Microsoft Technology Briefing - August 2025

Datacenters are the critical backbone behind modern computing - that help make cloud, AI, gaming, more accessible than ever before. Microsoft operates secure datacenter facilities spread across the world, creating a distributed infrastructure that supports thousands of online services. This globally distributed infrastructure is designed with sustainability in mind to bring applications closer to users, preserve data residency, offer comprehensive compliance, and resiliency options for...

We are delighted to invite you to an exclusive CISO Roundtable hosted by Microsoft on 4 September 2025 in Stockholm, Sweden. This intimate gathering is designed for a select group of our top customers to engage in a forward-looking conversation about the future of cybersecurity in Sweden. You’ll have the unique opportunity to connect directly with Michael Landolt, Microsoft’s EMEA Chief Information Security Officer, who will share strategic insights and lead a candid discussion on emerging...

Get ready for a fast-paced, one-hour session where Microsoft Sellers pull back the curtain on how they’re using Copilot to sell smarter, faster, and more effectively. This isn’t theory—it's a peer-to-peer session packed with hands-on demos, real stories, and practical tips you can use immediately to boost your impact. Picture a day in the life: an account manager walks into a meeting fully prepped with AI-generated insights, a sales manager wraps a call with key takeaways captured...

Join us at the next European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference #FabConEurope! 15-18 Sep 2025 in Vienna, Austria – the largest Microsoft tech conference in Europe. In partnership with Microsoft, the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference is brought to you by the team behind ESPC, Europe’s premier Microsoft 365 Conference and the European Power Platform Conference.

Join this 60-minute digital session to discover how Azure VMware Solution (AVS) enables you to move VMware workloads to Azure—without rearchitecting, retraining, or losing control. Learn how to modernize your VMware environment, enhance agility, and accelerate innovation—while preserving the tools, skills, and operational consistency your team relies on.

The workplace is evolving fast — and so are the challenges your company faces. From rising security threats to the growing demand for hybrid work, your organization needs endpoint solutions that are secure, scalable, and built for the AI era. To help you and your business tap into them, we're hosting a new Microsoft Discovery Hour event designed to do just that.

In just 60 minutes, Microsoft experts will explore how organizations across EMEA are navigating the EU AI Act, implementing trust-ready cloud strategies, and aligning with Microsoft’s Digital Commitments to privacy, security, and innovation...

Get ready to dive into the future of AI with our full-day Agent Hack on Azure. This hands-on event is designed for technical teams and IT decision-makers looking to accelerate their AI transformation journey through agentic solutions built on Azure AI Foundry. Location: Microsoft Office, Regeringsgatan 25.

AI and Agents are revolutionizing how organizations operate, far beyond traditional productivity. From enhanced decision making to creating additional value, such as automation, leaders are turning to AI and agentic AI to fill the capacity gap. At the Microsoft Copilot & AI Agents Summit, you will discover the tools and strategies that are empowering businesses to drive transformation today. Location: Microsoft Office, Regeringsgatan 25.

AI and Agents are revolutionizing how organizations operate, far beyond traditional productivity. From enhanced decision making to creating additional value, such as automation, leaders are turning to AI and agentic AI to fill the capacity gap. At the Microsoft Copilot & AI Agents Summit Digital, you will discover the tools and strategies that are empowering businesses to drive transformation today.

This roundtable is designed for the emerging role of Customer Experience and Journey specialists. At Microsoft, we understand the complexity of your mission and have built our platform with your needs in mind since moving to the cloud in 2016. Join us for a day of inspiration and discussion focused on mastering the full customer journey, from the first email open to the final service case, powered by a unified Customer 360 view with zero integration hassle.

This session is Part I of a two-part briefing designed for Works Councils and IT Leaders. This 60-minute session offers a clear, practical introduction to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Learn how it functions inside familiar tools like Word, Outlook, and Teams and what this means for employee workflows, data usage, and oversight.

