Partner Blog | Expanded partner benefits are now available: What’s new in February 2026
Expanded partner benefits are now available across the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program. These updates reflect continued investment in the tools, resources, and support partners rely on to build, differentiate, and grow, and they incorporate feedback we hear consistently across the ecosystem. If you read our January post about planning ahead for the February refresh, this is the follow-up: the new benefits are now rolling out, and partners with eligible offers will find them in Partner Center as they become available. What’s new You’ll find a range of meaningful additions designed to empower you to move faster with AI, support security needs, and improve go-to-market execution. Highlights include: Copilot additions in select offers: The FY26 refresh introduces new Copilot-related benefits across parts of the program, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and Microsoft Dragon Copilot (per user) in select partner offers where available. Security benefits expansion: Security-focused benefits have been broadened, including additions such as Microsoft Defender Suite, Microsoft Entra Suite, and Microsoft Intune Suite in select offerings. Azure credit updates: Azure benefits are being updated across multiple offers, including new additions and increases in value for certain cloud benefits. These credits are designed to support solution development, testing, and expansion of your practice. Go-to-market resources: As partners continue to access marketing benefits and resources through the program, Microsoft is simplifying discovery and execution—so you can bring campaigns to market with less friction. Continue reading hereManaging data sharing and access in healthcare systems
I am looking for general guidance on how healthcare teams manage data sharing and user access across different systems. I am interested in understanding common approaches for keeping data secure while still allowing the right staff to access what they need. This is more about best practices and real-world experience rather than a specific product issue. Any insights from similar healthcare environments would be helpful.
How Nonprofits Can Strengthen Cybersecurity with Small Steps (That Make a Big Difference)
Nonprofits are often stretched thin—limited budgets, diverse users, and critical missions. But that doesn’t mean cybersecurity has to be overwhelming. In fact, some of the most effective protections are simple, affordable, and accessible to organizations of any size. Below are practical steps every nonprofit can take to strengthen its security posture, along with upcoming nonprofit‑focused events designed to help your team build skills, stay informed, and protect your mission. Start with MFA (Multifactor Authentication) Turning on MFA is the single most impactful step any nonprofit can take to secure accounts. It protects your organization from: Password theft Account compromise Phishing attacks Phishing‑resistant MFA methods—such as Microsoft Authenticator or passkeys—offer the strongest protection. Secure Your Cloud Environment With many nonprofits using shared drives, third‑party tools, or cloud‑based CRMs, securing cloud configurations is essential. This includes: Using least‑privilege access Regularly reviewing permissions Enabling encryption Avoiding shared passwords Most breaches start with simple misconfigurations. A quick audit can dramatically reduce risk. Train Your Staff and Volunteers Cybersecurity is everyone’s responsibility. Short, simple training sessions can help your team recognize: Suspicious emails Unexpected login prompts Unsafe links Requests for personal or financial information Consistent training builds a culture of awareness and reduces the likelihood of human‑error‑based incidents. Use Security Tools to Safeguard Your Mission Many nonprofit discounts and grants make enterprise‑level protections more accessible. Solutions like Microsoft Defender and Microsoft 365 Business Premium include built‑in security features such as: Antivirus Threat detection Cloud app security Endpoint protection These tools help nonprofits stay secure—without adding complexity. And if your team is looking to deepen its understanding of how to use these solutions effectively, there are plenty of learning opportunities available. Nonprofit Events Discover tailored events and training opportunities designed to help you maximize your impact and strengthen your organization’s security posture. Gain expert insights, connect with industry leaders, and explore solutions built for nonprofit scenarios. See events below related specifically to security. Featured Events Below are upcoming and on‑demand security‑focused sessions especially relevant for nonprofits working to improve cybersecurity: Mastering Threat Detection and Response with Microsoft Defender XDR A deep dive into how Microsoft Defender XDR delivers extended detection and response across your digital estate. February 11, 2026 – 7:30 PM ET (Asia/ANZ) – Virtual February 12, 2026 – 11:00 AM ET (Americas) – Virtual Register: Microsoft Virtual Events Powered by Teams (Asia/ANZ) and Microsoft Virtual Events Powered by Teams (Americas) Mastering SIEM & SOAR with Microsoft Sentinel: From Setup to Automation Learn how to configure SIEM and SOAR capabilities in Microsoft Sentinel to strengthen your security operations. February 25, 2026 – 7:30 PM ET (Asia/ANZ) – Virtual February 26, 2026 – 11:00 AM ET (Americas) – Virtual Register: Microsoft Virtual Events Powered by Teams (Asia/ANZ) and Microsoft Virtual Events Powered by Teams (Americas) Unlocking AI‑Powered Security: A Deep Dive into Microsoft Security Copilot Explore how Microsoft Security Copilot combines generative AI with Microsoft’s security tools to help analysts investigate incidents and automate tasks. March 4, 2026 – 7:30 PM ET (Asia/ANZ) – Virtual March 5, 2026 – 11:00 AM ET (Americas) – Virtual Register: Microsoft Virtual Events Powered by Teams (Asia/ANZ) and Microsoft Virtual Events Powered by Teams (Americas) Strengthening Your Cybersecurity Strategy (On‑demand) This on‑demand session covers how to simplify security operations, enhance compliance, and empower your mission with confidence. On‑demand Register: Strengthening your Cybersecurity Strategy On-demand
