Microsoft’s announcement is in response to criticism it has received regarding the lack of registration data for certain cloud services licenses. The criticism stemmed from a series of attacks by a China-based threat actor that broke into the email accounts of about 25 organizations, including several U.S. federal agencies.

The perpetrator of the threat, which Microsoft has named Storm-0558, used a stolen Microsoft System Account (MSA) key to forge access tokens that allowed the attacker to gain access to Outlook Web Access email accounts on Exchange Online and Outlook.com. The threat activity was originally discovered in June by an unnamed Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agency that reported the attack to Microsoft.

CISA noted that the FCEB agency was only able to detect the intrusion because it had enabled enhanced logging for its Microsoft 365 services, which provided the agency’s security team with relevant data about the compromised email accounts.

Eric Goldstein, who is executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, wrote in a blog post that the agency has been working with Microsoft over the past few months to determine the types of logs needed to identify cyberattacks.

He said asking organizations to pay more for the required logging is “a recipe for inadequate visibility when investigating cyber security incidents”. It could allow bad actors to reach dangerous levels of success in attacks against U.S. organizations.

WinZO said they can sign up to the company’s game developer console and submit their games for review. The startup will then create a game profile based on the game’s quality, tech compatibility and skill requirements and approve the game by checking the app’s security. Once approved, the game developer will get access to WinZO’s SDK to make their game real on the platform.

Through this SDK, developers will be able to access real-time analytics and game-level data, including user ratings, data logs, revenue, retention metrics and other technical information, the company said in a statement.

WinZO enables developers to host their games on the platform and earn revenue through a microtransaction-based monetization model ranging from Rs 1- Rs 10, instead of traditional in-app purchases and ad-based models.

The company claims to have a portfolio of over 100 games spanning across genres including strategy, sports, casual, card, arcade, racing, action and board games in 12 languages such as English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali and Bhojpuri. Additionally, the company has a user base of over 100 million users on the platform, 90% of which are from tier 2 to tier 5 regions in the country.

Digital transformation in organizations has led to workloads moving to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Modern organizations are increasingly adopting cloud-native technologies including containers, microservices, serverless, etc.

Enterprises are in dire need of monitoring capabilities such as application performance management (APM), infrastructure monitoring, log management, error tracking, and more to monitor, optimize, and troubleshoot their applications and infrastructure.

Partnership with New Relic
New Relic, a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for 10 consecutive years in application performance management and observability, is one such Azure partner.

“Observability is essential in today’s modern, multi-cloud world. Whether our customers are running applications in data centers, spanning the public cloud, or operating at the edge, they need observability to be able to review all of these systems. Today’s news brings together more than a decade of innovation between New Relic and Microsoft to bring the power of full stack observability to Microsoft developers so they can accelerate enterprise cloud migration and multi-cloud initiatives.”

Said Bill Staples, CEO of New Relic

Azure Native New Relic Service simplifies the efforts of developers and IT administrators to monitor their cloud applications. With this new offering, they can:

Create New Relic accounts in the cloud with just a few clicks. Azure Native New Relic Service is a fully managed offering that enables easy onboarding and eliminates the need to create and manage monitoring for your infrastructure.

Seamlessly send logs and metrics to New Relic. Integrated right into the set up experience and also as part of the configuration, you can set up automatic discovery of resources within an Azure subscription to monitor logs and metrics. You no longer need to go through the tedious process of setting up event centers and writing custom code.

Batch deploy New Relic Agent to virtual machines (VMs) and application services with a single click. Then send logs and metrics from the host infrastructure and processes to New Relic.

Get unified billing for all resources you consume in Azure, including New Relic, from the Azure marketplace.

“Application performance monitoring and observability across the entire stack are critical to cloud transformation for enterprises of all sizes. With the Azure Native New Relic service, Microsoft and New Relic together have enabled a thoughtfully integrated, seamless and premium experience for these enterprises everywhere. With just a few clicks, developers and administrators can now seamlessly set up and monitor their cloud applications using the power of New Relic on Azure.”

Said Balan Subramanian, Director of Partner Product Management, Azure Developer Experiences.

Without providing an integrated managed service, New Relic offers AWS and Google integrations and options available in their respective marketplaces.

As part of the Azure marketplace, New Relic’s service billing is consumption-based and consolidates with Azure’s spend, contributing to Azure’s consumption commitment (MACC).

Crescent Cove Advisors, Henry Crown and Company and Luminar, a lidar company, also participated in the investment. Alberto Lacaze, CEO of Robotic Research told TechCrunch:

“Most people think robotics is some magic piece of software. The reality is that robotics is more like a stamp collection. You have to collect all these different edge cases where you need to be able to run on slippery roads and with dust and without being able to see the lines and so forth. We have collected lots and lots of stamps. To a certain degree, a common day for a military application is the edge case for a commercial application.”

This funding is specifically geared towards expanding and industrializing commercial applications, says Lacaze.

On the trucking side, RR.AI is working with sawmills in Canada to move logs, and says it will have a big U.S.-related announcement coming soon. The company will also be announcing an agriculture partnership in the coming months.

The company’s go-to-market strategy is to focus on the “low hanging fruits,” says Lacaze, or the areas where there are few regulations or easy regulations to work around.