One of the most important aspects of any search application is the ability to show relevant content that satisfies the needs of your users. Measuring relevance requires combining search results with the app side user interactions, and it can be hard to decide what to collect and how to do it. This is why we are excited to announce our new version of Search Traffic Analytics, a pattern on how to structure, instrument, and monitor search queries and clicks, that will provide you with actionable insights about your search application. You’ll be able to answer common questions, like most clicked documents or most common queries that do not result in clicks, as well as provide evidence for other situations, like deciding on the effectiveness of a new UI layout or tweaks on the search index. Overall, this new tool will provide valuable insights that will let you make more informed decisions.
Let’s expand on the scoring profile example. Let’s say you have a movies site and you think your users usually look for the newest releases, so you add a scoring profile with a freshness function to boost the most recent movies. How can you tell this scoring profile is helping your users find the correct movies? You will need information on what your users are searching for, the content that is being displayed and the content that your users select. When you have the data on what your users are clicking, you can create metrics to measure effectiveness and relevance.
Our solution
To obtain rich search quality metrics, it’s not enough to log the search requests; it’s also necessary to log data on what users are choosing as the relevant documents. This means that you need to add telemetry to your search application that logs what a user searches for and what a user selects. This is the only way you can have information on what users are really interested on and wether they are finding what they are looking for. There are many telemetry solutions available and we didn't invent yet another one. We decided to partner with Application Insights, a mature and robust telemetry solution, available for multiple platforms. You can use any telemetry solution to follow the pattern that we describe, but using Application Insights lets you take advantage of the Power BI template created by Azure Search.
The telemetry and data pattern consists of 4 steps:
1. Enabling Application Insights
2. Logging search request data
3. Logging users’ clicks data
4. Monitoring in Power BI desktop
Because it’s not easy to decide what to log and how to use that information to produce interesting metrics, we created a clear set schema to follow, that will immediately produce commonly asked for charts and tables out of the box on Power BI desktop. Starting today, you can access the easy to follow instructions on the Azure Portal and the official documentation.
Once you instrument your application and start sending the data to your instance of Application Insights, you will be able to use Power BI to monitor the search quality metrics. Upon opening the Power BI desktop file, you’ll find the following metrics and charts:
• Clickthrough Rate (CTR): ratio of users who click on a document to the number of total searches.
• Searches without clicks: terms for top queries that register no clicks.
• Most clicked documents: most clicked documents by ID in the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days.
• Popular term-document pairs: terms that result in the same document clicked, ordered by clicks.
• Time to click: clicks bucketed by time since the search query.
Operational Logs and Metrics
Monitoring metrics and logs are still available. You can enable and manage them in the Azure Portal under the Monitoring section.
Enable Monitoring to copy operation logs and/or metrics to a storage account of your choosing. This option lets you integrate with the Power BI content pack for Azure Search as well as your own custom integrations.
If you are only interested in Metrics, you don’t need to enable monitoring as metrics are available for all search services since the launch of Azure Monitor, a platform service that lets you monitor all your resources in one place.
Next steps
Follow the instructions in the portal or in the documentation to instrument your app and start getting detailed and insightful search metrics.
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Microsoft Gets the Pentagon’s Highest Cloud Security Rating for Unclassified Data
By Phil Goldstein as written on fedtechmagazine.com
Last month, the Defense Department gave Microsoft’s Azure Government cloud platform its highest certification in terms of security for unclassified data.
In a company blog post, Tom Keane, general manager for Microsoft Azure, noted that Azure Government is “the first commercial cloud service to be awarded an Information Impact Level 5 DoD Provisional Authorization by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).”
Such an authorization allows all DOD customers to use Azure Government for the most sensitive controlled unclassified information (CUI), including CUI of National Security Systems. FCW reports that Microsoft already held FedRAMP High, FedRAMP Moderate and FedRAMP Accelerated approvals under the General Services Administration's Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.
