Tag Archives: Azure

FOI 22/542

12th April 2022

Dear

Thank you for your email. Please see the response to your Freedom of Information Request below:

Further to the original Hosting request, the contract below has expired. Please provide the current status.

Azure – Cloud contract

I wish to submit a request to the organisation around their hosting contract(s) with 3rd party providers.

The type of contract I wish to see is below:

1. Dedicated hosting- Managed environment

2. Co-Location- hosting allows a business to still own their own server equipment; however, instead of storing it in their own data centre, they instead are able to store it in rented space in a colocation hosting centre.

3. Cloud Hosting- Cloud hosting services provide hosting for websites on virtual servers,…

Outages can be extremely detrimental to business operations which is why Microsoft has announced that it will extend its “outage mode” in Azure to cover both web-based and desktop applications.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is the software giant’s cloud directory responsible for handling authentication for Office 365 though it can also be linked to on-premises Active Directory. However, when it goes down, Microsoft customers are unable to access the Azure Portal to manage their cloud services.

Fortune 500 companies aren’t the only ones flocking to cloud services like Microsoft Azure. Increasingly, hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government are also hosting their tools in the cloud, and that’s keeping people in Redmond busy.

Earlier this year, members of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center suspended 18 Azure Active Directory applications after determining they were part of a sprawling command-and-control network. Besides the cloud-hosted applications, the members of the hacking group Microsoft calls Gadolinium also stored ill-gotten data in a Microsoft OneDrive account and used the account to execute various parts of the campaign.

Microsoft,…