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Our Microsoft Learn community, along with the rest of the world, has experienced a time of great change over the last few years—the pandemic, a sudden shift to remote work, economic volatility, and huge leaps in the capabilities and implementation of AI, to name just a few. Times of change like these cause us all to reevaluate our priorities, how we operate, and what’s most important across all areas of our lives. Careers are no small part of that equation. We must continuously adapt to these new realities, whether we’re employees, employers, job seekers, educators, or leaders of organizations. Because of that impact, Microsoft Learn remains committed to leading the way with resources to help equip our learners and customers with technical skills to not only meet but thrive through the challenges of that ever-changing landscape.
What does ‘skills-first’ mean and why are we talking about it?
We’re always on the lookout for emerging trends so that we can bring you insights to help you succeed. The latest and most significant of these trends is a direct response to the massive global shifts we alluded to above, what the World Economic Forum refers to as “an accelerated shift towards a skills-based operating model for talent.” Simply put: whether you’re focused on your own career or on finding the right talent, a skills-centric mentality is becoming more essential.
How does this impact you? There are all sorts of reasons to engage with skilling content—you might have one or more of the following goals (featuring some great Microsoft Learn blogs on the subject!):
Whatever your objective, knowing how to find and feature the right skills is a game-changer, and we want to be part of your journey.
What to expect from Microsoft Learn through the end of October
Our ‘Skill-it-forward’ content throughout September and October will be focused on understanding the skills-first trend and why it’s important. We’ll also be highlighting the tools and resources you need to build your technical skills and expertise. You can expect the inside scoop about what’s new with Microsoft Learn (hint: we might have a few announcements to make…). We’ll offer resources across Microsoft Learn and beyond to help you not only navigate this skills-centric shift but use it to achieve your goals. And of course, we can’t leave out Tips & Tricks – we always have a few up our sleeve!
Make sure you’re following us on Twitter and LinkedIn, and are subscribed to “The Spark,” our recently enhanced LinkedIn newsletter so you don’t miss any of the exciting stuff we have planned!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In a previous blog, we introduced Continuous Access Evaluation(CAE) – a product that brings Zero Trust principles to session management. Today we would like to discuss securing cross-tenant access with a focus on preventing data exfiltration.
It’s impossible to imagine a successful modern organization that doesn’t collaborate with partners across organizational boundaries. While cross-company collaboration empowers employees and enables partnerships, it also lowers barriers for both accidental and malicious data exfiltration. Microsoft Cross-Tenant Access Settings is designed to address security of cross-company exchange.
Outbound and Inbound Cross-Tenant Access Settings offer fine grain security controls for cross-company collaboration using user’s home identity, while Tenant Restriction v2 (TRv2) can be used to prevent data exfiltration using foreign identity.
Some of the hardest-to-prevent data leaks happen when users inside your organization use foreign identities to connect to external tenants. Let’s consider one such attack. A malicious insider creates a Microsoft Entra tenant. Then they authenticate to their malicious tenant from your organization’s device. Now the attacker can leak your files via email using the Exchange Online account of the malicious tenant. These types of attacks can be described as creating a “USB dongle in a cloud.” Regular security methods do not work against such attacks. Your tenant’s policies do not apply to external identities that attackers use. Blocking Microsoft Entra ID or Exchange Online URIs in the firewall would block your legitimate users along with the attacker. These types of attack need special defenses that TRv2 provides.
TRv2 works by sending special signals to Entra ID, Microsoft Account and other Microsoft resources. These signals point to Cross-Tenant Access Settings’ TRv2 policy that you created. Microsoft resources evaluate the policy and block unsanctioned access. We have two major flavors of TRv2.
Auth Plane TRv2 can block logins with external identities based on policy. To configure it you need to deploy a network proxy in your organization and configure that proxy to set TRv2 signals on all traffic to Entra ID and Microsoft Account. In the above example of a malicious insider leaking data over external email, the attacker will not be able to login to their malicious tenant and therefore will not be able to send email. Auth Plane TRv2 is now generally available.
Universal TRv2 as part of Microsoft Entra Global Secure Access goes one step further to protect against more sophisticated attacks where an attacker bypasses authentication by allowing anonymous access to the malicious tenant’s apps, such as anonymous meeting join in Teams. Or the attacker can import to your organizational device an access token lifted from a device in the malicious tenant. All these attack vectors bypass login to Entra ID. Since Universal TRv2 sends TRv2 signals on authentication plane (Entra ID and Microsoft Account) and data plane (Microsoft cloud applications), these attacks will be prevented. Universal TRv2 is currently in public preview.
