PL-900 information source - Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals Updated: 2023

1. Learn about the fundamentals of Microsoft stock

2. Consider Microsoft in the context of your investment plan

3. Know your investment timeline

4. Open a brokerage account if you don't have one

Last month was Cybersecurity Awareness Month, so it is a perfect time to revisit how businesses could Strengthen their cyber resilience. Raising public awareness, educating employees, and implementing standard security measures (such as data encryption, multi-factor authentication, or routing traffic through VPNs) are good recommendations for increased organizational security. However, they are hardly enough today if one does not employ open-source intelligence. 

What is Open-Source Intelligence? 

Open-source intelligence, or OSINT, defines the efforts of collecting, analyzing, and utilizing information from publicly available web sources, including forums, libraries, open databases, and even the dark web. Though OSINT can be used to gather commercially important business information and perform market analysis, at Oxylabs, we usually use it in the context of cyber threat intelligence.

Cybersecurity companies that employ open-source intelligence crawl through thousands of sites, forum messages, and dark web marketplaces, looking for stolen personal credentials and other confidential information, such as source code or trade secrets. Monitoring these sources also helps identify insecure databases and domain squatting.

It might sound counterintuitive, but organizations often do not suspect that some of their sensitive data is lurking somewhere in the open cyberspace. As such, OSINT helps organizations find both unintentional data leaks and criminal data breaches. It can also aid in identifying insecure devices and outdated applications.

The breakthrough that OSINT brings to the cybersecurity landscape mostly comes from the fact it uses publicly available information, releasing cybersecurity organizations of a legally troubling necessity to scour through classified or restricted sources looking for criminal evidence. Moreover, modern data scraping solutions, combined with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), allow them to pull and analyze raw cyber intelligence in real-time. 

OSINT “Starter” Pack

To gather cyber threat intelligence, cybersecurity providers must scan thousands of URLs looking for specific client data — it can be corporate email addresses or phone numbers, company names, employee information, and technical details, such as access tokens or IP addresses. The company can be instantly alerted whenever compromised data becomes available in the public domain or the dark web.

It is important to note that companies might monitor not only data directly related to their business and employees but also their client data, alerting them in case their passwords or other sensitive information has been breached.

The biggest challenges here are those of scale and anti-scraping measures. First of all, the global “surface” web hosts about six billion websites, which is only the tip of the iceberg. The deep web, which isn’t indexed by search engines, is estimated to be 400 to 550 times as large. Scraping at such a scale requires powerful automation and ML-driven solutions to structure otherwise a massive mess of unstructured data that comes in various formats and languages.

Furthermore, threat actors today are technically advanced professionals, employing anti-bot measures that can include anything from honeypots serving erroneous data to IP blocking that compromises real-time data flow. It means that cybersecurity companies must employ resilient proxy networks together with adaptive scraping solutions to circumvent the blocks. It is well worth leaving OSINT efforts for cybersecurity professionals, especially if it involves monitoring the dark web.

Diving Into the Dark 

The dark web is a part of the deep web that is inaccessible to ordinary browsers and hidden by multiple proxy layers. Although there are legitimate actors that use this part of the internet, e.g., investigative journalists, law enforcement actors, and intelligence agencies, criminals mostly employ the dark web. This is where stolen private data, intellectual property, confidential information, drugs, and illegal weapons are sold.

As in the case of the surface web, dark web monitoring is performed with the help of custom crawlers and scraper bots. Surveilling the dark web is a valuable source of information about fresh data breaches and new cyber-attack methods and vectors. It enables a faster incident response, closing the time gap between the data breach and the moment an organization becomes aware of it. For cybersecurity researchers, dark web monitoring also allows deep diving into the newest cybercrime strategies. 

However, even if your organization suffered a breach, it is not recommended to scour the dark web looking for that data yourself — firstly, the dark web is difficult to navigate without prior experience. Secondly, even if you’re armed with proxy servers and VPNs, the risk of exposing your organization to malware and cyber-attacks is still high. Therefore, it is always recommended to use “burner computers” for such tasks instead of devices connected to your corporate network.

Powered with modern scraping solutions and ML technology, open-source intelligence today allows cybersecurity companies to take a proactive approach to incident management and prevention. OSINT speeds up the detection of data leaks, cyberthreat hunts, and research on the newest criminal strategies. 

However, it is important to stress that, although becoming an imperative for cybersecurity, OSINT cannot and shouldn’t replace standard security measures. Businesses should first ensure their sensitive data is safe. Removing unused access, updating passwords, using multi-factor authentication, working with reliable proxy and VPN providers, and periodically educating employees is the best way to make sure that your business data doesn’t end up as a Black Friday deal on some dark web marketplace. 