“This achievement is the result of the collective efforts of Microsoft, DISA and its mission partners to work through requirements pertaining to the adoption of cloud computing for infrastructure, platform and productivity across the DOD enterprise,” Keane noted.
ACHIEVING A HIGH LEVEL OF CLOUD SECURITY
According to a March 2016 DISA guide on cloud computing security guidelines, “CUI is information the federal government creates or possesses that a law, regulation, or governmentwide policy requires, or specifically permits, an agency to handle by means of safeguarding or dissemination controls.”
CUI can encompass numerous kinds of information, including unclassified information concerning items, commodities, technology, software, or other information whose export could reasonably be expected to adversely affect U.S. national security and nonproliferation objectives.
This includes dual-use items; items identified in Export Administration Regulations, International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the munitions list; license applications; and sensitive nuclear technology information.
CUI can also include Personally Identifiable Information, Protected Health Information; and other data requiring explicit CUI designation (i.e., For Official Use Only, Official Use Only, Law Enforcement Sensitive, Critical Infrastructure Information, and Sensitive Security Information).
Level 4 authorization accommodates CUI or other mission critical data, according to DISA. Level 5 accommodates CUI that requires a higher level of protection than that afforded by Level 4 as deemed necessary by the information owner, public law or other government regulations. Level 5 also supports unclassified National Security Systems (NSSs) due to the inclusion of NSS specific requirements in the FedRAMP +Control and Control Enhancements.
IMPLICATIONS OF THE CLOUD SECURITY AUTHORIZATION
Microsoft has had to set up separate cloud infrastructure to achieve the certification. Keane noted that Information Impact Level 5 “requires processing in dedicated infrastructure that ensures physical separation of DOD customers from non-DoD customers.”
Keane added that DOD authorizing officials can use the Azure Government authorization “as a baseline for input into their authorization decisions on behalf of mission owner systems using the Azure Government cloud DOD Region.”
According to FCW, “the company said it has built multiple data centers to provide DOD with exclusive services for Azure and Office 365 U.S. Government Defense services.”
Over the past few months, Microsoft ran a preview program with more than 50 customers across the Pentagon, including all branches of the military, unified combatant commands and defense agencies.
“We are thrilled to announce the general availability of the DOD Region to all validated DoD customers,” Keane said. “Key services covering compute, storage, networking and database are available today with full service level agreements and dedicated Azure Government support.”
Katell Thielemann, research director for the public sector and U.S. federal government at Gartner, told MeriTalk that the approval is significant for both industry and the government “in that it sends a strong signal that companies like Microsoft are taking both security and Federal-specific requirements very seriously.”
“The FedRAMP and DISA review processes are stringent, lengthy, and costly. Federal agencies, and the DoD specifically, are looking for ways to leverage all the benefits of the cloud, but their mission environments demand high levels of data protection and security,” Thielemann said.
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Employee devices bring added security concerns
By Cindy Bates
The explosion in recent years of mobility solutions and ‘bring your own device’ policies has had a big impact on small businesses.
In fact, 52 percent of information workers across 17 countries report using three or more devices for work, according to research from Forrester and 61 percent of workers mix personal and work on their devices.
On one hand, there are huge benefits for organizations and employees — employees can be far more productive and work on the go with untethered access to the information they need. Business owners can also realize cost savings while reducing the time spent managing IT. Yet, there are risks: namely, how do businesses protect confidential information from leaking outside of the organization when employees can access and store data in a multitude of ways across devices.
When employees use personal devices for work, they can be mishandled inadvertently, like an accidental forward of a confidential mail, or in more nefarious ways, such as a hacker gaining access to confidential information through stolen credentials. According to a Verizon data breach investigation report, 75 percent of network intrusions used weak or stolen credentials to gain access.
