Public Preview: Introducing Vaulted Backup for Azure Data Lake Storage

Public Preview: Introducing Vaulted Backup for Azure Data Lake Storage

Announcing the Public Preview of Vaulted Backup for Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS)!

Azure Backup now supports vaulted protection for ADLS, delivering secure, off-site backups that ensure business continuity and compliance—even in cases of accidental deletion, malicious activity, or ransomware. Vaulted backups maintain an independent copy of your data, isolated from the source account.

Key Capabilities:

• Off-site protection: Recover data even if the source account is compromised. Restore to original or alternate accounts.
• Resilience against deletion and attacks: Isolated backups protect against insider threats and ransomware.
• Automated & flexible scheduling: Configure daily/weekly schedules or trigger on-demand backups.
• Long-term retention: Store backups for up to 10 years to meet compliance and archival needs.
• Security-first design: Features like soft-delete, immutability, encryption, and multi-user authorization safeguard vault data.

During public preview, you can configure vaulted backups for block blobs in HNS-enabled standard general-purpose v2 ADLS Gen2 accounts in the regions mentioned here. For more details, refer to this article.

Billing started from October 1st, 2025, including protected instance fees, write transaction charges, and backup storage costs. Refer to Pricing - Cloud Backup | Microsoft Azure for billing details.

Generally Available: Azure Firewall Updates - IP Group limit increased to 600 per Firewall Policy
Azure Firewall Policy now supports up to 600 IP Groups per policy, up from the previous limit of 200. This enhancement enables users to:

• Reduce rule complexity by replacing long lists of IPs with more well-organized IP Groups, making rule sets easier to manage and audit.
• Supports large-scale architectures and microsegmentation: Enterprises often manage hundreds of app tiers, networks, and subnets.
• Improves troubleshooting: Named groups make it easier to understand rule intent (e.g., HR-Network, IT-Network, etc.) in logging during debugging or reviews.

Generally Avaialbe: Azure NetApp Files short-term clones
Azure NetApp Files short-term clones enable space-efficient, instant read/write access to data by creating temporary thin clones from existing volume snapshots, eliminating the need for full data copies and enabling capacity savings. Ideal for software development, analytics, disaster recovery and testing, short-term clones support large datasets and allow quick refreshes from the latest snapshots. Short-term clones remain temporary and space-efficient for up to 32 days, consuming capacity only for incremental changes. This capability accelerates development and analytics workflows, improves quality and resilience, and reduces costs by avoiding full copy storage and minimizing operational overhead. This capability is now generally available in all Azure NetApp Files supported regions.

Generally Available: AI toolchain operator add-on (KAITO) for AKS
The AI toolchain operator add-on (KAITO) is now generally available on AKS, streamlining the deployment of AI inference and fine-tuning workflows using popular open-source frameworks. With vLLM as the default inference engine, this addon reduces management overhead for both AI app developers and cluster operators by automating the setup and lifecycle of key AI/ML components, accelerating development and simplifying operations.