On Microsoft Azure’s New Solutions

I invite you to click here and read the press statement issued by Microsoft Azure yesterday, on releasing market-leading innovations in a cloud-leading environment.

What does it mean “integrated experience that gives customers visibility and control”?  Did they build a dashboard?  That’s what it sounds like.  I hardly think that’s worthy of such fanfare.

Oh wait, “it helps customers stay ahead of the threats even as they evolve”.

Now THAT is a very dangerous statement right there.

It could give their customers the impression that Microsoft is providing some form of zero day solution, one that everyone wants but isn’t easy to come by.  Seriously, I know marketing people can get out of control at times, but statements like this one should be vetted by a lawyer.  If I’m a customer and I sign up based on that statement, and then a zero day takes down my network, what are they going do?

Reimburse me?

Cover my losses?

It’s one thing to say a person can stay abreast of new threats and be proactive in creating remedies; and quite another to lay claim to staying ahead of threats as they evolve.  Sorry, no one can and should make that statement.  Seems as though Microsoft intends to get into the business of threat intelligence and analysis.  This can be valuable for some clients. And the ones they mention in the announcement, being very large corporations, may benefit from such intelligence.   But then again, I don’t have complete demographics of the more typical Azure customer.

Are they all Fortune 500 or similarly large companies?

Smaller companies may not benefit that much from this service as they don’t have the resources to act upon information provided.  Threat intelligence is nice, but it’s only useful when you’ve a team that can do something with that information.  It isn’t clear from this announcement whether Microsoft will be offering that too; wait, no, actually it seems fairly clear that they aren’t.

All they appear to be offering, it seems, is information aggregation.