It’s important to have a strong device policy in place but even when the rules are clear, there is room left for costly errors. CEB found that as many as 93 percent of employees admit to violating information security policies. That means, depending on your business, there is a wide variety of data that could be at risk. It may be customers’ personally identifiable information, such as in healthcare, retail or financial institutions, or company confidential information, such as trade secrets, company financials, or employee records. With so much data available, traditional company firewalls and perimeter solutions no longer suffice to protect confidential information wherever it lives. Today, many small businesses are cobbling together a number of solutions to attempt to solve this problem. But none tie it all together until now.
Microsoft has developed Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), which is the only comprehensive solution that protects information assets across four layers: user identity, content, applications & cloud services, and devices. When combined with Office 365, it offers native protection for applications and services. Best of all, it’s about half the cost of competitive solutions. Not only is EMS flexible and easy to integrate, it offers enterprise-grade security for small businesses. Key security features include:
Threat detection: Detect abnormal user behavior, suspicious activities, known malicious attacks and security issues right away.
Conditional access: Control access to applications and other corporate resources like email and files with policy-based conditions that evaluate criteria such as device health, user location etc.
Single sign-on: Sign in once to cloud and on-premises web apps from any device. Pre-integrated support for Salesforce, Concur, Workday, and thousands more popular SaaS apps.
To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617
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Azure Backup’s cloud-first approach and why it matters
Backup is all about how quickly you can be back up from a disaster or data loss situation. On this World Backup Day, this blog post is dedicated to explaining Azure Backup's cloud-first approach and how it helps you be back up quickly and securely.
Backup is a deeply entrenched market and companies generally tend to stick with their backup solution unless there are major shifts in the IT infrastructure. When such a shift occurs, companies are open to evaluating alternate backup solutions that offer significant value tied to that infrastructure shift. Virtualization was a hardware infrastructure inflection that happened in the 2000s that allowed companies to significantly reduce their IT costs with the consolidation and portability benefits offered by virtualization. It also allowed new backup players to emerge and the ones that delivered significant value tied to virtualization became successful. The infrastructure inflection currently underway is the shift to the public cloud and Azure Backup has taken a cloud-first approach to deliver maximum value for backup scenarios in a cloud-transformed IT environment.
Cloud-first value propositions
These are the benefits customers would likely expect in backup scenarios as they augment the public cloud to their IT infrastructure:
Consistent management experience for Hybrid IT: Companies will be in a hybrid model where in addition to the on-premise IT, they will have a cloud foot print that has IaaS (“lift-and-shift applications”) that possibly extends to PaaS (“born-in-the-cloud applications”) and SaaS (O365). It is important to have a consistent experience to manage backups across the IT assets in this hybrid model.
Agility: Business owners are seeking more agility offered by the public cloud where they can deploy solutions from the marketplace to meet their business needs. From a backup perspective, an application admin should be able to sign up for backup and do self-service restores without having to go through a central IT process to provision compute/storage in the cloud to enable backup.
Reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership): A subscription based model (PAYG) is an obvious benefit of the public cloud, but it is also important to consider overall IT cost for backup. For example, if you need to deploy additional infrastructure in the cloud (compute and storage) for backups your overall costs would be higher.
Freedom from infrastructure: This is one of the fundamental benefits companies seek when they move their IT to the cloud and since backup has a significant infrastructure footprint in on-premises IT (storage, compute, licenses, etc), an infrastructure-less backup solution would be a natural expectation for customers.
There are 3 possible approaches backup solutions can take to leverage the cloud inflection and it is important to consider how well they deliver on the above promises in each approach:
Cloud as storage: In this model, the backup solution leverages the public cloud as a storage target for backup either for the second backup copy or to replace tape backups. The customer still needs to manage storage in the cloud, pay for any egress costs for restores, and manage bulk of backup infrastructure that is still on premises.
Cloud as infrastructure: This is the next level where the customer can run the backup application in an IaaS VM, which can protect applications deployed in IaaS. While it does offer a similar experience, it can only protect IaaS VMs and not the other cloud assets (PaaS, SaaS) and has TCO implications. For example, a single IaaS VM only supports 32 TB of total addressable storage, which is far too small for a backup application so to back up at scale, customers need to deploy additional IaaS VMs, configure scale sets for availability and provision/manage backup storage, all of which adds to the overall TCO for backup. Also, as the name implies, it does not free the customer from infrastructure management which is a fundamental promise of moving to the cloud.
