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New Datadog integration with Azure offers a seamless configuration experience

This post was co-authored by Sreekanth Thirthala Venkata, Principal Program Manager, Visual Studio and .NET.

Microsoft Azure enables customers to migrate and modernize their applications to run in the cloud, in coordination with many partner solutions. One such partner is Datadog, which provides observability and security tools for users to understand the health and performance of their applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. But configuring the necessary integrations often requires navigating between the Azure portal and Datadog.

This adds complexity, takes time, and makes it difficult to troubleshoot if things aren’t working. To reduce the burden of managing across multiple portals, we worked with Datadog to create an integrated Datadog solution on the Azure cloud platform. Available via the Azure Marketplace, this solution provides a seamless experience for using the Datadog’s cloud monitoring solution in Azure.

“The Microsoft cloud is the first to enable a seamless configuration and management experience for customers using third-party solutions like Datadog. With Datadog, customers are empowered to use this experience to monitor their Azure workloads and enable an accelerated transition to the cloud.” —Corey Sanders, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Solutions

With the new Azure integration with Datadog, organizations can now fully map their legacy and cloud-based systems, monitoring real-time data during every phase of the cloud transition, and ensure that migrated applications meet performance targets. This integration combines Azure’s global presence, flexibility, security, and compliance with Datadog's logging and monitoring capabilities to create the best experience for enterprises.

Through this unified experience, customers will be able to:

Provision a new Datadog organization and configure their Azure resources to send logs and metrics to Datadog—a fully managed setup with no infrastructure for customers to setup and operate.
Seamlessly send logs and metrics to Datadog. The log-forwarding process has been completely automated; rather than building out a log-forwarding pipeline with Diagnostic Settings, Event Hubs, and Functions, you can configure everything with just a few clicks.
Easily install the Datadog agent on VM hosts through a single-click.
Streamline single-sign on (SSO) to Datadog—a separate sign in from the Datadog portal is no longer required.
Get unified billing for the Datadog service through Azure subscription invoicing.

"Observability is a key capability for any successful cloud migration. Through our new partnership with Microsoft Azure, customers will now have access to the Datadog platform directly in the Azure console, enabling them to migrate, optimize and secure new and migrated workloads." —Amit Agarwal, Chief Product Officer, Datadog

Here’s a quick look at this integrated experience:

Acquire and setup the Datadog solution

Now let’s follow the step-by-step process to acquire and setup the Datadog solution:

Procuring the Datadog app: Azure customers can procure the Datadog app through the Azure Marketplace.

Provisioning in the Azure portal: After procuring in Azure Marketplace, customers can seamlessly provision Datadog as an integrated service on Azure via the Azure portal.

Configuring logs and metrics: Customers create a Datadog resource in Azure and configure which Azure resources send logs and metrics and to Datadog.

Installing Datadog agent: Customers can install the Datadog agent as an extension on virtual machines (VMs) and app services with a single click.

Access via SSO: Customers access Datadog from the Azure portal through a streamlined SSO experience and configure Datadog as a destination for logs and metrics from Azure services.

Next steps

Sign up for the preview of the new Datadog integration with Azure. The preview will be available on Azure Marketplace starting October 2020.
Read more about the Azure Monitor partner integration with Datadog.

Quelle: Azure

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Engaging in a European dialogue on customer controls and open cloud solutions

