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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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.