Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare: Unlocking the power of health data for better care

As healthcare providers have faced unprecedented workloads (individually and institutionally) around the world, the pandemic response continues to cause seismic shifts in how, where, and when care is provided. Longer-term, it has revealed the need for fundamental shifts across the care continuum. As a physician, I have seen first-hand the challenges of not having the right data, at the right time, in the right format to make informed shared decisions with my patients. These challenges amplify the urgency for trusted partners and solutions to help solve emergent health challenges.

Today we’re taking a big step forward to address these challenges with the general availability of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare brings together trusted capabilities to customers and partners that enhance patient engagement, empower health team collaboration, and improve clinical and operational insights. It makes it faster and easier to provide more efficient care and helps to ensure the end-to-end security, compliance, and interoperability of health data.

Innovation and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

That starts with Azure API for FHIR, which enables the rapid exchange of data through Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) APIs, backed by a managed platform as a service (PaaS) offering. It makes it easier for anyone working with health data to ingest, manage, and persist protected health information in the cloud. The healthcare industry is rapidly transforming health data to the emerging standard of FHIR®, which enables a robust, extensible data model with standardized semantics and data exchange that enables all systems using FHIR to work together. Transforming your data to FHIR allows you to quickly connect existing data sources such as the electronic health record systems or research databases. FHIR also enables the rapid exchange of data in modern implementations of mobile and web development. Most importantly, FHIR can simplify data ingestion and accelerate development with analytics and Machine Learning tools. The shift from on-premises computing to the cloud in healthcare is one of the five megatrends I spoke about recently and is a one-time event happening in a more compressed period than other industries.

Another key innovation for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare was born out of a Microsoft Hackathon and launched in 2019, but gained worldwide utilization this year during the pandemic. The Microsoft Health Bot service is an Azure cloud service that empowers healthcare organizations to rapidly build and deploy AI-powered virtual health assistants and chatbots that can be used to enhance their processes, self-service, and cost reduction efforts. The Health Bot comes with built-in healthcare AI services, such as clinical protocols and medical content from trusted industry sources, healthcare templates for rapid design, language understanding models that are tuned to understand medical and clinical terminology, and seamless hand-off to live chat and telehealth when required. The uptake of the Health Bot service has been incredible. Since March 2020, Microsoft’s Health Bot has triaged over 600 million messages and deployed 2,300 COVID-19 bots in 25 countries, to serve more than 50 million users. At a time when call centers and emergency departments were overwhelmed, this bot service has helped many hospital systems, non-government organizations (NGOs), and public health systems, including the US Center for Disease Control, to communicate up-to-date guidance, prioritize care for their most urgent patients, and receive real-time data on people’s interactions with the bot.

As we continue to expand the capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, our teams continue to bring forward innovations. Remote patient monitoring provides the ability to gather patient health data outside of traditional healthcare settings. Healthcare institutions can use Azure IoT Connector for FHIR to bring health data generated by remote devices into Azure API for FHIR. This data could be used to closely track patient health status, monitor patient adherence to treatment plans, and provide personalized care.

Recently released in Open Source, the Medical Imaging Server for DICOM streamlines the process of ingesting medical imaging data in the cloud. By using the Medical Imaging Server for DICOM alongside the Azure API for FHIR or other FHIR services, data references are created between imaging data and clinical data in FHIR, setting the stage for multiple scenarios which are difficult and expensive to execute in today’s on-premises systems. As a radiologist, I am excited to see the development of Microsoft’s imaging server. Imaging data makes up 74 percent of all medical data and on our quest for patient-centered care, this imaging data often provides the clues to connect the dots in disease detection as well as to guide the most effective prevention and treatment strategies. 

Text Analytics for Health, a feature of Microsoft Azure Text Analytics, is an AI service currently in preview that enables and simplifies the process of extracting insights from unstructured medical data. Trained on a diverse range of medical data—covering various formats of clinical notes, clinical trial protocols, and more—this health feature is capable of processing a broad range of data types and tasks, without the need for time-intensive, manual development of custom models. Much of today’s healthcare data is in the form of unstructured text, such as doctor’s notes, medical publications, electronic health records, clinical trial protocols, medical encounter transcripts, and more. Healthcare organizations, providers, researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and others face an incredible challenge in trying to identify and draw insights from all that information. Unlocking insights from this data has massive potential for improving healthcare services and patient outcomes.

Future enhancements of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will include solutions for precision medicine. Decoding the information in an individual’s genome has led to a greater understanding of the variability in disease progression and treatment response across individuals. Gaining a better understanding of these genetic variations at an individual and population level is key to development of precision medicine strategies to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. Microsoft Genomics open source solutions (Cromwell on Azure, Genomics Notebooks) enable biomedical researchers to orchestrate scalable workflows and efficiently manage genomics pipelines and analytics using the power of the Azure cloud. Our goal is to make genomics data actionable by analyzing and interpreting data generated by modern genomics technologies. 

Unlocking the power of health data with Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and its expanding pipeline of enhancements allow care givers to gain a holistic view of the patient with insights and actionable next steps for more informed, personalized care management.

