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How Azure IoT enables business resilience

Businesses around the world have been harnessing the Internet of Things (IoT) to reduce operational expenses, power breakthrough customer experiences, and create new revenue streams. Now, faced with the unprecedented challenges of our times, businesses are also harnessing IoT to create safer workplaces as employees return to work, reduce expenses to weather downturns, reduce environmental impact and help with sustainability goals, and remain competitive as IoT becomes a standard way of operating a business.

Microsoft is a recognized leader in IoT. Our mission is to simplify IoT and make it available to every organization on the planet, regardless of size or technical capability. And we haven’t stopped there; we simplified IoT with no code and low code offerings like Azure IoT Central that customers and partners can use without any cloud solutions development skills.

At Microsoft, we deeply understand the value of embracing tech intensity, of using data and AI to address challenges and identify opportunities. Azure IoT plays a leading role in this transformation with an edge and cloud methodology that instills confidence in organizations’ ability to act on the insights presented to them.

Azure IoT is uniquely positioned as a fully open, flexible platform that spans industry applications and simplifies the development process. This week at Microsoft Ignite, we shared the latest from Azure IoT and how partners and customers are using these innovations in amazing ways.

RXR Realty builds on Azure IoT to increase safety

When faced with the question of what is needed to enable a safer, sustainable return to the workplace, New York-based RXR Realty looked at how they could quickly pivot the work they were doing around smart buildings to support a holistic end-to-end approach that spans an employee’s entire day—from waking up, to entering the office building and having a productive day, to going home. The result was the RxWell program, a connected environment solution built on Azure IoT, which was developed and deployed in under six months through partnership with Microsoft, McKinsey, and Infosys.

RXR Realty knew that for every one office worker that returns to the office, it drives five service jobs, such as food service and childcare providers, therefore helping stimulate the local economy. Azure technology allowed them to quickly build an edge-to-cloud solution that merges physical and digital assets, giving office workers the tools and peace of mind to navigate the workplace in safety. This technology helps manage employee rotations and enable touch-free building and elevator access.

Additionally, real-time analytics deliver insights into occupant density, air quality, humidity, and population health, enabling businesses and their workers to make informed decisions and navigate office buildings safely and confidently. Read the RXR Realty customer story and watch the Microsoft Mechanics—How We Built It video featuring RXR Realty to get a demo-rich, technical breakdown of the RxWell solution.

GE Aviation digitally models and observes aircrafts with Azure Digital Twins

As connected solutions continue to grow, companies are looking for ways to create richer models of entire connected business environments. Companies are currently able to use Azure Digital Twins to design and build sophisticated digital replicas of assets, environments, and business systems that can be used across connected environments including, smart buildings, utilities, factories, farms, railways, and entire cities.

Many of our customers and partners are already benefiting from Azure Digital Twins. Using Azure Digital Twins, GE Aviation can model digital representations of individual aircrafts and their components to track asset performance, monitor component usage, and view maintenance history. In a world where it’s not always possible to send someone on site, these insights allow GE Aviation to observe the plane inside and out and mitigate issues before they occur—helping get essential supplies and goods to our doors.

"Azure Digital Twins allows us to fuse vital data—whether it’s from our Asset Records system, our EMS system or another—into the asset-centric point of view needed for the new Asset Lifecycle product we’re creating to show an asset’s state at any point in time. Azure Digital Twins also provides an out-of-the-box ability to track changes for properties or relationships between components over time for advanced analytics. This proves valuable for supporting airlines in making critical maintenance decisions, such as whether or not to keep parts on the wing longer, while also helping reduce their maintenance burden, costs, and the amount of downtime or out-of-service-time for an aircraft.”—Nate Hicks, Sr. Product Manager at GE Aviation’s Digital Group

Azure Digital Twins, currently in preview with general availability coming soon, will bring many new capabilities plus the scale, reliability, and broader market availability necessary for customers to build production-ready solutions. Partners can use its flexible integration capabilities to bring together any service and data points from edge devices, as well as any business system—even from outside Azure. Its use of an open modeling language, Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL), allows companies to create custom models of any connected environment while maintaining compatibility with other parts of the Azure ecosystem.

ENGIE helps decarbonize energy production with Azure Time Series Insights

The emergence of connected environments also means the continued generation of large volumes of data as assets are connected and brought together. To truly see the benefits, companies require comprehensive analytics across large-scale IoT data sets. ENGIE Digital, a European provider of renewable energy, integrated Azure Time Series insights with Azure IoT Edge to deliver a robust data and AI-driven analytics platform across hundreds of renewable energy sites. This enabled them to support historical data analysis and keep pace with large volumes of data while generating contextualized insights, Azure Time Series Insights ensures they always have the latest data at hand.

Azure Time Series Insights Gen2 is a powerful, fully managed IoT analytics platform created to help contextualize and turn IoT data into actionable insights. Features made generally available in July included multi-layered, scalable storage options for both highly interactive analytics over a short time span and advanced analysis of decades worth of historical data. Rich semantic modeling also enables the analysis of billions of events across millions of IoT sensors to identify trends and anomalies, conduct root-cause analysis, and deliver insights for operational excellence.

AT&T builds cellular-enabled guardian module with Azure Sphere

Security continues to be a key investment area for Microsoft as it is imperative that every IoT device is secured by design.  Accordingly, we are very pleased to share the news from Microsoft Ignite that AT&T and Microsoft are teaming up to enable enterprises to seamlessly connect machines and equipment to the cloud with highly secure global network connectivity. The new, cellular-enabled guardian module shows how Microsoft is empowering customers to achieve more, and in turn, to deliver innovation and opportunity to their customers. Check out the full announcement blog post to see opportunities created.

In addition to all the great customer and partner announcements, we announced the following product innovations:

Azure IoT Hub on-premises in Azure Stack Hub

While customers and partners love the power and productivity Azure IoT Hub brings in the cloud, they also asked for support on-premises. We are bringing Azure IoT Hub on-premises in Azure Stack Hub. This is another industry first from Azure IoT and enables customers to take advantage of Azure IoT Hub in occasionally connected or fully disconnected environments, such as manufacturing shop floors, remote industrial sites, and more. We are putting the finishing touches on preview, which will be available in October.

Azure Defender for IoT with CyberX capabilities

IoT security is fundamental and needs to be addressed throughout the ecosystem as organizations’ assets, data, brand, and overall reputation are on the line. Building on this security momentum and research that shows 97 percent of companies highlight security as a concern when adopting IoT, we are expanding upon our existing industry-leading IoT security offerings.

First, we rebranded Azure Security Center for IoT to Azure Defender for IoT. Already generally available, this offering integrates seamlessly with Azure IoT Hub to proactively monitor IoT and IoT Edge devices and cloud solutions and provide security recommendations and alerts.

Next, we are bringing the availability of Azure Defender for IoT CyberX capabilities, which incorporates agentless technology from our recent acquisition of CyberX and offers new capabilities for securing unmanaged brownfield devices used in operational technology environments. The combination of on-device, agent-based monitoring with the new agentless CyberX capabilities makes Azure Defender for IoT one of the most fully featured and sophisticated security offerings in the industry.

And finally, we continue to partner with industry to refine the IoT Security Maturity Model (SMM) in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). This establishes a consistent approach for matching security investments with need, addressing areas including governance, processes, technologies, and operations—for which Microsoft co-authored and edited the Practitioner’s Guide.

New Azure IoT Central capabilities

Azure IoT Central is our IoT application platform that builds on top of the Azure IoT platform. It’s an easy, cost-effective way to build, manage, and operate IoT solutions. Go from idea, to proof of concept (PoC), to enterprise scale in weeks with one of the most advanced IoT application platform in the industry.

