Azure Review: Animal identification; IBM Watson; Azure Data Lake Storage; Name changes; Stream Analytics; Vulnerabilities

Across the cloud market, competition continues to heat up. Following Microsoft's bold moves partnering with Walgreens, Walmart, Kroger and others throughout 2018 and early 2019, Google has announced new plans to invest $13 billion in cloud and go on a hiring and data center-building spree in 14 states. But even with more competition, some signs suggest greater collaboration than ever between cloud competitors. During its event in San Francisco last week, IBM announced that it would make its IBM Watson AI service portable to other cloud systems including Azure and AWS.

Cybersecurity vendor, Lacework, announced support for Azure with its automated threat detection tools, in a bid to support multi-cloud customers. In the wake of recently announced collaborations with TomTom, Moovit and Microsoft, all three companies are coordinating to create a new trip planning system. A unique partnership between Pennsylvania State University and Azure saw the application of machine learning pattern recognition to photos of big game, such as giraffes in East Africa, to study wildlife populations.

James Baker, program manager for Azure Storage offered a more in-depth look at the capabilities of Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, which is generally available as of February 7th. The program counts on the strengths of server-side Apache Hadoop compatible file system logic, hierarchical namespace, Azure Blob Storage and the Azure Blob Filesystem driver. In addition to features aimed at scalability, Baker pointed to security options, like Active Directory OAuth bearer tokens for authentication or encryption at rest and in-transit. Ed Nightingale, partner director of engineering for Azure Sphere announced the general availability of version 19.02 with support for DHCP and SNTP servers in private LAN configurations, new hardware and application support.