Azure Management services: what's new in March 2022

In March there were several news announced by Microsoft regarding Azure management services. In this series of articles, published on a monthly basis, major announcements are listed, accompanied by the necessary references to be able to conduct further studies on.

The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which are covered in this series of articles, in order to stay up to date on these topics and to better deploy and maintain applications and resources.

Figure 1 – Management services in Azure overview

Monitor

Azure Monitor

New agent: support for Private Links

The new Azure Monitor agent introduced support for network configurations via private link. This configuration allows you to operate in restricted environments that require special network requirements and a high degree of isolation.

Govern

Azure Cost Management

Automated emails on cost views

To allow you to stay up to date on cost changes in Azure Cost Management and Billing the possibility of sending automated e-mails has been introduced. From the cost analysis, selecting a graphic view, you have the opportunity to subscribe to updates on a daily basis, weekly or monthly and even share those views with people outside the Azure portal.

Updates related toAzure Cost Management and Billing

Microsoft is constantly looking for new methodologies to improve Azure Cost Management and Billing, the solution to provide greater visibility into where costs are accumulating in the cloud, identify and prevent incorrect spending patterns and optimize costs . Inthis article some of the latest improvements and updates regarding this solution are reported.

Secure

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Microsoft Defender for Cloud development is constantly evolving and improvements are being made on an ongoing basis. To stay up to date on the latest developments, Microsoft updates this page, this provides information about new features, bug fixes and deprecated features. In particular, this month the main news concern:

Protect

Azure Backup

Azure Files Snapshot Protection

To protect Azure Files snapshots from accidental deletion, Azure Backup has added an extra layer of security to the snapshot management solution, integrating with the Azure Files platform's ability to acquire a snapshot lease. This lease creates and maintains a lock on snapshots for delete operations. After taking a snapshot of Azure File, Azure Backup acquires it, thus protecting it from accidental elimination. Furthermore, to ensure that the snapshot is not deleted during a restore operation, Azure Backup also checks the lease status at the beginning of the recovery and acquires it if necessary.

Support for Azure virtual machines with technologies trusted launch (preview)

Trusted launch is an easy way to improve the security of second generation virtual machines, which allows you to get protection from advanced attack techniques, combining technologies that can be independently enabled, such as secure boot and the virtualized version of the Trusted Platform Module (vTPM). Azure introduced support, currently in preview, of Azure VMs with trusted launch features enabled.

Azure Site Recovery

On-demand capacity reservation with Azure Site Recovery to safeguard virtual machine failover

Azure Site Recovery is now integrated with the’on-demand capacity reservation, which allows you to take advantage of the capacity reservation to reserve processing capacity in the disaster recovery region (DR) and thus ensure the execution of workloads during failover processes. By assigning a capacity reservation group (CRG) for protected VMs, Azure Site Recovery will fail over the VMs to that CRG. Furthermore, there is a SLA for the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 2 hours.

New Update Rollup

For Azure Site Recovery was released theUpdate Rollup 61 that solves several issues and introduces some improvements. The details and the procedure to follow for the installation can be found in the specific KB.

Migrate

Azure Migrate

New Azure Migrate releases and features

Azure Migrate is the service in Azure that includes a large portfolio of tools that you can use, through a guided experience, to address effectively the most common migration scenarios. To stay up-to-date on the latest developments in the solution, please consult this page, that provides information about new releases and features.