The one-upmanship in the public cloud continued as usual last week, with several major providers rolling out new features for their infrastructure-as-a-service platforms. Microsoft Corp. led the charge by launching a breach prevention tool called Azure Security Center that aims to help customers deal with hacking attempts more effectively.

The service’s arguably biggest selling is an automated diagnostics engine that can identify weaknesses in a cloud deployment and provide suggestions on how to solve them. It’s then possible to quickly implement the necessary changes thanks to built-in configuration functionality. Azure Security Center enables administrators to tighten user access permissions, place restrictions on application behavior and even install third malware detection tools from Microsoft partners. The company claims that early adopters were able to identify hundreds of thousands of threats during beta testing as a result.

The service entered general availability within 24 hours of Google, one of Redmond’s biggest rivals in the cloud market, upgrading its own infrastructure-as-a-service platform. The search giant launched a new data center in Oregon and added a natural language processing tool for extracting information from free-flowing text. The functionality is available through a relatively straightforward API that can be accessed on-demand by applications to parse documents, social media posts and practically any other written content. Google says that its service is able to look for everything from simple phrases to contextual information about a specific company or event.

Last week’s infrastructure-as-a-service updates were joined by a funding announcement from LogDNA Inc., which secured $1.3 million in financing to fuel the development of new features for its managed log processing tool. The service enables organizations to aggregate operational information about their systems and apps in a centralized repository where they can be analyzed as a whole. The startup claims that the functionality is useful for finding hidden software buys, troubleshooting performance issues and mapping out user behavior patterns.

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