Hey folks, James Lee here with another episode of Azure This Week. Did you know that it has
been five years since WannaCrypt was wreaking havoc globally? Encrypting and ransoming data for
Bitcoins. In May, 2012, Microsoft provided tools to Azure customers to help protect against this
threat. Now WannaCrypt was of course, just one of many different cyber attacks over the years. And
that's why it's really great to see several new Azure announcements for protecting Azure customers
against other security threats. Coming up on Azure This Week, we'll take a look at Compute Gallery
support for trusted launch virtual machines, private endpoint support for Arc servers,
and the public preview of expanded managed identity support for Stream Analytics.
Trusted launch helps you to protect your virtual machines in Azure by
ensuring security threats aren't hiding, uh, in your OS boot loader or drivers or kernel.
This helps you to protect against sophisticated attacks that can be otherwise very difficult to
detect. Trusted launch supports Linux and Windows virtual machine images from the marketplace,
but you couldn't traditionally use this feature for custom VM images. So if you had custom VM
images for things like standardized deployments, or Azure Virtual Desktop, then trusted launch was
unsupported...until now that is. With this recent announcement, as long as you manage
your custom images through Compute Galleries, you can now also enable trusted launch.
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Okay. I've got a question for you. Do you have any servers hosted on competitor clouds?
Maybe AWS or GCP? It's okay really, tell me the truth. No judgment here. It's fine. All
joking aside, it is increasingly common to see organizations with multi-cloud
or hybrid deployments. It is for this reason that Microsoft created Azure Arc. With Azure Arc,
you can manage your Windows or Linux service, wherever they are, using the Azure Portal,
Azure Policy, Azure Automation, and much, much more. But to get access to all of this
cool functionality required public internet accessibility, until now. With the announced
support for private endpoint for Arc-enabled servers, you'll be able to use Azure Arc without
having to open up public network access. To secure your Arc connectivity using this new feature,
you'll need to configure an Azure Private Link Scope, and you must also be using ExpressRoute
or a site-to-site VPN to connect your environment to Azure. This will help you to securely
manage your servers wherever they might be. Stream Analytics is a powerful service that helps
businesses to gain value from data. That allows you to analyze, transform, and act upon streams of
data from devices, sensors, or other sources. But as with most analytics tools, Stream Analytics is
typically just one service within a multi-service data analytics platform. So we need to be sure
that data can be securely accessed across these services. Well, with this update, Stream Analytics
can now use a managed identity to securely access data that you may have within Cosmos DB and
Service Bus. This is in addition to the existing support for other services such as Blob storage
or Power BI. With managed identity authentication you don't need to worry about managing a username
or a password. Instead, you can assign your Stream Analytics job a managed identity and let
the platform take care of the rest for you. Now, your Stream Analytics job has an Azure AD identity
that can be securely granted permissions to access data and other Azure services.
Well, that's a wrap for today, everybody. I hope you've enjoyed this security-focused
episode of Azure This Week. For more awesome updates on all things Azure,
be sure to tune in again to next week's episode. Until then keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.