Microsoft Corp. is kicking off the week with the release of several major updates for HDInsight, one of the main data analytics services on its Azure cloud platform.

The most significant of the changes revealed today is an up to 52 percent price reduction for companies using the product. The move comes a week after Google LLC, one of Microsoft’s top rivals in the cloud market, rolled out a similarly significant price cut for a key machine learning service. It also accidentally leaked what appeared to be two upcoming features in the blog post announcing the update, which was quickly taken offline as a result.

Microsoft didn’t give the world a glimpse of any yet-unannounced products this morning. However, it did pair the price reduction with an even bigger 80 percent cut for HDInsight deployments that run Microsoft R Server. It’s an implementation of a statistics-oriented programming language of the same name that is quite popular among data scientists.

Besides R Server, HDInsight also provides the ability to run Hadoop, Spark and several other leading open-source analytics technologies. As part of today’s update, Microsoft further expanded the list with the addition of support for Kafka, a tool used by organizations to rapidly shuffle data between applications. 

Even more significant is Microsoft’s introduction of a new addon for HDInsight called Enterprise Security Package. According to the tech giant, it’s designed to help enterprises better control how users interact with their analytics environments.

The package lets administrators restrict access down to the individual files and folders in a cluster. Moreover, they can link HDInsight with their company’s Active Directory deployment to allow to workers log in with the same credentials they use for other applications.

Last but not least, the Enterprise Security Package makes it possible to log who accessed what in an HDInsight cluster. If even deeper visibility is needed, enterprises can use the new integration with the Azure Log Analytics service that Microsoft is rolling out alongside the other features. The company says that this addition will enable administrators to do central monitoring of the different components of an analytics environment and troubleshoot potential problems more easily.

Image: Microsoft