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced a set of important new Azure IoT Central capabilities including:

New Azure IoT Central application template for video analytics—Use this new application template to quickly and easily develop and scale AI-powered video analytics solutions through Intel AI Modules. Leverage existing IP cameras with Azure Media Services and Azure Storage to store and stream relevant portions of the live video feed and live video analytics.
Continuous data export—Send filtered and enriched data from your devices in near real-time to cloud destinations unlocking business insights with IoT data. The new data export capability allows you to re-use destinations, send only specific streams of data, and enrich your data with data from your Azure IoT Central application.
Use Jobs to interact with devices—The Jobs experience in Azure IoT Central has been redesigned with a new wizard that allows you to create, run, and save jobs. The UI includes rich charts and interactions for monitoring the progress and completion of jobs across a fleet of devices. Next month, we’ll be releasing additional capabilities that include job schedules and batches.
Command-line interface (CLI) improvements—The Azure IoT Central CLI extension has a new set of commands including az iot central user, az iot central api-token, and az iot central device compute-device-key for generating device SAS keys used during provisioning.
Raw data views—Use the new raw data view to inspect telemetry in real-time as it flows from your devices.
File upload—Azure IoT Central now supports uploading media and other files directly from connected devices.

New Azure IoT Edge capabilities

Azure IoT Edge is a leading edge compute offering in the industry, offering unparalleled production readiness and security. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced a set of breakthrough new capabilities including:

Nested Azure IoT Edge preview support enables customers to deploy Azure IoT Edge nodes across networks organized in hierarchical layers, such as ISA-95 network topologies, adhering to strict networking requirements to ensure a secure environment from real-time production all the way to the cloud.
Azure IoT Edge security with enclaves are now generally available, enabling deployment and execution of Trusted Applications in devices suitably equipped with trusted execution environments.
Edge Compute Node protection profile for IoT device security certification combines industry standard definitions and practices to enable how IoT stakeholders create and consume device security claims.
Industry-leading monitoring with the latest release of Azure IoT Edge enables rich monitoring of Azure IoT Edge fleets and applications at scale by emitting a rich set of metrics from IoT Edge system modules. Our new monitoring support easily integrates with existing monitoring solutions and even enables local monitoring for offline use cases.

Unified Azure Certified Device program and final certification for IoT Plug and Play

A unified Azure Certified Device program expands on previous Microsoft certification offerings that validate IoT devices meet specific capability needs and work great on Azure. This program helps device builders increase visibility of their products while making it easy for solution builders and customers to find the right device for their IoT solutions via the Azure Certified Device Catalog.

Certifications currently available include: Azure Certified Device, IoT Plug and Play, and Edge Managed. The Final IoT Plug and Play certification, announced in August, helps reduce time to market for device builders. Additionally, Azure IoT platform services and SDKs for IoT Plug and Play will be generally available by the end of this month.

View our developer documentation for more information, and join the companies already beginning to prepare and certify their devices for IoT Plug and Play.  Also, read the full technical blog to learn more about these certifications and others in development.

Accelerate technical skills with Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification and new learning content

Part of empowering tech intensity in our customers and partners is providing the tools and resources for individuals to successfully use advanced digital technologies, such as machine learning and IoT, so they can see projects through to realization. The Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification is a great first step to support developers in gaining technical knowledge, advancing their career, and becoming recognized as experts on their journey to building innovative new solutions.

Developers looking to start their IoT learning and certification journey can find free online courses at Microsoft Learn. They can also prepare for certification with the new Internet of Things Event Learning Path on GitHub. This series of five video-based modules explores topics including IoT device connectivity, IoT data communication strategies, use of AI at the edge, data processing considerations for IoT data, and IoT solutioning based on the Azure IoT reference architecture.

We encourage you to explore these new releases and innovations in depth, and learn more about how Azure IoT can help with  business resilience and staying agile for the future of connected ecosystems. We also recommend checking out these

Microsoft Ignite sessions:

Azure IoT services, roadmap, and vision: from connected assets to connected environments.
Azure IoT: Building end-to-end IoT solutions secured from edge to cloud.

Additional IoT learning resources:

IoT at Microsoft Ignite: Learn Collection.
Microsoft IoT Deep Dives.
Azure IoT Developer Specialty Certification.
How to prepare for Azure IoT Developer Specialty certification blog.
IoT Learning Path blog post.
Round-up of IoT developer resources and insights.
Security Maturity Model (SMM) training.

Azure. Invent with purpose.

Quelle: Azure

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Unlock cost savings and maximize value with new Azure infrastructure innovation

Organizations including ASOS, Keiser University, and Manulife trust and build services on Azure to run their business-critical workloads and support their customers across the world. It’s customers such as these that fuel our desire to innovate. While this desire is ever-present, given the impact of the pandemic in recent months, organizations now more than ever are looking to adopt Microsoft Azure more rapidly to enable remote work, optimize costs, increase efficiency, and innovate.

Today we’re announcing several new Azure infrastructure capabilities that unlock cost savings, increase efficiency, and extend innovation anywhere—directly addressing the challenges we have heard from customers like yourself.

Enable remote work and business continuity

Azure has more than 60 regions worldwide, enabling customers to connect their employees, customers, and partners. Organizations can easily connect their data centers and branch offices to the Azure network, taking advantage of one of the fastest, most reliable, and secure networks in the world. Recently, we’ve seen an increased adoption of Azure networking services, such as Azure VPN Gateway and Azure Firewall, which are helping customers quickly connect to their resources securely. Customers are also taking advantage of Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup, offering unlimited scale, to recover their business services in the case of an outage, and to safeguard the recovery of their data in the event of accidental deletion, corruption, or ransomware.

There has also seen a surge in remote work powered by Windows Virtual Desktop. Windows Virtual Desktop delivers a secure and always up to date experience on Azure and provides the only multi-session Windows 10 desktop in the cloud. Customers can quickly and cost-effectively, deploy virtual desktops within minutes right from the Azure portal.

In less than two weeks, Keiser University completely transitioned from a traditional brick-and-mortar school to 100 percent online, by enabling remote work with Windows Virtual Desktop. As Keiser shifted its infrastructure to the cloud, their IT department was also able to achieve tighter security policies, accelerate performance, and lower costs.

Today, we’re highlighting some of the new features we’re making to enhance remote work and business continuity:

Preview of the Cisco SD-WAN native support within the Azure Virtual WAN hubs. This will enable customers to take advantage of SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) to improve performance while retaining existing investments and skills.
Preview of the global load balancer feature for Azure Load Balancer. Customers can now use this feature for latency-based traffic distribution across regional deployments or use it to improve application uptime with regional redundancy.
Coming soon in preview, new capabilities for Windows Virtual Desktop. Support of Microsoft Endpoint Manager for Windows 10 multi-session will enable a familiar method for securing and managing virtual desktops, the same ways as physical devices. Azure Monitor integration will provide customers with a workbook that captures all the relevant monitoring telemetry and rich visualizations to identify and troubleshooting issues quickly. The MSIX app attach portal integration with Windows Virtual Desktop will enable the ability to add application layers from the Azure portal—with just a few clicks.
Preview of Backup Center to enable customers with the capability to monitor, operate, govern, and optimize data protection at scale, with a consistent management in the Azure portal. Backup Center is also an action center from where you can trigger backup related activities, such as configuring backup, restore, creation of policies or vaults—all from a single place.
Preview of backup support for Azure PostgreSQL through Azure Backup to enable long-term retention for Azure PostgreSQL.
Preview of cross-region-restore capabilities for SQL and SAP HANA backups through Azure Backup to enable customers to restore backup data from a secondary region at any given time.

