Intercept Insights October 2026

Azure prices are rising. Will you pay more?

From 1 February 2027, Microsoft will increase prices for selected Azure Virtual Machines and Storage services across seven regions.

For workloads in the affected regions, the announced increases include:

Selected older VM series will also see price increases of approximately 25%.

What does this mean for you? Your Azure costs could increase even if your usage stays the same. The actual impact depends on your resources, regions and existing pricing agreements.

But your Azure bill doesn't have to rise at the same rate.

Now is the time to check for unnecessary spending.

Our Azure Cost Assessment identifies opportunities to reduce costs before the new pricing takes effect.

Digital sovereignty: Where does Intercept stand?

Should you move away from American cloud providers to protect your digital sovereignty? It's a question more organisations are asking as geopolitical uncertainty, regulation and digital dependency become harder to ignore.

But sovereignty is not achieved simply by moving workloads to a European cloud provider. It goes beyond data location and requires organisations to consider legal, technical, operational and geopolitical factors.

At Intercept, we approach sovereignty as a risk-based discussion rather than a binary choice.

Our position remains clear: Azure-first, not Azure-only.

Microsoft expands its sovereign cloud options

Microsoft announced further developments in its Sovereign Cloud strategy in October, with a focus on greater control and deployment flexibility.

These developments offer organisations more options for managing sovereignty requirements. This includes where workloads run, who can access data and how much operational control you retain over your cloud environment.

AKS upgrades could disrupt your workloads

From 1 June 2027, Microsoft will begin platform-initiated upgrades for AKS clusters that remain on unsupported Kubernetes versions beyond the 60-day grace period.

Unlike planned upgrades, these can:

• Run outside your configured maintenance window.
• Proceed despite deprecated API usage.
• Override Pod Disruption Budgets (PDBs) when necessary.
• Potentially disrupt running applications.

There's no opt-out once a cluster becomes eligible.

Check your Kubernetes end-of-life dates, deprecated APIs, add-on compatibility and upgrade settings now.

Better to upgrade on your schedule than have the platform do it for you.

13 agentic development mistakes to avoid

AI agents can write code, run commands and create pull requests. But as they take on more responsibility, mistakes can have a bigger impact.

Are your developers trusting generated code too quickly, losing important context or giving agents too much freedom?

Our latest article explores 13 common agentic development pitfalls with GitHub Copilot, from review fatigue and security gaps to poorly scoped tasks, and how to avoid them.

GitHub Copilot can now help fix security vulnerabilities

GitHub has made two code security capabilities generally available.

1. AI Scan for pull requests helps detect additional vulnerabilities in code before changes are merged.

2. Agentic autofix can investigate code scanning alerts, propose fixes and open pull requests for review.

This can help reduce the time between detecting a vulnerability and fixing it.

AI-generated fixes still need validation, and organisations should review licensing and usage costs.

Azure retirements: Are you prepared?

Several Azure services have important retirement dates. Are any of them still part of your environment?

• Azure Deployment Environments: Retires on 22 February 2027. Plan your migration to alternative development workflows.
• Microsoft Dev Box: Retires on 18 September 2028. Review dependencies and plan your transition.
• Legacy Blob and General-Purpose v1 storage accounts: Retired on 13 October 2026. Check affected accounts and potential billing changes.

These changes could affect development workflows, infrastructure dependencies and costs. Check whether your organisation uses these services and review the required next steps.

Microsoft & Security NL meetup: Are these security features worth it?

Do Microsoft's latest security features actually deliver on their promises?

Join Microsoft Security NL on 3 November at Makersfabriek in Zwolle for two practical sessions:

• Security Copilot in Microsoft Purview: Dominique Hermans tests two security agents through live demonstrations, including effectiveness and costs.
• Enterprise Application Management in Intune: Arno van Dijk explores whether EAM can simplify application deployment, updates and security.

Intercept will open the evening. Expect practical insights, a pub quiz and opportunities to meet other Microsoft security professionals.