At last year’s Europe-focused Google Cloud Next event, we outlined our commitment to European customers, sharing ways Google Cloud is helping European organizations transform their businesses in our cloud and address their strict data security and privacy requirements. This included expanding our existing cloud regions on the continent, growing our ecosystem of local partners, and adding compliance certifications, to name a few. Since then, we have made significant progress on all these fronts and are deeply committed to delivering additional capabilities.In recent months, European customers and policymakers have placed an even greater emphasis on working with cloud service providers to protect customers’ most sensitive information. Based on our conversations, this focus is driven by concerns about government access to sensitive European public and private sector data, and concerns about European customers’ reliance on global cloud service providers to support critical services and workloads.Today, Google Cloud’s baseline controls and security features offer strong protections, meet current robust security requirements, and, in most cases, fully address customer needs. We have a long history of supporting features that are most important to customers globally. This includes critical features such as data residency controls, default encryption for data-at-rest, organization policy constraints, and VPC Service Controls, among many others. Our whitepaper includes more details on the capabilities you can take advantage of with Google Cloud Platform. Through our close partnership and work with European customers and policymakers, we understand that they strive for even greater security and autonomy. At Google Cloud, we take these issues—often discussed under the umbrella term of digital sovereignty—seriously. We are working diligently across three areas: data sovereignty, operational sovereignty, and software sovereignty, to help address digital sovereignty in the cloud computing context. And we continue to listen to customers and policymakers and incorporate their feedback on the best potential path forward.Key to our approach is our commitment to open source-based software solutions that offer control and autonomy, high capability, usability and flexibility, and robust data protection, as well as solutions that expand opportunities to partner with European cloud service providers to build local skills. You can read more about our open, partnership-oriented approach here.Working together to address concernsIn our engagement with European customers and policymakers about their sovereignty needs, they describe several core requirements: control over all access to their data by the provider, including what type of personnel can access and from which region; inspectability of changes to cloud infrastructure and services that impact access to or the security of their data, ensuring the provider is unable to circumvent controls or move their data out of the region; and survivability of their workloads for an extended period of time in the event that they are unable to receive software updates from the provider.These requirements reflect three distinct pillars of sovereignty: data sovereignty, operational sovereignty, and software sovereignty.Click to enlargeBy engaging with customers and policymakers across these pillars, we can provide solutions that address their requirements, while optimizing for additional considerations like functionality, cost, infrastructure consistency, and developer experience. Data sovereignty provides customers with a mechanism to prevent the provider from accessing their data, approving access only for specific provider behaviors that customers think are necessary. Examples of customer controls provided by Google Cloud include storing and managing encryption keys outside the cloud, giving customers the power to only grant access to these keys based on detailed access justifications, and protecting data-in-use. With these capabilities, the customer is the ultimate arbiter of access to their data. Operational sovereignty provides customers with assurances that the people working at a cloud provider cannot compromise customer workloads. With these capabilities, the customer benefits from the scale of a multi-tenant environment while preserving control similar to a traditional on-premises environment. Examples of these controls include restricting the deployment of new resources to specific provider regions and limiting support personnel access based on predefined attributes such as citizenship or a particular geographic location. Software sovereignty provides customers with assurances that they can control the availability of their workloads and run them wherever they want, without being dependent on or locked-in to a single cloud provider. This includes the ability to survive events that require them to quickly change where their workloads are deployed and what level of outside connection is allowed. This is only possible when two requirements are met, both of which simplify workload management and mitigate concentration risks: first, when customers have access to platforms that embrace open APIs and services; and second, when customers have access to technologies that support the deployment of applications across many platforms, in a full range of configurations including multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises, using orchestration tooling. Examples of these controls are: platforms that allow customers to manage workloads across providers; and orchestration tooling that allows customers to create a single API that can be backed by applications running on different providers, including proprietary cloud-based and open-source alternatives.In working to deliver these capabilities, they must align with how we support customers’ efforts to provide operational transparency and documentation to regulators (e.g., for audits in regulated industries). Our work is an important part of the commitments we make to European customers and policymakers including our core commitment to customer control. My blog has more details on what we are doing to enhance customer control in the cloud.Building on an open source foundation to enable interoperability and survivabilityCertain customers and policymakers don’t want to be solely dependent on a single cloud provider to protect sensitive information and deliver critical services. This is an important part of their survivability requirement, particularly in the event that a provider is forced to suspend or terminate cloud services or software licenses. We do not believe it is possible to fully address survivability requirements with a proprietary solution. Instead, solutions based on open source tools and open standards are the route to addressing customer and policymaker concerns and, more importantly, giving customers the flexibility to deploy–and, if necessary, migrate–critical workloads across or even off public cloud platforms.An open source approach is highly differentiated from vendor solutions that keep customers tethered to a cloud service provider’s proprietary technology stack. At Google Cloud, we collaborate with the open source community to develop many of our services on open source technology and advance solutions that promote interoperability, and we also create new technologies for–and contribute to–the open source ecosystem. We are able to do this by leveraging decades of experience in open source and operating cloud services at scale, including creating and maintaining Kubernetes and Istio. This approach benefits customers by offering greater flexibility and provides ecosystem benefits, such as enabling and empowering innovation and workforce development outside Google. It is also consistent with our belief that openness enables faster innovation, tighter security, and offers freedom from vendor lock-in.Google Cloud’s open source approach is evidenced in products like Anthos, our hybrid and multi-cloud platform that provides a consistent development and operations experience for multi-cloud and on-premises environments. This approach makes it possible to leverage advanced cloud technologies with the safety net of migrating back to on-premises and operating without provider assistance if necessary.Significantly expanding regional partnerships and collaborationTo enhance our ability to deliver these solutions to customers across Europe, we are empowering a range of local partners. This has the added benefit of helping public and private sector stakeholders build and sustain a local workforce and contribute to the European economy. By empowering European providers, we can help the region accelerate digital transformation, support digital skill development, and foster collaboration with the open source community, as well as partner on common causes like environmental responsibilities. We will share more about our progress on this front in the coming months.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Helping European businesses grow and digitally transform in the cloud

