Azure mandatory multifactor authentication: Phase 2 starting in October 2025

By Dustin Ward

As cyberattacks become increasingly frequent, sophisticated, and damaging, safeguarding your digital assets has never been more critical, and at Microsoft, your security is our top priority. Microsoft research shows that multifactor authentication (MFA) can block more than 99.2% of account compromise attacks, making it one of the most effective security measures available. As announced in August…

Microsoft Cost Management updates—July & August 2025

By Dustin Ward

Whether you’re a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints. You need to know what you’re spending, where your money is being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise bill—and that’s where Microsoft Cost Management comes in. We’re always looking for ways to learn…

Agent Factory: Top 5 agent observability best practices for reliable AI

By Dustin Ward

This blog post is the third out of a six-part blog series called Agent Factory which will share best practices, design patterns, and tools to help guide you through adopting and building agentic AI. Seeing is knowing—the power of agent observability As agentic AI becomes more central to enterprise workflows, ensuring reliability, safety, and performance is critical.…

Transforming scientific discovery with Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA

By Dustin Ward

From startups to industry-leading enterprises, there is an insatiable desire for organizations to experiment with the idea of how the world could work differently. They explore bold, new ways for society to operate and meet market demand by focusing their efforts on developing innovative products and services. With 78% of companies using AI in at least one…

Protecting Azure Infrastructure from silicon to systems

By Dustin Ward

At Microsoft, secure design begins at the foundation of our computing stack—the silicon level—and extends through every layer of the cloud. Since launching the Secure Future Initiative (SFI)—a company-wide commitment to security, we continue to prioritize delivering products and solutions that are secure by design, secure by default, and secure in operation. SFI sits at…