Migrate to Azure to save money and achieve cloud scale and performance

Customers are increasingly choosing Azure as the trusted destination for their most demanding Windows Server, SQL Server, and Linux applications and taking advantage of great offers that help customers save money. Our comprehensive infrastructure delivers choice and flexibility and an increase in scalability with great performance as your Azure footprint grows, making Azure the cloud to run business-critical applications. Manulife chose Azure as one of its cloud platforms, migrating and modernizing its business-critical applications to improve agility, scalability, risk management, and cost-efficiency and to accelerate the support of new business models.

This week, we’re also announcing new capabilities that make Azure a great cloud to run Windows Server and Linux workloads including:

Preview of Azure Automanage for Windows Server to help customers significantly reduce day-to-day management tasks with automated operations across the entire lifecycle of Windows Server virtual machines (VMs) on Azure. IT admins can now manage their VMs with point-and-click simplicity, individually or at scale.
Preview of the Windows Admin Center in Azure to enable customers to perform deep Windows Server OS management on their Azure Virtual Machines right from Azure.
Preview of Azure Hybrid Benefit with improved flexibility and enhanced user experience for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server customers migrating to Azure. Customers can convert their pay-as-you-go instances to bring their own subscription without any downtime and maintain business continuity.
General availability of Flatcar Container Linux, compatible with CoreOS (which reached its end-of-life on May 26, 2020). Flatcar is an immutable Linux distribution making Flatcar Container Linux a viable and straightforward migration choice for container workloads running on Azure.
Preview of the Azure Image Builder to streamline cloud native image building and customization process without the need of external IP addresses, providing customers better protection against vulnerabilities. This will be generally available by the end of this year.

In addition to the investments we’re making to support your Windows and Linux workloads, customers can migrate their business-critical applications to Azure with confidence by taking advantage of an expanded compute and storage portfolio, which offers improved performance and flexibility and support for your highly scalable apps:

General availability of Azure VMware Solution. Seamlessly extend or completely migrate existing on-premises VMware applications to Azure without the cost, effort, or risk of re-architecting the application. With Azure VMware Solution, customers experience the speed and agility of the cloud, while using existing VMware skills and tools, making Azure your one-stop shop to achieve cost savings and accelerate cloud adoption.
Preview of the ability to schedule Dedicated Host and isolated VM maintenance operations, giving customers more control over platform updates. Customers can also automate guest OS image updates on Virtual Machine Scale Sets, reducing manual upkeep.
Preview of two new Azure Dedicated Hosts features to simplify VM deployment at scale. When deploying Azure Virtual Machines in Dedicated Hosts, customers can enable the platform to select the host group to which the VM will be deployed. Customers can also use Virtual Machine Scale Sets in conjunction with Dedicated Hosts to enable use of scale sets across multiple dedicated hosts within a dedicated hosts group.
Preview of automatic VM guest patching to automate rollout of security patches and simplify application management, including enhanced monitoring capabilities.
Preview of the price history and associated eviction rates of Azure Spot Virtual Machines in the Azure portal to provide increased Azure costs transparency and predictability.
General availability of new Azure Virtual Machines. The Intel 2nd generation Intel Xeon Platinum processors offer up to 20 percent greater CPU performance and better overall price-per-core performance compared to the prior generation. The new AMD EPYC™-based Dav4 and Eav4 Azure Virtual Machine series provides increased scalability (up to 96vCPUs) in 18 regions.
Preview of the NC T4 series VM and the ND A100 Series to enable AI computing. These VMs offer powerful and massively scalable AI VMs. With these new VM sizes and capabilities, customer can benefit from a greater range in underlying processor technologies.
General availability of Azure Private Link integration with disks to enhance the security of disk storage. This provides secure imports and exports of data over a private virtual network.
General availability of support for 512E format on Ultra Disks to enable migration of on-premises legacy applications to Azure with Ultra Disks, giving customers the ability to benefit from best-in-class performance of Ultra Disks.
Preview of disk performance tiers to offer the flexibility to increase disk performance independent of size, reducing costs.

In addition to new Azure services and updates, we’re investing in tools and programs to help our customers move to Azure. Azure Migrate, a central hub of tools to migrate your apps to Azure—can now perform a comprehensive discovery and assessment of their server estate, including agentless software inventory and dependency mapping. Once that is complete, customers can migrate workloads at scale, with added support now for Azure Availability Zone and Unified Extensible Firmware Interface migrations.

We’re also announcing new additions to the Azure Migration Program and FastTrack for Azure. Both the Azure Migration Program and FastTrack for Azure now support Windows Virtual Desktop to help customers accelerate their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments while enabling a secure, remote desktop experience from anywhere. In addition, the Azure Migration Program supports ASP.NET web app migration scenarios to help customers scale their websites and reduce operational burden with innovative, fully managed services like Azure App Service and Azure SQL.

Bring innovation anywhere to your hybrid and multi-cloud environments

More customers are adopting a hybrid cloud approach to operate across distributed IT environments, benefit from on-premises investments, and take advantage of edge computing. These hybrid cloud capabilities must evolve to enable innovation anywhere, while providing seamless management and ensuring uncompromised security. With new capabilities now generally available, Azure Arc offers a consistent approach to managing Windows Servers, Linux Servers, and Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge. Customers can also use the latest in the Azure Stack portfolio to modernize their data centers, remote offices, and edge locations. Learn more about updates to our Azure hybrid capabilities.

Secure apps and networks from increased cyberattacks

As the need to support remote work grows, customers must ensure security across their entire organization to reduce potential threats regardless of where IT resources sit. Microsoft invests $1 billion annually and has over 3,500 global security experts to monitor and secure the environment of Azure resources. We provide built-in security controls across layers to protect your apps and data as it moves around both inside and outside of your organization and simplify security management with a unified multi-cloud view into your security estate. We also keep your organization up to date on the security state of your workloads with AI-enabled intelligent insights and recommendations on how to further strength your assets or respond to threats.

Yesterday, we announced significant innovation in our Azure security suite with a preview of behavioral intelligence and third-party threat intelligence sources to Azure Sentinel, the first cloud native SIEM in the market. We also announced the preview of Azure Defender, a new service within Azure Security Center, providing customers with more protection against threats entering the environment. Learn more about our new Azure security innovations.

These are just a few infrastructure innovations highlighted at Microsoft Ignite this week. Whether you’re attending the event live or accessing the recorded content, make sure to check out all of our Azure Infrastructure sessions and learn more about optimizing costs and maximizing value in our upcoming webinar miniseries. You can also take advantage of self-paced technical learning paths at Microsoft Learn.

We look forward to seeing you integrate these latest capabilities in your cloud adoption journey.

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Gain IT efficiency for Windows Server with new Azure innovation

Companies such as Church and Dwight and Altair are migrating their Windows Server apps to Microsoft Azure to transform how they run their business, optimize costs, and increase IT efficiency and security. Today, we are excited to share new capabilities that continue to make Azure the best place to run Windows Server apps.

Increase IT efficiency with Azure Automanage

We often hear from customers that maintaining and operating servers on-premises is complex. Windows Server admins are responsible for day-to-day administration tasks such as backup, disaster recovery, and security updates. With growing security threats every day, ensuring that apps and data remain secured compounds this administrative burden.

This week, we’re introducing the preview of Azure Automanage, a new Azure service that helps customers significantly reduce day-to-day management tasks with automated operations across the entire lifecycle of Windows Server virtual machines (VMs). IT admins can now manage the entire VM lifecycle with point-and-click simplicity, individually or at scale.

