The trust of businesses in the Azure OpenAI Service was increased by the implementation of Data Zones.
Data security and privacy are critical for businesses in today’s quickly changing digital environment. Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service provides strong enterprise controls that adhere to the strictest security and regulatory requirements, as more and more businesses use AI to spur innovation. Anchored on the core of Azure, Azure OpenAI may be integrated with the technologies in your company to assist make sure you have the proper controls in place. Because of this, clients using Azure OpenAI for their generative AI applications include KPMG, Heineken, Unity, PWC, and more.
With over 60,000 customers using Azure OpenAI to build and scale their businesses, it is thrilled to provide additional features that will further improve data privacy and security capabilities.
Introducing Azure Data Zones for OpenAI
Data residency with control over data processing and storage across its current 28 distinct locations was made possible by Azure OpenAI from Day 0. The United States and the European Union now have Azure OpenAI Data Zones available. Historically, variations in model-region availability have complicated management and slowed growth by requiring users to manage numerous resources and route traffic between them. Customers will have better access to models and higher throughput thanks to this feature, which streamlines the management of generative AI applications by providing the flexibility of regional data processing while preserving data residency within certain geographic bounds.
Azure is used by businesses for data residency and privacy
Azure OpenAI’s data processing and storage options are already strong, and this is strengthened with the addition of the Data Zones capability. Customers using Azure OpenAI can choose between regional, data zone, and global deployment options. Customers are able to increase throughput, access models, and streamline management as a result. Data is kept at rest in the Azure region that you have selected for your resource with all deployment choices.
Global deployments: With access to all new models (including the O1 series) at the lowest cost and highest throughputs, this option is available in more than 25 regions. The global backbone of the Azure resource guarantees optimal response times, and data is stored at rest within the customer-selected area.
Data Zones: Introducing Data Zones, which offer cross-region load balancing flexibility within the customer-selected geographic boundaries, to clients who require enhanced data processing assurances while gaining access to the newest models. All Azure OpenAI regions in the US are included in the US Data Zone. All Azure OpenAI regions that are situated inside EU member states are included in the European Union Data Zone. The upcoming month will see the availability of the new Azure Data Zones deployment type.
Regional deployments: These guarantee processing and storage take place inside the resource’s geographic boundaries, providing the highest degree of data control. When considering Global and Data Zone deployments, this option provides the least amount of model availability.
Extending generative AI apps securely using your data
Azure OpenAI allows you to extend your solution with your current data storage and search capabilities by integrating with hundreds of Azure and Microsoft services with ease. Azure AI Search and Microsoft Fabric are the two most popular extensions.
For both classic and generative AI applications, Azure AI search offers safe information retrieval at scale across customer-owned content. This keeps Azure’s scale, security, and management while enabling document search and data exploration to feed query results into prompts and ground generative AI applications on your data.
Access to an organization’s whole multi-cloud data estate is made possible by Microsoft Fabric’s unified data lake, OneLake, which is arranged in an easy-to-use manner. Maintaining corporate data governance and compliance controls while streamlining the integration of data to power your generative AI application is made easier by consolidating all company data into a single data lake.
Azure is used by businesses to ensure compliance, safety, and security
Content Security by Default
Prompts and completions are screened by a group of classification models to identify and block hazardous content, and Azure OpenAI is automatically linked with Azure AI Content Safety at no extra cost. The greatest selection of content safety options is offered by Azure, which also has the new prompt shield and groundedness detection features. Clients with more stringent needs can change these parameters, such as harm severity or enabling asynchronous modes to reduce delay.
Entra ID provides secure access using Managed Identity
In order to provide zero-trust access restrictions, stop identity theft, and manage resource access, Microsoft advises protecting your Azure OpenAI resources using the Microsoft Entra ID. Through the application of least-privilege concepts, businesses can guarantee strict security guidelines. Furthermore strengthening security throughout the system, Entra ID does away with the requirement for hard-coded credentials.
Furthermore, Managed Identity accurately controls resource rights through a smooth integration with Azure role-based access control (RBAC).
Customer-managed key encryption for improved data security
By default, the information that Azure OpenAI stores in your subscription is encrypted with a key that is managed by Microsoft. Customers can use their own Customer-Managed Keys to encrypt data saved on Microsoft-managed resources, such as Azure Cosmos DB, Azure AI Search, or your Azure Storage account, using Azure OpenAI, further strengthening the security of your application.
Private networking offers more security
Use Azure virtual networks and Azure Private Link to secure your AI apps by separating them from the public internet. With this configuration, secure connections to on-premises resources via ExpressRoute, VPN tunnels, and peer virtual networks are made possible while ensuring that traffic between services stays inside Microsoft’s backbone network.
The AI Studio’s private networking capability was also released last week, allowing users to utilize its Studio UI’s powerful “add your data” functionality without having to send data over a public network.
Dedication to Adherence
It is dedicated to helping its clients in all regulated areas, such as government, finance, and healthcare, meet their compliance needs. Azure OpenAI satisfies numerous industry certifications and standards, including as FedRAMP, SOC 2, and HIPAA, guaranteeing that businesses in a variety of sectors can rely on their AI solutions to stay compliant and safe.
Businesses rely on Azure’s dependability at the production level
GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Security Copilot, and many other of the biggest generative AI applications in the world today rely on the Azure OpenAI service. Customers and its own product teams select Azure OpenAI because it provide an industry-best 99.9% reliability SLA on both Provisioned Managed and Paygo Standard services. It is improving that further by introducing a new latency SLA.
Announcing Provisioned-Managed Latency SLAs as New Features
Ensuring that customers may scale up with their product expansion without sacrificing latency is crucial to maintaining the caliber of the customer experience. It already provide the largest scale with the lowest latency with its Provisioned-Managed (PTUM) deployment option. With PTUM, it is happy to introduce explicit latency service level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee performance at scale. In the upcoming month, these SLAs will go into effect. Save this product newsfeed to receive future updates and improvements.
