Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Ayla Kol

Parul Manek

Kameshwar Jayaraman

Ganesh Pandey

Yoganand Rajasekaran

Brijesh Bhupendra Desai

Gregory Irving Thiel

James Charles Kleewein

Benjamin Du

Philip Ross Moyer

Zijun Hao

Mainul Mizan

Raquibur Rahman

Rebecca Benfield

Bradford R Clark

Dmitri Gavrilov

Alexander Wetmore

Brian Kress

Mark Wistrom

Yogesh Bansal

Naresh Sundaram

Manoharan Kuppusamy

Konstantin E Ryvkin

Srinivasachakrapani Kotipalli

Qi Cao

Steven Jay Lieberman

Amit A Bapat

Anuj Dhawan

Greg Thiel

Brad D Rutkowski

Priyanshu Kumar Jha

Paul Howard Rich

Girish Nagaraja

Alexander Robert Norton Wetmore

Soumit Rahman

Brad Rutkowski

Georgia Ann Huggins

Curtis Thibault

Ajay Kalidindi

Yeshua Garcia

Nikhil Aggarwal

Jaclynn Hiranaka

Methods, systems, and computer programs are presented for protecting restricted actions on encryption keys that control the management of data stored by a service provider. In some implementations, a system of the service provider receives a request to generate a data encryption policy (DEP) for data stored by the system of the service provider for a customer, the request including a reference to a customer key and an availability key. The customer key and the availability key are root keys for encrypting a data encryption key. The data encryption key is used to encrypt the data stored by the service provider for the customer. Further, destructive changes to the availability key require receiving an approval from an account of the service provider. The system of the service provider validates the DEP. The system of the service provider stores the DEP based on the validation.

Protection for restricted actions on critical resources

A client-side system detects a current location of a client device and a cloud interaction metric. The geographic area around the location of the client device is divided into grid sections. The client-side system identifies a pre-defined reference location corresponding to the grid section that the client device location resides in. The pre-defined reference location, corresponding to that grid section, and the cloud interaction metric are provided to a remote server computing system.

Abstracting geographic location to a square block of pre-defined size

A secure investigation platform in a sovereign cloud includes a request processing system that receives requests to investigate an incident. A control message processing system creates a workspace, within the sovereign cloud, so that an investigation can be conducted within that workspace. An investigation pack, which includes investigative resources used in the investigation, is identified and the workspace is pre-configured with the identified investigation pack. The control message processing system performs investigation tasks within the workspace using the investigation pack.

Secure incident investigation workspace generation and investigation control

A secure investigation platform in a sovereign cloud includes a request processing system that receives requests to investigate an incident. A control message processing system creates a workspace, within the sovereign cloud, so that an investigation can be conducted within that workspace. The control message processing system performs investigation tasks within the workspace. A secure log generation system captures information corresponding to the tasks and generates an event record based on the captured information.

Secure incident investigation event capture

Methods, systems, and computer programs are presented for protecting restricted actions on encryption keys that control the management of data stored by a service provider. In some implementations, a of the service provider receives a request to generate a data encryption policy (DEP) for data stored by the of the service provider for a customer, the request including a reference to a customer key and an availability key. The customer key and the availability key are root keys for encrypting a data encryption key. The data encryption key is used to encrypt the data stored by the service provider for the customer. Further, destructive changes to the availability key require receiving an approval from an account of the service provider. The of the service provider validates the DEP. The of the service provider stores the DEP based on the validation.

A request to perform a command or operation on a computing system is received from a support user. A clearance level needed to perform that requested command or operation is identified, and a data store that has a pool of cleared users is accessed to identify a cleared user that has an adequate clearance level. The secured user is assigned to the request. A risk level, corresponding to the requested command or operation is identified and surfaced for the secured user. The requested command or operation can be automatically executed, after it is authorized by the secured user.

Cleared user facilitation and control system

A secure investigation platform in a sovereign cloud includes a request processing system that is a user-facing system and receives requests to prepare for an incident investigation. A control message processing system creates a workspace, within the sovereign cloud, so that an investigation can be conducted within that workspace. The request processing system does not access the workspace and the control message processing system is not available for external access by a user. Data and functionality are ingested into the workspace. The control message processing system performs investigation preparation tasks within the workspace. The results of the investigation tasks are surfaced for user access.

Secure investigations platform

Systems, methods, and software technology for managing keys used to encrypt data at-rest and decrypt the data when serving requests for the data. In an implementation, a data service receives a request for data that has been encrypted at rest using a data key, wherein the data key has been encrypted using a policy key, and wherein the policy key has been encrypted using a root key. When the root key is unavailable, the data service requests a key service to decrypt the policy key using an alternative root key. When the data service receives the policy key in an unencrypted state from the key service, it decrypts the data key using the policy key and decrypts the data using the data key.

Enhanced key availability for data services

High availability architecture that employs a mid-tier proxy server to route client communications to active data store instances in response to failover and switchover. The proxy server includes an active manager client that interfaces to an active manager in each of the backend servers. State information and configuration information are maintained separately and according to semantics consistent with needs of corresponding data, the configuration information changing less frequently and more available, the state information changing more frequently and less available. The active manager indicates to the proxy server which of the data storage instances is the currently the active instance. In the event that the currently active instance is inactive, the proxy server selects a different backend server that currently hosts the active data store instance. Client communications are then routed to the different backend server with minimal or no interruption to the client.

Adding individual database failover/switchover to an existing storage component with limited impact

A data replication mechanism is proposed that relies on existing federation infrastructure enabling distributed authentication instead of storing and using explicit credentials for a remote forest. The data replication mechanism requests a federation token with data replication capabilities targeted to the remote forest and passes this token to the remote forest in lieu of explicit credentials.

Federated authentication for mailbox replication

Optimizations for data transmission may be provided. A portion of a data block may be read into a batch by a read thread on a first server. The batch may be passed to a transmission thread. The transmission thread may then transmit the first batch to a second server while the read thread asynchronously reads a second portion of the data block into another batch.

Massive structured data transfer optimizations for high-latency, low-reliability networks

A data resiliency layer provides manageable data resiliency policy options for email related applications. Through one or more APIs such applications are enabled to query whether a data resiliency policy is satisfied for a given mailbox or database at a given point in time. Email related applications may consume this information to modify their behavior such as to wait, repeat, or fail the actions at hand to the point where data committal is guaranteed to a degree specified by the data resiliency policy.

Policy driven distributed data resiliency

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Ayla Kol