We have another flavor of TRv2 in public preview – TRv2 on Windows. It’s a partial solution that protects the authentication and data planes but only for some scenarios. It only works on managed Windows devices and does not protect .NET stack, Chrome, or Firefox. We have heard from customers that it is difficult to deploy and does not provide adequate security. The Windows solution was meant to provide temporary protection until Universal TRv2 is released and we’re planning to retire it after Universal TRv2 is generally available.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft recognized as a Leader in the Gartner DaaS Magic Quadrant with a global presence, the largest partner ecosystem, and unparalleled integration.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Sellers are fundamental to any organization’s success—and despite economic headwinds, business leaders are concerned about keeping the talent they have happy and productive at their jobs. Many sellers have long relied on highly manual and disjointed processes that involve a mix of email, spreadsheets, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. But following manual processes and switching between sales tools and spreadsheets can waste valuable time that sellers need to build relationships with customers and close deals. According to the latest Microsoft WorkLab research, 78 percent of sellers would be happy to have some help from AI to make their everyday tasks—like sending follow-up emails or tracking sales—easier. That is why we’ve been busy building a vision for sales-specific AI to help increase seller productivity and success.
Today, we’re excited to share that Microsoft has been recognized again as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms* for the thirteenth consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision.
Figure 1: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms**
Our strong vision and approach with Microsoft Sales Copilot by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities allows sellers to spend more time focused on engaging with their customers.
Empowering sellers through automation and intelligence
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables sellers to close more deals and meet customer needs with the help of next-generation AI and real-time insights. Sellers have everything they need in their app of choice to engage with customers, including historical data and access to subject matter experts. Using data, sellers can achieve more consistent sales interactions from creating a lead to closing a sale, predict how much revenue they will generate in a given timeframe, automate repeatable processes and define sales best practices, and promote products and services with targeted marketing campaigns. Additional sales enablement features include adaptive guidance for next best steps based on actionable insights, AI-guided selling features like the sales assistant and conversation intelligence to help build stronger customer relationships, and predictive scoring models to prioritize leads and opportunities for increased conversion and win rates. Sales managers can also get intelligent insights into how their sales team members are performing, so they can provide proactive coaching to improve their teams’ overall performance.
With Microsoft Sales Copilot, which is included with Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses, we have established a vision of CRM platform by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities to help sellers reduce mundane tasks and personalize customer relationships even further. Powered by Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Sales Copilot features built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security. Sellers can access Copilot in the tools where they’re working, whether that’s Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales. Microsoft Sales Copilot also connects to Salesforce for instant data syncing. Sellers can use Copilot to automate tasks or view email or meeting summaries, helping them save time on daily tasks and spend more time with customers. AI-powered, real-time insights including customer summaries, recent notes and customer news, and highlights of any issues or concerns help sellers enter customer meetings fully prepared to focus on key items. And to help sellers follow up after those meetings, Copilot can generate AI-assisted content and recommendations, such as customer-specific emails using data from their CRM platforms and Microsoft Graph.
Providing sellers with access to customer data in one place is key to helping ensure their success. Microsoft Dynamics 365 utilizes Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM platform data, which enables customers to securely store and manage data used by business applications. By using a platform solution to simplify and unify sales processes, sellers benefit from products built to talk to each other. Dynamics 365 Sales works seamlessly with technologies including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power BI, and LinkedIn to enhance and extend capabilities for sellers. This means that sellers can continue to use familiar tools, which helps to simplify user adoption and lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and IT costs—a priority for many organizations in today’s economy.
Organizations can leverage the power of the full Microsoft Cloud to help sellers succeed. Dynamics 365 Sales natively integrates with Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. With automatic data syncing between Microsoft 365 apps and Dynamics 365 Sales or other CRM platforms, sellers can also surface customer and opportunity information directly in Teams and Outlook, which minimizes context switching and data loss. In addition, sales operation leads and managers can use Power BI to further analyze trends and build reports. And Microsoft Power Platform enables sellers to automate workflows, create apps, and analyze data to increase agility and innovation.
Helping to ensure our customers’ success
Investec, a global financial services company, set out to help its client-facing teams listen directly to customers and build more valuable relationships. This made conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales appealing because it automatically transcribes sales calls and analyzes the content, sentiment, and participants’ behavior. Conversation intelligence takes advantage of Microsoft advancements in AI and natural language processing to automatically extract meaningful insights from sales calls. With these insights, Investec can review salespeople’s conversation styles, help coach individuals on best practices, keep track of sales conversations, build stronger client relationships, and ultimately keep track of sales conversations, and build stronger client relationships. With Dynamics 365 Sales, Investec automatically incorporates conversation intelligence data across its customer engagement platform, saving time on manual entry, reducing overhead, and building a comprehensive customer view.