Stand out as an authority on cloud sovereignty with the Digital Sovereignty specialization
The Digital Sovereignty specialization is designed to drive meaningful business outcomes. It differentiates your organization as a sovereign cloud leader, building trust with customers in compliance-heavy regions. It also opens access to high-value projects in regulated industries such as government, defense, banking, and healthcare. The Digital Sovereignty specialization supports business growth by highlighting value-added services capabilities with higher margins in digital sovereignty. Finally, it signals proven delivery capability on sensitive cloud deployments, fostering strong client relationships. To enroll, meet the five specialization prerequisite requirements across Security, Azure, and Modern Work. Once eligible, respond to Microsoft outreach and schedule a third-party audit, demonstrating recent sovereign cloud projects. Then, maintain the specialization by continuing to meet prerequisites annually and passing the audit every two years. Don't miss this opportunity to tap into incredible business value and access exciting opportunities based on the capabilities and knowledge you already have.Why Entra ID attributes don’t always appear on Microsoft 365 profile cards
While working with Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft 365 profile cards, I ran into a behavior that often causes confusion: attributes like EmployeeType can exist in Entra ID and Microsoft Graph, yet not appear consistently on Microsoft 365 profile cards. This post breaks down why this happens, what’s actually happening behind the scenes, and what you can realistically expect when working with profile card attributes in real environments. Profile cards should be treated as a presentation layer, not a guaranteed real-time reflection of every Entra ID attribute. If you’ve seen similar behavior with other attributes or workloads, I’d love to hear how you’ve approached it in your environments.AI Didn’t Break Your Production — Your Architecture Did
Most AI systems don’t fail in the lab. They fail the moment production touches them. I’m Hazem Ali — Microsoft AI MVP, Principal AI & ML Engineer / Architect, and Founder & CEO of Skytells. With a strong foundation in AI and deep learning from low-level fundamentals to production-scale, backed by rigorous cybersecurity and software engineering expertise, I design and deliver enterprise AI systems end-to-end. I often speak about what happens after the pilot goes live: real users arrive, data drifts, security constraints tighten, and incidents force your architecture to prove it can survive. My focus is building production AI with a security-first mindset: identity boundaries, enforceable governance, incident-ready operations, and reliability at scale. My mission is simple: Architect and engineer secure AI systems that operate safely, predictably, and at scale in production. And here’s the hard truth: AI initiatives rarely fail because the model is weak. They fail because the surrounding architecture was never engineered for production reality. - Hazem Ali You see this clearly when teams bolt AI onto an existing platform. In Azure-based environments, the foundation can be solid—identity, networking, governance, logging, policy enforcement, and scale primitives. But that doesn’t make the AI layer production-grade by default. It becomes production-grade only when the AI runtime is engineered like a first-class subsystem with explicit boundaries, control points, and designed failure behavior. A quick moment from the field I still remember one rollout that looked perfect on paper. Latency was fine. Error rate was low. Dashboards were green. Everyone was relaxed. Then a single workflow started creating the wrong tickets, not failing or crashing. It was confidently doing the wrong thing at scale. It took hours before anyone noticed, because nothing was broken in the traditional sense. When we finally traced it, the model was not the root cause. The system had no real gates, no replayable trail, and tool execution was too permissive. The architecture made it easy for a small mistake to become a widespread mess. That is the gap I’m talking about in this article. Production Failure Taxonomy This is the part most teams skip because it is not exciting, and it is not easy to measure in a demo. When AI fails in production, the postmortem rarely says the model was bad. It almost always points to missing boundaries, over-privileged execution, or decisions nobody can trace. So if your AI can take actions, you are no longer shipping a chat feature. You are operating a runtime that can change state across real systems, that means reliability is not just uptime. It is the ability to limit blast radius, reproduce decisions, and stop or degrade safely when uncertainty or risk spikes. You can usually tell early whether an AI initiative will survive production. Not because the model is weak, but because the failure mode is already baked into the architecture. Here are the ones I see most often. 1. Healthy systems that are confidently wrong Uptime looks perfect. Latency is fine. And the output is wrong. This is dangerous because nothing alerts until real damage shows up. 2. The agent ends up with more authority than the user The user asks a question. The agent has tools and credentials. Now it can do things the user never should have been able to do in that moment. 