Microsoft Azure Upgrades Security And Disaster Recovery For Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure is adding a number of new features to its public cloud offering that provide customers with extra security protection and disaster recovery improvements.

The firm told attendees at its TechEd conference in Houston that a glut of new features will include enhanced malware protection, performance protection for virtual machines as well as various parts of the product being refreshed, according to Cloud Pro.

One of the many changes is a rebranded version of the Hyper-V Recovery Manager that will be now be known as Microsoft Azure Site Recovery and able to be previewed from next month.

It will include allowing end users to replicate and recover virtual machines, workloads and services to Azure even if a primary data centre goes down, and this makes it cheaper and easier for enterprises to benefit from.

“One of the things that differentiates [this] is that it is drop dead simple to use, and you can apply this to every workload in your data centre. Historically, disaster recovery has been reserved for only the most mission critical applications for most organisations because it’s too expensive and too difficult. Let’s have disaster recovery for every one of the offerings in your company. For every one of the offerings your users and customers are using,” said Brad Anderson, corporate VP of the company’s cloud and enterprise division.

Anti-malware protection is another product that has been added to the public cloud service to let end users protect Azure hosted virtual machines as well as applications that are being built for the public cloud platform.

To try to build confidence and trust in the security and performance of the public cloud it also announced the launch of the Azure ExpressRoute service. It gives a private Internet connection to connect on-premise and data centre assets to the public cloud and thus reduces the strain on bandwidth and any latency issues.

The latest changes come after the company changed the product name from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure in order to better reflect its position as a product that is no longer just linked to Windows.