As we welcome thousands of customers, partners, business leaders and developers to Google Cloud Next OnAir EMEA, our five-week virtual event, I want to take a moment to reflect on how inspiring it’s been to see organizations around the world pivoting and adapting to unprecedented circumstances. It’s why we’ve reimagined our event and taken it online to best serve our customers and partners, in the same spirit as our global Google Cloud Next OnAir conference. Throughout the next five weeks, Next OnAir EMEA will bring you key announcements, product enhancements, and best practices tailored specifically for organizations across Europe, Middle East and Africa. As with almost every aspect of our lives, things are a little different this year. The ongoing pandemic has changed the course of business in 2020, and likely the world in the long term. At Google Cloud, we have seen first-hand how important it is to keep our cloud up and running – enabling remote collaboration and scaling to meet changing customer demands. We continue to help businesses and their employees, as well as governments and schools, collaborate and learn during these challenging times. Growing with our EMEA customers and partnersIt’s been a big year for us in EMEA. We announced new cloud regions in France, Italy, Poland, and Spain. Our Dunant cable has landed, crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Virginia Beach in the U.S. to the French Atlantic coast, and we announced a new subsea cable, Grace Hopper, that will connect the U.S. to the U.K. and Spain. All these projects will provide further capacity and resilience to our network, so we can better serve customers who are taking advantage of all our Google Cloud solutions.We are proud of our continuing work with some of the world’s biggest brands, including Carrefour, Lloyds Banking Group, Lufthansa Group, Renault, Telecom Italia and Telefonica, to name a few. And we’re exploring new opportunities as we partner with major industry players such as Deutsche Bank and Orange. Today, we’re also announcing our new collaboration with Reckitt Benckiser to drive stronger customer engagement as the consumer health, hygiene and nutrition company embarks on wide-scale digital transformation. We’re also excited about the findings of a new IDC study which shows Google Cloud’s ecosystem is thriving, growing and driving significant economic benefit for our partners in EMEA. According to IDC, the Google Cloud partner opportunity in Western Europe will increase more than 3.7 times by 2025. In addition, IDC expects Google Cloud partners to generate $5.49 USD in revenue for every $1 of Google Cloud products sold, increasing to $7.74 by 2025.To support our growing customer and partner base within the region, we’ve also bolstered our EMEA regional senior leadership team, welcoming Laurence Lafont as vice president for EMEA Industries (exclusive of France), Pip White as the new managing director of the U.K. and Ireland, Daniel Holz as vice president of the DACH and Northern region, and Samuel Bonamigo as the vice president for Southern Europe. With these new leaders on board, we’re strengthening our focus on our customers’ success.Building for the future, sustainablyWhile we continue to grow, our commitment to do so in a sustainable manner remains unchanged. Earlier this month, Google announced that we set our most ambitious energy goal yet: to run our business on carbon-free energy everywhere, at all times, by 2030. This means we’re aiming to always have our data centers supplied with carbon-free energy, and are the first cloud provider to make this kind of commitment. As we learn, we’ll help develop useful tools to empower others to follow suit. For example, we’re developing tools to help our customers measure the impact of migrating to Google Cloud, report on their emissions, and reduce them. We’re also building the Industrial Adaptive Controls platform in collaboration with DeepMind, which provides AI control of cooling systems in commercial and industrial facilities. In addition, we’ve been collaborating with our partners and customers on a wide range of sustainability initiatives. This includes working with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and fashion brands, like Stella McCartney, to create an environmental data platform that helps create a more sustainable supply chain for the fashion industry. Additionally, we’re working with Unilever to leverage AI on satellite imagery to improve detection of deforestation, bringing a new standard to supply chain monitoring.Committed to helping EMEA businesses At Google Cloud, we are committed to being a trusted partner to businesses of all sizes and industries across EMEA, and Google Next OnAir EMEA is just one of the ways we are investing locally. Over the course of the next five weeks, we hope you’ll join us as we help organizations grow and innovate for the future through digital transformation.Find out more about the event here.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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IDC confirms bright future for Google Cloud partners in EMEA