Cloud as platform: Backup can be built in a PaaS model to deliver backup as a service and architected to provide a consistent management experience to both on premises infrastructure as well as backup for born-in-the-cloud applications (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS). Since all the service infrastructure is owned and managed by the service, there would be no additional costs for the backup and there is complete freedom from managing infrastructure associated with backup.
Azure Backup is architected from the ground-up as a first-class PaaS service in Azure as described in approach 3 and delivers on the cloud promises customers expect as they cloud transform their IT infrastructure. In addition, since it is a first-party service in Azure, it can also leverage other services in Azure to deliver value beyond backup scenarios. For example, rich monitoring and reporting using PowerBI or the capability to do advanced analytics on backup data in Azure.
Compelling backup scenarios enabled by the cloud first architecture
The cloud-first approach of Azure Backup provides unique benefits to customers which are either difficult or not possible in traditional approaches.
Native Backup for IaaS/PaaS: Azure Backup seamlessly integrates with IaaS VM by providing an enable-backup experience in the VM blade itself. A VM extension is deployed when the customer chooses to enable backup and with a few clicks, the IaaS VM is configured for backup. Backup can also be enabled via ARM templates and it supports all the features of IaaS VMs such as disk encryption, premium disks etc. This capability will be extended for SQL Azure, Azure Files, and other Azure PaaS assets like WebApps and Service Fabric for a first-class backup experience in Azure.
Restore as a service: One of the key concerns customers have when they store their backups in the cloud is the restore experience. There are egress costs, the time it takes to restore data back on premises and handling encryption requirements. Restore operation typically requires all the data has to be restored on premises or a restore appliance needs to be hydrated in the cloud to browse items from the cloud restore points. Azure Backup, restore-as-a-service feature uses a unique approach to mount a cloud recovery point as a volume and browse it to enable item-level-restore. The customer does not need to provision any infrastructure and the egress from Azure is free which are both unique value propositions of Azure Backup. This feature is currently available for IaaS VMS (Windows and Linux) and on premise Windows servers. The same capability for System Center Data Protection Manager and Microsoft Azure Backup Server will be available over the next few months.
Secure Cloud Backups: Azure Backup leverages Azure authentication services to provide multiple layers of security to secure cloud backups against malware attacks such as ransomware. While the predominant ransomware attacks are limited to infecting on-premises data, some of the more evolved ransomware attacks also target backup copies of the data. Typical infections include reducing backup retention, re-encrypting data, and deleting backup schedule/copies that are initiated from compromised machines. Azure backup has several layers of protection to prevent and alert against such attacks.
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Ever wonder how your company would function during a catastrophic data loss? Ninety percent of executives agree they need a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan, so why put your business at risk any longer? Download this infographic and learn the 5 steps to a solid disaster recovery plan with Microsoft Azure.
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Adobe unveils new Microsoft HoloLens and Amazon Alexa integrations
Many of these new innovations are backed by the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning platform Adobe Sensei and the company’s catalog of cloud offerings.
Virtual reality is a big part of Adobe’s newest projects. In the advertising realm, the company envisioned a situation where someone could be standing in the middle of Times Square in New York City with a VR headset on. Based on the individual, various Adobe products such as Sensei and the Adobe Experience Cloud would come together to virtually replace the iconic billboards in the neighborhood with advertisements that might better speak to that person.
The HoloLens project visualizes data and layers it on top of the real world. For example, a retailer could use the technology to visualize sales data, so an employee wearing a HoloLens could see how various items are doing and decide to emphasize the more popular ones in the store. Additionally, retailers could place sensors on items, and see which products are generating the most foot traffic.