Azure Automanage works with any new or existing Windows Server VM on Azure. It automatically implements VM management best practices as defined in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. Azure Automanage eliminates the need for service discovery, enrollment, and configuration of VMs. For example, Azure Automanage enables customers to implement security best practices by offering an easy way to apply an operating system baseline to VMs per Microsoft’s baseline configuration. Services such as Azure Security Center are automatically onboarded per the configuration profile chosen by the customer. If the VM’s configuration drifts from the applied best practices, Azure Automanage detects and automatically brings the VM back to the desired configuration. Learn more about Azure Automanage and join the preview.

Manage Azure Virtual Machines with Windows Admin Center in the Azure portal

Windows Admin Center delivers a modern, integrated, and simplified browser-based interface to configure and troubleshoot servers. Customers can also connect their on-premises Windows Server to Azure and use Azure services for backup, disaster recovery, centralized security management, and threat protection. Customers use Windows Admin Center to manage millions of Windows Server nodes today, and we’re continuously making it better based on their feedback.

This week, we are introducing the preview of Windows Admin Center available natively in the Azure portal. It is a built-in capability that enables customers to take advantage of the familiar Windows Admin Center experience to manage Windows Server VMs right within Azure. Customers can now do detailed management, configuration, troubleshooting, and maintenance from a unified user experience. For example, customers can launch an in-browser Remote Desktop (RDP) session for Azure Virtual Machines in a few clicks or manage expired certificates, right from the Azure portal. This new capability will be available for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 versions. Learn more about Windows Admin Center in Azure portal.

Bring Azure services on-premises with Azure Arc and Azure Kubernetes Service

We understand that customers cannot move all their Windows Server apps to the cloud due to compliance requirements. With Azure Arc enabled servers now generally available, admins can use the Azure portal to manage and govern Windows Server anywhere.

We also want to offer options for customers who want to containerize Windows Server apps on-premises. This week, we are introducing the preview of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Stack HCI. This new service simplifies the Kubernetes cluster deployment on Azure Stack HCI. It offers a consistent and familiar Azure experience with built-in security. Customers can use Azure management and governance services such as Azure Monitor to manage on-premises Kubernetes clusters. With AKS on Azure Stack HCI, customers can consistently and easily deploy their modern apps anywhere—cloud, on-premises and edge. Learn more about Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI and register to join the preview.

We are excited to share new Azure innovation that will help you gain IT efficiency for Windows Server. Whether you are attending Microsoft Ignite live or accessing the on-demand content, make sure to check out Windows Server sessions to see these capabilities in action. You can also register for Windows Server Summit where we will dive deep into these capabilities and more.

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Achieve agility with Azure Data in a changing world

We live in demanding times, and change is happening faster than ever before. Data has always provided important insights into changing contexts, but to navigate the rapidly evolving landscape, adding layers of intelligence where AI advances decision making and applies predictive analytics at the edge to unlock new possibilities is pivotal.

At Microsoft Ignite, we shared a number of announcements to help organizations rebuild in a changing world. Following the announcement of Azure Arc in November 2019, we are announcing the preview launch of Azure Arc enabled data services. With this preview, customers can now bring Azure data services to any infrastructure across data centers, edge, or any cloud using Kubernetes on their hardware of choice. Data services now in preview include SQL Managed Instance and PostgreSQL Hyperscale. Data sources are often spread across diverse infrastructures which lead to challenges with data sovereignty, latency, and regulatory compliance. Customers can now benefit from Azure innovations such as always current evergreen SQL, elastic scale, and a unified management experience—while being able to run on any infrastructure.

We also announced the general availability of Azure SQL Edge, which brings the most secure SQL engine to IoT gateways and edge devices. Azure SQL Edge supports predictive intelligence with AI right where the action happens, with built-in data streaming and storage, packed into a small-footprint container—less than 500 megabytes—running in ARM and x64-based devices in connected, disconnected, or semi-connected environments. All with the same industry-leading security, the same familiar developer experience, and the same tooling that customers already know and trust in SQL Server and Azure SQL.

Fugro, a leading global geo-data specialist, helps clients in the energy and infrastructure sectors gain vital insights using Azure IoT Edge and Azure SQL Edge to boost efficiency and speed innovation. Reports that once took two weeks to compile now take eight minutes.

“We use this geo-data to ensure that anything we build or operate on this rapidly changing planet is done in a safe and sustainable way.” – Pim Peereboom, Global Project Manager of Integrated Marine Management at Fugro

Azure SQL announcements at Microsoft Ignite

Microsoft continues to invest in our Azure SQL family of SQL cloud databases including SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Databases. We announced several new capabilities in SQL Managed Instance that make for more seamless migration and app modernization in Azure—including upcoming support for distributed transactions between multiple SQL Managed Instances and a preview of Azure Machine Learning Services for R and Python analytics. With general availability of global VNet peering, it’s now easy to connect virtual networks in different regions in an easy and performant way for enhanced business continuity and disaster recovery options. Sign up to learn more at our Azure SQL virtual event, Transform Your Applications with Azure SQL. 

We also made announcements that continue to deliver on our commitment to provide the best developer experience of any cloud. Azure Cosmos DB serverless, now in preview, offers consumption-based pricing with no minimums making it a cost-effective way to get started with the service or run small applications with light traffic.

Flexible Server, a new deployment option now in preview for Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL, offers developers enhanced choice with greater performance and manageability by building on a new architecture with native Linux integration. Developers can also benefit from a guided experience that simplifies end-to-end deployment and reduces costs with stop and start capabilities.

Azure Synapse, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Cache for Redis

Azure Cache for Redis now has two new product tiers in preview: Enterprise and Enterprise Flash. These tiers, developed in partnership with Redis Labs, integrate features from their Redis Enterprise offering for the first time on a major cloud platform making caches larger, more reliable, and provide new deployment options to unlock new use cases such as data analytics.

We are excited to see the ability to deliver near real-time analytics over operational data become a reality with Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB. With a single click, you can now analyze large volumes of operational data in Azure Cosmos DB in near real-time with no extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) pipelines, and no performance impact on transactional workloads.

As we look beyond the horizon, the opportunity to reinvent your business and achieve agility with your data is substantial. Your data has so much potential. We look forward to seeing what you can do with it.

Azure. Invent with purpose.
Quelle: Azure

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Achieving business resilience with cloud application development

Over the last six months, organizations of all shapes and sizes have had to suddenly pivot to serve customers, employees, and partners exclusively via digital channels. In this uncertain business environment, we have seen resilient organizations adapt in three dimensions: by supporting remote application development; improving business agility with a focus on Developer Velocity; and by driving cost savings. At Microsoft Ignite, we've shared new capabilities that enable developers and the teams they support to become more resilient with Microsoft Visual Studio, GitHub, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft Power Apps.

Creating resilient development teams with remote development

At Build, we shared innovation in our developer tools and services that allow development teams to code, collaborate, and ship software from anywhere. Since then, we have seen how our customers have used these tools to adapt. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has moved their development process to the cloud using Visual Studio and Azure, and in doing so have made their developer team twice as productive as before. We’ve also shared our own stories about how development teams at Microsoft have met the challenge of shifting to remote work.  

In order to help developers meet today’s challenges, we’ve focused on making Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code the most productive developer tools for distributed development teams. Both have strong integration with GitHub, where over 50 million developers code together. With GitHub Codespaces, developers can create cloud-powered development environments right from Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. The release of Visual Studio 2019 16.8 Preview 3.1 includes support for the GitHub Codespaces beta. Learn more about what's in the latest release so you can code in your own cloud-hosted dev box.

