Azure Updates: OpenAI Service; Copilot; AI Studio

After a lull in product news around the annual US Thanksgiving holiday, Microsoft picked up the pace of its announcements in late November and early December.

Senior product marketing manager Andy Beatman looked into the ways that customers can improve risk management with Azure OpenAI Service. Globally, spending on cybersecurity is expected to rise 14.3 percent from 2023 in 2024. According to Beatman, companies worldwide are using AI for a wide variety of use cases such as identification, assessment, mitigation, compliance, business continuity and more. Azure OpenAI is particularly suited to unstructured data assessment, whereas Orca Security’s partnership with Microsoft supports risk management together with capabilities from Intapp and NTT.

Principal product manager Michael Flanakin discussed recent Azure developments like the introduction of Copilot in Cost Management and Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft is encouraging customers to leverage the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS for short) to speed up FinOps initiatives. Currently, customers are eligible to sign up for a limited preview of Cost Management gaining access to cost and usage details, price sheets, reservation details, reservation transactions and recommendations. The FOCUS dataset includes both actual and amortized costs, with options to extract, transfer, and load large datasets reliably with APIs.

Microsoft CTO Mark Russinovich explored ways that Microsoft is trying to build resilience for customers. The company’s design principles play a key role in achieving these goals. In part, Microsoft encourages its customers to define realistic SLAs, shift between CapEx and OpEx, or boost architecture reliability with tools like Azure Advisor and Reliability Workbook.