3. Each action is allowed, but the chain is not Read data, create ticket, send message. All approved individually. Put together, it becomes a capability nobody reviewed. 4. Retrieval becomes the attack path Most teams worry about prompt injection. Fair. But a poisoned or stale retrieval layer can be worse, because it feeds the model the wrong truth. 5. Tool calls turn mistakes into incidents The moment AI can change state—config, permissions, emails, payments, or data—a mistake is no longer a bad answer. It is an incident. 6. Retries duplicate side effects Timeouts happen. Retries happen. If your tool calls are not safe to repeat, you will create duplicate tickets, refunds, emails, or deletes. Next, let’s talk about what changes when you inject probabilistic behavior into a deterministic platform. In the Field: Building and Sharing Real-World AI In December 2025, I had the chance to speak and engage with builders across multiple AI and technology events, sharing what I consider the most valuable part of the journey: the engineering details that show up when AI meets production reality. This photo captures one of those moments: real conversations with engineers, architects, and decision-makers about what it truly takes to ship production-grade AI. During my session, Designing Scalable and Secure Architecture at the Enterprise Scale I walked through the ideas in this article live on stage then went deeper into the engineering reality behind them: from zero-trust boundaries and runtime policy enforcement to observability, traceability, and safe failure design, The goal wasn’t to talk about “AI capability,” but to show how to build AI systems that operate safely and predictably at scale in production. Deterministic platforms, probabilistic behavior Most production platforms are built for deterministic behavior: defined contracts, predictable services, stable outputs. AI changes the physics. You introduce probabilistic behavior into deterministic pipelines and your failure modes multiply. An AI system can be confidently wrong while still looking “healthy” through basic uptime dashboards. That’s why reliability in production AI is rarely about “better prompts” or “higher model accuracy.” It’s about engineering the right control points: identity boundaries, governance enforcement, behavioral observability, and safe degradation. In other words: the model is only one component. The system is the product. Production AI Control Plane Here’s the thing. Once you inject probabilistic behavior into a deterministic platform, you need more than prompts and endpoints. You need a control plane. Not a fancy framework. Just a clear place in the runtime where decisions get bounded, actions get authorized, and behavior becomes explainable when something goes wrong. This is the simplest shape I have seen work in real enterprise systems. The control plane components Orchestrator Owns the workflow. Decides what happens next, and when the system should stop. Retrieval Brings in context, but only from sources you trust and can explain later. Prompt assembly Builds the final input to the model, including constraints, policy signals, and tool schemas. Model call Generates the plan or the response. It should never be trusted to execute directly. Policy Enforcement Point The gate before any high impact step. It answers: is this allowed, under these conditions, with these constraints. Tool Gateway The firewall for actions. Scopes every operation, validates inputs, rate-limits, and blocks unsafe calls. Audit log and trace store A replayable chain for every request. If you cannot replay it, you cannot debug it. Risk engine Detects prompt injection signals, anomalous sessions, uncertainty spikes, and switches the runtime into safer modes. Approval flow For the few actions that should never be automatic. It is the line between assistance and damage. If you take one idea from this section, let it be this. The model is not where you enforce safety. Safety lives in the control plane. Next, let’s talk about the most common mistake teams make right after they build the happy-path pipeline. Treating AI like a feature. The common architectural trap: treating AI like a feature Many teams ship AI like a feature: prompt → model → response. That structure demos well. In production, it collapses the moment AI output influences anything stateful tickets, approvals, customer messaging, remediation actions, or security decisions. At that point, you’re not “adding AI.” You’re operating a semi-autonomous runtime. The engineering questions become non-negotiable: Can we explain why the system responded this way? Can we bound what it’s allowed to do? Can we contain impact when it’s wrong? Can we recover without human panic? If those answers aren’t designed into the architecture, production becomes a roulette wheel. Governance is not a document It’s a runtime enforcement capability Most governance programs fail because they’re implemented as late-stage checklists. In production, governance must live inside the execution path as an enforceable mechanism, A Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) that evaluates every high-impact step before it happens. At the moment of execution, your runtime must answer a strict chain of authorization questions: 1. What tools is this agent attempting to call? Every tool invocation is a privilege boundary. Your runtime must identify the tool, the operation, and the intended side effect (read vs write, safe vs state-changing). 2. Does the tool have the right permissions to run for this agent? Even before user context, the tool itself must be runnable by the agent’s workload identity (service principal / managed identity / workload credentials). If the agent identity can’t execute the tool, the call is denied period. 