Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

Advancing resilience through chaos engineering and fault injection

“When I first kicked off this Advancing Reliability blog series in my post last July, I highlighted several initiatives underway to keep improving platform availability, as part of our commitment to provide a trusted set of cloud services. One area I mentioned was fault injection, through which we’re increasingly validating that systems will perform as designed in the face of failures. Today I’ve asked our Principal Program Manager in this space, Chris Ashton, to shed some light on these broader ‘chaos engineering’ concepts, and to outline Azure examples of how we’re already applying these, together with stress testing and synthetic workloads, to improve application and service resilience.” – Mark Russinovich, CTO, Azure

Developing large-scale, distributed applications has never been easier, but there is a catch. Yes, infrastructure is provided in minutes thanks to your public cloud, there are many language options to choose from, swaths of open source code available to leverage, and abundant components and services in the marketplace to build upon. Yes, there are good reference guides that help give a leg up on your solution architecture and design, such as the Azure Well-Architected Framework and other resources in the Azure Architecture Center. But while application development is easier, there’s also an increased risk of impact from dependency disruptions. However rare, outages beyond your control could occur at any time, your dependencies could have incidents, or your key services/systems could become slow to respond. Minor disruptions in one area can be magnified or have longstanding side effects in another. These service disruptions can rob developer productivity, negatively affect customer trust, cause lost business, and even impact an organization’s bottom line.

Modern applications, and the cloud platforms upon which they are built, need to be designed and continuously validated for failure. Developers need to account for known and unknown failure conditions, applications and services must be architected for redundancy, algorithms need retry and back-off mechanisms. Systems need to be resilient to the scenarios and conditions caused by infrequent but inevitable production outages and disruptions. This post is designed to get you thinking about how best to validate typical failure conditions, including examples of how we at Microsoft validate our own systems.

Resilience

Resilience is the ability of a system to fail gracefully in the face of—and eventually recover from—disruptive events. Validating that an application, service, or platform is resilient is equally as important as building for failure. It is easy and tempting to validate the reliability of individual components in isolation and infer that the entire system will be just as reliable, but that could be a mistake. Resilience is a property of an entire system, not just its components. To understand if a system is truly resilient, it is best to measure and understand the resilience of the entire system in the environment where it will run. But how do you do this, and where do you start?

Chaos engineering and fault injection

Chaos engineering is the practice of subjecting a system to the real-world failures and dependency disruptions it will face in production. Fault injection is the deliberate introduction of failure into a system in order to validate its robustness and error handling.

Through the use of fault injection and the application of chaos engineering practices generally, architects can build confidence in their designs – and developers can measure, understand, and improve the resilience of their applications. Similarly, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and in fact anyone who holds their wider teams accountable in this space can ensure that their service level objectives are within target, and monitor system health in production. Likewise, operations teams can validate new hardware and datacenters before rolling out for customer use. Incorporation of chaos techniques in release validation gives everyone, including management, confidence in the systems that their organization is building.

Throughout the development process, as you are hopefully doing already, test early and test often. As you prepare to take your application or service to production, follow normal testing practices by adding and running unit, functional, stress, and integration tests. Where it makes sense, add test coverage for failure cases, and use fault injection to confirm error handling and algorithm behavior. For even greater impact, and this is where chaos engineering really comes into play, augment end-to-end workloads (such as stress tests, performance benchmarks, or a synthetic workload) with fault injection. Start in a pre-production test environment before performing experiments in production, and understand how your solution behaves in a safe environment with a synthetic workload before introducing potential impact to real customer traffic.

Healthy use of fault injection in a validation process might include one or more of the following:

