azure

Microsoft Research’s Cambridge lab has revealed the second-generation Analog Optical Computer (AOC), a hybrid photonic–analog prototype that uses light, commodity optics and analog electronics to accelerate both AI inference and combinatorial optimization — promising orders-of-magnitude gains in...

Microsoft’s decision to unveil its first in-house foundation models — MAI‑Voice‑1 and MAI‑1‑preview — marks a deliberate strategic shift: Microsoft is moving from an AI product strategy that leaned heavily on OpenAI’s frontier models toward an orchestrated, multi‑model architecture that blends...

Microsoft’s Azure Fibre R&D team — working with researchers from the University of Southampton and the Lumenisity spin‑out — has published results showing a hollow‑core (air‑cored) optical fiber with record low attenuation of 0.091 dB/km at 1,550 nm, a broad low‑loss spectral window, and...

Microsoft’s public preview of a self-service quota management experience for Azure App Service brings a long-requested level of transparency and control to scaling web apps — a dedicated App Service Quota blade in the Azure portal that shows usage per SKU, lets teams request new limits inline...

A UK government Proof of Concept (PoC) led by Hitachi Solutions Europe has shown that Microsoft applications — including Power Platform, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot — can securely operate on live data that remains resident in Amazon Web Services (AWS) without copying or moving that...

Breaking Down CVE-2025-54914 — Azure Networking Elevation‑of‑Privilege (what admins need to know) Summary Microsoft has published a Security Update Guide entry for CVE-2025-54914, an elevation‑of‑privilege issue that Microsoft lists under its Azure Networking surface. Administrators should...

Microsoft’s internal IT organization has completed one of the most ambitious cloud migrations in corporate history — moving virtually all employee-facing systems into Azure and reshaping how the company thinks about operations, security, and engineering at scale. The transition, driven by...

Microsoft’s $4 billion education bet is not charity dressed up as marketing — it’s an explicit, measurable strategy to shape the next generation of AI users, buyers, and decision-makers so that Microsoft’s cloud and Copilot-led ecosystem become the default environment for businesses and...

Microsoft has started letting organizations turn on Trusted Launch for many existing Azure virtual machines and scale sets without rebuilding images or redeploying workloads — a move that lowers the operational bar for platform-rooted boot security while introducing a set of important...

Microsoft has pushed a major real‑time audio milestone into the Azure stack: gpt‑realtime, a speech‑to‑speech (S2S) model optimized for low‑latency, natural‑sounding conversational agents, is now generally available on Azure AI Foundry and accessible through the Real‑time API for developers and...

Microsoft’s renewed public‑sector push in South Africa is more than a sponsorship line on an events page — it’s the visible axis of a multi‑year strategy that mixes heavy infrastructure spending, deep skilling partnerships, and product‑level integrations that together aim to reshape how...

Microsoft’s recent push to make Trusted Launch easier to adopt across Azure virtual infrastructure is a practical — and overdue — step toward raising the cloud security baseline for many organizations, but the rollout contains important caveats that IT teams must understand before flipping the...

Redaction automation is quietly becoming one of the most consequential — and immediately practical — AI use cases in government, and Simpson Associates’ RedactXpert is now a textbook example of how targeted AI can deliver measurable operational gains while fitting inside existing Microsoft cloud...

Microsoft’s new federal bargain is one of those rare deals that looks simple on paper and seismic in practice: deep, governmentwide discounts on Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, security tooling and — critically — up to 12 months of Microsoft 365 Copilot for qualifying G5 agency customers...

Microsoft has quietly made one of the most practical security upgrades for Azure virtual infrastructure far easier to adopt: Trusted Launch can now be enabled in-place for many existing VMs and scale sets, reducing the migration friction that has kept foundational boot security from reaching...

Microsoft and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) have announced a sweeping OneGov agreement that puts Microsoft’s cloud and AI stack — including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure services, Dynamics 365, and security tooling — on preferential, government‑wide terms that the GSA and...

Microsoft and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) have struck a government‑wide OneGov agreement that bundles Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure cloud services, Dynamics 365 and related security tooling into a single, opt‑in procurement vehicle — a package the GSA and...

Israel’s reliance on commercial cloud and AI tools has crossed a new threshold: investigative reporting and follow‑up coverage show the Israeli military’s Unit 8200 used a segregated Microsoft Azure environment to store and process huge volumes of intercepted Palestinian phone calls, and that AI...

Microsoft’s position in the software industry today is defined by a rare combination of enormous scale, accelerating cloud-and-AI revenue, and a conservative balance sheet — a profile that helps explain why the company is being valued like a growth platform even as some headline ratios appear...

Microsoft and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) have struck a governmentwide "OneGov" agreement that offers steep discounts across Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics 365 and associated security tools, and — critically — makes Microsoft 365 Copilot available at no cost for an initial...