GitHub Codespaces integration with Visual Studio

In a remote context, development teams need to be able to communicate and collaborate in ways that are intuitive and natural. With Visual Studio and GitHub, developers can collaborate both asynchronously and in real-time. We have updated the Git tooling experience in Visual Studio to enable more async collaboration with other repo contributors, and the GitHub extension for Visual Studio Code enables developers to work with GitHub Issues and Pull Requests directly in the editor. For real-time communication, Visual Studio Live Share, is supported in Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and now in GitHub Codespaces, enabling developers to collaborate from anywhere.

With distributed team members pushing code changes more frequently, it's more important than ever that your DevOps platform makes it easy to create seamless, automated, and secure code-to-cloud deployments. The publish experience in Visual Studio now has an option to generate a GitHub Actions workflow for CI/CD to your preferred Azure resources, by using deployment secrets configured in your GitHub repository. We are alsor releasing new GitHub Actions for Azure to scan Azure resources for policy violations, check for vulnerabilities in container images, and for deploying ARM templates. These enable developers to create automated code-to-cloud workflows with integrated security and governance, and also help organizations adopt an “everything as-code” DevOps model for everything from infrastructure to compliance and security policies and build and release pipelines, enabling continuous improvement, better re-use and greater transparency. To learn how to incorporate these actions into your workflows, check out our GitHub Actions for Azure documentation 

Increasing Developer Velocity and agility

In a recent study published by McKinsey & Co, companies that have a higher Developer Velocity Index (DVI) score, experience up to five-fold increase in revenue growth and 55 percent higher innovation. Public cloud adoption and modern application development practices—using a mix of cloud native architectures with Containers/Kubernetes and serverless functions, DevOps, managed databases, and rapid application development with low-code platforms—can help organizations increase Developer Velocity.

When it comes to increasing agility, we have seen that development teams that adopt DevOps are able to ship new features faster. Although many organizations are adopting DevOps, implementing effective practices at enterprise-scale can be difficult. To help with this, we have now published the Enterprise DevOps Report 2020–2021, a Microsoft and Sogeti research study of more than 250 cloud and DevOps implementations. In this report, you can learn how to scale your DevOps practices to improve business metrics, customer satisfaction, and Developer Velocity, creating the right environment for developers to innovate.

There is increasing demand to accelerate line-of-business (LoB) application development. In fact, the demand is growing 5X faster than IT departments can deliver. To address this challenge, Power Apps offers low-code development experience for anyone to create web and mobile frontends and business processes in days instead of weeks or months. Combined with Azure services, Power Apps allows developer teams to scale to demand without needing to compromise on architectural fundamentals, compliance, quality, or scale. See how Priceline Australia gained insights from their 1,000+ retail stores using Power Apps and Azure. Today, we are announcing that developers can now build custom connectors with Azure API Management and Azure Functions to any Microsoft hosted third-party, legacy, or LoB apps. We are also announcing GitHub integration for Power Apps, that allows developers to streamline application lifecycle management using the CI/CD tool they are already familiar with. These features are now available in preview.

Integrations with existing enterprise applications play a key role in delivering new features faster. Azure Logic Apps, our workflow platform with more than 300 connectors to enterprise and SaaS applications, has enabled over 40,000 customers to build workflows seamlessly. Today, we are announcing the preview of a new containerized runtime for Logic Apps, the same runtime powering Azure Functions, offering hosting flexibility to run on App Service Plans, Kubernetes, or any cloud and enterprise features such as private endpoints, deployment slots, and more cost-effective Virtual network (VNET) access.

I'm also sharing that .NET 5 Release Candidate is now available, with general availability coming on November 10, 2020 at .NET Conf. This release continues the journey to unify the .NET platform across mobile, web, desktop, machine learning, big data and IoT workloads, enabling developers to use a single platform for all their application needs. .NET 5 also has several cloud and web investments, such as smaller, faster single file applications that use less memory, which are appropriate for microservices and containerized applications. This release includes significant performance improvements, support for Windows ARM64, and new releases of C# 9.0 and F# 5.0 languages. Developers can now download .NET 5 RC with a go-live license with support for production deployments.

Delivering cost savings with the cloud

With remote work and digital customer engagement resulting in increased website traffic, many customers are finding that their existing web applications and infrastructure are limited in capacity and lack the agility to address changing business demands. Azure App Service hosts over 2M web apps and processes over 50B requests every day. Combined with Azure SQL Database, App Service offers a fully managed environment to migrate and modernize all your web apps.

In a recent report on .NET app modernization, GigaOm found that customers migrating their .NET Apps to Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database can save up to 54 percent compared to on-premises. City National Bank migrated an integrated accounting and bill-pay client solution, built on ASP.NET and SQL Server, to Azure App Service and Azure SQL, with minimal code changes. This migration helped them get a clear understanding of the ROI, better cost optimization and increased agility to launch new web and mobile apps faster. This week we're announcing several major investments in App Service to make it easier and more cost effective to migrate and modernize your .NET web apps with Azure.

The new Premium v3 (Pv3) App Service Plan can handle large scale web apps, supporting more apps per instance and larger, memory intensive apps with up to 32GB per instance.​ We’re also making Windows Containers support in App Service generally available, enabling customers to run a broader range of .NET applications with COM+ or custom OS dependencies.​

Starting November 1, 2020, we will offer Reserved Instance (RI) Pricing for App Service, delivering up to 35 percent cost savings with a 1-year commitment and up to 55 percent for a 3-year commitment, compared to pay as you go prices. A fantastic way to save even more costs as you look to migrate existing Web Apps to the cloud. For customers that need an isolated environment to secure their most sensitive web apps, we are announcing the preview of App Service Isolated v2 plan, with a simplified deployment experience and no stamp fee, offering a 80 percent reduction in costs, compared to Isolated v1 plans.

Kubernetes has become the standard way for customers to orchestrate containers at scale. We recently shared how to optimize your costs with scale-to-zero configurations, leveraging spot node pools and by using resource quota policies with Azure Policy for Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS). Today, we are announcing the preview of AKS start/stop cluster feature, allowing customers to completely pause an AKS cluster and pick up where they left off later with a switch of a button, saving time and cost. Azure Policy add-on for AKS is now generally available enabling customers to audit and enforce policies and drive in-depth compliance across pods, namespaces, and other Kubernetes resources.

We also want developers to be able to work with cloud resources as easily as if they were local. The release of our Bridge to Kubernetes extensions for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code allows you to develop against microservices within a running AKS cluster from your development environment. This enables debugging existing services without needing to configure or deploy a new cluster. Support for AKS is generally available today, and is in preview for all other Kubernetes platforms. 

Lastly, we believe that Azure is the best place for Open Source and have been working to give developers more control, confidence, and options to reduce costs. Yesterday, we announced the preview of a new deployment option for Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Flexible Server. We also announced the preview of a new serverless pricing option for all Azure Cosmos DB APIs, which offers a cost effective option to get started with Azure Cosmos DB and is a perfect fit for applications with intermittent traffic patterns. Learn more about innovation on databases. 

 I have always been inspired by developers and I continue to be motivated to empower them and their teams. We have released new capabilities to help your team become more resilient with remote application development and increase agility and Developer Velocity while driving significant cost savings with Visual Studio, GitHub, Azure and Power Apps. I hope you will join us in the Azure Application Development Keynote, where we will share more information about these releases and share some awesome demos.

Happy coding!

Azure. Invent with purpose
Quelle: Azure

da Agency

Bring innovation anywhere with Azure’s multi-cloud, multi-edge hybrid capabilities

As businesses shift priorities to enable remote work, take advantage of cloud innovation, and maximize their existing on-premises investments, relying on an effective multi-cloud, multi-edge hybrid approach is even more important than it has ever been.