3. If the tool can run, is the agent permitted to use it for this user? This is the missing piece in most systems: delegation. The agent might be able to run the tool in general, but not on behalf of this user, in this tenant, in this environment, for this task category. This is where you enforce: user role / entitlement tenant boundaries environment (prod vs staging) session risk level (normal vs suspicious) 4. If yes, which tasks/operations are permitted? Tools are too broad. Permissions must be operation-scoped. Not “Jira tool allowed.” But “Jira: create ticket only, no delete, no project-admin actions.” Not “Database tool allowed.” But “DB: read-only, specific schema, specific columns, row-level filters.” This is ABAC/RBAC + capability-based execution. 5. What data scope is allowed? Even a permitted tool operation must be constrained by data classification and scope: public vs internal vs confidential vs PII row/column filters time-bounded access purpose limitation (“only for incident triage”) If the system can’t express data scope at runtime, it can’t claim governance. 6. What operations require human approval? Some actions are inherently high risk: payments/refunds changing production configs emailing customers deleting data executing scripts The policy should return “REQUIRE_APPROVAL” with clear obligations (what must be reviewed, what evidence is required, who can approve). 7. What actions are forbidden under certain risk conditions? Risk-aware policy is the difference between governance and theater. Examples: If prompt injection signals are high → disable tool execution If session is anomalous → downgrade to read-only mode If data is PII + user not entitled → deny and redact If environment is prod + request is destructive → block regardless of model confidence The key engineering takeaway Governance works only when it’s enforceable, runtime-evaluated, and capability-scoped: Agent identity answers: “Can it run at all?” Delegation answers: “Can it run for this user?” Capabilities answer: “Which operations exactly?” Data scope answers: “How much and what kind of data?” Risk gates + approvals answer: “When must it stop or escalate?” If policy can’t be enforced at runtime, it isn’t governance. It’s optimism. Safe Execution Patterns Policy answers whether something is allowed. Safe execution answers what happens when things get messy. Because they will, Models time out, Retries happen, Inputs are adversarial. People ask for the wrong thing. Agents misunderstand. And when tools can change state, small mistakes turn into real incidents. These patterns are what keep the system stable when the world is not. 👈 Two-phase execution Do not execute directly from a model output. First phase: propose a plan and a dry-run summary of what will change. Second phase: execute only after policy gates pass, and approval is collected if required. Idempotency for every write If a tool call can create, refund, email, delete, or deploy, it must be safe to retry. Every write gets an idempotency key, and the gateway rejects duplicates. This one change prevents a huge class of production pain. Default to read-only when risk rises When injection signals spike, when the session looks anomalous, when retrieval looks suspicious, the system should not keep acting. It should downgrade. Retrieve, explain, and ask. No tool execution. Scope permissions to operations, not tools Tools are too broad. Do not allow Jira. Allow create ticket in these projects, with these fields. Do not allow database access. Allow read-only on this schema, with row and column filters. Rate limits and blast radius caps Agents should have a hard ceiling. Max tool calls per request. Max writes per session. Max affected entities. If the cap is hit, stop and escalate. A kill switch that actually works You need a way to disable tool execution across the fleet in one move. When an incident happens, you do not want to redeploy code. You want to stop the bleeding. If you build these in early, you stop relying on luck. You make failure boring, contained, and recoverable. Think for scale, in the Era of AI for AI I want to zoom out for a second, because this is the shift most teams still design around. We are not just adding AI to a product. We are entering a phase where parts of the system can maintain and improve themselves. Not in a magical way. In a practical, engineering way. A self-improving system is one that can watch what is happening in production, spot a class of problems, propose changes, test them, and ship them safely, while leaving a clear trail behind it. It can improve code paths, adjust prompts, refine retrieval rules, update tests, and tighten policies. Over time, the system becomes less dependent on hero debugging at 2 a.m. What makes this real is the loop, not the model. Signals come in from logs, traces, incidents, drift metrics, and quality checks. The system turns those signals into a scoped plan. Then it passes through gates: policy and permissions, safe scope, testing, and controlled rollout. If something looks wrong, it stops, downgrades to read-only, or asks for approval. This is why scale changes. In the old world, scale meant more users and more traffic. In the AI for AI world, scale also means more autonomy. One request can trigger many tool calls. One workflow can spawn sub-agents. One bad signal can cause retries and cascades. So the question is not only can your system handle load. The question is can your system handle multiplication without losing control. If you want self-improving behavior, you need three things to be true: The system is allowed to change only what it can prove is safe to change. Every change is testable and reversible. Every action is traceable, so you can replay why it happened. When those conditions exist, self-improvement becomes an advantage. When they do not, self-improvement