With today’s launch, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare lays the foundation for our customers and partners to build innovative solutions, leading to better experiences and outcomes for both patients and their providers. Collaborating with our partners to bring these innovations to life is the work that keeps me energized as we reimagine the future of health globally.

Source: microsoft.com

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Migrate your Hadoop data lakes with WANDisco LiveData Platform for Azure

It’s no secret that organizations consider data as one of their most valuable assets and are investing to build their capability for data-driven decision making. It is challenging to manage a flexible and cost-effective data estate on-premises, and we are seeing customers embrace Azure for its best-in-class analytics solutions rapidly. However, migrating analytics workloads can be complex and challenging. The thought of moving large volumes of critical business data has often been too daunting or too expensive for a lot of enterprises. Add to that the challenges inherent in updating all the existing data ingestion and consumption pipelines from your traditional Hadoop environment, and it’s no surprise that many organizations have been reticent to begin their cloud migration.

We are delighted to partner with WANDisco to provide a turnkey solution for Hadoop-oriented data lake migrations, WANDisco LiveData Platform for Azure. WANdisco LiveData Platform for Azure is our preferred solution for Hadoop to Azure migrations. With LiveData Platform for Azure, you can deploy and manage your data lake migrations using the same Azure management experience you enjoy today through the Azure portal and Azure CLI. You begin your data lake migration in minutes and not weeks or months like you would with other solutions. Most importantly, LiveData Platform for Azure allows you to begin migrating your Hadoop-oriented data lake into ADLS with zero business downtime.

“We were intrigued by Analytics services on Azure and wanted to use them for making data-driven decisions more effectively. But migrating Hadoop data lakes is a problem we have had for some time. We are very happy to try the new WANDisco LiveData Platform for Azure and were able to quickly migrate our data without issues. We were also impressed that we could manage our migration entirely through the Azure portal.” - Dawit Alemu, Technical Architecture Lead Analytics CoE, Johnson Controls

LiveData Platform for Azure key features

LiveData Platform comes with two service features, LiveData Migrator for Azure and LiveData Plane for Azure. LiveData Migrator for Azure allows you to migrate your existing data sets with a single pass over the source data set, thus eliminating the need to repeatedly scan for changes. It begins migrating data immediately, and it ensures continuous replication of any changes (creates, appends, and deletes) at your local Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) source to your new data lake in Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) including metadata changes.

LiveData Plane for Azure provides active-active data and metadata consistency across two or more distributed Hadoop environments, ensuring 100 percent data consistency at all times. You can use LiveData Plane for Azure, to replicate changes that originate at your on-premises Hadoop cluster to your Azure HDInsight cluster backed by ADLS, and vice versa. LiveData Plane for Azure is driven by a distributed consensus model that ensures, in real-time, that all prospective changes to a Hadoop environment system may proceed safely and without inconsistencies. It also comes with comprehensive support for Hive, Ranger, and Sentry so that all of your structured metadata and centralized access policies are also kept consistent across your multi-environment data estate.

Using LiveData Platform for Azure is easy, as shown in the Azure portal "Create" experience below. With a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, you are ready to go.

You can connect your Hadoop cluster to LiveData platform by downloading and installing the LiveData Migrator as seen below. Once the LiveData Migrator service is running in your on-premises Hadoop environment, you may continue to use the Azure portal for a full management experience.

LiveData Platform is tightly integrated with Azure and follows the same metered, pay-as-you-go billing model as all other Azure services. LiveData Platform for Azure consumption will appear on the same monthly Azure bill and provides a consistent and convenient way to track and monitor your usage.

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Introducing the Microsoft Azure Modular Datacenter

We designed the Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC) for customers who need cloud computing capabilities in hybrid or challenging environments, including remote areas. This announcement is complemented by our Azure Space offerings and partnerships that can extend satellite connectivity anywhere in the world. Scenarios range from mobile command centers, humanitarian assistance, military mission needs, mineral exploration, and other use cases requiring high intensity, secure computing on Azure.

The MDC can give customers a path to migrate apps to Azure while still running these workloads on-premises with low-latency connections to their own datacenter. This provides a stepping stone for transforming workloads to the Azure API with the option of continuing to run these apps on-premises, or in public or sovereign clouds.

Azure where you need it

Around the world, there are significant cloud computing and storage needs in areas with adverse conditions, where low communication, disrupted network availability and limited access to specialized infrastructure would have previously prevented taking advantage of cloud computing. The MDC solves this by bringing Azure to these environments, providing datacenter scale compute resources closest to where they're needed.

With MDC you can deploy a self-contained datacenter unit with a field transportable solution that provides near-immediate value. The unit can operate in a wide range of climates and harsh conditions in a ruggedized, radio frequency (RF) shielded unit. Once deployed it can act as critical infrastructure where temperature, humidity, and even level surfaces can pose a challenge.

MDC can provide onsite augmentation of compute and storage capabilities, managing and operating high-performance applications in the field, IoT and real-time analytics workloads that require ultra-low latency, and standing up cloud applications to support critical infrastructure recovery.

Connectivity

A major differentiator for MDC is that customers can run the unit with full network connectivity, occasionally connected or fully disconnected. This is a unique, powerful capability that allows customers to access the power of the Azure cloud on their terms.