Ad hoc validation of new features in a test environment:
A developer could stand up a test virtual machine (VM) and run new code in isolation. While executing existing functional or stress tests, faults could be injected to block network access to a remote dependency (such as SQL Server) to prove that the new code handles the scenario correctly.
Automated fault injection coverage in a CI/CD pipeline, including deployment or resiliency gates:
Existing end-to-end scenario tests (such as integration or stress tests) can be augmented with fault injection. Simply insert a new step after normal execution to continue running or run again with some faults applied. The addition of faults can find issues that would normally not be found by the tests or to accelerate discovery of issues that might be found eventually.
Incident fix validation and incident regression testing:
Fault injection can be used in conjunction with a workload or manual execution to induce the same conditions that caused an incident, enabling validation of a specific incident fix or regression testing of an incident scenario.
BCDR drills in a pre-production environment:
Faults that cause database failover or take storage offline can be used in BCDR drills, to validate that systems behave appropriately in the face of these faults and that data is not lost during any failover tests.
Game days in production:
A ‘game day’ is a coordinated simulation of an outage or incident, to validate that systems handle the event correctly. This typically includes validation of monitoring systems as well as human processes that come into play during an incident. Teams that perform game days can leverage fault injection tooling, to orchestrate faults that represent a hypothetical scenario in a controlled manner.

Typical release pipeline

This figure shows a typical release pipeline, and opportunities to include fault injection:

An investment in fault injection will be more successful if it is built upon a few foundational components:

Coordinated deployment pipeline.
Automated ARM deployments.
Synthetic runners and synthetic end-to-end workloads.
Monitoring, alerting, and livesite dashboards.

With these things in place, fault injection can be integrated in the deployment process with little to no additional overhead – and can be used to gate code flow on its way to production.

Localized rack power outages and equipment failures have been found as single points of failure in root cause analysis of past incidents. Learning that a service is impacted by, and not resilient to, one of these events in production is a timebound, painful, and expensive process for an on-call engineer. There are several opportunities to use fault injection to validate resilience to these failures throughout the release pipeline in a controlled environment and timeframe, which also gives more opportunity for the code author to lead an investigation of issues uncovered. A developer who has code changes or new code can create a test environment, deploy the code, and perform ad hoc experiments using functional tests and tools with faults that simulate taking dependencies offline – such as killing VMs, blocking access to services, or simply altering permissions. In a staging environment, injection of similar faults can be added to automated end-to-end and integration tests or other synthetic workloads. Test results and telemetry can then be used to determine impact of the faults and compared against baseline performance to block code flow if necessary.

In a pre-production or ‘Canary’ environment, automated runners can be used with faults that again block access to dependencies or take them offline. Monitoring, alerting, and livesite dashboards can then be used to validate that the outages were observed as well as that the system reacted and compensated for the issue—that it demonstrated resilience. In this same environment, SREs or operations teams may also perform business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) drills, using fault injection to take storage or databases offline and once again monitoring system metrics to validate resilience and data integrity. These same Canary activities can also be performed in production where there is real customer traffic, but doing so incurs a higher possibility of impact to customers so it is recommended only to do this after leveraging fault injection earlier in the pipeline. Establishing these practices and incorporating fault injection into a deployment pipeline allows systematic and controlled resilience validation which enables teams to mitigate issues, and improve application reliability, without impacting end customers.

Fault injection at Microsoft

At Microsoft, some teams incorporate fault injection early in their validation pipeline and automated test passes. Different teams run stress tests, performance benchmarks, or synthetic workloads in their automated validation gates as normal and a baseline is established. Then the workload is run again, this time with faults applied – such as CPU pressure, disk IO jitter, or network latency. Workload results are monitored, telemetry is scanned, crash dumps are checked, and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) are compared with Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to gauge the impact. If results are deemed a failure, code may not flow to the next stage in the pipeline.

Other Microsoft teams use fault injection in regular Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery (BCDR) drills, and Game Days. Some teams have monthly, quarterly, or half-yearly BCDR drills and use fault injection to induce a disaster and validate both the recovery process as well as the alerting, monitoring and live site processes. This is often done in a pre-production Canary environment before being used in production itself with real customer traffic. Some teams also carry out Game Days, where they come up with a hypothetical scenario, such as replication of a past incident, and use fault injection to help orchestrate it. Faults, in this case, might be more destructive—such as crashing VMs, turning off network access, causing database failover, or simulating an entire datacenter going offline. Again, normal live site monitoring and alerting are used, so your DevOps and incident management processes are also validated. To be kind to all involved, these activities are typically performed during business hours and not overnight or over a weekend.

Our operations teams also use fault injection to validate new hardware before it is deployed for customer use. Drills are performed where the power is shut off to a rack or datacenter, so the monitoring and backup systems can be observed to ensure they behave as expected.

