Pedro Hernandez

Getting to the bottom of connectivity issues affecting Azure virtual machines is now easier with a new diagnostics tool released by Microsoft. Connectivity Check, a new feature in the Azure Network Watcher network performance and health monitoring service, helps users unearth issues that can affect their cloud applications. Customers can use the tool to determine […]

In a sure sign that Microsoft’s coders are wrapping up development on the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, upcoming preview builds released to the Windows Insider Fast and Slow rings will feature more bug fixes and fewer new features. “We are now at the point of the development cycle for the Windows 10 Fall Creators […]

Microsoft kicked off a public preview of its Azure Archive Blob Storage service this week, offering customers a lower-cost cloud storage solution for rarely accessed data. Storage tiering is hardly a new concept, although it may be coming to an end thanks to the advent of solid-state drives and innovations in the storage and hardware […]

Microsoft’s latest system, dubbed Project Brainwave, uses field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) from Intel to process artificial intelligence (AI) workloads in real time, a capability that is coming soon to the Redmond, Wash., software giant’s cloud. Although AI is quickly becoming a mainstream technology, delivering AI-enabled software and services that run at an acceptable speed generally […]

As expected, Samsung officially unveiled its highly anticipated Galaxy Note 8 smartphone, a follow-up to the ill-fated Note7, here in New York City today. To further distance the Note 8 from the notoriety surrounding last year’s Note7, which was banned from passenger planes after reports of the device’s defective batteries catching fire and then recalled, […]

Microsoft has some bad news for businesses hoping to find a safe haven from cyber-attackers in the cloud. IT departments can now add weaponized virtual machines on the cloud to their ever-expanding list of cybersecurity concerns. The Redmond, Wash., software giant recently released its Security Intelligence Report Volume 22, compiled using threat data gathered during […]

Microsoft and Linux server software provider Red Hat are building on their existing cloud partnership with new initiatives aimed at helping businesses incorporate containers into their hybrid cloud application strategies. Fueled largely by the booming popularity of Docker, enterprises and their software development teams are increasingly turning to container platforms as a means of enabling […]

Microsoft researchers this week reported significant progress in their speech recognition efforts. A year ago, the company attained a 5.9 percent word error rate in Switchboard, a conversational speech recognition task. Switchboard is a collection of recorded phone conversations that is commonly used by researchers to benchmark their speech recognition technologies. On Aug. 20, Microsoft […]

Power BI users now have another way of making sense of their analytics data with the release of the Visio Custom Visual for the cloud-enabled business intelligence offering from Microsoft. Currently available in preview, the new visual allows users to take diagrams created in Visio and use them as a foundation on which to overlay […]

Microsoft has released a preview version of its Skype software for desktop PCs that owes much of its look and feel to the iOS and Android versions of the app. “For Mac, Windows 10 November Update and lower, Windows 8, and Windows 7 users, Skype Preview delivers most of the great features of our next […]

Terraform, an open-source software solution for automating infrastructure provisioning, is getting more room to play on Microsoft’s cloud. HashiCorp, makers of the DevOps-enabling “infrastructure-as-code” Terraform software, and Microsoft announced that they were building on their existing partnership to extend support for the technology to more Azure cloud services. In 2016, the companies announced support for […]

Microsoft took the wraps off a new service called Azure Event Grid that enables developers to build event-based and serverless applications on the Redmond, Wash. tech titan’s cloud. Enterprises are warming to the agility and modularity offered by serverless architectures like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda. Rather than unpacking big and monolithic business applications when […]