Satellite communications option

Microsoft is partnering with satellite operators to provide an option for secure and reliable connectivity to field deployed MDC units.

This connectivity is achieved through a network high availability module which continuously evaluates network performance. In the event of a network disruption, the network high availability module will move traffic from the impacted network to a backup satellite connection. This resiliency ensures continued delivery of essential hyperscale services through Azure. Alternatively, MDC can use satellite communications as the primary connection where no other network is available.

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Quickly get started with samples in Azure Synapse Analytics

Get started immediately on your first project with the new Knowledge center in the Azure Synapse Studio.

To further accelerate time to insight in Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, we are introducing the Knowledge center to simplify access to pre-loaded sample data and to streamline the getting started process for data professionals. You can now create or use existing Spark and SQL pools, connect to and query Azure Open Datasets, load sample scripts and notebooks, access pipeline templates, and tour the Azure Synapse Studio—all from one place.

The Knowledge center can be accessed from the Azure Synapse Studio Homepage under Useful links or by clicking the Question mark icon on the Navigation bar.

Use samples immediately

The Knowledge center offers several one-click tutorials that create everything you need to instantaneously explore and analyze data.

In the Explore sample data with Spark tutorial, you can easily create an Apache Spark pool and use notebooks natively inside Azure Synapse to analyze New York City (NYC) Yellow Taxi data and customize visualizations. This is possible as Azure Synapse unifies both SQL and Spark development within the same analytics service.

In the Query data with SQL tutorial, you can query and analyze the same NYC Yellow Taxi dataset with a serverless SQL pool, which allows you to use T-SQL for fast data lake exploration without provisioning or managing dedicated resources. The tutorial also enables you to quickly visualize results with one click.

The Create external table with SQL tutorial allows you to use either a serverless or dedicated SQL pool to create an external table, giving you the flexibility to harness data on your own terms and choose the most cost-effective option for each use case. Dedicated SQL pools provide a broad set of workload management capabilities including workload isolation and workload priority.

Browse available samples

The new Knowledge center also contains numerous sample datasets, notebooks, scripts, and pipeline templates to allow you to quickly get started.

Add Azure Open Datasets to access sample data on COVID-19, public safety, transportation, economic indicators, and more. The datasets are automatically loaded into the Data hub on the main navigation under the Linked tab and then Azure Blog Storage. With the click of a button, you can run sample scripts to select the top 100 rows and create an external table or you can also create a new notebook.

Regardless of whether you prefer to use PySpark, Scala, or Spark.NET C#, you can try a variety of sample notebooks. These will open in the Develop hub of the Azure Synapse Studio under Notebooks.

In addition to sample notebooks, there are samples for SQL scripts like Analyze Azure Open Datasets using SQL On-demand, Generate your COPY Statement with Dynamic SQL, and Query CSV, JSON, or Parquet files. Once these scripts are published in your workspace, they will open in the Develop hub of the main navigation under SQL scripts.

Furthermore, there are around 30 different templates for pipelines, including templates for copying data from various sources.

Tour Azure Synapse Studio

The Knowledge center offers a comprehensive tour of the Azure Synapse Studio to help familiarize you with key features so you can get started right away on your first project.

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How to Succeed in MD-101 Exam on Your Way to Managing Microsoft Modern Desktops Certification?

The MD-101 Managing Microsoft Modern Desktops certification confirms skills, comprising leading deploying Windows, configuring connectivity, managing devices and data, maintaining Windows, managing policies, deploying and updating operating systems, protecting data, and managing apps. Applicants should be conversant with Microsoft 365 workloads and expert in configuring, deploying, and managing Windows 10 and non-Windows devices and technologies.

MD 101, Managing Modern Desktops exam evaluates the capability to manage devices, policies, apps, profiles, and data, along with deploying and updating operating systems.

MD-101 Exam: Structure, Duration, Cost, Prerequisites, and Objectives

The exam comprises of multiple-choices, as well as multiple answers. The exam takers will be given a total of 150 minutes to answer all the questions. The number of questions usually ranges from 40 to 60. To pass the exam, you need to score 700 out of 1000 marks. And, Microsoft MD-101 exam cost is $165.

As stated, the enriching Microsoft 365 Certified: Modern Desktop Administrator Associate certification requires two exams to be passed, and the first MD-101 is relying on the following exam objectives:

• Deploy and update operating systems (35-40%)
• Manage policies and profiles (25-30%)
• Manage and protect devices (20-25%)
• Manage apps and data (10-15%)

Now that you understand what you need to study to pass the Microsoft MD-101 exam, you can find out how you can study to get the passing score. So, you should pay great attention to the information provided in the further parts of this article.

How to Succeed in the MD-100 Exam?

Microsoft certification exam preparation is difficult. However, all you need to do is understanding what materials to use and whom to prepare with. Many candidates learning for Microsoft certification don't give them sufficient time or don't embrace the right resources; otherwise, they may use invalid or obsolete online sources or don't practice adequately. These are just some of the few fundamental reasons why people fail to obtain the sought-after certifications.

This takes us to the requirement to visit and use the most robust and reliable resources. First of all, Microsoft online training courses are best to start with. Microsoft offers online free and Instructor-led paid training.