At Microsoft, we use chaos engineering principles and fault injection techniques to increase resilience, and confidence, in the products we ship. They are used to validate the applications we deliver to customers, and the services we make available to developers. They are used to validate the underlying Azure platform itself, to test new hardware before it is deployed. Separately and together, these contribute to the overall reliability of the Azure platform—and improved quality in our services all up.

Unintended consequences

Remember, fault injection is a powerful tool and should be used with caution. Safeguards should be in place to ensure that faults introduced in a test or pre-production environment will not also affect production. The blast radius of a fault scenario should be contained to minimize impact to other components and to end customers. The ability to inject faults should have restricted access, to prevent accidents and prevent potential use by hackers with malicious intent. Fault injection can be used in production, but plan carefully, test first in pre-production, limit the blast radius, and have a failsafe to ensure that an experiment can be ended abruptly if needed. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident is a sobering example of a fault injection drill gone wrong. Be careful to insulate your system from unintended consequences.

Chaos as a service?

As Mark Russinovich mentioned in this earlier blog post, our goal is to make native fault injection services available to customers and partners so they can perform the same validation on their own applications and services. This is an exciting space with so much potential to improve cloud service reliability and reduce the impact of rare but inevitable disruptions. There are many teams doing lots of interesting things in this space, and we’re exploring how best to bring all these disparate tools and faults together to make our lives easier—for our internal developers building Azure services, for built-on-Azure services like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Dynamics, and eventually for our customers and partners to use the same tooling to wreak havoc on (and ultimately improve the resilience of) their own applications and solutions.
Quelle: Azure

New Windows Virtual Desktop capabilities now generally available

With the global pandemic, customers are relying on remote work more than ever, and Windows Virtual Desktop is helping customers rapidly deliver a secure Windows 10 desktop experience to their users. Charlie Anderson, CIO of Fife Council in the United Kingdom, was planning to modernize his companies’ existing Remote Destop Services (RDS) infrastructure, and then business requirements changed. He needed increased agility and scale to meet the changing requirements. In his own words:

“Windows Virtual Desktop was absolutely essential for us in terms of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many, we were faced with a continuity issue unparalleled in recent times. For us, this meant not only the continuation of services we already delivered, but also responding very quickly to new demands arising as a result of our public response to the pandemic.

To do that, we needed to provide as close to the “in-office” experience as we could to a workforce now working away from our offices. This meant multiplying previous remote working capacities by a factor of 15 almost overnight – something which would have been impossible without a scalable and cloud-based approach, which also worked well on a range of Council and self-provided devices.

There is little doubt that the Windows Virtual Desktop solution will not only be vital to the future resilience of our public services to the people of Fife, but it will also form a key part of our future device strategy as we seek to develop new, agile, and cost-effective approaches going forward.“

In April 2020, we released the public preview of Azure portal integration which made it easier to deploy and manage Windows Virtual Desktop. We also announced a new audio/video redirection (A/V redirect) capability that provided seamless meeting and collaboration experience for Microsoft Teams. We are humbled by the amazing feedback we’ve received from you on these capabilities, and that’s been a huge motivation for our team to accelerate development. We are happy to announce that both the Azure portal integration and A/V redirect in Microsoft Teams are now generally available.

Azure portal integration

With the Azure portal integration, you get a simple interface to deploy and manage your apps and virtual desktops. Host pool, workspace, and all other objects you create are Azure Resource Manager objects and are managed the same way you manage other Azure resources.

 
Customers who have existing deployments based on the previous (classic) model can continue using it. We will soon publish guidance on migrating to the new Azure Resource Manager-based deployment model so you can take advantage of all the new capabilities, including:

Azure role-based access control (RBAC)

You can use Azure RBAC to provide fine-grained access control to your Windows Virtual Desktop resources. There are four built-in admin roles that you can get started with, and you can create custom roles if necessary.

User management

Previously, you could only publish Remote Apps and Desktops to individual users. You can now publish resources to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) groups, which makes it much easier to scale.

Monitoring

The monitoring logs are now stored in Azure Monitor Logs. You can analyze the logs with Log Analytics and create visualizations to help you quickly troubleshoot issues.

