Here are some recent Windows Azure developments that you may have missed. I think that they are worth highlighting.

Windows Azure Endpoint Protection

One of the deficiencies in Windows Azure up until recently was the lack of virus checking/malware protection or even the ability to install your own.  Recently Microsoft released a community technical preview of Microsoft Endpoint Protection (MEP) for Windows Azure. 

MEP is a plugin that allows you to include anti-malware protection in your Windows Azure Virtual Machines.  Here are more details.

Windows Azure Backup Service for Windows 8

To further illustrate how important the cloud is becoming Microsoft recently announced the Beta of The Microsoft Online Backup Service. This is a Windows Azure based backup solution that can be used to backup Windows 8 files and folders to Windows Azure Blob storage. 

This service is expected to be exposed through the standard Windows backup.  The Windows Server blog has a blog post describing the beta.  The Beta site, including support forums is located here.

Windows Azure Based Team Foundation Server Adds In-the-Cloud Build Capability.

The Windows Azure based Team Foundation Server as a Service cloud offering has been under development at Microsoft for a while.  Recently the invitation-only Community Technical Preview has added the ability to run an application build in the service. (See more details in this blog post.)

The significance of this feature is that, when released, it will better serve the needs of globally distributed software development teams as well as smaller companies that do not have their own build infrastructure. 

Up until now all Windows Azure development and application build has been done on-premise and then the resulting application deployed to the cloud. This is the first foray by Microsoft into cloud-based development and project management services.

Bill Zack