Cloud Computing

In this episode of First Ring Daily, Brad Sams and Paul Thurrott discuss Bing’s stagnating market share despite Microsoft investing over 10 billion dollars into OpenAI.

Azure Data Studio is a database management tool from Microsoft. It offers a modern and user-friendly UI for performing several database operations and building customizable dashboards. In this article, I’ll explain how Azure Data Studio works, how it differs from SQL Server Management Studio, and how you can download and install it on your PC….

Microsoft is making some minor changes to its cloud licensing policies for specific customers that run Microsoft Office on AWS. This move comes a week after the European Commission opened an antitrust investigation of Microsoft Teams bundling with Office 365/Microsoft 365 subscriptions. In 2019, Microsoft announced new licensing terms that made it more expensive to…

Microsoft is planning to sunset its Microsoft Managed Desktop service next year. The company has quietly updated its support document to indicate that the service will be deprecated on July 31, 2024. Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD) is a cloud-based device management service that includes Windows 10/11 Enterprise and Microsoft Office apps. It provides a simplified…

Every system administrator dreams of building the perfect Rube Goldberg machine of IT automation to manage the employee IT lifecycle, end to end, including IT offboarding. A new hire joins the company, HR files a ticket, and BAM! In an instant, all of the birthright accounts, access, and permissions are granted in a glorious cascade…

Splunk Inc. announced this week a new strategic partnership with Microsoft. The new deal will enable both companies to build Splunk’s enterprise security and observability solutions on Microsoft Azure. Splunk is a popular platform that enables customers to search, analyze, and visualize machine-generated data in real-time. It collects and processes data coming from a wide…

Microsoft announced yesterday that it will provide organizations access to expanded cloud logging data at no additional cost to prevent potential cyberattacks. The announcement comes in response to criticism the company faced regarding the lack of security logs for select cloud licenses. Last week, Microsoft confirmed a series of attacks from a Chinese hacking group…

In this episode of First Ring Daily, Brad Sams and Paul Thurrott discuss Microsoft’s pricing model for the Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as how Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard will impact the company financially.

Microsoft announced at its Inspire conference yesterday that it’s expanding its AI partnership with Meta to accelerate innovation in that field. Microsoft will be Meta’s preferred partner to distribute Llama 2, the company’s next-gen and open-source large language model (LLM) designed for commercial use.  Over the past couple of months, the AI conversation has mostly…