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New services in Microsoft Azure : Data Box and DDOS protection standard

We saw a lot of new exciting features for Azure being announced in the recently concluded MSIgnite conference. Many of the long anticipated features or products were released in preview and in this blog series I will try to explore some of these features and how you can get started with them.

Azure Data box

This can be considered as an extension to the Storage import/export services already available in GA in Azure. While using the Import/export service, customers have to copy their data to HDDs of a given specification and then send them off to Azure datacenters, where the data will be moved to your storage of choice . This services targets migration scenarios where customer have to transfer several terabytes of data to Azure storage and over the network transfer would take  a very long time or is practically impossible.More details about this service can be found here : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-import-export-service
 With Azure Data box we move one step ahead, where you can order an Azure Data box to copy and transfer your data to Azure. It is described as a 'secure,tamper-resistant' option of transferring your data to Azure cloud. It uses a plug and play model supporting NAS protocols such as CIFS & SMB and data is encrypted using 256 bit AES encryption. The services is available in preview and you can signup for the same from the Azure portal.As shown below, you need to provide some details such as Azure Subscription, Azure of data to be transferred and , targeted Azure region and service, data transfer time frame and frequency.














Azure DDOS protection standard

Azure platform has  DDOS protection built in at platform level.This protects against platform level DDOS attacks and is now being named as Azure DDOS protection basic.This isolates any resources being attacked when a predefined  threshold is reached. However this service is platform managed and controlled. DDOS standard is a new offering in preview that helps integrate DDOS at Virtual network level. Services that have public IPs associated with it like VMs, load balancer ,application gateways and service fabric instances are protected against DDOS attack . DDOS standard provides protection against volumetric attacks and protocol attacks (layer 3 and layer 4) . When used with Application gateway WAF it also provides protection against layer 7 attacks like HTTP protocol violations,SQL injection and cross-site scripting . The service can defend and protect against 60 types of DDOS attacks . DDOS protection standard is integrated with Azure monitor and provides visibility of the metrics. Alerts about any kind of attacks happening in your environment can be generated using Azure Metrics, OMS integration etc. The service offers turnkey protection and can be used for always on traffic monitoring. More details about the service is available from this document : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ddos-protection-overview . You can sign up for the preview from this link :http://aka.ms/ddosprotection 

Comments

  1. It is really a helpful blog to find some different source to add my knowledge.
    Microsoft 365 Certified: Developer Associate

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  2. Superbly written article, if only all bloggers offered the same content as you, the internet would be a far better place.. Pegasus

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