This session is Part II of a two-part briefing designed for Works Councils and IT Leaders. This 60-minute session focuses on how Microsoft Copilot can be introduced in a way that respects privacy laws, adheres to the EU AI Act, and follows Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard. It also includes guidance on how to manage change and drive organizational trust.

GitHub’s two-day developer event celebrating innovation, collaboration, and the boundless potential of AI-powered development.

Ignite possibilities. Get the edge you need to drive impact in the era of AI. Join us to bolster your knowledge, build connections, and explore emerging technologies. San Francisco, Moscone Center, November 18–21, 2025 (optional pre-day November 17).

Summary The growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in enterprise workflows has introduced a new class of adversarial techniques: indirect prompt injection. Indirect prompt injection can be used against systems that leverage large language models (LLMs) to process untrusted data. Fundamentally, the risk is that an attacker could provide specially crafted data that the LLM misinterprets as instructions.

We’re excited to announce significant updates to the Microsoft .NET Bounty Program. These changes expand the program’s scope, simplify the award structure, and offer great incentives for security researchers. The .NET Bounty Program now offers awards up to $40,000 USD for vulnerabilities impacting the .NET and ASP.NET Core (including Blazor and Aspire).

Microsoft Threat Intelligence has uncovered a cyberespionage campaign by the Russian state actor we track as Secret Blizzard that has been ongoing since at least 2024, targeting embassies in Moscow using an adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) position to deploy their custom ApolloShadow malware.

Microsoft's Identity Threat Detection and Response solution integrates identity and security operations to provide proactive, real-time protection against sophisticated identity-based cyberthreats.

Last year, we announced the largest hacking event in history: Zero Day Quest, with up to $4 million in bounty awards. The response from the global security community was incredible and helped improve security for our customers and partners. This year, Zero Day Quest is back with even more potential bounty awards: up to $5 million total for high-impact research in Cloud and AI security.

According to a new Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, organizations using the Microsoft Entra Suite achieved a 131% ROI, $14.4 million in benefits, and payback in less than six months.

Defender Experts now offers 24/7, expert-driven protection for cloud workloads, beginning with hybrid and multicloud servers in Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Additionally, third-party network signals can be used in Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR to enhance incidents for faster and more accurate detection and response.

We’re excited to launch SFI patterns and practices: a new library of actionable guidance designed to help organizations implement security measures at scale. This launch marks a next step in our journey to make our SFI learnings practical for our customers, partners, and broader security ecosystem. These patterns are not just theory—they’re based on what we’ve done internally to protect Microsoft’s infrastructure, and we are now sharing them to help you do the same.

The Phishing Triage Agent in Microsoft Defender is now available in Public Preview. It tackles one of the most repetitive tasks in the SOC: handling reports of user-submitted phish.

Microsoft recently spoke with Mario Ferket, Chief Information Security Officer for Dow, about the company’s approach to AI in security.

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2025 for a week of immersive learning, hands-on experiences, and strategic insights tailored for security leaders, practitioners, and innovators.

A comprehensive technical deep dive on PipeMagic, a highly modular backdoor used by Storm-2460 masquerading as a legitimate open-source ChatGPT Desktop Application. Beneath its disguise, PipeMagic is a sophisticated malware framework designed for flexibility and persistence. Once deployed, it can dynamically execute payloads while maintaining robust command and control (C2) communication via a dedicated networking module.

Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders, I’m thrilled to announce two most requested features from our passionate OneNote community are now rolling out to Insiders! These updates are all about giving you more control, more flexibility, and a smoother note-taking experience, just the way you like it. Merge Table Cells Yes, it’s finally here! You can now merge table cells in OneNote!

In today’s fast-paced world, capturing attention and building meaningful connections is more important than ever. It’s no longer enough to just share information, people want experiences that engage, inspire, and feel real. While in-person events remain foundational, virtual and hybrid formats have become essential for their reach, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.

