Microsoft is repositioning AI agents from experimental projects to managed investments, with Microsoft Foundry adding tools to track token costs, optimize workflows, and control runaway usage. The shift comes as 71% of surveyed business leaders plan to increase AI budgets, while organizations increasingly demand measurable returns rather than successful pilots alone.

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Azure SRE Agent is an AI-powered operations assistant that investigates incidents, analyzes telemetry and cloud resources, and helps automate routine site reliability engineering tasks. Azure is offering new customers a 30-day trial of Azure SRE Agent without the usual always-on charges, allowing teams to configure up to three agents and pay only for active Azure Agent Unit usage during the trial. Microsoft is also making VNet integration generally available and releasing Live Reports in public preview.

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SQL Server Express users can now move small applications to Azure SQL Database Free Tier with a short workflow that combines SSMS or Visual Studio Code, Azure provisioning, and GitHub Copilot-assisted migration. The option removes Express’s local hardware and maintenance burden, while Microsoft’s preview Azure SQL Developer container provides the same database engine for developers who want to stay local.

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GitHub has attributed its 7-hour-47-minute outage on August 17 to a Central US infrastructure component that failed to scale when traffic reached a new peak. The resulting capacity shortage cascaded into authentication, GitHub Actions, APIs, pull requests, issues, Pages, webhooks, and Copilot, while a client-side retry loop prolonged recovery.

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Microsoft will stop selling license-included Azure VMware Solution (AVS) environments on October 31, 2026, and existing customers must move to a new licensing model by August 30, 2027. AVS will continue, but customers will need to obtain VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licenses from Broadcom and bring them to Azure.

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A Microsoft deployment pattern puts Azure Landing Zones under version control and approval gates instead of relying on manual portal configuration. By combining Azure DevOps with Terraform, organizations can provision subscriptions, networking, identity, policies, security, and monitoring through a repeatable pipeline that produces an audit trail before changes reach production.

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A password-spraying campaign generated more than 81 million login attempts against Azure CLI users in two weeks, compromising 78 accounts while exploiting an authentication path that bypassed MFA. Huntress recorded a 155-fold increase in password spraying during the first half of 2026, with attackers using breached credentials and legacy OAuth behavior rather than simply guessing passwords.

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The alleged theft of 3.64 million employee records from nine companies’ Azure and Entra environments appears more consistent with compromised identities than an Azure vulnerability, Hudson Rock’s analysis suggests. TheHatman is selling the data, but the claims remain unconfirmed: Tata Consultancy Services and Gap say they found no evidence that their corporate systems were breached.

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Microsoft keeps Microsoft 365, Entra ID, and Azure services available, but does not promise to restore a customer’s data to a specific known-good point after an attack. That makes independent, immutable backup increasingly important as stolen identities let attackers reach mailboxes, files, cloud resources, and recovery controls.

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Azure Private Link over IPv6 is a public preview that lets an IPv6 client reach selected Azure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) resources through a private endpoint. A private endpoint is a network interface with a private address in your Azure virtual network that represents a specific service resource. This article explains what PaaS means, how private access worked before this preview, the practical benefits of IPv6, and the configuration requirements and preview limitations you need to consider.

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Microsoft is rolling out three Azure IoT security changes with different readiness levels: TLS 1.3 for IoT Hub and managed-identity authentication between Device Provisioning Service and IoT Hub are in public preview, while HTTPS downloads for Device Update are generally available. The earlier Microsoft security overhaul focused on Cloud Solution Providers; this previous coverage addresses a separate Azure IoT security update.

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Windows Server 2016 Extended Security Updates are now generally available through Azure Arc, giving organizations a pay-as-you-go way to keep eligible on-premises, edge, and multicloud servers patched after end of support. Critical and Important security updates will remain available through January 2030 without moving workloads to Azure virtual machines.

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