The same applies to the latest hype around monitoring the dark web. Without denying the opportunities the dark web surveillance opens for professional cybersecurity researchers and threat hunters, for ordinary businesses out there, pulling valuable information from the surface web and integrating digital security best practices and standards into daily operations might be a more rewarding path to follow. 

Microsoft seems to have committed to open-source software over the past few years, letting the community contribute to things such as PowerShell and the old File Manager from Windows 3.0. But there's more to be opened up to the world, and now Microsoft has announced that the Windows Calculator app is now open-sourced and available on GitHub.

This isn't any old version of the Calculator app, either. It's the app that ships with Windows 10, so contributions here can likely Strengthen the experience for everyone. Of course, any contributions you make will have to go through Microsoft, and you can head here to learn more about the requirements for changes to be approved for a production release.

Otherwise, the process will work similarly to any other project on GitHub. Developers can participate in discussions, suggest ideas, report issues, or do the hard work themselves, if they so prefer.

Microsoft also emphasizes that exploring the code for the Calculator app may be a good learning experience, teaching developers about the Universal Windows Platform, XAML, Fluent Design, and Azure Pipelines. You can also reuse the code to build your own projects, and Microsoft will be bringing custom controls and API extensions from the app into the Windows Community Toolkit and the Windows UI Library. To check out the code for the Calculator app, head to the respective GitHub page to get started.

How much an investment in Microsoft is worth

Before investing, do your due diligence

Microsoft Shares Attract Big Money Inflows

Want an edge in trading? Follow the Big Money.

What’s Big Money? Said simply, it’s when a stock rises due to institutional demand. Top stocks tend to attract savvy investors.

You see, fund managers are always looking to bet on the next outperforming stocks…the best in class. They spend countless hours sizing up companies, memorizing reports, speaking to analysts…you name it. When they find a company firing on all cylinders, they pounce in a big way.

The 1-year action tells the story. Each green bar signals unusual increasing volumes in MSFT shares, pushing the stock higher. We believe this to be institutional demand:

Few stocks have charts this strong. latest green bars suggest healthy demand. But, what about the fundamental story?

Microsoft Fundamental Analysis

Next, I want to make sure the fundamental story is healthy too. As you can see, MSFT has had positive sales & earnings growth in latest years:

Source: FactSet

Marrying great fundamentals with our proprietary Big Money software has found some big winning stocks over the long-term.

Check this out. Microsoft has been a top-rated stock at MAPsignals. That means the stock has had buy pressure and growing fundamentals. We have a ranking process that showcases stocks like this on a weekly basis.

It’s made the rare Top 20 report many times. The blue bars below shows when MSFT was a top pick:

Tracking unusual volumes reveals the power of the MAPsignals process.

Don’t fight the Big Money!

Microsoft Price Prediction

The MSFT rally has been in place all year. Big Money buying in the shares is signaling to take notice. Given the historical gains in share price and strong fundamentals, this stock could be worth a spot in a diversified portfolio.

Disclosure: the author holds a long position in MSFT at the time of publication.

If you want to take your investing to the next level, learn more about the MAPsignals process here.

Story continues

Follow our free insights here.

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

More From FXEMPIRE:

Microsoft is in the process of rolling out its new AI assistant Copilot to Windows 11 as part of the massive 2023 Update. Now, sources tell Windows Central that the company is eager to bring Copilot to Windows 10 as well.

This goes against previous reports that Microsoft has shifted all focus to Windows 11 when it comes to introducing new features, but according to Windows Central, the company does not want to risk “missing” the large percentage of people still running Windows 10.

Most Windows users have not made the leap to Windows 11. More than a billion devices are still running Windows 10 according to the latest statistics, far outpacing Windows 11’s adoption. Microsoft wants them using Copilot AI as well, according to Windows Central. Microsoft also reportedly wants to make it more attractive for developers to build plug-ins for Copilot by being able to show a higher potential user figure.

Windows Central also asked its sources about the end date of the support for Windows 10. This is currently set for October 14, 2025, but according to the sources, internal discussions are ongoing about a possible extension. No decision has been made yet however.

This article was translated from Swedish to English and originally appeared on pcforalla.se.

Informatica Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of jointly developed integrations between Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud and Microsoft’s Azure cloud ecosystem, including the Fabric integrated data analytics platform Microsoft announced in May.

The partnership accompanies Microsoft’s announcement of Fabric’s general availability at its Ignite conference. The highlight is the integration of Informatica capabilities directly into Fabric as a native feature. Users will be able to access Informatica’s data quality and observability services natively within the fabric user experience.

Check out our full coverage of Microsoft Ignite in these stories:

Described as a single platform for all of the data and analytics tools organizations need to build artificial intelligence applications, Fabric integrates the Azure Data Factory integration service, analytics service and Power BI business intelligence platform into a single software-as-a-service product. It’s built on top of a unified logical data lake called OneLake that aggregates all of an organization’s analytical data and eliminates the need for extracts, copies and data movement.