A/V redirect for Microsoft Teams

Many of you use Microsoft Teams to collaborate with your colleagues. Traditionally, virtual desktops have not been ideal for audio and video conferencing due to latency issues. That changes with the new A/V redirect feature in Windows Virtual Desktop. Once you enable A/V redirect in the Desktop client for Windows, the audio and video will be handled locally for Microsoft Teams calls and meetings. You can still use Microsoft Teams on Windows Virtual Desktop with other clients without optimized calling and meetings. Microsoft Teams chat and collaboration features are supported on all platforms.

Next steps

You can read more about these updates in the Azure portal integration and Microsoft Teams integration documentation pages.

Thank you for your support during the preview. If you have any questions, please reach out to us on Tech Community and UserVoice. 
Quelle: Azure

Deliver hybrid cloud capabilities with the next generation of Azure Stack HCI

Customers are increasingly moving their workloads to the cloud to save money, increase efficiency, and to innovate. At the same time, some workloads need to remain on-premises for compliance, latency, or other business and technical reasons. As organizations look for cost-effective solutions that bring hybrid capabilities to their datacenter while being able to use existing skills and investments, we are committed to giving them more choice and the best solution for their hybrid needs.

Customers have been using Azure Stack solutions to meet their hybrid needs across datacenters, remote offices, and edge locations. Customers have choice and flexibility for running hybrid applications with Azure Stack Hub that is Azure consistent and can be run connected or disconnected, high-performance virtualization on-premises with Azure Stack HCI or an Azure managed appliance that provides intelligent compute and artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge with Azure Stack Edge.

Today, we’re delivering the next generation of Azure Stack HCI, an Azure service that combines the price-performance of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with native Azure hybrid capabilities, all while letting enterprises leverage existing skills.

Azure hybrid by design

The new Azure Stack HCI solution is an Azure service, giving customers the latest security, performance, and hybrid enhancements. It delivers an integrated management and operations experience with Azure allowing customers to manage Azure Stack HCI deployments and Azure resources, side-by-side, right from the Azure portal. Customers can monitor multiple clusters at scale and even view and manage virtual machines (VMs) running on Azure Stack HCI taking advantage of Azure Arc.

IT administrators can also use a new deployment wizard to quickly setup an Azure Stack HCI cluster and connect to Azure and take advantage of Azure Stack HCI native integration with core Azure services such as Azure Backup, Azure Security Center, and Azure Monitor, so customers can easily take advantage of Azure hybrid management capabilities.

Enterprise-scale and great price-performance

We give customers the flexibility to run small deployments, like remote and branch offices, or scale to datacenter grade deployments. The flexible per core subscription model enables customers to optimize cost based on their needs. For example, in a branch-office scenario, an 8 core server with less than 16 VMs, the upfront cost for Azure Stack HCI is 2.5 times less than other HCI solutions in market today.

In addition, the new Azure Stack HCI includes no cost Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows Server 2008 VMs running on it.

We want to help customers save money while delivering great performance. Early benchmarking shows Azure Stack HCI input/output operations per second (IOPs) in the 13 million+ range, and over one million requests/sec for TPC-c SQL server workloads—both in line with industry leading performance demonstrated with the first-generation Azure Stack HCI.

We also included new features, such as Stretch Cluster, which delivers native high availability (HA) and disaster recovery, so you can extend a cluster from a single site to multiple sites easily.

Familiar management and operations

IT teams can build on their knowledge and familiarity of Azure, Windows Server, and Hyper-V to run and operate Azure Stack HCI. Customers can use familiar tools such as Windows Server Admin Center or Azure portal to manage and monitor resources in your deployment. Management tasks are completely scriptable using the popular cross-platform Windows PowerShell framework.

Choice of hardware and deployment options

We are working with partners to bring Azure Stack HCI to a broad range of validated hardware solutions that meet our customer needs. These validated solutions are based on standardized reference architecture that are supported by Microsoft and our hardware partners.

To improve customer experience, we are bringing Azure Stack HCI integrated systems as a new purchasing option. Integrated systems offer an appliance-like deployment experience, for the quickest time-to-value with factory preinstalled bits enabling easy deployment, integrated updates across the full stack of firmware, drivers, agents, and the operating system, and many more unique capabilities.