Herewith, to start the MD-101 exam preparation competently, the first and the most crucial tip is to practice your obtained skills completely. Therefore, you will know what kind of questions to expect and prepare for them ahead of time.

Start Future Venture in IT with MD-101 Managing Microsoft Modern Desktops Certification

But the only training isn't of much help except you begin practicing with the right questions and answers that might confront the exam.

How Can MD-101 Practice Tests Help in Your Exam Preparation?

These are tests intentionally planned to help you outline what areas you've learned and which ones still require to be worked out. Not only will taking practice tests to give you a feeling of the actual exam, but it will also help you recognize any potential weak areas you might require to work upon. Make sure that you make use of the MD-101 practice tests provided by trusted websites only unless you never know if those sites do more evil than good to you!

ALSO READ: WHY PASS MICROSOFT MD-101 EXAM TO BECOME AN ENTERPRISE ADMINISTRATOR AND THAT TOO WITH PRACTICE TESTS

Practice tests are an excellent way to increase confidence. Once you have taken many practice tests, you'll know for sure what topics require future preparation. This will save you time, as you won't be spending time studying topics you already know.

What to Do on Exam Day?

If possible, review the MD-101 exam's core points and topics using your notes the day before, but don't read the whole topic.

Time management is another important factor you need to contemplate. Once the exam begins, use your time wisely. During the preparatory phase, plan on how to divide the given time over all the exam questions. If the schedule allows you, skip difficult questions, highlight them, and answer later before the time ends.

Why Should You Earn MD-101 Managing Microsoft Modern Desktops Certification?

One of the questions some professionals always ask is if they should earn Microsoft certification. As it demands intrapersonal communication, the answer is: "It depends!". If you are obtaining an industry certificate, then it is important to define your reasons clearly. What inspires you? Let us look at perks you relish after earning Microsoft certification that can motivate you to become certified by Microsoft.

1. Acquire Credibility

If you are a fresher in your career and would like to promote your career, earning Microsoft certification can prove your skills. The Managing Microsoft Modern Desktops certification is a bonus because it confirms that you are well-informed about what you desire to do for an organization. It also provides an extra validation that you are not engaged in success because only successful professionals can achieve Microsoft certification.

2. Enhances Your Marketability

IT's job market is militant, and you have to stand out to excel in your career. Competing in such a competitive market without certification is becomes challenging. According to HR.com's study, 100% of the persons interviewed agreed that professional certifications are often favored during the recruiting process. If you want to excel, get your Microsoft certification!

3. MD-101 Certified Professionals Are Employers' First Choice

Your university degree is many times, not sufficient for the job position you have applied. Certifications are a sign for hiring managers that you are qualified to work in a particular domain and that you have worked on to improve your skills. So, if you want to get hired, then aim for a certification.

4. Lucrative Career Prospects

Earning the Microsoft 365 Modern Desktop Administrator Associate certification, you get new job opportunities like promotion in your potential organization, a salary increase, or lucrative job offers. With MD-101 certification, you are qualified to become an IT Consultant, Desktop Administrator, a System Administrator, etc.

According to the most recent research done by thePayscale.com, the professionals with this certification receive an average annual basic pay of $74k.

5. Promotions

Everyone wants to advance in their career. Microsoft certifications can be a stimulus to make your promotions come early. Management favors skilled professionals who can execute their skills. If you have the certification, you can get an opportunity to work as a team leader in software development and management.

6. Personal Contentment

Contentment is what we all strive to attain when we presume professional roles in our companies. With Managing Microsoft Modern Desktops certification, you will gratify yourself and accomplish a dream of becoming a modern desktop certified professional. Moreover, technology is rapidly growing, and having a certificate confirms that you have updated knowledge.

Conclusion

Microsoft MCSE MD-101 is the lately introduced certification exam to enhance professional's expertise in modern desktops. It is an exam to prove that you are well-versed with the most trending developments in IT. Make an effort to register for the exam and give your best shot to pass the exam with a good score. Lastly, make sure to practice every concept you have studied because the world is waiting to watch your talent.

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Lower prices and more flexible purchase options for Azure Red Hat OpenShift

For the past several years, Microsoft and Red Hat have worked together to co-develop hybrid cloud solutions intended to enable greater customer innovation. In 2019, we launched Azure Red Hat OpenShift as a fully managed, jointly engineered implementation of Red Hat OpenShift running on Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 that is deeply integrated into the Azure control plane.

Today we’re sharing that in collaboration with Red Hat, we are dropping the price of Red Hat OpenShift licenses on Azure Red Hat OpenShift worker nodes by up to 77 percent. We’re also adding the choice of a three-year term for Reserved Instances (RIs) on top of the existing one year RI and pay as you go options, with a reduction in the minimum number of virtual machines required. The new pricing is effective immediately. Finally, as part of the ongoing improvements, we are increasing the Service Level Agreement (SLA) to be 99.95 percent.

With these new price reductions, Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides even more value with a fully managed, highly-available enterprise Kubernetes offering that manages the upgrades, patches, and integration for the components that are required to make a platform. This allows your teams to focus on building business value, not operating technology platforms.

How can Red Hat OpenShift help you?