Customers come first for our team at Google Cloud EMEA, but we couldn’t deliver to our high standard without the help of our partners. They play a key role in the delivery of Google Cloud technologies and solutions to our businesses all over the region. With this in mind, I’m very proud to share the results of a recent study from IDC, which highlights that Google Cloud is prospering, growing and unlocking huge commercial benefits for our EMEA partners. According to IDC, demand for cloud-based technology and services is growing rapidly in the EMEA market, especially for capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, IoT, and security. In fact, IDC puts public cloud growth at 22% year-on-year for EMEA. Whereas implementations used to be lift-and-shift scenarios, today digital transformation remains the primary driver for cloud growth in organizations, who are looking to reimagine their business models. What’s more, this need to digitally transform has only been heightened in the face of global COVID-19 pandemic. As businesses seek to be flexible and adapt to current circumstances, they need cloud capabilities for support. “This is good news for Google Cloud partners, who by their nature are engaged across many of these technologies,” reports the IDC study. The research predicts that partners’ revenues from Google Cloud-linked opportunities will more than triple by 2025. This is an amazing opportunity for all of our partners across the entire EMEA ecosystem, as they develop and build out their Google Cloud practices. According to the IDC study, the opportunity for Western European partners will increase 3.7 fold by 2025. Moreover, for every $1 of Google Cloud technology sold, Western European partners will generate $5.49 in revenue via their own products, services, and IP (such as new apps and software). The future looks bright too, as IDC predicts this revenue stream will increase to $7.74 for every $1 of Google Cloud technology sold by 2025. The IDC results prove there is a flourishing ecosystem around Google Cloud. It’s heartening to see how much value our partners can achieve and will continue to do so in future years.For every $1 of Google Cloud technology sold, partners will generate:The IDC study also uncovers insights into numerous other benefits that partners are experiencing from collaborating with Google Cloud. For example, IDC identifies 50% of Google Cloud partners as at the “late stage of digital maturity,” with more than a third having “fully integrated digital into their strategies and businesses.” With this level of strong expertise in contemporary cloud technologies and solutions, it’s clear that customers can trust Google Cloud partners to deliver on support and implementation for even the most advanced technologies, such as AI and ML. At Google Cloud, we concentrate on the delivery of end-to-end, best-in-class solutions. Most of our partners are expanding these offerings. The IDC study shows that these partners who are engaged in developing their own unique IP around Google Cloud are witnessing strong margins linked to these offerings. Partners are reaping the benefits from our target goal of 100% partner attach on customer sales. Strong margins are being recorded across resale, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS add-ons, IT services, business services, and support for hardware and networking.“We started our global partnership with Google Cloud a little over two years ago, and have already gone a long road together delivering greater value to our enterprise customers with our secure hybrid cloud, machine learning and collaboration solutions. Google Cloud has been a partner for growth and innovation, as we jointly help European and global companies through their digital transformation” says Wim Los, senior vice president for Atos Cloud Enterprise Solutions.“From the collaborative solutions to the Infrastructure and Machine learning ones, Google Cloud has been a key strategic partner for more than 10 years. This partnership brings value to the market not only with the trusted technology but also with the training support and capacities we bring to the market to make sure companies succeed in their digital transformation” says Sébastien Chevrel, COO and managing director) of Devoteam.“After more than a decade of partnership, we are really amazed about what we have been able to accomplish together, working hand-in-hand and with the entire Google Cloud ecosystem. This is why we wanted this relationship to go even stronger and announced in September 2020 a new, non-binding commitment to deliver $1.5 billion in Google Cloud infrastructure and services over the next five years,” says DoiT International’s CEO, Yoav Toussia-Cohen.“Google Cloud continues to show commitment to its partner ecosystem in EMEA, enabling its partners to capitalize on the growth, but also differentiate. Google Cloud is delivering a partner program that provides access to advanced technology and solutions, while maintaining a focus on strong partner profitability and specialization,” said Stuart Wilson, Research Director, European Partnering Ecosystems at IDC.Our EMEA partners have a unique opportunity to ride the wave of cloud adoption and capitalise on the opportunities provided by being part of the Google Cloud family. We will continue to work together to support customers spanning multiple industries who want to solve their most important challenges via the cloud.When I see the work our partners are doing in the region, I feel incredibly proud, and I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what the future brings as the Google Cloud ecosystem continues to evolve. To read the findings in full, you can download the Partner Opportunity in a Cloud World IDC study, here.Related ArticleUpdates to our Partner Advantage program help partners differentiate and grow their businessesWe’re showcasing our partners’ achievements and providing updates on our expanding ecosystem.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform