We talked about Azure Backup before in this blog, when they recently added the capability to backup VMware virtual machines, now they are introducing a new set of features: Central monitoring, enhanced security and available in new regions.

Amazon released recently the Aurora Storage Engine as a MySQL-compatible relational database service and is highly encouraging to customers to migrate from Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to this new cloud service platform. Amazon Aurora is promising up to five times better performance than MySQL with better security, availability, and reliability of a commercial database and a 10% cost of what organizations are paying. And also announced a short time ago, PostgreSQL compatibility (available as a preview).

The technology giant Microsoft is, as many other big ones in the market, making a statement regarding CyberSecurity: They are maintaining their $1 billion investment on yearly basis for research and development in this field, which does not include any “inorganic investments” (buying other companies). The latter investments will be a separate budget.

Microsoft recently announced new features and updated capabilities within Azure Storage. Some of the new features are Larger blobs, incremental copy, new API capabilities and an updated version for the Storage Emulator.

Microsoft will be “guiding” new customers to use the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program to acquire any of the Azure subscriptions. Even though you won’t see the pay-as-you-go option from Microsoft, don’t panic, there’s an explanation.

AT&T, the Texas-based telecommunications company, has just announced two new Internet of Things (IoT) starter kits at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2017 in Las Vegas, one for Amazon Web Services (AWS) developers, the other for developers that use Raspberry Pi.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be one of the trends in 2017, the two big cloud providers are investing a large amount of money into developing new technologies in this area. Amazon Web Services (AWS) released in December 2016 several new services customers can acquire within their cloud offerings: Polly, Rekognition and Lex.

Microsoft continues with its expansion over Europe, offering new Azure Services most precisely within their brand new UK datacenters. The new services focus on PowerBI, SQL Server and Azure Functions; all of those are currently available for European customers.

We’ve discussed in previous posts about Azure and the security topic as being one of the most critical ones for customers and therefore to Microsoft as well. Because of that, the Redmond based company has been including several new enhancements and features into Azure Security Center. One of the latest is the integrated vulnerability assessment.

Microsoft is expanding the features and functionalities constantly, two of the key aspects related to the new Azure features are related to enhancing end-user interaction and facilitate the work in the DevOps world. Azure now has the “Bot-as-a-Service” available where customers can use these automated text-based exchanges systems with their own customers.