Hey, what's up Gurus. Welcome to Azure This Week. I'm Brian Roehm, and I'll be taking you through what's been happening in the world of Azure. In this episode, we'll talk about a new certification, some ways to save you money and some new security measures for Cosmos DB to keep your data safe. First up, there's a brand new Azure certification out.

It's the Azure Support Engineer for Connectivity Specialty. To get this certification, you need to pass the Azure AZ-720. What is this certification? And how do you know if it's right for you? Well, to simplify as much as possible, this cert is for networking ninjas, who are not only adept at planning, implementing, and maintaining networking solutions, including hybrid solutions, but networking ninjas that are capable of discerning when things go wrong and how to fix them. Essentially, if you took the AZ-700, which is the exam for Designing and Implementing Microsoft Azure Networking Solutions, and added in the ability to break and fix everything in it...well, you'd have the AZ-720. I think this will be an extremely valuable certification for support engineers that want to stand out and display a more senior level skillset.

The exam itself won't be available until late March and will be in beta at that time. Now beta means you might not get results back for a little while, as Microsoft needs to get enough exams in to establish a pass/fail baseline. Hey, keen, to start your cloud journey? We've just launched a new limited time offer for our Personal Plus annual plan, giving you a savings of over 36%. The Personal Plus plan gives you access to great course features like hands-on labs and practice exams, making it easier to kickstart your cloud career. If you're interested, scan the QR code on the screen or click the link.

Next up, let's take a look at cost in Azure. Runaway billing due to errant compute selection or resources left behind their intended period, is always a concern, particularly with new cloud installations or teams that might not have a good cost management practice in place. This is a great time for a small public service announcement. You did set billing alerts for your resources and subscriptions, right? If you haven't, do a little research and set those up. In the meantime, though, you should consider taking a look at a brand new feature that just went into preview mode, anomaly detection for subscriptions.

This is a new feature that is a part of Insights. It's extremely easy to set up and provides an automated anomaly detection for your subscriptions. It establishes a baseline of the last 60 days and will provide insights on various anomalies. For instance, a spike that occurs every Monday or a drastic increase over spend over previous months. You can then drill down with charts to determine the root cause and lower your overall spend or catch critical errors.

Last up, we're gonna take a look into Azure Cosmos DB and the newest addition, Microsoft Defender. Cosmos DB had a bumpy year last year with some critical vulnerabilities. They were of course corrected quickly, but still they highlighted the need for additional security, especially considering the generally critical applications with global reach that Cosmos DB is used for. Microsoft Defender is a tool to secure and defend vital Azure resources. It utilizes the cloud, behavior analytics, and machine learning to provide a continual assessment of your environment.

SQL injections are one of the most likely attack techniques that are used against databases, such as Cosmos DB. Defender utilizes pattern recognition, along with policies to both stop attacks and to decrease their likelihood. Defender also applies automation to block bad actors in a variety of ways, such as the identification of suspicious behavior patterns, scanning for known malicious indicators, and stopping key extraction attacks. The addition of Defender is a pretty large upgrade for Cosmos DB security, and one that you should definitely consider taking a look at. As always there's a lot going on in the world of Azure, but unfortunately that's all the time that we have for this Azure This Week.

Sad to say goodbye, but I do have some good news. Next week you can join us again for another Azure This Week, where you will be joined by Erik Gross. He will be discussing all the new updates going on in the world of Azure. It will definitely be a show that you don't want to miss. Until then, keep being awesome Gurus.