becomes automated risk. And this leads straight into governance, because in this era governance is not a document. It is the gate that decides what the system is allowed to improve, and under which conditions. Observability: uptime isn’t enough — you need traceability and causality Traditional observability answers: Is the service up. Is it fast. Is it erroring. That is table stakes. Production AI needs a deeper truth: why did it do that. Because the system can look perfectly healthy while still making the wrong decision. Latency is fine. Error rate is fine. Dashboards are green. And the output is still harmful. To debug that kind of failure, you need causality you can replay and audit: Input → context retrieval → prompt assembly → model response → tool invocation → final outcome Without this chain, incident response becomes guesswork. People argue about prompts, blame the model, and ship small patches that do not address the real cause. Then the same issue comes back under a different prompt, a different document, or a slightly different user context. The practical goal is simple. Every high-impact action should have a story you can reconstruct later. What did the system see. What did it pull. What did it decide. What did it touch. And which policy allowed it. When you have that, you stop chasing symptoms. You can fix the actual failure point, and you can detect drift before users do. RAG Governance and Data Provenance Most teams treat retrieval as a quality feature. In production, retrieval is a security boundary. Because the moment a document enters the context window, it becomes part of the system’s brain for that request. If retrieval pulls the wrong thing, the model can behave perfectly and still lead you to a bad outcome. I learned this the hard way, I have seen systems where the model was not the problem at all. The problem was a single stale runbook that looked official, ranked high, and quietly took over the decision. Everything downstream was clean. The agent followed instructions, called the right tools, and still caused damage because the truth it was given was wrong. I keep repeating one line in reviews, and I mean it every time: Retrieval is where truth enters the system. If you do not control that, you are not governing anything. - Hazem Ali So what makes retrieval safe enough for enterprise use? Provenance on every chunk Every retrieved snippet needs a label you can defend later: source, owner, timestamp, and classification. If you cannot answer where it came from, you cannot trust it for actions. Staleness budgets Old truth is a real risk. A runbook from last quarter can be more dangerous than no runbook at all. If content is older than a threshold, the system should say it is old, and either confirm or downgrade to read-only. No silent reliance. Allowlisted sources per task Not all sources are valid for all jobs. Incident response might allow internal runbooks. Customer messaging might require approved templates only. Make this explicit. Retrieval should not behave like a free-for-all search engine. Scope and redaction before the model sees it Row and column limits, PII filtering, secret stripping, tenant boundaries. Do it before prompt assembly, not after the model has already seen the data. Citation requirement for high-impact steps If the system is about to take a high-impact action, it should be able to point to the sources that justified it. If it cannot, it should stop and ask. That one rule prevents a lot of confident nonsense. Monitor retrieval like a production dependency Track which sources are being used, which ones cause incidents, and where drift is coming from. Retrieval quality is not static. Content changes. Permissions change. Rankings shift. Behavior follows. When you treat retrieval as governance, the system stops absorbing random truth. It consumes controlled truth, with ownership, freshness, and scope. That is what production needs. Security: API keys aren’t a strategy when agents can act The highest-impact AI incidents are usually not model hacks. They are architectural failures: over-privileged identities, blurred trust boundaries, unbounded tool access, and unsafe retrieval paths. Once an agent can call tools that mutate state, treat it like a privileged service, not a chatbot. Least privilege by default Explicit authorization boundaries Auditable actions Containment-first design Clear separation between user intent and system authority This is how you prevent a prompt injection from turning into a system-level breach. If you want the deeper blueprint and the concrete patterns for securing agents in practice, I wrote a full breakdown here: Zero-Trust Agent Architecture: How to Actually Secure Your Agents What “production-ready AI” actually means Production-ready AI is not defined by a benchmark score. It’s defined by survivability under uncertainty. A production-grade AI system can: Explain itself with traceability. Enforce policy at runtime. Contain blast radius when wrong. Degrade safely under uncertainty. Recover with clear operational playbooks. If your system can’t answer “how does it fail?” you don’t have production AI yet.. You have a prototype with unmanaged risk. How Azure helps you engineer production-grade AI Azure doesn’t “solve” production-ready AI by itself, it gives you the primitives to engineer it correctly. The difference between a prototype and a survivable system is whether you translate those primitives into runtime control points: identity, policy enforcement, telemetry, and containment. 