As a developer

Kubernetes was built for the needs of IT Operations, not developers. Red Hat OpenShift is designed so developers can deploy apps on Kubernetes without needing to learn Kubernetes. With built-in Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines, you can code and push to a repository and have your application up and running in minutes.

Azure Red Hat OpenShift includes everything you need to manage your development lifecycle; standardized workflows, support for multiple environments, continuous integration, release management, and more. Also included is the provision self-service, on-demand application stacks, and deploy solutions from the Developer Catalog such as OpenShift Service Mesh, OpenShift Serverless, Knative, and more.

Red Hat OpenShift provides commercial support for the languages, databases, and tooling you already use, while providing easy access to Azure services such as Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Cosmos DB, to enable you create resilient and scalable cloud native applications.

As an IT operator

Adopting a container platform lets you keep up with application scale and complexity requirements. Azure Red Hat OpenShift is designed to make deploying and managing the container platform easier, with automated maintenance operations and upgrades built right in, integrated platform monitoring—including Azure Monitor for Containers, and a support experience directly from the Azure support portal.

With Azure Red Hat OpenShift, your developers can be up and running in minutes. You can scale on your terms, from ten containers to thousands, and only pay for what you need. With one-click updates for platform, services, and applications, Azure Red Hat OpenShift monitors security throughout the software supply chain to make applications more stable without reducing developer productivity. You can also leverage built-in vulnerability assessment and management tools in Azure Security Center to scan images that are pushed to, imported, or pulled from an Azure Container Registry.

Discover Operators from the Kubernetes community and Red Hat partners, curated by Red Hat. You can install Operators on your clusters to provide optional add-ons and shared services to your developers, such as AI and machine learning, application runtimes, data, document stores, monitoring logging and insights, security, and messaging services.

Regional availability

Azure Red Hat OpenShift is available in 27 regions worldwide, and we’re continuing to expand that list. Over the past few months, we have added support for Azure Red Hat OpenShift in a number of regions, including West US, Central US, North Central US, Canada Central, Canada East, Brazil South, UK West, Norway East, France Central, Germany West Central, Central India, UAE North, Korea Central, East Asia, and Japan East.

Industry compliance certifications

To help you meet your compliance obligations across regulated industries and markets worldwide, Azure Red Hat OpenShift is PCI DSS, FedRAMP High, SOC 1/2/3, ISO 27001 and HITRUST certified. Azure maintains the largest compliance portfolio in the industry, both in terms of the total number of offerings and also the number of customer-facing services in assessment scope.

Source: microsoft.com

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Gain real-time insights on Oracle E-Business Suite data with Azure and Incorta

Insights that are frequently sought after in an organization are often locked in business-critical systems. These systems power functions such as sales, marketing, finance, supply chain, and operations. While the data these applications produce can tell the complete business story, organizations struggle to coalesce the data and deliver valuable analytics on top of them. It requires months and even years of work to redefine business logic or migrate existing applications in the attempt to have scalable, real-time analytics. On top of that, many legacy systems don’t provide APIs for easy connection to modern analytics tools, which further stagnates access to quick insights.

To enable companies to gain real-time insights on the critical data in their Oracle E-Business Suite, we are announcing a new offer with Incorta that brings Azure Synapse Analytics, Power BI, and Incorta together for end-to-end finance analytics.

The proof-of-value offer

With this new offer, customers can quickly see the value this packaged solution brings without complex overhead. Azure and Incorta provide qualified customers a free business use case consultation, a technical deep dive session, software subscriptions, and hands-on technical expertise.

The business value

The combination of Azure Synapse and Incorta enables leaders to connect directly to their Oracle E-Business Suite data. In fact, customers that use Azure Synapse and Incorta for finance analytics experience a 10x faster time to production. This accelerated path results in organizations having an analytics-ready solution for accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger, and more in a matter of weeks.

The technical value

Incorta automates various data preparation steps using a proprietary technology called Direct Data Mapping, which enables organizations to go from raw data to quicky discovering actionable insights in Azure Synapse. Incorta leverages best practices captured from real customer implementations, and provides that pre-built content through their Blueprints, for accessing, organizing, and presenting data for popular business solutions. Incorta's Blueprints contain data connection properties, physical schema descriptions, business views, materialized views, and sample queries so that organizations can quickly implement a complete out-of-the-box solution rather than rewrite logic or migrate systems.

The result of using Incorta’s Direct Data Mapping technology and Blueprints are ready-to-go, pre-built business schemas, which act as a logical grouping of one or more physical tables and a subset of physical columns. These are used to create a business semantic layer, or business view, to provide end-users with an intuitive entry point into the data. This is what significantly shortens the time to production from months to weeks and enables organizations to easily load data into Azure Synapse for a complete finance analytics solution.

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Microsoft 70-462 Exam: Gateway to Becoming A Database Professional

The main title of the Microsoft 70-462 certification exam is Microsoft SQL Server 2012/2014 Database Administration. Microsoft SQL Server indicates that it is used to put up data of various types. In current databases, the purpose is much more than collecting data; it also includes recovering data specified by the user. The Microsoft certification exam 70-462 is used to test several people's competence in the administration of Microsoft SQL Server 2012/2014.

