Month: April 2018

Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW) continues to introduce updates to the Azure portal to provide a seamless user experience when monitoring, managing, and integrating your data warehouse. Support for Azure Monitor metrics SQL DW now supports Azure Monitor which is a built-in monitoring service that consumes performance and health telemetry for your data warehouse. Azure monitor not only enables you to monitor your data warehouse within the Azure portal, but its tight integration between Azure services also enables you to monitor your entire data analytics solution within a single interface. For this release, data warehouse metrics have been enabled to enables you to identify performance bottlenecks and user activity: Successful/Failed/Blocked by firewall connections CPU IO DWU Limit DWU Percentage DWU used These metrics now have a one-minute frequency for…

Has your organization failed to devise a business continuity and disaster recovery plan because of the perception that it’s complex or expensive? Or perhaps you have a disaster recovery plan, but maybe you're not testing it frequently enough because of concerns about impacting production systems. If you’re in either category, you’ll want to start developing a plan now. Especially if your company does business in the European Union (EU) or might have any data on EU citizens. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect May 25, 2018,  is the EU’s new data protection regulation. While it doesn’t explicitly require that you back up data or implement a site recovery solution, the GDPR requirements provide additional reasons to stop waiting and fine-tune your DR plan: Under the GDPR,…

So many customers I talk to want to upload their offline data stores into the cloud. Yet, no one wants to spend hours and hours inserting tapes, connecting older hard disks, or figuring out how to digitize and upload film. Well, I’m excited to announce that together with our partners Microsoft Azure is making it easy with our Offline Media Import Program. This partner-enabled service makes it easy to move data into Azure from almost any media, such as tapes, optical drives, hard disks, or film. Why migrate your current storage media to Azure? Azure provides a range of flexible storage options from low-cost, archive storage to high-performance, SSD-based storage. You simply choose the storage tier and we take care of the rest. And once the data is available in…

https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Azure-Friday/Azure-Security-Center Kelly Anderson joins Scott Hanselman to discuss Azure Security Center, which offers built-in security management and threat protection for your cloud workloads. Azure Security Center helps you find & fix vulnerabilities, aids in blocking malicious access and alerts you when your resources are under attack.  

I think if you are an old school infrastructure management service techie, you must have been part of many DR excersice during your various job roles. If you are a pre sales techie, in many of the pre sales discussion you may have tried to convince your customers that Microsoft Azure enviroment is highly reliable and available so you don’t need to setup any DR enviroment. However it’s hard to digest by the customer because of the compliance need. The compliance requirements such as ISO 27001 still require that you have a provable disaster recovery solution in place as part of a business continuity plan (BCP). For many days the questions related to setting up a DR site in another Azure region doesn’t have any concrete answer untill May 2017…

Continuing in our series of tutorials showcasing features of Azure SQL database that enable SaaS app management, we are introducing two new tutorials that explore disaster recovery strategies for recovering an app and its resources in the event of an outage. Disaster Recovery (DR) is an important consideration for many applications, whether for compliance reasons or business continuity. Should there be a prolonged service outage, a well-prepared DR plan can minimize business disruption. The tutorials target the database-per-tenant architecture model of the Wingtip Tickets sample and demonstrate recovery using the geo-restore capabilities of Azure SQL database, and recovery using the geo-replication capabilities of Azure SQL database. Disaster recovery using geo-restore In this tutorial, you will explore a full disaster recovery scenario using a geo-restore-based DR strategy. You use geo-restore to…

Every business has different regulations, compliances that they need to comply with. These regulations and compliances are different from one industry to another. As an example, if its financial institute they will need to comply with PCI (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), if it’s a healthcare service they will need to comply with HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Some of these compliances are must to comply and some will just add extra value to business. ISO certifications are good example for that. Some of these regulations and compliances are directly apply to computer infrastructures as well. Especially related to data protection and data governance. Apart from that most business has their own “Policies” to protect data and workloads in their infrastructures. Most of the time end goal…