Welcome to the July 2025 edition of What's new in Microsoft 365 Copilot! Every month, we highlight new features and enhancements to keep Microsoft 365 admins up to date with Copilot features that help your users be more productive and efficient in the apps they use every day. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new this month: Copilot Control System...

In this edition of our monthly roundup, we're recapping new features released in Microsoft Copilot Studio in July 2025.

Coauthored by Jeff Kizner In his recent post, “ Sovereign Private Cloud: Resiliency, Security, and Control for Your Critical Workloads ”, Douglas Phillips explored Microsoft’s vision for enabling digital sovereignty across critical industries and government sectors. His message was clear: Microsoft’s cloud innovation will be defined not just by scalability and performance but by offering customers control, autonomy, and jurisdictional assurance.

Microsoft regularly enhances the underlying AI models that power Microsoft 365 Copilot. These updates are designed to bring performance improvements, more advanced reasoning, and expanded multimodal capabilities without altering controls, configurations, compliance, security, or core enterprise contractual commitments. Customers do not need to make changes to their environment to account for new model changes.

We’re excited to announce that GPT‑5—OpenAI’s best AI system to-date—is rolling out today in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Studio across the world. GPT-5 is a significant leap in intelligence and becomes even more powerful when applied to work. Bringing GPT-5 to Copilot on the day of its release is part of our commitment to make OpenAI’s latest models available to customers in Microsoft 365 Copilot within 30 days.

The wait is over: the Cloud Update feature is now generally available (GA) in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center , ushering in a new era for update management. Designed to simplify and modernize how organizations handle Microsoft 365 Apps updates, Cloud Update is already making waves with its ease of use and impressive results in keeping environments current and secure.

Have you ever felt that moment of panic when you realize you might be sharing something you shouldn’t in a meeting? With Microsoft Teams’ new sensitive content detection feature , those heart-stopping “oops” moments may soon be a thing of the past. Now generally available as part of Teams Premium, this feature helps detect accidental exposure of sensitive information during screen sharing, helping keep confidential data private, even in cases of unintentional overshare.

Microsoft Teams has become a critical platform for business communications, especially with the rise of remote and hybrid work models. With over 320 million monthly active users, Teams hosts sensitive conversations, file sharing, and collaborative work, necessitating a thorough understanding of how Teams protects data in transit and at rest. Encryption is essential for protecting sensitive communications and helping to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

Internal Microsoft pilots saw more than 23% higher daily active usage The Great Copilot Journey is a 30-day skilling resource that helps users learn how to use Copilot, one prompt at time. We designed this program based on two beliefs: Small, consistent successes help users get more confident and comfortable using Copilot. Having fun and delight with Copilot drives adoption. And now we have the data that shows it works.

Happy July, everyone! It’s hard to believe that we’re already in the second half of 2025. It was a busy first half for Teams, and there are no signs of slowing down. This month, I’m excited to share that engaging with Copilot is even easier. Copilot is now accessible right at the top of the Teams chat list, even without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Now in Teams, everyone can explore the possibilities of Copilot Chat. We’re also launching the amazing Interpreter.

Ever wonder why your agent’s answers can be right but for the wrong reasons? Let’s dive into why that matters, with a brief foray into epistemology (bear with me!) Knowledge: More Than Just Right Answers Imagine asking someone the time, and they confidently reply, “2:30 PM.” They’re correct—but what if their watch stopped exactly 12 hours...

In today’s connected world, voice communication remains a cornerstone of customer engagement. Whether it’s a support call for customer service or a telehealth session with a doctor, call quality and reliability are critical. That’s where our enriched telemetry and insights come in. Equipped with comprehensive telemetry data, developers and IT teams can monitor, detect, diagnose, and resolve issues with voice call performance, regardless of the calling service provider. This...

Starting today, Microsoft Copilot Studio users will have access to GPT-5, OpenAI’s best generative AI system that was introduced this morning.