1. Identity-first execution (kill credential sprawl, shrink blast radius) A production AI runtime should not run on shared API keys or long-lived secrets. In Azure environments, the most important mindset shift is: every agent/workflow must have an identity and that identity must be scoped. Guidance Give each agent/orchestrator a dedicated identity (least privilege by default). Separate identities by environment (prod vs staging) and by capability (read vs write). Treat tool invocation as a privileged service call, never “just a function.” Why this matters If an agent is compromised (or tricked via prompt injection), identity boundaries decide whether it can read one table or take down a whole environment. 2. Policy as enforcement (move governance into the execution path) Your article’s core idea governance is runtime enforcement maps perfectly to Azure’s broader governance philosophy: policies must be enforceable, not advisory. Guidance Create an explicit Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) in your agent runtime. Make the PEP decision mandatory before executing any tool call or data access. Use “allow + obligations” patterns: allow only with constraints (redaction, read-only mode, rate limits, approval gates, extra logging). Why this matters Governance fails when it’s a document. It works when it’s compiled into runtime decisions. 3. Observability that explains behavior Azure’s telemetry stack is valuable because it’s designed for distributed systems: correlation, tracing, and unified logs. Production AI needs the same plus decision traceability. Guidance Emit a trace for every request across: retrieval → prompt assembly → model call → tool calls → outcome. Log policy decisions (allow/deny/require approval) with policy version + obligations applied. Capture “why” signals: risk score, classifier outputs, injection signals, uncertainty indicators. Why this matters When incidents happen, you don’t just debug latency — you debug behavior. Without causality, you can’t root-cause drift or containment failures. 4. Zero-trust boundaries for tools and data Azure environments tend to be strong at network segmentation and access control. That foundation is exactly what AI systems need because AI introduces adversarial inputs by default. Guidance Put a Tool Gateway in front of tools (Jira, email, payments, infra) and enforce scopes there. Restrict data access by classification (PII/secret zones) and enforce row/column constraints. Degrade safely: if risk is high, drop to read-only, disable tools, or require approval. Why this matters Prompt injection doesn’t become catastrophic when your system has hard boundaries and graceful failure modes. 5. Practical “production-ready” checklist (Azure-aligned, engineering-first) If you want a concrete way to apply this: Identity: every runtime has a scoped identity; no shared secrets PEP: every tool/data action is gated by policy, with obligations Traceability: full chain captured and correlated end-to-end Containment: safe degradation + approval gates for high-risk actions Auditability: policy versions and decision logs are immutable and replayable Environment separation: prod ≠ staging identities, tools, and permissions Outcome This is how you turn “we integrated AI” into “we operate AI safely at scale.” Operating Production AI A lot of teams build the architecture and still struggle, because production is not a diagram. It is a living system. So here is the operating model I look for when I want to trust an AI runtime in production. The few SLOs that actually matter Trace completeness For high-impact requests, can we reconstruct the full chain every time, without missing steps. Policy coverage What percentage of tool calls and sensitive reads pass through the policy gate, with a recorded decision. Action correctness Not model accuracy. Real-world correctness. Did the system take the right action, on the right target, with the right scope. Time to contain When something goes wrong, how fast can we stop tool execution, downgrade to read-only, or isolate a capability. Drift detection time How quickly do we notice behavioral drift before users do. The runbooks you must have If you operate agents, you need simple playbooks for predictable bad days: Injection spike → safe mode, block tool execution, force approvals Retrieval poisoning suspicion → restrict sources, raise freshness requirements, require citations Retry storm → enforce idempotency, rate limits, and circuit breakers Tool gateway instability → fail closed for writes, degrade safely for reads Model outage → fall back to deterministic paths, templates, or human escalation Clear ownership Someone has to own the runtime, not just the prompts. Platform owns the gates, tool gateway, audit, and tracing Product owns workflows and user-facing behavior Security owns policy rules, high-risk approvals, and incident procedures When these pieces are real, production becomes manageable. When they are not, you rely on luck and hero debugging. The 60-second production readiness checklist If you want a fast sanity check, here it is. Every agent has an identity, scoped per environment No shared API keys for privileged actions Every tool call goes through a policy gate with a logged decision Permissions are scoped to operations, not whole tools Writes are idempotent, retries cannot duplicate side effects Tool gateway validates inputs, scopes data, and rate-limits actions There is a safe mode that disables tools under risk There is a kill switch that stops tool execution across the fleet Retrieval is allowlisted, provenance-tagged, and freshness-aware High-impact actions require citations or they stop and ask Audit logs are immutable enough to trust later Traces are replayable end-to-end for any incident If most of these are missing, you do not have production AI yet. You have a prototype with unmanaged risk. A quick note In Azure-based enterprises, you already have strong primitives that mirror the mindset production AI requires: identity-first access control (Microsoft Entra ID), secure workload authentication patterns (managed identities), and deep telemetry foundations (Azure Monitor / Application Insights). The key is translating that discipline into the AI runtime so governance, identity, and observability aren’t external add-ons, but part of how AI executes and acts. Closing Models will keep evolving. Tooling will keep improving. But enterprise AI success still comes down to systems engineering. If you’re building production AI today, what has been the hardest part in your environment: governance, observability, security boundaries, or operational reliability? If you’re dealing with deep technical challenges around production AI, agent security, RAG governance, or operational reliability, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m open to technical discussions and architecture reviews. Thanks for reading. — Hazem AliJSON Web Token (JWT) Validation in Azure Application Gateway: Secure Your APIs at the Gate