Lenovo is one of the first partners that are bringing Azure Stack HCI integrated systems to market with their innovation on hardware and customer experience and we are truly excited with this partnership.

“Lenovo and Microsoft's long-time partnership continues to grow—together we are elevating our mutual customers’ experience by bringing Azure Stack HCI to our award-winning Server and Software-Defined portfolios, including our ThinkAgile MX1021 edge server platform. The combination of our technologies will further accelerate customers' modernization of their IT and journey to the hybrid cloud, leveraging hybrid capabilities with the seamless integration of Azure.” —Kamran Amini, Vice President and General Manager, Datacenter Infrastructure and Software-Defined Solutions, Lenovo Data Center Group

Intel is another partner that has long history of partnership with Microsoft, and investment in our mutual customers journey to the cloud and hybrid capabilities.

“We’re seeing an increased urgency for digital transformation, and technology is playing a critical role in helping customers find the resilience and reimagination required to navigate a time of disruption. Azure Stack HCI takes advantage of the latest technologies from Intel’s broad portfolio, so customers can quickly modernize their infrastructure. Customers can quickly adapt in a dynamic world and have cloud efficiency for on-premises workload, while getting the flexibility, performance, and scale they trust from Microsoft and Intel.” —Jason Grebe, Corporate Vice President, General Manager, Cloud Enterprise Solutions Group at Intel

We are also offering the flexibility of running Azure Stack HCI on existing hardware if it matches our validated node solution. We believe this is an important new change for customers to get the most value out of their current hardware investment.

Modernize your datacenter

Azure Stack HCI can be used across a variety of use cases to modernize datacenters with high-density virtualization and storage. This is an ideal solution for organizations that want to reduce their datacenter costs especially for legacy hardware or SAN environments with modern hyperconverged infrastructure through both the savings in OPEX and efficiencies gained by centrally managing from Azure.

Banks, retail stores, factory floors, and edge locations can leverage the broad choices of hardware available from small systems to server class hardware to run solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or high performance SQL environments supported by a single control plane for fleet and cluster management through Azure.

Get started

We are excited about these big changes to Azure Stack HCI, and we want you to try it today. Visit Azure Stack HCI solutions and provide us with feedback while in preview to continue to bring you the best hybrid approach in the industry.
Quelle: Azure

Introducing the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework

As the technology requirements of your business or practice grow and change over time, deploying business-critical applications can increase complexity and overhead substantially. To help manage this ever-growing complexity, we are pleased to announce the introduction of the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework. Following industry standards and terms, the Azure Well-Architected Framework provides a set of Azure architecture best practices to help you build and deliver great solutions.

The Azure Well-Architected Framework is divided into five pillars of architectural best practices: cost management, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, and security. These pillars help you effectively and consistently optimize your workloads against Azure best practices and the specific business priorities that are relevant to you or your customers' cloud journey.

Get started with the Azure Well-Architected Framework:

Read the framework content, reference material, and samples available in the Azure Architecture Center.
Take the Azure Well-Architected Review on Microsoft Assessments.
Learn how to Build great solutions with the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework on MS Learn.

Here is how each of these modalities can help you improve your workloads and grow your business.

Get started

Designing and deploying a successful workload in any environment can be challenging. This is especially true as agile development and DevOps/SRE practices begin to shift responsibility for security, operations, and cost management from centralized teams to the workload owner. This transition empowers workload owners to innovate at a much higher velocity than they could achieve in a traditional data center, but it creates a broader surface area of topics that they need to understand to produce a secure, reliable, performant, and cost-effective solution.

As an example, consider a Dev/Test workload that you’ve deployed as a simple proof of concept to measure the feasibility of Azure. If you’ve never had to manage the security, cost, performance, and reliability constraints for a workload, how do you ensure that your proof of concept is valid? How do you know you’re even asking the right questions or reviewing the metrics that you have available? The Azure Well-Architected Framework helps you make all the appropriate considerations for your workload.

For existing workloads, an additional tool that aligns with the Azure Well-Architected Framework is Azure Advisor. The guidance provided by Azure Advisor helps you pinpoint specific resources in your application that can be improved across the five pillars. Additionally, recommendations are prioritized according to our best estimate of significance to your environment, and you can share them with your team or stakeholders.