Improvement in technology has led to the growth of several industries. Computers have been advantageous to humankind in various ways. More job opportunities, such as area service technicians, database administrators, network administrators, and web developers, have been created. Currently, there are more looking specialties where skills are required to deal with computer software and hardware.

From this aspect, 2012/2014, Microsoft’s SQL Server is among the essential software used on 90% of world computers, as statistic goes. To work with the software and be hired as a specialist working with databases, you should take the MCSA: SQL Server 2012/2014 certification.

But to get this prestigious badge, you must pass the qualitative Microsoft exam 70-462, with two more assessments to add (70-461 and 70-463).

Essential Details of Exam 70-462

So, 70-462 test measures contesters’ ability to make administering tasks in the 2012/2014 SQL Server. In particular, the exam includes 40-60 questions that are presented in different formats, including case study, multiple-choice, repeated answer choices, short answers, drag and drop, mark review, and best answer.

The Microsoft 70-462 exam allows people to decide the benchmark of the industry. The test checks if a person meets the standards expected in the administration of the SQL server. If a person fails, it is thought that he has not complied with the IT standards inappropriate and is not regarded as good sufficient to join the industry.

Therefore, the test gives individuals an obstacle they have to prove whether they meet the required standards. This bar is aimed at workers or technicians and employers to ensure that they meet the expected standards and have the indicated qualifications. Adhering to industry standards means that the service's quality will be of a very high standard, and customer satisfaction will be guaranteed.

Career Opportunities with 70-462 Certification

The Microsoft 70-462 exam allows candidates to learn from the best. Microsoft is one of the top IT companies in information technology and is one of the best. The mere fact that Microsoft itself is the inventor of the media that knows its implementation very well.

Many providers offer to teach an individual the SQL server's ins and outs in the current market, but none do it better and more complete than Microsoft. The Microsoft team is very experienced in using the SQL server, and this provides an opportunity for a person to have that experience transferred to them.

The Microsoft 70-462 exam offers the opportunity to improve the professional career. People see professional growth as a vital element in their lives. No one of us would like to start and finish your career without improving it. Most jobs currently require that one have certifications other than academic certificates. A person who works for a company that requires the Microsoft 70-462 exam skills can put his name into thought. This assembles an employee's sense of worth and also promotes the execution of some life targets.

MCSA 70-462: Your Career Possibilities and Salary Considerations

Database Developers

Database developers are sometimes related to database programmers, and they create and complete databases. They form the focus of the corporate IT department in the companies they serve.

While creating databases is their primary role, database developers can also test new products and build database documentation. The latest figures suggest that the median salary for an average database developer is $75,850 per annum.

Database Analysts

Database analysts deal with database technologies. They create, maintain, and manipulate data and preserve it exceptionally. For this reason, some of the best database analysts also have outstanding technical skills compared to the collection, organization, and retrieval of data. All that is essential in improving the business.

This can be a gratifying career if you hold the relevant skills to analyze an organization’s database to understand the significance of the information. According to the survey, data analysts’ salaries range from $42,000 to $84,000 per year.

Bottom Line

The most important thing to recognize when you require to pass a crucial test like the Microsoft exam 70-462 is preparing the right preparation resources. You need to work hard and get a lot to take the test and earn the MCSA: SQL Server 2012/2014 certification.

Moreover, exam takers should take the preparation sincerely to gain confidence in taking the real assessment. Do not forget to utilize exam dumps as they will give a boost to the whole process.

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Zone Redundancy for Azure Cache for Redis now in preview

Between waves of pandemics, hurricanes, and wildfires, you don’t need cloud infrastructure adding to your list of worries this year. Fortunately, there has never been a better time to ensure your Azure deployments stay resilient. Availability zones are one of the best ways to mitigate risks from outages and disasters. With that in mind, we are announcing the preview for zone redundancy in Azure Cache for Redis.

Availability Zones on Azure

Azure Availability Zones are geographically isolated datacenter locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking. By maintaining a physically separate set of resources with the low latency from remaining in the same region, Azure Availability Zones provide a high availability solution that is crucial for businesses requiring resiliency and business continuity.

Redundancy options in Azure Cache for Redis

Azure Cache for Redis is increasingly becoming critical to our customers’ data infrastructure. As a fully managed service, Azure Cache for Redis provides various high availability options. By default, caches in the standard or premium tier have built-in replication with a two-node configuration—a primary and a replica hosting two identical copies of your data.

New in preview, Azure Cache for Redis can now support up to four nodes in a cache distributed across multiple availability zones. This update can significantly enhance the availability of your Azure Cache for Redis instance, giving you greater peace of mind and hardening your data architecture against unexpected disruption.

High Availability for Azure Cache for Redis

The new redundancy features deliver better reliability and resiliency. First, this update expands the total number of replicas you can create. You can now implement up to three replica nodes in addition to the primary node. Having more replicas generally improves resiliency (even if they are in the same availability zone) because of the additional nodes backing up the primary.

Even with more replicas, a datacenter-wide outage can still disrupt your application. That’s why we’re also enabling zone redundancy, allowing replicas to be located in different availability zones. Replica nodes can be placed in one or multiple availability zones, with failover automatically occurring if needed across availability zones. With Zone Redundancy, your cache can handle situations where the primary zone is knocked offline due to issues like floods, power outages, or even natural disasters. This increases availability while maintaining the low latency required from a cache.