Microsoft Dataverse introduces new security controls to manage sensitive business data.

Generative pages aims to redefine how makers build with Microsoft Power Apps—bringing the power of vibe coding to enterprise development in model-driven apps. With just a few prompts, makers can generate rich, responsive pages backed by real React and TypeScript code, all while maintaining enterprise-grade governance and reliability. Aligning to the official GPT-5 announcement yesterday,

Dataverse knowledge in Microsoft Copilot Studio’s latest update now with support for multi-line text and file columns...

With the latest updates to the Case Management Agent (CMA) in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft is helping organizations accelerate their evolution into frontier firms. These organizations lead by empowering AI agents to run entire business processes while humans set direction and monitor progress. The July 2025 preview updates to CMA introduced powerful capabilities that...

Microsoft Power Pages has transformed the way organizations build secure, data-driven business websites. Traditionally, site creation has been a low-code, design-first experience. However, the new code-first approach gives developers greater flexibility: you can create, customize, and manage Power Pages sites entirely in source code. With the recent release of the GitHub Spark, developers can now prototype a site, edit it directly in a GitHub Codespace, and they can deploy it to a Power Pages...

Stay ahead with Power Platform Monitor Alerts (public preview). Admins set custom health thresholds to proactively monitor their resources and get notifications when that threshold is violated—no setup required.

We’re excited to announce two enhancements to Dynamics 365 Contact Center, powered by Azure Communication Services (ACS): SMS mobile numbers and SMS short codes. These capabilities significantly expand our global SMS footprint. Moreover, they provide businesses with more flexibility and control over how they engage with customers through real-time, two-way messaging. SMS mobile numbers With the introduction of SMS mobile numbers, ACS-based SMS in Contact...

With the latest July 2025 updates to the Customer Intent Agent, Microsoft is accelerating the journey toward fully autonomous contact centers. These enhancements empower organizations to leverage AI agents that not only understand customer intent but also automate the entire resolution process. This increases the availability of human service reps to focus on high-value interactions.

Welcome to Copilot Studio Agent Academy Whether you’re just starting your journey with AI agents or looking to sharpen your skills in Microsoft Copilot Studio, we’ve got your mission briefing ready and it’s time to suit up! We’re thrilled to introduce Copilot Studio Agent Academy, a new, self-paced curriculum designed to help makers, developers, and...

Customers can use configurable maintenance windows to schedule gateway maintenance for Point-to-Site VPN Gateway (P2S VPN) in Virtual WAN Service. With P2S VPN in Virtual WAN service now being generally available, customers can now configure maintenance w...

You can now use Microsoft Entra ID authentication to connect to Azure Database for PostgreSQL from Power BI Desktop. This update simplifies access management, enhances security, and helps you support your organization’s broader Entra-based authentication...

In late-July, the following updates and enhancements were made to Azure SQL: Use the UNISTR intrinsic function to define Unicode string literals using Unicode encoding values in a string. Use the ANSI SQL concatenation operator (||) to concatenate charac...

Network security perimeter allows organizations to define a logical network isolation boundary for PaaS resources (for example, Azure Storage account and SQL Database server) that are deployed outside your organization’s virtual networks. It restricts pub...

The AKS Security Dashboard provides a centralized view of security posture and runtime threat protection for your AKS cluster within the Azure Portal. It highlights software vulnerabilities, critical security issues, compliance gaps, and active threats, h...

We are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Storage Discovery, a fully managed service that provides you enterprise-wide visibility into your Azure Blob Storage data estate.

We’re proud to announce that Microsoft has once again been recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Container Management, for the third year in a row.

After a brief hiatus, Azure Automation is resuming deployments of the revised Service and Subscription limits from August 11, 2025. This update will ensure fair distribution of cloud resources across all customers and further improve reliability and perfo...

Now you can deploy Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server in the Malaysia West Azure region. Learn more.

