When clouds get hacked, it's often the fault of user misconfigurations. Just ask Amazon Web Services (AWs) about that. Beginning a few years ago or so, the AWS cloud notoriously suffered a long spate of such attacks, most of which leveraged misconfigured S3 storage buckets as attack vectors. Recently, Microsoft's Azure cloud experienced a similar situation, this one concerning misconfigurations from lazy users of the Kubeflow machine learning platform used with Kubernetes, the wildly popular container orchestration system. Hackers managed to exploit these misconfigurations to launch cryptocurrency mining campaigns leveraging powerful machine learning Kubernetes nodes, Microsoft announced earlier this month.

Peggy Smedley: For you, what are the most interesting trends that you see? You and I have talked in the past about the IoT (Internet of Things) and I know that you have a lot of vision, a lot of examples that you look at when you think about cloud and edge and we talk about manufacturing and all these things in vertical markets, but for listeners right now, based on investments you guys [Microsoft] are making, what do you see are the most interesting trends? Sam George: Well, I think if you zoom the telescope way back out and look at the very big picture, what we're seeing across all of these vertical markets, whether it's manufacturing or agriculture, smart cites, smart energy. If you take a look at what's happening with all of these, there's a set of disruptive technologies that are fundamentally transforming how those industries function. Cloud was a big catalyst for that and I'd say, very well established at this point. And then IoT, a couple of years ago, really started hitting the scene, building on top of cloud and giving these businesses unprecedented visibility if they were able to take advantage of it back in the early days. Virtually all aspects of their business are able to sense things in the physical world, in realtime, that they weren't able to before. And then while the IoT was happening, edge computing started happening too, which was a normal and natural optimization, where as I connect and start collecting data from these billions of devices that are sensing across all of these different industries that are sensing things that are happening, it's natural to start taking some of the computing that you were doing in the cloud and some of the services that you were taking advantage of and pushing those right out and distributing those right out to the devices themselves for a variety of reasons, whether that's latency concerns or security concerns or anything else. We see this wonderful trend of AI that is powering really new breakthrough capabilities across all of these industries. AI is a great example, where as it takes advantage of those proceeding waves, edge computing and the IoT and cloud. AI can now run in a distributed fashion as well.

Microsoft launched a bunch of new services and capabilities to secure Azure-connected IoT devices and workloads. The new IoT security tool is called Azure Security Center for IoT, and it essentially connects Azure cloud security, visibility, and analysis tools with the company's Azure IoT Hub. Azure Security Center for IoT uses Microsoft's threat intelligence, Azure Security Center, which Microsoft says collects data from more than 6 trillion signals daily. It also hooks into Microsoft's new cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) tool, Azure Sentinel. And it adds new capabilities to Sentinel that allow customers to combine their IoT security data with security data from across the enterprise, and then use analysis or machine learning to identify and mitigate threats.

Scale out read-heavy workloads on Azure Database for PostgreSQL with read replicas, which enable continuous, asynchronous replication of data from one Azure Database for PostgreSQL master server to up to five Azure Database for PostgreSQL read replica servers in the same region. Replica servers are read-only except for writes replicated from data changes on the master. Stopping replication to a replica server causes it to become a standalone server that accepts reads and writes. Replicas are new servers that can be managed in similar ways as normal standalone Azure Database for PostgreSQL servers. For each read replica, you are billed for the provisioned compute in vCores and provisioned storage in GB/month.

For years, many healthcare organizations tended to be skeptical and resistant (if not outright hostile) to the idea of storing their data, particularly protected health information, in the cloud. IT and security decision-makers had deep reservations about stashing such sensitive data anywhere but their own on-premises servers, safe under their own watchful eyes. But not too long ago that changed, and seemed to change quickly. To the surprise of many, over the past few years, it appears that many healthcare providers have been getting markedly more comfortable putting their trust in the cloud. "If you had asked me in 2011, I would have predicted that healthcare would still be one of the slower moving industries," said Jason McKay, chief technology officer of Logicworks, a managed hosting company that helps organizations in many sectors build and manage cloud infrastructure.

At Microsoft, we analyze 300 billion user authentications and check 200 billion emails for spam and malware monthly. We also have unprecedented visibility into cloud infrastructure choices, platforms and the activity therein. Such visibility has no precedent in the on-premises world. But, how do you make sense of so much data and turn it into cyber security? With Azure Security Center, we deeply analyze a wealth of data, from a variety of Microsoft and partner solutions to help you achieve greater security.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked a lot about machine learning during his keynote at Microsoft Build 2016, but neither he nor the executives on stage covered how machine learning can drive security applications. But don't let its absence onstage fool you, as several of Microsoft's latest security moves rely on the company's machine learning investments. Take the Intelligent Security Graph, which Nadella announced last fall. Based on the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning technology, it collects "trillions of signals from billions of sources" to provide IT teams with real-time insights they can use to detect and respond to threats. At Build, Terry Myerson, executive vice president of the Windows and Devices Group in Microsoft, said Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection relies on the intelligent security graph, behavioral sensors, cloud-based security analytics, and threat intelligence to protect Windows devices.

CEO Satya Nadella's 1 billion security initiative yields fruit with the Azure Security Center, powered by the technology behind Azure Machine Learning. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella late last year outlined the company's 1 billion investment in a new, holistic, operations-centric approach to addressing cybersecurity with the formation of its Enterprise Cybersecurity Group (ECG). Until this point, the Trustworthy Computing Initiative launched in 2002 by co-founder Bill Gates was largely at the center of the Microsoft security universe. That paved the way for the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) -- the companywide blueprint for how all of Microsoft's software would be architected, built and maintained. Consequently, SDL is baked into the Microsoft delivery model, and new versions of products ranging from SQL Server to Windows are markedly more secure than the last.