that enables customers and partners to create a
comprehensive digital model of any physical environment. As the
world enters the next wave of innovation in IoT where the connected
objects such as buildings, equipment or factory floors need to be
understood in the context of their environments, Azure Digital
Twins provides a complete picture of the relationships and
processes that connect people, places and devices. Azure Digital
Twins leverages the full power of the Intelligent Cloud and
Intelligent Edge to provide a foundation for partners to build
custom digital solutions that stay up-to-date with the physical
world, as well as use advanced analytics to understand the past and
predict future states for scenarios such as predictive maintenance,
energy management and more.
- Azure Sphere, the first holistic solution designed to
secure and power IoT devices at the intelligent edge, is now
available in public preview. Azure Sphere is designed to secure
connected microcontrollers — of which there are 9 billion shipping
every year — from the silicon to the cloud. Development kits are
now universally available.
- With Azure Data Box Edge public preview, now available,
Microsoft is adding even more products to the Azure Data Box family
to help customers analyze, process, and transform data before
uploading it to the cloud. Azure Data Box Edge is a physical
network appliance, shipped by Microsoft, that sends data in and out
of Azure with AI-enabled edge capabilities. It uses advanced FPGA
hardware natively integrated into the appliance to run machine
learning algorithms efficiently at the edge. The size and
portability enables customers to run Azure Data Box Edge as close
to users, applications and data as needed.
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) is the leading platform and
productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and
its mission is to empower every person and every organization on
the planet to achieve more.
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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.