Review your workloads consistently

The Azure Well-Architected Review is designed to help you evaluate your workloads against the latest set of Azure best practices. It provides you with a suite of actionable guidance that you can use to improve your workloads in the areas that matter most to your business. Every customer is on a unique cloud journey, so we designed the Azure Well-Architected Review to be tailored to an individual company’s needs. You can evaluate each workload against only the pillars that matter for that workload, so when evaluating one of your mission-critical workloads, you might examine reliability, performance efficiency, and security first and then later come back and look at the other pillars to improve your operational efficiency and cost footprint.

 
As you complete the assessment, you're provided a score for each pillar that you chose to evaluate and an aggregate score across the entire workload. You also receive a set of actionable recommendations that you can follow to better align the workload with your business priorities.

At the current pace of technical innovation, having a well-architected workload is a moving target. As best practices and technology evolve, business priorities change, or other factors shift, what was best for your workload may move right along with it. To continuously meet these targets and requirements, update your process to regularly review and monitor your or your customers' most important workloads to ensure that they're reliable, secure, and operating as expected.

Learn how to build great solutions

At Build 2020, we introduced the Build great solutions with the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework learning path, which you’ll find helpful if you’re new to building solutions in the cloud or prefer a more interactive experience. This learning path consists of six modules: an overview of the framework along with one module for each pillar that provides a high-level conceptual overview without getting bogged down in the specific details of workload optimization.

Next steps

For a quick introduction to the Azure Well-Architected Framework please visit us at this session, or explore one of the modalities that we’ve detailed above.

We’re rapidly iterating to build out Azure Well-Architected across each of the channels we’ve detailed. If you have feedback, please reach out to us via GitHub, Facebook, and Twitter.
Quelle: Azure

Build safer, more resilient workplaces with IoT solutions

We are coming together as a global community, looking for opportunities to act or perform small steps that drive change for the better. Many parts of the world are still in the first stage of responding, actively working through the immediate crisis with urgency. While other areas have started on recovery, looking at how to restart the economy, provide stability, and most importantly bring together our society. Amidst these goals are also questions, how do we make it safe for people to connect in person? To have a meal with friends, travel to see loved ones, or function as a community?

Top of mind for many organizations, and a theme prevalent at Microsoft’s inaugural virtual Inspire conference this week: how do we make it safe for people to return to the workplace? And how can the Internet of Things (IoT) play a role in supporting these phases of responding, recovering, and rebuilding?

Digital capabilities enabling business resilience

The COVID-19 outbreak has been a reminder of how interconnected humanity is globally—and how resilient the human spirit can be. But it has also shown that businesses using technology to stay connected have been more resilient than others.

In the world of IoT, we have the ability to transform analog and digital feeds, to reason over data and respond immediately. The response is important. In today’s increasingly connected world, we have seen organizations and industries respond to market demands and needs by putting technology at the center of their business. But more importantly, we are also seeing customers use technology built on the Microsoft platform to develop their own unique digital capabilities.

As we see these organizations build out their own digital capabilities—most recently with a focus on coming out stronger from this global outbreak—it is those that are able to quickly adapt to the changes around them that emerge resilient. At Microsoft, we built an edge and cloud methodology grounded by the principles of trust, responsibility, and inclusiveness. And organizational resilience is built upon cloud-enabled technologies that offer on-demand tools tailored to your needs, enable productivity enhancement, drive cost savings, and so much more.

Innovations leading the way to safer workplaces

It has been energizing to see the innovative strides being made by our partners and customers. To see how they are investing in digital capabilities and addressing our global challenge. And this use of technology has helped many of our customers as they were forced to adapt to new ways in an accelerated fashion. What would have taken years has happened in mere weeks.

As we enter this phase of recovery, many of our partners are using IoT solutions to solve the question of how we enable safer workplaces. Microsoft’s role as a platform provider is to empower our partner ecosystem with platforms upon which to build solutions to meet the evolving needs of their customers.

Employee health testing

One of the first areas we have come to re-examine as part of this global outbreak is how sick you should be before you avoid the workplace. We have also shown ourselves time and time again in the past few months that you do not need to be in the office to be productive, efficient, and connected.