Hello Folks! In a Zero Trust world, identity becomes the control plane and tokens become the gatekeepers. Recently, in an E2E conversation with my colleague Vyshnavi Namani, we dug into a topic every ITPro supporting modern apps should understand: JSON Web Token (JWT) validation, specifically using Azure Application Gateway. In this post we’ll distill that conversation into a technical guide for infrastructure pros who want to secure APIs and backend workloads without rewriting applications. Why IT Pros Should Care About JWT Validation JSON Web Token (JWT) is an open standard token format (RFC 7519) used to represent claims or identity information between two parties. JWTs are issued by an identity provider (Microsoft Entra ID) and attached to API requests in an HTTP Authorization: Bearer <token> header. They are tamper-evident and include a digital signature, so they can be validated cryptographically. JWT validation in Azure Application Gateway means the gateway will check every incoming HTTPS request for a valid JWT before it forwards the traffic to your backend service. Think of it like a bouncer or security guard at the club entrance: if the client doesn’t present a valid “ID” (token), they don’t get in. This first-hop authentication happens at the gateway itself. No extra custom auth code is needed in your APIs. The gateway uses Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) as the authority to verify the token’s signature and claims (issuer/tenant, audience, expiry, etc.). By performing token checks at the edge, Application Gateway ensures that only authenticated requests reach your application. If the JWT is missing or invalid, the gateway could deny the request depending on your configuration (e.g. returns HTTP 401 Unauthorized) without disturbing your backend. If the JWT is valid, the gateway can even inject an identity header (x-msft-entra-identity) with the user’s tenant and object ID before passing the call along 9 . This offloads authentication from your app and provides a consistent security gate in front of all your APIs. Key benefits of JWT validation at the gateway: Stronger security at the edge: The gateway checks each token’s signature and key claims, blocking bad tokens before they reach your app. No backend work needed: Since the gateway handles JWT validation, your services don’t need token‑parsing code. Therefore, there is less maintenance and lower CPU use. Stateless and scalable: Every request brings its own token, so there’s no session management. Any gateway instance can validate tokens independently, and Azure handles key rotation for you. Simplified compliance: Centralized JWT policies make it easier to prove only authorized traffic gets through, without each app team building their own checks. Defense in depth: Combine JWT validation with WAF rules to block malicious payloads and unauthorized access. In short, JWT validation gives your Application Gateway the smarts to know who’s knocking at the door, and to only let the right people in. How JWT Validation Works At its core, JWT validation uses a trusted authority (for now it uses Microsoft Entra ID) to issue a token. That token is presented to the Application Gateway, which then validates: The token is legitimate The token was issued by the expected tenant The audience matches the resource you intend to protect If all checks pass, the gateway returns a 200 OK and the request continues to your backend. If anything fails, the gateway returns 403 Forbidden, and your backend never sees the call. You can check code and errors here: JSON Web Token (JWT) validation in Azure Application Gateway (Preview) Setting Up JWT Validation in Azure Application Gateway The steps to configure JWT validation in Azure Application Gateway are documented here: JSON Web Token (JWT) validation in Azure Application Gateway (Preview) Use Cases That Matter to IT Pros Zero Trust Multi-Tenant Workloads Geolocation-Based Access AI Workloads Next Steps Identify APIs or workloads exposed through your gateways. Audit whether they already enforce token validation. Test JWT validation in a dev environment. Integrate the policy into your Zero Trust architecture. Collaborate with your dev teams on standardizing audiences. Resources Azure Application Gateway JWT Validation https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/application-gateway/json-web-token-overview Microsoft Entra ID App Registrations https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/active-directory/develop/quickstart-register-app Azure Application Gateway Documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/application-gateway/overview Azure Zero Trust Guidance https://learn.microsoft.com/security/zero-trust/zero-trust-overview Azure API Management and API Security Best Practices https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/api-management/api-management-key-concepts Microsoft Identity Platform (Tokens, JWT, OAuth2 https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/active-directory/develop/security-tokens Using Curl with JWT Validation Scenarios https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/active-directory/develop/v2-oauth2-client-creds-grant-flow#request-an-access-token Final Thoughts JWT validation in Azure Application Gateway is a powerful addition to your skills for securing cloud applications. It brings identity awareness right into your networking layer, which is a huge win for security and simplicity. If you manage infrastructure and worry about unauthorized access to your APIs, give it a try. It can drastically reduce the “attack surface” by catching invalid requests early. As always, I’d love to hear about your experiences. Have you implemented JWT validation on App Gateway, or do you plan to? Let me know how it goes! Feel free to drop a comment or question. Cheers! Pierre Roman