Azure Databricks connector for Power Platform is now generally available. You can easily connect Azure Databricks with Microsoft Power Apps in several new ways. The new connector enables you to: Support real-time data access without the need for data cop...

Azure Files now supports the provisioned v2 billing model on the SSD (premium) media tier. Provisioned v2 enables independent provisioning of storage, IOPS, and throughput, allowing you to create a file share that meets your exact storage and performance...

The Archive access tier for Azure Blob Storage is now generally available in the Malaysia West region.With this regional expansion, customers in Malaysia can now store infrequently accessed data in the cost-effective Archive tier, while meeting data resid...

In our technical guide, “Accelerating Generative AI Innovation with Cloud Migration” we outline how IT and digital transformation leaders can tap into the power and flexibility of Azure to unlock the full potential of generative AI.

With the launch of OpenAI’s gpt‑oss models—its first open-weight release since GPT‑2—we’re giving developers and enterprises unprecedented ability to run, adapt, and deploy OpenAI models entirely on their own terms.

Today, we’re announcing general availability of OpenAI’s new flagship, GPT-5, in Azure AI Foundry. This is more than a new model release; it is the most powerful large language model (LLM) ever released across key benchmarks.

Customer-managed keys (CMK) for Microsoft Fabric workspaces are now available in preview in all public regions! This expansion makes it easier for customers worldwide to meet compliance requirements and implement robust data protection strategies. Note: Encrypt data at rest in your Fabric workspaces using customer-managed keys (Preview) was released in a limited set of regions …

We’re thrilled to share a major update and simplification to OneLake’s capacity utilization model that will make it even easier to manage Fabric capacity and scale your data workloads. We are reducing the consumption rate of OneLake transactions via proxy to match the rate for transactions via redirect. This means you no longer have to …

AzCopy is a powerful and performant tool for copying data between Azure Storage and Microsoft OneLake, and is the preferred tool for large-scale data movement due to its ease of use and built-in performance optimizations. AzCopy now supports copying data from firewall-enabled Azure Storage accounts into OneLake using trusted workspace access. Now you can use …

Frontier Firms are moving beyond experimentation and into scaled transformation—powered by human-agent teams—by having agents as members of their team, reinventing processes, providing employees with new skills to scale their impact, and using a modern cloud foundation.

The Open API specification, formerly Swagger Specification, is a widely used, language-agnostic description format for REST APIs. This allows humans and computers alike to discover and understand the capabilities of a service in a standardized format. This is critical for creating integrations with external systems, AI agents and code generators. Now, you can automatically generate …

We’ve made a major update to User Data Functions! This update addresses the most critical feedback we have received since the start of the preview: the testing and development experience of your functions. Important note: In order to use this feature, you need to upgrade to the latest version of the fabric-user-data-functions library. Beginning in …

Copy Job is the go-to solution in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory for simplified data movement. With native support for multiple delivery styles, including bulk copy, incremental copy, and change data capture (CDC) replication, Copy job offers the flexibility to handle a wide range of scenarios—all through an intuitive, easy-to-use experience. In this update, we’re excited …

Agents are only as capable as the tools you give them—and only as trustworthy as the governance behind those tools.

We’re thrilled to announce that workspace-level Private Link support in Microsoft Fabric is now in Preview! Last year in May, we announced General Availability of Private Link for Fabric Tenants. Since then, we’ve heard feedback asking for more granular network security controls. Now the wait is finally over! Private link for Fabric workspaces empowers your …

Join Robert Green and Leslie Richardson for a full day of live sessions, demos, and interviews. Live from Microsoft HQ – Stream Tuesday’s Sessions with Visual Studio Toolbox! On Tuesday, August 5, join us for a special edition of Visual Studio Toolbox Live—broadcast from VS LIVE! Redmond and hosted by Leslie Richardson and Robert Green.

