Microsoft Corp. announced Monday the extensive addition of new tools to its Azure cloud computing services.
The new features reportedly include a simpler cloud storage service for businesses and security features, according to TechCrunch.
While some of these features are currently available, others are in preview or will be released over the summer.
The tools were introduced at Microsoft's annual TechEd user conference, which is being held this week in Houston, PCWorld reported.
"This is about leveraging assets that organizations already have in their data centers," said Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft's cloud and enterprise division.
Hybrid cloud lets companies run some operations in-house while operating others with cloud services. Most of Microsoft's services introduced this week were built on the company's IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) offerings, which Anderson said are "enterprise completers."
"These are things that organizations want to have to give them assurance and confidence," of the cloud, he said.
The company introduced Microsoft Azure Files as a new way for companies to access and share files. With Azure Files, companies are able to use a cloud-based file sharing server that uses the standard SMB protocol that are part of the Windows API, TechCrunch reported.
Microsoft also released Azure API Management, which lets businesses share data with outside developers.
The company will preview Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (now called Hyper-V Recovery Manager), an updated version of its disaster recovery service, next month. Users of the service will be able to replicate and recover virtual machines and services to Azure in case their primary data center experiences an outage, PCWorld reported.
"You set up recovery rules, and have your virtual machines completely replicated in Azure. When there is some kind of issue, they will fail over to Azure," Anderson said. "It's very simple and has very powerful automation capabilities. Organizations will be able to provide disaster recovery for all their applications, just not a subset of capabilities, which is what we find now."
