The competitive focus in the public cloud switched gears from revolutionary to evolutionary advances last week as the big players brought their capabilities up to par with the latest trends. Microsoft Corp. set the wheels in motion after launching a data-driven security function for its popular email service.

The optional extension adds a filtering layer over Exchange Online that acts as a barrier to malicious files, checking every attachment against known viruses and sending emails that pass the initial test through an isolated environment where behavior analysis is performed to ferret out zero-day malware. Links embedded in the body of the message are also scanned along the way to identify more indirect attacks.

Positive hits are then logged to a reporting component that allows administrators to quickly identify the origins of breaching attempts, which can prove invaluable when the source is a compromised employee account. The kind of visibility is potentially just as handy for streaming normal everyday operations, a use case Nimble Storage Inc. hopes to address with the monitoring service it introduced for its flash on the same day.

The cloud-based console aggregates around 30 million data points from each system running in an environment to provide what is touted as a comprehensive view of storage infrastructure. The company says that the system identifies an average of 90 percent of all technical issues and solves 80 percent of them, which can save administrations a lot of time in large enterprise-scale implementations.

Saving time is also a priority with the infrastructure itself, particularly on cloud platforms such as Amazon’s, where every hour that a service spends running idly amounts to unnecessary costs. The online giant promises to take the hassle out of optimizing utilization through its newly updated on-demand code execution service, which debuted on Thursday with new capabilities for handling sporadic workloads.

One of main improvements is the ability to execute more than one command for each event, a small but crucial upgrade that extends the usefulness of the service to executing complex operations combining multiple actions. That functionality can come especially handy for developing mobile apps processing a lot of real-time data such as notifications, a use case that Amazon is specifically targeting with a new synchronous access option added in conjunction that allows applications to run functions almost instantaneously.