Since the beginning, Microsoft Azure has always been hybrid by design, providing customers consistency and flexibility in meeting their business needs and empowering them to invent with purpose. This is one of the many reasons that the world’s leading brands trust their businesses to run on Azure. As we expand our Azure hybrid capabilities, we give customers a holistic and seamless approach to run and manage their apps anywhere across on-premises, multi-cloud, and the edge. Today, we are releasing even more innovation in our Azure hybrid portfolio.

Azure Arc: Bring Azure to any infrastructure

In November 2019, we launched Azure Arc to give customers the flexibility to innovate anywhere with Azure. Azure Arc does two key things: first, it brings Azure management capabilities to any infrastructure, and second, it enables Azure services to run anywhere. Since its launch, Azure Arc has seen tremendous customer interest and adoption across all industries. Organizations such as Africa’s Talking, Avanade, DexMach, Ferguson, Fujitsu, KPMG, and Siemens Healthineers are already realizing value with Azure Arc. They use Azure Arc to manage and govern their resources more efficiently in distributed environments, and they use Azure Arc to bring Azure data services on-premises.

Today, we are announcing more innovation with Azure Arc:

Azure Arc enabled data services is now in preview. Now, Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure PostgreSQL Hyperscale can run across on-premises datacenters, multi-cloud, and the edge. Customers can now take advantage of the latest Azure managed database innovation, such as staying always current with evergreen SQL, elastic scale, and a unified data management experience, regardless of whether it’s running in Azure, running in their datacenter, or running in a different public cloud. And, these data services work in both connected and disconnected modes. Customers are seeing wide-ranging benefits in improving their IT productivity and business agility with Azure Arc enabled data services. Sign up for the preview of Azure Arc enabled data services.
Azure Arc enabled servers is now generally available. Customers can seamlessly organize and govern Windows and Linux servers—both physical and virtual machines (VMs)—across their multi-cloud, multi-edge environment, all from the Azure portal. Customers can now use Azure management services to monitor, secure, and update servers, and audit them with the same Azure Policy across multi-cloud and multi-edge deployments. In addition, customers can implement standardized role-based access control across all their servers to meet important compliance requirements. Learn more about Azure Arc.

Azure Stack HCI and Azure Stack Hub: Modernize on-premises datacenters

Over three years ago, we were first to market with Azure Stack that enables customers to bring cloud innovation into their own datacenters to take advantage of cloud technology while meeting any regulatory compliance requirement and the ability to run disconnected. Since then, we’ve continued to grow the Azure Stack portfolio to provide cloud consistent infrastructure and Azure services to a range of solutions within local datacenters and running at the edge.

Today, we’re launching new Azure Stack capabilities to help customers modernize their datacenters:

Preview of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) on Azure Stack HCI. AKS on Azure Stack HCI enables customers to deploy and manage containerized apps at scale on Azure Stack HCI, just as they can run AKS within Azure. This now provides a consistent, secure, and fully managed Kubernetes experience for customers who want to use Azure Stack HCI within their datacenters. Sign up for the preview of AKS on Azure Stack HCI.

Azure Stack Hub is now available with GPUs. To power visualization intense apps, we’ve partnered with AMD to bring the AMD Mi25 GPU to Azure Stack Hub, which allows users to share the GPU in an efficient way. The NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPU enables customers to run compute intense machine learning workloads in disconnected or partially connected scenarios. The NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU provides visualization, inferencing, and machine learning for less compute intense workloads. Learn more about Azure Stack Hub.

Azure VMware Solution: Seamlessly extend and migrate VMware workloads to Azure

Many customers want the ability to seamlessly integrate their existing VMware environments with Azure. Today, we are announcing Azure VMware Solution is now generally available. Designed, built, and supported by Microsoft, Azure VMware Solution is cloud verified by VMware and enables customers to migrate VMware workloads to the cloud with minimal complexity. The Azure service includes the latest VMware Cloud Foundation components such as vSphere, NSX-T, HCX, and vSan, and integrates with a rich set of partner solutions, so customers can continue to use existing tools and skills. In addition, with our licensing offering Azure Hybrid Benefit, Azure is the most cost-effective cloud to migrate your Windows Server and SQL workloads to, whether they run on VMware or elsewhere. Learn more about Azure VMware Solution.

New innovation to run compute and AI at the Edge

Organizations are extending compute and AI to the edge of their network to unlock new business scenarios. Imagine that a retail store always stocks the right products at the right places, a hospital extends patient care to the most remote areas in the world, or a factory optimizes its performance level against capacity in real time. It’s what we call the intelligent edge. Azure offers a comprehensive portfolio of cloud services and edge device support to help customers realize these new use-cases.

Today, we are releasing new edge capabilities:

Azure SQL Edge is now generally available, bringing the most secure Microsoft SQL data engine to IoT gateways and edge devices. Optimized for edge workloads, this small-footprint container supports built-in data streaming, storage, and AI in connected or disconnected environments. Built on the same codebase as SQL Server and Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Edge provides the same industry-leading security, the same familiar developer experience, and the same tooling that many teams already know and trust. Learn more about Azure SQL Edge.

Two new Azure Stack Edge rugged devices are available. Customers can perform machine learning and gain quick insights at the edge by running the Azure Stack Edge Pro R with NVIDIA's powerful T4 GPU and the lightweight, portable Azure Stack Edge Mini R. Both devices are designed to operate in the harshest environments at remote locations. To check out these new devices through augmented reality in 3D, download the Microsoft Hardware Experience on iOS or on Android.

Azure Stack Edge is now available with GPUs. Customers can run visualization, inferencing, and machine learning at the edge with the Azure Stack Edge Pro series powered by the NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU. This unlocks a broad set of new edge scenarios, such as automatically recognizing license plates for efficient retail curbside pickup, and detecting defects in real time in products on a manufacturing assembly line. Learn more about Azure Stack Edge.

AT&T builds cellular-enabled guardian module with Azure Sphere: AT&T and Microsoft are teaming up to enable enterprise customers to connect their machines and equipment securely by Azure Sphere guardian devices to the cloud seamlessly via AT&T’s cellular network, without needing to rely on Wi-Fi systems. This enables customers to connect their devices where Wi-Fi does not meet their security standards. For example, customers who operate franchises in third-party locations will be able to connect their machines directly to their own clouds, bypassing third-party-owned Wi-Fi. The AT&T powered guardian device expands Azure Sphere’s reach with the AT&T Global SIM that can operate in over 200 countries, and provides multi-layered, unified security from edge to cloud. Learn more about Azure Sphere.

We look forward to sharing even more updates on our innovation in multi-cloud, multi-edge hybrid at Microsoft Ignite this week! To learn more about our Azure hybrid offerings, visit the Azure hybrid solutions page. You can also register for our upcoming webinar series that will demonstrate use case scenarios and best practices using key Azure hybrid offerings.

Azure. Invent with purpose.
Quelle: Azure

da Agency

Introducing Azure Orbital: Process satellite data at cloud-scale

Data collected from space to observe Earth is instrumental in helping address global challenges such as climate change and furthering of scientific discovery and innovation. The cloud is central to both modern communications scenarios for remote operations and the gathering, processing, and distributing the tremendous amounts of data from space.

Today we’re announcing the preview of Azure Orbital. The new ground station service enables satellite operators to communicate to and control their satellites, process data, and scale operations directly with Microsoft Azure. With Azure Orbital, the ground segment, including the ground stations, network, and procedures, becomes a digital platform now integrated into Azure and complemented by many partners.

Amergint, Kratos, KSAT, Kubos, Viasat, and US Electrodynamics INC. and have joined the ecosystem of Azure Orbital partners, each of them bringing their unique value and expertise for the benefits of our customers.