Here is a look at how Adobe and Microsoft are working together on virtual reality and retail:
Adobe wants to personalize Amazon’s digital brain Alexa. Alexa is open to third party developers, and Adobe wants to tie in its Experience Cloud to make it possible for consumers to ask Alexa for their reward status for a hotel chain or airline, for example.
Alexa would then use their customer profile data and preferences to recommend promotions or activities that take advantage of those rewards. Adobe said it would be able to do this in a way that protects people’s privacy.
Digital transformation is being driven by Indian companies such as Flipkart (the country’s leading marketplace) and Tata Motors, as well as Korean companies such as LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics and Asan Medical Center, through the leveraging of Microsoft cloud.
Azure is available from two new cloud regions in Korea, part of 38 Azure regions around the globe which is more regions than any other cloud provider. 13 of those regions are in Asia which gives customers across the region the opportunity to leverage the Azure cloud platform’s ability.
Across industries, including finance and health care, Korean companies are putting local Azure services to use in their organizations. LG Electronics is sending real-time data and using the scalability of virtual machines in order to better serve their customers and Asan Medical Center is able to collaborate with the industry & academia in order to supply anonymous clinical notes through Microsoft's hybrid cloud.
Other Korean companies, such as Samsung Electronics, are leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT). Using its remote energy reduction solutions (S-Net Cloud), Samsung is able to monitor energy use and deliver efficiencies to customers in order to save them money on energy costs.
Data center regions in India opened in September 2015 have provided the immense computing power of Microsoft cloud for the purposes of growth and innovation. Flipkart has adopted Azure as its exclusive public cloud platform to do just this, grow and innovate. The collaboration between Microsoft and Flipkart has marked the process towards providing customers with the best online shopping experience possible, aided in addition by Flipkart's use of Azure Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics to optimize the areas of merchandising, marketing, and customer service. This partnership comes on the heels of Microsoft's cloud collaboration with Tata Motors – India’s leading auto manufacturer – to provide connected driving experiences with Azure.
The rise of cloud computing and the plethora of new business opportunities it comes with ushers virtually every organization in every industry into the realm of becoming a digital business in at least some respect. This, in turn, makes it pivotal that every company master the legalities that come with the digital economy.
One challenge that technology leaders such as Microsoft have consistently acknowledged is the risk of patent infringement. With over two decades of experience and a broad legal infrastructure designed to manage these risks, Microsoft will use its patent portfolio to help protect cloud customers.
Microsoft announces its launch of the Azure IP Advantage program – the industry’s most comprehensive protection against intellectual property (IP) risks.
The goal is to foster innovation and investments in the cloud while businesses can respond to the changing needs of their customers without worrying about lawsuits.
The cloud-based economic opportunity is great with an estimated more than $1 trillion in IT spending by 2020, according to the research firm Gartner, representing an huge economic opportunity for individuals and businesses everywhere.
At the same time, however, the growing risk of IP lawsuits in the cloud is essential to acknowledge. According to Boston Consulting Group, there has been a 22 percent rise in cloud-based IP lawsuits over the last five years in the US. During the same period of time, non-practicing entities (NPEs) have increased their acquisition of cloud-related patents by 35 percent.
Microsoft Azure IP Advantage program includes the following to address this issue:
1) Microsoft's best-in-industry IP protection with uncapped indemnification coverage will now also cover any open source technology that powers Microsoft Azure services, such as Hadoop used for Azure HD Insight.
2) 10,000 Microsoft patents will be made available to customers that use Azure services for the sole purpose of allowing them to better defend themselves against patent lawsuits against their services that run on top of Azure.
3) Any patents that Microsoft transfers to non-practicing entities in the future can never be asserted against them. Microsoft does not have a practice of making such transfers, but see this as an extra protection that many customers value.
These measures are put in place to make sure the cloud is used for good & to protect users against intellectual property risk.
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Microsoft Gets the Pentagon’s Highest Cloud Security Rating for Unclassified Data
