New Azure Updates: What to Expect With DDoS Protection, Cost Management and More

Microsoft routinely adds new features and products to the Azure landscape to meet the growing needs of cloud-based companies. If your organization relies on cloud applications for day-to-day operations, Azure’s most recent additions can enhance security and save you money. Here are three new Azure updates that will keep your cloud infrastructure running smoothly.

Azure Cost Management

As your business continues to migrate more functionalities to the Azure cloud, controlling cloud spend across your organization is difficult. Azure Cost Management is a new multi-cloud management tool that empowers you to manage costs across Azure and other cloud resources. It provides all the tools required to monitor, allocate and optimize cloud expenses.

Benefits of Cost Management

• Monitor and visualize cloud costs: Monitor cloud usage and billing data through Application Program Interfaces (APIs) from Azure, AWS and other cloud platforms. This data gives you full visibility into your resource consumption and costs in a single dashboard.
• Gain important operational and financial insights: The new tool also lets you monitor your cloud consumption and cost trends in real time. Track cloud spend against your budget to prevent overspending. You can also use historical data to improve cloud usage forecasting.
• Improve accountability in your organization: Cost Management lets you allocate cloud costs to different business units and projects and create clear chargeback reports to drive accountability across your organization. You can also enable Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to manage cloud spend within your teams. Set custom budget thresholds, and send stakeholders automatic alerts when they are close to overspending.

Azure Cost Management is currently available for free to all customers and partners. Some premium features are also available at no cost until June 2018, when they will become paid features.

Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances (RIs)

Your organization now has the ability to reserve Azure virtual machines in advance and significantly reduce costs. When you purchase one-year or three-year terms on Windows or Linux virtual machines, you can save up to 72 percent compared to pay-as-you-go prices. When you combine Azure RIs with the Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can save up to 82 percent. Azure makes it easy to select and purchase RIs. Simply specify your Azure region, virtual machine type and term (one year or three years). While RIs require you to make an upfront compute capacity commitment and advance payment, they also offer flexibility if your business needs change. You can exchange RIs across any region or cancel them at any time for an adjusted refund.

Azure DDoS Protection (Preview)

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are one of the largest security concerns facing customers who rely on cloud-based applications. DDoS Protection leverages the power of Microsoft’s global network to defend against DDoS attacks. Key features of DDoS Protection 

• Turnkey protection: The service protects all resources on a virtual network as soon as Azure DDoS Protection is enabled. 24/7 traffic monitoring offers near-immediate detection of potential DDoS attacks. The feature also instantly and automatically mitigates the attack.
• Adaptive tuning: DDoS Protection integrates with the Azure platform and automatically configures and tunes your DDoS Protection settings. Its intelligent traffic profiling learns your application’s traffic over time.
• Protection against attacks at Layers 3-7: DDoS Protection deploys with Azure Application Gateway Web Application Firewall (AppGW WAF). DDoS Protection protects your application from a variety of network layer (Layer 3-4) attacks. AppGW WAF also protects web applications from common Layer 7 attacks like SQL injection, session hijacks and cross-site scripting attacks.
• Alerting and insights into DDoS attack telemetry: DDoS Protection also integrates with Azure Monitor to expose attack metrics and telemetry. You’ll be notified immediately when your application is under attack.
• Protection against unplanned costs: The service’s cost protection reimburses you for resource costs incurred from a DDoS attack.

Azure DDoS Protection has two service tiers: DDoS Protection Basic and DDoS Protection Standard. DDoS Protection Basic is automatically enabled in the Azure platform at no additional cost. DDoS Protection Standard provides additional mitigation capabilities and features within Azure Virtual Network resources. Azure DDoS Protection is currently available in preview at no cost to you. Have additional questions about the new Azure updates? Schedule a call with an Agile IT cloud specialist today.