However, as some of us slowly return to work in office or factory environments, we are all sensitive to how others around us are feeling. IoT partners are building solutions on the Microsoft platform to monitor public health in public spaces, including business offices. These IoT solutions use connected devices—such as thermal imaging cameras for temperature monitoring, smart sensors for promoting social distancing, and hand sanitizer dispensers to encourage recommended hygiene—and turn the data gathered at the intelligent edge into valuable insights that can help manage how people are interacting with their environment.

Employee wellbeing, proximity, and contact

With the return to work, we anticipate how our work environments are structured will change. From office layouts and break rooms to the normal business handshake, some level of social distancing will be part of our daily routine.

Microsoft partners have developed IoT solutions that use proactive monitoring and real-time alerts to track employee proximity and ensure a safe, healthy working environment is being promoted. Microsoft partners have architected contactless UI systems that help minimize potential exposure by reducing touchpoints throughout the day.

Workplace sanitization

Even with reduced touchpoints and increased distancing, workplace sanitization will be more important than ever. BrainLit's BioCentric Lighting™ (BCL) system is a dynamic, self-learning, IoT-based system that delivers disinfection through ultraviolet light in unoccupied spaces, to promote health and well-being and help kill viruses without disrupting business operations. This solution leverages Azure Sphere, which connects the BrainLit devices directly to the cloud for complete Azure-based security and the latest OS and app updates, ensuring an up-to-date and scientifically based lighting and disinfection system.

Just as important as hygienic workspaces will be, so will the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) as we return to work. Partners have built solutions with the Azure intelligent edge to increase visibility of adherence to face mask policies, so safety violations and concerns can be quickly addressed, and a safe work environment maintained.

The role of security in digital capabilities

With solutions like the above, we are capturing more and more data that is used to generate valuable insights and contribute to a safer, healthier workplace for our employees. Yet a key part of this conversation is the importance of building all these solutions on a foundation of security. Especially as we move to a more connected world where we realize our potential to work from anywhere, it is more essential than ever to also protect our companies and our employees from a cybersecurity perspective.

From democratized data to digitized processes, companies must ensure the necessary security practices and procedures are in place to manage disparate technologies and various attack vectors. Plus, with attackers becoming increasingly creative in how they try to infiltrate IoT deployments by identifying security weaknesses, building security into every part of your IoT platform helps minimize risks to your private data, business assets, and brand reputation.

As companies build out their digital capabilities, they must be thoughtful and implement security by design. It requires that protection be built-in at each stage of your solution’s deployment—including your cloud services and devices—and that security weaknesses are minimized where they exist. And it requires using technology built on decades of experience to make your threat detection and response smarter and faster with AI-driven security signals that modernize your security operations.

Just as critical is protecting people’s privacy, especially as companies focus on digital technologies used for tracking, tracing, and testing to fight the global outbreak. Here at Microsoft, we believe privacy and ethical concerns must be considered as we move forward to use data responsibly in creating safer workplaces. We have seven privacy principles that we believe everyone should consider using to ensure people are in control of their data and understand how it will be collected and used—from providing appropriate data safeguards to deleting data as soon as it’s no longer needed.

Learn more about creating safer workplaces

In this increasingly connected world, it is thrilling to see the variety of IoT solutions and devices that exist to help generate valuable insights. Yet these same solutions don’t always have the necessary digital capabilities due to legacy, inflexibility, or the need for human intervention to respond. The result of this is we fail to act on the very insights presented to us.

Now, more than ever, we can’t afford to fail. But even more importantly, we can’t afford to not act. The decisions we make now as individuals, leaders, societies, organizations, and countries will have both an immediate and long-lasting impact. And the decisions we don’t make—even more so.

As companies look to reopen, how they bring together technology and people will play a key role in creating safer, more resilient workplaces. And companies that enhance their digital capabilities, so they can act more quickly and make informed decisions, will be able to successfully navigate future changes and uncertainties.

Contact iotcovidsupport@microsoft.com to discuss how IoT solutions built on Azure can help you to return to the workplace safely.

Microsoft does not create technologies related to contact tracing, exposure notification, and case management and does not imply or expressly represent any vetting or endorsement of contact tracing, exposure notification, or case management technologies.
Quelle: Azure