MAPEI, a global leader in adhesive, sealant, and chemical product manufacturing, was using 90 different customized CRM systems across 57 countries when it decided to consolidate into a single, centralized system. Migrating to Dynamics 365 Sales helped MAPEI simplify internal processes for its employees and provide more proactive service to customers. Today, MAPEI salespeople can build strong relationships with customers, make data-driven decisions, and close deals faster. The service also helps salespeople track customer accounts and contacts, track sales from prospect to purchase, and better qualify leads to assure they are spending time on the most impactful opportunities.
Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner
Microsoft is recognized again as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms for the thirteenth consecutive year.
We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.
Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.
Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, Adnan Zijadic, Ilona Hansen, Steve Rietberg, Varun Agarwal, Guy Wood, 5 September 2023.
*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today, we are announcing the general availability of the latest generations of Azure Burstable virtual machine (VM) series – the new Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2 VMs based on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C, AMD EPYC™ 7763v, and Ampere® Altra® Arm-based processors respectively.
The new generation of Azure burstable B-series v2 VMs are the lowest priced amongst general purpose VMs in Azure and now include native support for Arm-based workloads with the Bpsv2 series. B-series v2 VMs offer up to 15% better price-performance, up to 5x higher network bandwidth, and 10x higher remote storage throughput compared to the previous generation B-series VMs.
Azure customers today can select from a diverse range of Azure virtual machines that are tailored to meet the high CPU performance and utilization needs of their workloads. However, certain categories of workload do not require high levels of CPU utilization and performance on a continuous basis and can be run more cost-effectively on VMs optimized for burstable performance. With B-series v2 VMs, you can balance high CPU utilization and cost savings that automatically meets your workload’s real-time requirements. Burstable virtual machines provide high CPU utilization when applications need it and run at a baseline CPU utilization to save cost when high CPU utilization and performance are not required.
B-series v2 VMs are ideal for workloads that experience unpredictable spikes in demand and require occasional bursts of high CPU utilization. This capability makes burstable VMs ideal candidates for a variety of workloads such as web applications, small and medium databases, micro services, code repositories, CI/CD pipelines for development and test environments, and servers for proof-of-concept development that don’t require full CPU performance all the time, but occasionally need to burst to complete tasks quickly.
With the new Arm-based Bpsv2 VMs now available alongside x86-based Bsv2 and new AMD-based Basv2 burstable VMs, customers can now tailor their infrastructure for specific performance and price-performance requirements across CPU architectures. Arm-Based Bpsv2 VMs, with one physical core per vCPU, are ideal for many workloads like microservices, web apps, containers, and small to medium databases. While Bsv2 and Bav2 VMs can run these workloads, they also offer capabilities and infrastructure for monolithic, vectorized workloads, and others that don’t have affinity to Arm-based VMs.
You can choose from multiple memory ratios for a given vCPU size, giving you the flexibility to select the configuration and architecture that is ideal for your workload. Bsv2-series and Basv2-series offer up to 32 vCPUs and 128 GiB of RAM, and the Bpsv2-series offers up to 16 vCPUs with 64 GiB of RAM. All sizes support accelerated networking and network bandwidth up to 6.25 Gbps.To learn more about the pricing of Arm64-based and x86-based VMs, please visit the Azure Virtual Machines pricing pages.
The new Azure B-series v2 VMs support various Linux OS distributions including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Debian, SUSE Enterprise Linux and more. Windows Server and Windows Client are supported on x86-based B-series VMs. Client application developers can take advantage of Azure’s highly available, scalable, and secure platform to run cloud-based software, build and test workflows. To help developers increase their agility and support their work, we’ve made Insider Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise available on Arm-based Azure B-series VMs. Access the full list of images in the Azure Marketplace.
The new virtual machines support all remote disk types such as Standard SSD, Standard HDD, Premium SSD and Ultra Disk storage. To learn more about various disk types and their regional availability, please refer to Azure managed disk type. Disk storage is billed separately from virtual machines and to learn more ondisk pricing please see pricing for disks.
You can also take advantage of Spot Virtual Machines, Reserved Instances and Saving Plan that are available for all new B-series VM families to potentially save even more. You can significantly reduce costs and improve your budget forecasting with Reserved VM Instances through upfront one-year or three-year commitments. With the Azure Savings Plan, you have the flexibility to save across multiple Azure Services, including this one. For workloads that can tolerate interruptions and have flexible execution time, using Spot Virtual Machines can significantly reduce the cost of running in Azure and further optimize your cloud spend. Eligible new Azure customers can sign up for an Azure free account and receive $200 Azure credit.
Start running your applications on Azure B-series v2 VMs today. We can’t wait to hear about the amazing workloads you will build with these new VMs.
Learn what our partners have to say about Azure’s latest burstable VMs:
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