Microsoft is well-positioned to support customer needs in gathering, transporting, and processing of geospatial data. With our intelligent cloud and edge strategy currently extending over 60 announced cloud regions, advanced analytics, and AI capabilities coupled with one of the fastest and most resilient networks in the world—security and innovation are at the core of everything we do.
​

Azure Orbital scenarios

Earth observation and IoT

Satellite images are used in many industries. Areas such as meteorology, oceanography, agriculture, geology, and defense and intelligence most often use satellites that are in a non-geostationary orbit (NGSO), including low-earth orbit (LEO) or medium-earth orbit (MEO). As the satellites are orbiting, a substantial amount of ground stations are required to establish contact within a specific time window to downlink the data to Earth.

Azure Orbital enables satellite operators to schedule contacts with their spacecrafts and directly downlink data into their virtual network (VNet) in Azure. Azure Virtual Networks are isolated, highly secure, and governed by Microsoft's more than 90 compliance certifications covering applications and datasets.

Azure Orbital on-ramps your data directly into Azure, where it can immediately get processed with market-leading data analytics, geospatial tools, machine learning, and Azure AI services.

Contact scheduling will be available for Microsoft owned and operated ground stations in X, S, and UHF band frequencies via shared high gain antennas. We are also directly interconnecting our global network with our partner's ground station networks for easy scheduling with your preferred Teleport operators while maintaining the benefits of direct integration with Azure.

Whether you choose to use Microsoft or partner ground stations, the digitized Radio Frequency (RF) signal from the antenna to the cloud can be transmitted using the VITA Radio Transport (VRT) format (VITA-49) and then subsequently be demodulated using custom modems or cloud modems offered by the platform.

 ​

Global communications

In-flight connectivity (IFC), maritime, connected cruise, mobility, and video broadcasting are examples of communication scenarios addressed by the space industry. Leveraging Azure Orbital, satellite operators can go beyond selling network capacity with the accelerated building of managed services. Azure Orbital offers interconnection of your existing ground stations and colocation of dedicated antennas close to our network PoPs or Datacenters. Orbital enables you to take full advantage of our global network and services infrastructure to build new product offerings and service chains with the edge, 5G, SD-WAN, and AI while continuously optimizing your operations and footprint.

​

SES has selected Microsoft Azure to collocate the ground stations (including Telemetry, Tracking, and Command Systems) of their next-generation SES O3b mPOWER communication system. SES has designed a cloud-scale operational environment and will leverage Azure Orbital as a core platform to scale and build managed services and streamline order and service delivery management processes.

"In the last 12 to 18 months, our focus has been to accelerate our customers' cloud adoption plans. We are pleased to have found an ideal partner in Microsoft with its new Azure Orbital system. This partnership leverages both companies' know-how—SES's experience in satellite infrastructure and Microsoft's cloud expertise—and is building blocks in developing new and innovative solutions for the future," said JP Hemingway, CEO of SES Networks."we are thrilled that we will be co-locating, deploying and operating our next-generation O3b mPOWER gateways alongside Microsoft's data centers. This one-hop connectivity to the cloud from remote sites will enable our MEO customers to enhance their cloud application performance, optimize business operations with much flexibility and agility needed to expand new markets."

The ground segment is a significant part of any satellite operator's investments. An ecosystem of partners has joined our Managed Service Providers (MSP) program to enrich the platform by selecting services and technology integrations. Cloud modems optimized for Azure, Mission Control Operations are examples of third-party cloud-native services provisioned on-demand when your business needs it.

Azure Orbital is now in preview. For questions, feedback, and interest to participate in the preview, please contact MsAzureOrbital@microsoft.com. Please visit our product documentation to learn more, share feedback, or express interest in participating in the preview.

Learn more about Azure Orbital

Introduction to Azure Orbital
What’s new in Azure networking

Azure. Invent with purpose.

Quelle: Azure

da Agency

AT&T powered guardian device with Azure Sphere enables highly secured, simple, and scalable connectivity from anywhere

In July 2019, Microsoft and AT&T entered a strategic alliance to lead innovation and deliver powerful new solutions in some of the most transformative technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT). Today, we are sharing that as part of that partnership, AT&T is introducing a new IoT solution consisting of a cellular guardian device powered by their network, security, and support services, and built with Azure Sphere.

As a global leader in telecommunications and network security, AT&T is deeply invested in providing resilient solutions that free their customers to innovate with confidence. When looking for an IoT platform to build upon, they were uncompromising in their quest to balance ease of use with best-in-class device security. They wanted renewable security to guard against emerging threats and keep devices secured over time. They chose Microsoft Azure Sphere for device security.

The cellular-enabled guardian device powered by AT&T combines the fully supported multi-layered security of AT&T’s core network with Azure Sphere’s integrated silicon, software, and cloud services. The Azure Sphere components work seamlessly together to deliver ongoing device security updates for more than ten years. The guardian device physically attaches to brownfield equipment with little to no equipment redesign, delivering edge-to-cloud communication via the AT&T secured cellular network.

AT&T’s guardian device is a transformative example of how Microsoft is working with industry leaders, like AT&T, to achieve more and, in turn, to deliver innovation and opportunity to their customers. Organizations in over 200 countries and territories can now connect their various devices directly to their own cloud network to securely manage and monitor them remotely, unlocking:

Direct connection to their own clouds bypassing the need for Wi-Fi.
Device connection in remote areas without Wi-Fi access.
Devices which are mobile without the need for disconnection and re-pairing to multiple Wi-Fi networks.

A new connectivity option for enterprises

Cellular connectivity is a great addition to the Wi-Fi connectivity option natively offered through Azure Sphere. Cellular presents a compelling opportunity for enterprise customers to solve real world business problems through data and insights.

For instance, retail organizations with embedded or franchised stores (such as convenience stores, fast food restaurants, coffee shops, located in grocery stores, airports, hospitals, or remote locations) with third-party owned Wi-Fi, are now able to simply retrofit a cellular guardian module with Azure Sphere to their equipment and connect securely and directly to their cloud environments to improve product quality and customer service and to reduce operating costs.

Delivering on the vision of securely connected devices and data

As enterprises set their sights on what can be achieved through innovation, the precautions organizations must take when connecting their essential equipment to the cloud are well warranted. If not secured adequately, infrastructure can become vulnerable to exploitation, leading to equipment being rendered useless or controlled for malicious purposes, data pollution or confidential information being compromised.

IoT attacks put organizations at risk and can be so disruptive that they jeopardize long-term business value and objectives. With fully supported network security from AT&T, and device level security from Azure Sphere, organizations can leverage the benefits of secured bi-directional data transfer between devices and any cloud. AT&T provides front-end security, including wireless network security, professional services, and support to the guardian device. Azure Sphere provides the back-end security, protecting the device or equipment connected to the guardian device. This combination empowers enterprises to protect their devices while transforming their business with connected experiences.

Streamlined and scalable connectivity​

AT&T’s extensive global network makes it possible for customers’ data to travel via cellular with fast activation out of the box. The cellular guardian device with Azure Sphere enables device connections in any market, with seamless and agile deployments. The AT&T Global SIM allows customers to utilize the same AT&T subscription across more than 200 countries and territories without the need to re-credential.

Azure Sphere’s mission is to empower every organization on the planet to connect and create secured and trustworthy IoT devices. Everything we do is organized around this mission. AT&T’s offer complements our mission; at its core, it’s designed to accelerate IoT transformation by delivering anywhere, anytime access to secured connectivity.