Zone redundancy is currently only available on the premium tier of Azure Cache for Redis, but it will also be available on the enterprise and enterprise flash tiers when the preview is released.

Industry-leading service level agreement

Azure Cache for Redis already offers an industry-standard 99.9 percent service level agreement (SLA). With the addition of zone redundancy, the availability increases to a 99.95 percent level, allowing you to meet your availability needs while keeping your application nimble and scalable.

Source: microsoft.com

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Microsoft is a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management

We are excited to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management 2020 based on the ability to execute and completeness of vision. Our placement is a testament to our continued innovation in enterprise API management capabilities and broad customer adoption of Azure API Management.

With the rapid shift to and increasing adoption of digital channels for all business transactions, APIs are becoming increasingly important for organizations, enabling them to innovate, increase agility and take advantage of new business opportunities by building thriving API ecosystems. Azure API Management helps organizations of all sizes to design, secure, publish, scale, and observe APIs across clouds and on-premises and make them discoverable and consumable by internal, partner, and public developers.

Azure API Management is available in more than 50 regions worldwide. Thousands of global enterprise customers across every major industry vertical use Azure API Management including Alaska Airlines, CEMEX, SwissRe, Chipotle, Finastra, Bosch, Zeiss, Legrand.

Disclaimer: This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available by visiting this Microsoft site. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

API management is an essential component of digital transformation: Microsoft Power Platform empowers professional and citizen developers with no and low code app development tools to rapidly build business applications and provides a complete solution for digital transformation with bi-directional integration with Azure API Management. With Azure API Management, you can create, design, test, and quickly publish APIs to Power Platform to enable easy discovery and consumption. Once exported as a connector to the Power Platform, the APIs are accessible for anyone to use. For example, low code developers at T-Mobile rapidly built an internal initiative tracking app with Power Apps and a custom API connector built by their professional developers, using Azure API Management and existing internal APIs.

API management across clouds and on-premises: Azure API Management offers high throughput, low latency API gateway on Azure. With the self-hosted version of the gateway, customers can deploy a containerized version of API Management’s runtime component anywhere they host their APIs, on-premises or in the cloud, to support hybrid, multi-cloud API scenarios securely and efficiently. Self-hosted gateways are managed from Azure, enabling centralized visibility and unified management across internal and external APIs, regardless of where they are hosted.

API discovery and onboarding: Azure API Management offers a built-in developer portal for customers to effortlessly publish APIs for discovery and consumption by internal employees, partners, or external application developers. API consumers can use the portal to browse an always up-to-date API reference, request API access, interactively test APIs, and view their API consumption reports. The developer portal can be styled to reflect custom branding and extended for additional business logic, such as integration with support systems.

Developer and DevOps integration: Azure API Management can be integrated early into the API development process and as a part of the development inner-loop. API developers can configure, test, and debug APIs and policies in Azure API Management from within their primary tools such as Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio and orchestrate the deployment of API Management artifacts using popular DevOps solutions such as GitHub Actions.

Azure native service: Azure customers using Azure API Management enjoy a familiar and consistent experience and benefit from seamless integration with other Azure services such as Azure Monitor, Azure Active Directory, Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, and others.

Source: microsoft.com

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Learn how the Azure nested edge securely unlocks value from manufacturing data

Around the world, customers are demonstrating the future of data-driven manufacturing. Dutch paint company AkzoNobel transformed from a manual operation to one focused on expanding a modern digital performance solution across its European factories. Swedish manufacturer Sandvik Coromant saw a 40 percent increase in engineering and operator productivity.

How others can replicate data-driven manufacturing success

We’ve recently developed a white paper to help our customers understand how they can replicate that success in their own facilities. For manufacturers, the promise of Industry 4.0 lies in breaking down silos and gaining a holistic view across the entire operation, from asset data to insights across all manufacturing processes. However, there are some big challenges in getting there—the data path is generally several layers deep, and enabling those layers to communicate freely can be an expensive proposition.

The manufacturing industry has a series of standards and compliance requirements, such as the International Society of Automation’s ISA-95. The ISA-95 automation structure is a generally accepted standard for manufacturing control systems that supports long-term reliability of operation. Still, it also makes interactions with control systems and automation devices all but impossible from an internet-connected system. However, building the capabilities from scratch to integrate the layers of the automation pyramid requires intense networking effort and expertise. Many companies are unable to fully realize their vision for a functional solution.

Microsoft Azure offers a path to overcome the ISA-95 compliance and interoperability conundrum. Azure Industrial IoT enables both established plants and new plants to be equipped with future monitoring and optimization functions for Industry 4.0 needs, in addition to the classic automation pyramid—through a safe, secure, and open approach that does not compromise existing implementations.

Our white paper shows how customers can use an Azure nested edge solution to unlock Industry 4.0 in their own facilities. It offers guidance on how customers around the world can build cloud-native industrial solutions on their terms and be ready for the future. The Azure nested edge is your path to meeting ISA-95 requirements without getting stuck in networking limbo.

Let’s take a look at what Azure nested edge allows you to do

◉ Increase security and deploy edge computing at multiple levels of the automation pyramid without compromising existing technologies.