Integrated user interface

Informatica’s integration services will “look like just another Fabric experience,” said Jitesh Ghai (pictured), Informatica’s chief product officer. “Leveraging our artificial intelligence and machine learning engine against Fabric data, we’re jointly enabling our customers to realize trusted data and analytics.”

Informatica’s data quality tools cover such technical dimensions as latency, timeliness, consistency and standardization, along with business logic rules and standards that apply to functions within the business. IDMC provides data profiling, quality, observability and integration with interactions supported by Claire GPT, Informatica’s intelligent metadata automation engine.

The two companies are also expected to announce that Informatica will leverage Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service to expand AI capabilities within Clair GPT. “We’re primarily leveraging the OpenAI large language model to enable a simple prompt-based experience to understand intent and deliver outcomes,” Ghai said.

Informatica said it will release IDMC connectors for the OneLake, Lakehouse and DataWarehouse components of Fabric. The connectors support data ingestion into the Delta and Parquet file formats with SQL endpoints.

“There are multiple connectors across the various services within Fabric to move and process data on Fabric as well as to derive metadata from data stored in Fabric so it can governed,” Ghai said. “This is all done through the native interfaces that Fabric brings to the market.”

The nonexclusive arrangement allows existing Informatica customers to procure services directly from the vendor or through the Azure Marketplace Using Azure credits.

Photo: SiliconANGLE

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Microsoft today announced the launch of Radius, a new open source, language-agnostic application platform for building and running cloud-native applications. The project is being spun out of the Microsoft Azure Incubation team, the same group that previously launched open source projects like Dapr for building microservices, the KEDA event-driven autoscaling solution and Copacetic, a security tool for patching container image vulnerabilities. Dapr and KEDA are already part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation‘s (CNCF) stable of projects and Microsoft recently submitted Copacetic as well. It’s no surprise then that the company also plans to submit Radius for inclusion in the CNCF within the next six months.

With Radius, developers will be able to deploy applications to private clouds, Microsoft’s own Azure and Amazon’s AWS, with support for Google Cloud coming soon. The overall idea here is that while Kubernetes has made it easier to build applications that can — at least in theory — run anywhere, those applications have become increasingly complex, making it harder to manage them. Ideally, an application platform abstracts all of this away and lets developers focus on writing their applications.

Image Credits: Microsoft

We’ve seen other application platforms in the past that tried to abstract all the infrastructure away from developers, including the Cloud Foundry project and commercial services built around it like VMware’s Tanzu Application Service. But as Azure CTO and Microsoft technical fellow Mark Russinovich told me, Radius is taking a decidedly different approach to solving this problem.

“One of the things that we’re doing that is different is that we want Radius to support all types of applications, and not just be vertically opinionated about an architecture of an application or only support a certain pattern of applications — like 12-factor — or require that apps themselves are written a certain way. Radius itself is unopinionated about the way the app is written and it’s flexible enough to support your two-tier and three-tier applications, which there are a ton of them still being built in the enterprise. They’re containerized now but they’re still that architecture. And it’s also able to support complex microservice-based applications with a dozen or two dozen microservices.”

He also noted that rival platforms are very focused on describing the relationship between the compute tiers of the application or microservices, but they often leave the other cloud resources that make up modern applications as an external concern. “The goal with Radius was that, as a developer, I can just fully describe my app — not just the compute parts but the resources that they use, like, hey, there’s PubSub between this front end and this back end. And there’s a state store sitting here off of this microservice — and whatever resource out of all the cloud resources can be described this way. So a complete application graph is what you end up getting. And you’re motivated as a developer to leverage Radius to describe those relationships because it does a lot of work for you under the hood.”

Microsoft notes that it designed Radius to meet developers where they are. It doesn’t try to completely reinvent the infrastructure-as-a-code concept, for example, and instead leverages existing tools like Terraform (or maybe OpenTofu as long as it remains compatible) and Bicep. It also integrates with CI/CD services like GitHub Actions.

At the heart of Radius is also a universal control plane, which, it turns out, is based on the Azure Resource Manager deployment engine — the same deployment orchestrator the company uses in Azure to manage the deployments of applications there. The company will open source this resource manager within the next six months, Russinovich tells me. He also noted that Bicep, the domain-specific infrastructure-as-code language that sits on top of the deployment engine, is already open source.

Microsoft also already partnered with Comcast and Portuguese bank Millennium BCP to enable Radius to work on any cloud.

In many ways, Microsoft is using the same overall playbook for Radius as it did for Dapr distributed application runtime. It’s launching the service as an open source project and is putting it under the governance of the CNCF. Dapr then also spawned some commercial activity around the project, including from companies like Diagrid. We will likely see a similar trajectory for Radius — assuming it gains enough traction — and maybe Azure itself may one day offer a Radius-based application platform, too.