When we first set out to get smarter AI edits in Visual Studio Copilot, we knew we were tackling a deeply complex problem. It wasn’t just about generating great suggestions—it was about figuring out how to seamlessly apply those suggestions to your code. While the idea seemed simple at first glance, the reality was anything...

Support for Visual Studio 2015 will end on October 14, 2025. If you’re using an older version of Visual Studio, we want to keep you productive and secure when using Visual Studio, and strongly recommend you upgrade to Visual Studio 2022, which brings the power of Copilot to your development workflow. It also contains key...

We’re excited to share that GPT-5, OpenAI’s latest frontier model, is now rolling out in GitHub Copilot for Visual Studio. GPT-5 offers faster responses and even better performance for writing and understanding code. This release brings a new level of capability to your development workflow, making it easier to move from idea to implementation. Try...

Learn how the International Telecommunication Union made the switch to open source, and how you can too!

In July, we experienced one incident that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.

How GitHub's new MCP server and GPT-5 are revolutionizing developer workflows — with live build examples.

The open source Git project just released Git 2.51. Here is GitHub’s look at some of the most interesting features and changes introduced since last time.

We’re excited to announce that MCP support is now GA in Visual Studio—unlocking richer, real-time context from your entire development stack and expanding the power of Agent Mode like never before. Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that makes it easy for AI agents to connect with external tools and services—think of it...

Delegate coding tasks to Copilot and track progress wherever you are on GitHub. Copilot works in the background, creates a pull request, and tags you for review when finished.

We’re excited to announce that you can now bring your own language model into Visual Studio Chat. You can connect API keys from providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google) to access a wider range of models. This makes it easy to test the latest releases, customize workflows, or run on infrastructure you control. What it unlocks...

Open source is aging. We can better support Gen Z contributors through purpose, flexibility, and pathways to leadership.

Quantum computing promises transformative advancements, yet it also poses a very real risk to today’s cryptographic security. In the future scalable quantum computing could break public-key cryptography methods currently in use and undermine digital signatures, resulting in compromised authentication systems and identity verification.

Microsoft Digital stories The rate of change in IT is accelerating at a blistering pace. AI-powered capabilities like Microsoft 365 Copilot have enabled a new era of employee productivity. Today, agentic capabilities are supercharging IT like never before. As IT leaders, we are living in extraordinary times. But change can be destabilizing, even during normal...

Microsoft Digital readiness guide AI transformation is one of the most profound business changes in decades. Making the most of AI tools will require careful planning, thoughtful communication, comprehensive employee enablement, and diligent tracking. Fortunately, Microsoft Viva fills all of these roles and more. Microsoft Viva is a suite of applications designed to help organizations...

Microsoft Digital technical stories Agentic AI is the frontier of the AI landscape. These tools show enormous promise, but harnessing their power isn’t always as straightforward as prompting a model or accessing data from Microsoft 365 apps. To reach their full potential in the enterprise, agents sometimes need access to data beyond Microsoft Graph. But...

Microsoft Digital stories Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most ubiquitous and highly trusted content storage and sharing solutions in modern business. Around the world, organizations add over 2 billion pieces of content to SharePoint and create more than 2 million sites every day. It’s the place where people connect with each other and share...

Microsoft Digital stories The 2020s have been a tumultuous decade for employees globally. Starting with the COVID-19 pandemic that upended workplace norms and expectations in 2020, then quickly followed by the generative AI revolution in 2022, we’re living through a time of unprecedented workplace change. From hybrid, flexible work to the advent of generative AI...

Wassette empowers AI agents to securely fetch and run Wasm tools, enabling dynamic, permission-controlled capabilities with zero dependencies.

Learn how BMW, Aurobay, Denso, and others use AI to modernize their manufacturing processes.

AI is redefining manufacturing—transforming operations, empowering workers, and accelerating innovation through data-driven decisions.

To keep pace with the energy transition, we need to move from static studies to dynamic, data-driven planning.