◉ Benefit from the increased security and compliance standards mandated by ISA-95.

◉ Leverage edge computing that puts managers and engineers right on the factory floor when they’re needed.

◉ Securely collect and aggregate telemetry from each layer of the network to reduce unplanned downtime and minimize manufacturing defects.

By adopting open standards to innovate and connect the dots between your partners’ systems and your own—while respecting the limits and requirements of the ISA-95 environment—we can help you simplify your systems so you can focus on what’s important for your business.

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Three ways serverless APIs can accelerate enterprise innovation

With the wrong architecture, APIs can be a bottleneck to not only your applications but to your entire business. Bottlenecks such as downtime, low performance, or high application complexity, can result in exaggerated infrastructure and organizational costs and lost revenue. Serverless APIs mitigate these bottlenecks with autoscaling capabilities and consumption-based pricing models.

Once you start thinking of serverless as not only a remover-of-bottlenecks but also as an enabler-of-business, layers of your application infrastructure become a source of new opportunities. This is especially true of the API layer, as APIs can be productized to scale your business, attract new customers, or offer new services to existing customers, in addition to its traditional role as the communicator between software services.

Given the increasing dominance of APIs and API-first architectures, companies and developers are gravitating towards serverless platforms to host APIs and API-first applications to realize these benefits. One serverless compute option to host API’s is Azure Functions, event-triggered code that can scale on-demand, and you only pay for what you use. Gartner predicts that 50 percent of global enterprises will have deployed a serverless functions platform by 2025, up from only 20 percent today. You can publish Azure Functions through API Management to secure, transform, maintain, and monitor your serverless APIs.

Faster time to market

Modernizing your application stack to run microservices on a serverless platform decreases internal complexity and reduces the time it takes to develop new features or products. Each serverless function implements a microservice. By adding many functions to a single API Management product, you can build those microservices into an integrated distributed application. Once the application is built, you can use API Management policies to implement caching or ensure security requirements.

Quest Software uses Azure App Service to host microservices in Azure Functions. These support user capabilities such as registering new tenants and application functionality like communicating with other microservices or other Azure platform resources such as the Azure Cosmos DB managed NoSQL database service.

“We’re taking advantage of technology built by Microsoft and released within Azure in order to go to market faster than we could on our own. On average, over the last three years of consuming Azure services, we’ve been able to get new capabilities to market 66 percent faster than we could in the past.” - Michael Tweddle, President and General Manager of Platform Management, Quest

Quest also uses Azure API Management as an serverless API gateway for the Quest On Demand microservices that implement business logic with Azure Functions and to apply policies that control access, traffic, and security across microservices.

Modernize your infrastructure

Developers should be focusing on developing applications, not provisioning and managing infrastructure. API management provides a serverless API gateway that delivers a centralized, fully managed entry point for serverless backend services. It enables developers to publish, manage, secure, and analyze APIs on at global scale. Using serverless functions and API gateways together allows organizations to better optimize resources and stay focused on innovation. For example, a serverless function provides an API through which restaurants can adjust their local menus if they run out of an item.

Chipotle turned to Azure to create a unified web experience from scratch, leveraging both Azure API Management and Azure Functions for critical parts of their infrastructure. Calls to back-end services (such as ordering, delivery, and account management and preferences) hit Azure API Management, which gives Chipotle a single, easily managed endpoint and API gateway into its various back-end services and systems. With such functionality, other development teams at Chipotle are able to work on modernizing the back-end services behind the gateway in a way that remains transparent to Smith’s front-end app.

“API Management is great for ensuring consistency with our API interactions, enabling us to always know what exists where, behind a single URL,” says Smith. “There are lots of changes going on behind the API gateway, but we don’t need to worry about them.”- Mike Smith, Lead Software Developer, Chipotle

Innovate with APIs

Serverless APIs are used to either increase revenue, decrease cost, or improve business agility. As a result, technology becomes a key driver of business growth. Businesses can leverage artificial intelligence to analyze API calls to recognize patterns and predict future purchase behavior, thus optimizing the entire sales cycle.

PwC AI turned to Azure Functions to create a scalable API for its regulatory obligation knowledge mining solution. It also uses Azure Cognitive Search to quickly surface predictions found by the solution, embedding years of experience into an AI model that easily identifies regulatory obligations within the text.

“As we’re about to launch our ROI POC, I can see that Azure Functions is a value-add that saves us two to four weeks of work. It takes care of handling prediction requests for me. I also use it to extend the model to other PwC teams and clients. That’s how we can productionize our work with relative ease.”- Todd Morrill, PwC Machine Learning Scientist-Manager, PwC

Quest Software, Chipotle, and PwC are just a few Microsoft Azure customers who are leveraging tools such as Azure Functions and Azure API Management to create an API architecture that ensures your API’s are monitored, managed, and secure. Rethinking your API approach to use serverless technologies will unlock new capabilities within your organization that are not limited by scale, cost, or operational resources.

Get started immediately

Learn about common serverless API architecture patterns at the Azure Architecture Center, where we provide high-level overviews and reference architectures for common patterns that leverage Azure Functions and Azure API Management, in addition to other Azure services.

Source: microsoft.com

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