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Azure Cognitive Services adds important certifications, greater availability, and new unified key

One of the most important considerations when choosing an AI service is security and regulatory compliance. Can you trust that the AI is being processed with the high standards and safeguards that you come to expect with hardened, durable software systems?

One of the most important considerations when choosing an AI service is security and regulatory compliance. Can you trust that the AI is being processed with the high standards and safeguards that you come to expect with hardened, durable software systems?

Cognitive Services today includes 14 generally available products. Below is an overview of current certifications in support of greater security and regulatory compliance for your business.

Added industry certifications and compliance

Significant progress has been made in meeting major security standards. In the past six months, Cognitive Services added 31 certifications across services and will continue to add more in 2019. With these certifications, hundreds of healthcare, manufacturing, and financial use cases are now supported. 

The following certifications have been added:

  • ISO 20000-1:2011, ISO 27001:2013, ISO 27017:2015, ISO 27018:2014, and ISO 9001:2015 certification
  • HIPAA BAA
  • HITRUST CSF certification
  • SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, and SOC 3 attestation
  • PCI DSS Level 1 attestation

For additional details on industry certifications and compliance for Cognitive Services, visit the Overview of Microsoft Azure Compliance page.

Enhanced data storage commitments

Cognitive Services now offers more assurances for where customer data is stored at rest. These assurances have been enabled by graduating several Cognitive Services to Microsoft Azure Core Services. The first services to make Azure Core Service commitments (effective January 1, 2019) are Content Moderator, Computer Vision, Face, Text Analytics, and QnA Maker.

For your reference, you can learn more about Microsoft Azure Core Services through the Online Services Terms (OST).

Greater regional availability

Additionally, more customers around the world can now take advantage of these intelligence services that are closer to their data. The global footprint for Cognitive Services has expanded over the past several months — going from 15 to 25 Azure data center regions.

For further reference, visit the Azure product availability page for the complete list where Cognitive Services are now available.

Simplified experience with a unified API key

When building large AI systems, many use cases require multiple Cognitive Services and as such, there are efficiencies in adding more services using a single key. Recently, we launched a new bundle of multiple services, enabling the use of a single API key for most of our generally available services: Computer Vision, Content Moderator, Face, Text Analytics, Language Understanding, and Translator Text. Now developers can provision all these services in 21 Azure regions around the world1. More regions and APIs will be added to this unified service throughout 2019.

Get started today by creating a Cognitive Service resource in the Azure portal. To learn more, watch the latest “This Week in Cognitive,” video on using the unified key.

If you haven’t yet started using Cognitive Services for your business, you can try it for free. Visit the Cognitive Services page to learn more.

1 Note: When a unified key resource is provisioned, the services that are regional will be provisioned in the selected region. Services that are non-regional will still be provisioned globally even though they can now be accessed using the unified key and API endpoint.