Drive Microsoft 365 renewals and upgrades ahead of pricing and packaging updates
We recently announced that in 2026, we’re expanding the availability of security and management capabilities to the commercial Microsoft 365 suites. Along with these added features, there will also be a global price update to these suites across all purchasing channels effective July 1, 2026. As a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner, this is a key moment for you to drive renewals and upgrades before July 1, 2026. Learn more about the pricing updates, as well as the promotions, offers, and go-to-market resources you can use to support your customer conversations. Learn more here Join the conversation by following the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners discussion board where both direct bill and indirect resellers collaborate, troubleshoot, and stay informed on the latest developments in the CSP ecosystem.Beyond Visibility: Hybrid Identity Protection with Microsoft Entra & Defender for Identity
In a previous blog, we explored how Microsoft Entra and Defender for Identity form a powerful duo for hybrid identity protection. But visibility alone isn’t enough. To truly defend your organization, you need to operationalize that visibility—turning insights into action, and strategy into security outcomes. Let’s explore how to take your hybrid identity protection to the next level. From Detection to Response: Building a Unified Identity SOC Security teams often struggle with fragmented signals across cloud and on-prem environments. Defender for Identity and Entra solve this by feeding identity-based alerts into Microsoft 365 Defender and Microsoft Sentinel, enabling: Centralized incident response: Investigate identity threats alongside endpoint, email, and cloud signals. Automated playbooks: Trigger actions like disabling accounts or enforcing stricter access policies. Advanced hunting: Use KQL queries to uncover stealthy attacks like domain dominance or golden ticket abuse. This unified approach transforms your SOC from reactive to proactive. Strengthening Identity Posture with Entra ID Protection Once threats are detected, Entra ID Protection helps you contain and prevent them: Risk-based Conditional Access: Automatically block or challenge risky sign-ins based on Defender for Identity signals. User risk remediation: Force password resets or MFA enrollment for compromised accounts. Policy tuning: Use insights from past incidents to refine access controls and reduce false positives. This adaptive security model ensures that your defenses evolve with the threat landscape. To learn more about these and additional policy-driven security mechanisms, please visit: Risk policies - Microsoft Entra ID Protection | Microsoft Learn Least Privilege at Scale with Entra ID Governance Identity protection isn’t just about stopping attacks—it’s about minimizing the blast radius. Entra ID Governance helps enforce least privilege by: Automating access reviews: Regularly audit who has access to sensitive resources. Just-in-time access: Grant temporary permissions only when needed. Entitlement management: Control access to apps and groups with policy-based workflows. By reducing unnecessary access, you make lateral movement harder for attackers—and easier for auditors. To learn more about least privilege, please visit: Understanding least privilege with Microsoft Entra ID Governance | Microsoft Learn Real-Time Insights with Microsoft Sentinel Sentinel supercharges your hybrid identity protection with: Custom dashboards: Visualize risky users, sign-in anomalies, and privilege escalations. Threat intelligence fusion: Correlate identity signals with external threat feeds. Data connectors: Stream Entra and Defender for Identity logs for deep analysis and long-term retention. This gives you the clarity to spot patterns and the context to act decisively. To learn more about Microsoft Sentinel, please visit: What is Microsoft Sentinel SIEM? | Microsoft Learn Next Steps: Operationalize Your Identity Strategy To move from visibility to action: Deploy Defender for Identity sensors across all domain controllers. Integrate with Microsoft 365 Defender and Sentinel for unified threat detection. Enable risk-based Conditional Access in Entra to respond to identity threats in real time. Implement least privilege policies using Entra ID Governance. Use Sentinel for advanced hunting and analytics to stay ahead of attackers. Final Thoughts Hybrid identity protection isn’t a checkbox—it’s a continuous journey. By operationalizing the integration between Microsoft Entra and Defender for Identity, you empower your security teams to detect, respond, and prevent identity threats with precision and speed.Siemens and Microsoft: Beyond Connectivity to Autonomous, Sustainable Manufacturing
Explore how Siemens Industrial Edge and Microsoft Azure IoT Operations enable secure edge-to-cloud integration, contextualized data, and AI-driven insights—transforming factories into adaptive, future-ready operations.