AT&T wants to make IoT easier for their customers. Mo Katibeh, EVP-Chief Product and Platform Officer, puts it nicely, “With the combined solutions from AT&T and Microsoft, we’re offering our customers the means to accelerate their innovation and business problem-solving – simply. This is about creating simple customer experiences that remove connectivity complexity. With cellular, devices just work without the customer having to do Wi-Fi pairing or managing issues with Wi-Fi networks that are not under their control.”

Organizations can streamline their IoT deployment process by leveraging the suite of AT&T’s professional services through the AT&T powered guardian device with Azure Sphere. Features include enhanced support, priority care and monitoring from a single provider, and simplified device connectivity process. By taking advantage of these services, organizations can scale their cellular connectivity deployment, ultimately reaching more end customers.

Get started today

AT&T has introduced a truly unique offering to the market by providing network security and services for a cellular guardian device. It’s exciting to see a network leader back their cellular guardian device with a commitment to security—AT&T is paving the way for customers to achieve more through scalable cellular-enabled IoT deployments.

Explore more about cellular connectivity with Azure Sphere and connect with this AT&T team to explore the opportunities the AT&T powered guardian device with Azure Sphere can bring to your business.

Azure. Invent with purpose.
Quelle: Azure

da Agency

Build powerful and responsible AI solutions with Azure

As organizations assess safely reopening and continue navigating unexpected shifts in the world, getting insights to respond in an agile and conscientious manner is vital. Developers and data scientists of all skill levels are inventing with Microsoft Azure AI's powerful and responsible tools to meet these challenges.

Operating safely

To help organizations operate safely in today’s environment, we are introducing a new spatial analysis capability in the Computer Vision Azure Cognitive Service. Its advanced AI models aggregate insights from multiple cameras to count the number of people in the room, measure the distance between individuals, and monitor wait and dwell times. Organizations can now apply this technology to use their space in a safe, optimal way. For instance, RXR, one of New York City’s largest real estate companies, has embedded spatial analysis in their RxWell app to ensure occupants' safety and wellness.

“When it came to developing RxWell, there was simply no other company that had the capability and the infrastructure to meet our comprehensive data, analytics, and security needs than Microsoft. With our partnership, the RxWell program provides our customers the tools they need to safely navigate the ‘new abnormal’ of COVID-19 and beyond.” – Scott Rechler, Chairman and CEO, RXR Realty

Read more about the RXR customer story here.

Achieving agility and resiliency

To get timely insights into their business, organizations need to monitor metrics proactively and quickly diagnose issues as they arise. Metrics Advisor, a new Azure Cognitive Service, helps customers to do this through a powerful combination of real-time monitoring, auto-tuning AI models, alerting, and root cause analysis. It allows organizations to fix issues before they become significant problems. No machine learning expertise is required. Customers such as NOS telecommunications have been able to increase agility and improve customer service using Metrics Advisor. 

“Metrics Advisor helps capture potential network device failures in time so that we can react instantly. It reduces incoming customer call bottlenecks and improves customer satisfaction. “ – João Ferreira, Director of Product Development, NOS telecommunications company (Portugal)

To help customers build custom machine learning models without data science expertise, Azure Machine Learning’s no-code automated machine learning and drag and drop designer are now generally available. These capabilities empower citizen data scientists and developers to build machine learning solutions.

“By using Azure Machine Learning designer, we were able to quickly release a valuable tool built on machine learning insights, that predicted occupancy in trains, promoting social distancing in the fight against Covid-19. ” – Steffen Pedersen, Head of AI and advanced analytics, DSB 

We are also making machine learning more accessible by providing additional value at a lower cost. Azure Machine Learning customers will now get the all the Enterprise edition capabilities in the Basic edition at no extra charge, helping them adopt and scale machine learning more cost effectively. Learn more about updates to Azure Machine Learning.

Applying AI responsibly

Safe and responsible use of AI is essential as organizations, and the world, depend on technology more than ever before. Responsible AI practices and guidelines for safe use are infused into Azure AI’s services, such as spatial analysis, to ensure personal privacy, transparency, and trust. We’ve also seen the rapid adoption of Azure Machine Learning’s responsible ML capabilities and toolkits.

A recent example is Philips, a leading health technology company, who’s using the Azure and Fairlearn toolkit to build unbiased machine learning models. Healthcare models can be biased depending on how different hospitals document symptoms and tasks. Using the Fairlearn toolkit, Philips was able to assess key fairness metrics to uncover model inaccuracies for different patient groups. By improving their models’ overall fairness and mitigating biases, they were able to deliver valuable insights to their hospitals on patient wellbeing and care.

With these innovations, all developers and data scientists can harness the power of Azure AI responsibly to help their organizations move forward. For more on the latest, check out these resources:

Learn more about Azure AI.
Learn more about Metrics Advisor and spatial analysis, part of Azure Cognitive Services.
Learn more about Azure Machine Learning. 

Azure. Invent with purpose.

Quelle: Azure

da Agency

Build rich communication experiences at scale with Azure Communication Services

The global situation today has truly transformed how we communicate with each other. While we woke up one day and the world was different, business hasn’t stopped. Customers are still needing to connect with businesses. Whether it’s providing real-time virtual assistance or enabling curb side pickup we’ve had to rethink how we engage without physical interactions.

In this remote-first world, businesses are looking to quickly adapt to customers’ needs and connect with them through engaging communication experiences. Building new communication solutions or integrating them into existing applications can be complex and time-consuming. Often requiring considerable investment and specialized expertise. That’s why we’re excited to announce, Azure Communication Services, the first fully managed communication platform offering from a major cloud provider.

Azure Communication Services is built natively on top a global, reliable cloud—Azure. Businesses can confidently build and deploy on the same low latency global communication network used by Microsoft Teams to support over 5 billion meeting minutes in a single day. It also enables developers to easily tap into other Azure services, such as Azure Cognitive Services for translation, sentiment analysis and more. Additionally, companies benefit from all communications being encrypted to meet privacy and compliance needs, such as HIPAA and GDPR.

"One of our customers in the construction industry was looking for a solution that would give project managers more visibility and communication with people on site. Using Azure Communication Services we were able to get a proof of concept deployed in days vs. weeks, easily integrating voice, video and messaging for our customers in a secure way." -Erik Lagerway, Founder Snapsonic

Azure Communication Services makes it easy to add voice and video calling, chat, and SMS text message capabilities to mobile apps, desktop applications, and websites with just a few lines of code. While developer friendly APIs and SDKs make it easy to create personalized communication experiences quickly, without having to worry about complex integrations. These capabilities can be used on virtually any platform and device.

Azure Communication Services capabilities

One example of how we see Azure Communication Services come to life in this remote-first world is customer service. Imagine a maintenance or installation call right now. There’s a problem but a technician is unable to go to the customers’ home. While some problems can be addressed remotely, troubleshooting over the phone can be a challenge. There aren’t many tools, that are easy to use and deploy, which connect a service rep and end user over video especially built right into a company’s app or home page. With Azure Communication Services, integrating voice and video calling into a multichannel communication experience is simple.

Every day, we find a new challenge that changes customer, developer, and business needs. Our goal is to meet businesses where they are and provide solutions to help them be resilient and move their business forward in today’s market. We see rich communication experiences—enabled by voice, video, chat, and SMS—continuing to be an integral part in how businesses connect with their customers across devices and platforms. Azure Communication Services brings together the best of communication technology, development efficiency, cloud scale, and enterprise-grade security. So, businesses can start creating more meaningful customer interactions on a secure, global platform in days, not months.

Get started today:

Visit the Azure Communication Services website
Attend the Microsoft Ignite session on Azure Communication Services
See how it works in my Mechanics show with Jeremy Chapman
Try the APIs on GitHub

Azure. Invent with purpose.

Quelle: Azure