Aviatrix Blog 
After a week in the snowy mountains of Salt Lake City at KubeCon 2024, Aviatrix hit the big windy city of Chicago for Ignite 2024! (It snowed there, too). It was a whirl of customer conversations, a packed booth with demos of Aviatrix features, and some exciting news as Aviatrix unveiled two announcements:
Aviatrix’s Integration with Microsoft Security Copilot
Identifying, analyzing, and responding to threats is bread and butter for a security team, but it’s expensive and exhausting without the right tools or resources. Aviatrix’s integration with Microsoft Security Copilot (CFS) turns the amazing potential of AI into practical help for customers. Using dynamic threat intelligence from the Microsoft Security Copilot, the power of OpenAI to summarize known threats and vulnerabilities, and Aviatrix Distributed Cloud Firewall API to create policy recommendations, this integration revolutionizes your team’s ability to secure data.
Aviatrix Secure Edge for Microsoft Secure Service Edge
In a world of globally distributed users and resources, ensuring that users have secure and high-performance access to your network is critical. This secure access must align with zero trust principles such as least privilege. The Aviatrix Secure Edge for Microsoft SSE uses the power of Microsoft Entra to extend secure zero-trust access across any endpoint. It ensures that any user, application, or workload across all major clouds and on-premises can enjoy fully secure, always-on access to Microsoft Global Secure Access without any agents or host configuration. With this integration, Aviatrix and Azure customers can drastically improve the user experience and security teams’ ability to safeguard their networks.
Chris McHenry, Aviatrix SVP of Product Management, played a starring role in sharing Aviatrix news and insights, including:
- Microsoft Ignite 2024 Unpacked — A conversation with Rob Strechay from theCUBE’s Microsoft Ignite 2024 Unpacked to talk about how Aviatrix is “creating the ‘easy’ button” with its recent integration with Microsoft Security Copilot, its new Aviatrix Secure Edge for Microsoft Secure Service Edge (SSE) plugin, and its new Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS offering.
- Live theater session — A presentation on the upcoming change to Azure internet access in September 2025. This session wasn’t recorded, but you can learn more from Bryan Woodworth’s recent explanation of how customers can prepare their Azure environments.
- Online session — A recorded discussion of how to “Turn the tables with GenAI on your advanced threat response model,” including a demo of the Aviatrix integration with Microsoft CFS.
Reflections
Here are some thoughts from Aviatrix team members who went to Ignite:
Bryan Woodworth, Director of Technology Partnerships
“We made fantastic progress on our integration with Microsoft Security Copilot. Strong progress also with the Entra SSE team. Chris McHenry’s presentation was awesome and very well attended. We had some great customer meetings and conversations on the floor and at the booth. The focus on AI was exciting but also overwhelming . . . It feels like we are on the edge of a major paradigm shift.”
Brad Gouzie, Microsoft Alliance Manager
“At the Microsoft Ignite conference, we drew a strong crowd of partners and customers, showcasing our integration with Microsoft’s Security CoPilot and Entra SSE live on stage. Our booth, meanwhile, was a hub of continuous activity, highlighted by back-to-back demos that spotlighted our solutions and engaged attendees. We were also able to demonstrate significant cloud savings and the seamless addition of high-speed encryption from the datacenter edge and across clouds.”
Faisal Khan, Director of Solutions Engineering
“Attending Microsoft Ignite in Chicago was an incredible experience, filled with engaging conversations and meaningful exchanges with our customers and prospects. I truly value these events as they provide an excellent opportunity to listen, learn, and understand the challenges our customers face. At the same time, I was thrilled to showcase how our solutions address real-world challenges.
Demonstrating Cloud Perimeter Security, particularly in light of the upcoming NAT gateway requirements next year, helped customers anticipate potential issues and proactively prepare for this significant change. Hybrid cloud connectivity was another key topic of interest, and our demos effectively demonstrated how to achieve this in a secure and efficient manner.
Customers were especially excited about our seamless Microsoft Security Service Edge (Entra) integrations, which now offer an agentless option. With the Aviatrix-enabled network handling the heavy lifting, customers can achieve smarter security and improved visibility.
I was especially proud to hear how many customers appreciated our demo setup, which they described as reflective of real-world deployments. By showcasing use cases like Multi-Region and Multicloud Connectivity and Distributed Firewalling, we demonstrated how our solutions enable customers to navigate complexity with confidence.
My biggest takeaway? Customers are eager to push boundaries with the cloud—whether through AI, operational efficiencies, addressing ever-growing business demands, or driving cost savings—and we’re proud to help them achieve these goals.”
Alex Weiss, Solution Architect
“When I received the invitation from Aviatrix to join Ignite, I said YES! I took a lot of pleasure in preparing a demo that brought together Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search seating in the East US region alongside the Microsoft sample OpenAI ChatGPT application but running on AWS using Aviatrix as a secure private dataplane across clouds.
There was not a single visitor passing by our booth who was not curious to know who we are and what we do — from just willing to gather info to pass to the networking team back home or challenge us on their network architecture for half an hour to discover what value we could bring to them. What a week!
Also, as a former Microsoft FTE, I consider this as a true human experience, being able to shake hands and talk face-to-face. It has been a great time to reconnect with folks from Microsoft who have such a growth mindset! So much to learn! Ready for the next one.”
Register for “Microsoft Ignite Unpacked” Webinar
Join Aviatrix and Microsoft for a comprehensive recap of this year’s Ignite, including key networking and security announcements.