Friday, 29 January 2021

Tested Study Hacks to Pass Microsoft AZ-303 Exam


To obtain the Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification, there are two new exams that you require to pass, the
AZ-303: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies and the AZ-304: Microsoft Azure Architect Design exam. In this article, we will talk about AZ-303: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies Certification.

Passing Exam AZ-303 Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies confirms the skills and knowledge to counsel stakeholders and interpret business demands into scalable, secure, and dependable cloud solutions. Applicants have advanced experience and skills across IT operations, comprising virtualization, networking, identity, security, disaster recovery, business continuity, data platform, budgeting, and governance.

Thursday, 28 January 2021

4 reasons customers are asking service partners for Azure Lighthouse

With an increasingly complex security landscape and an ever-growing service partner portfolio, how do you stay on top of industry-standard best practices? As your business needs grow, you employ more and more partners to support your infrastructure, network, apps, and employees, but with that support comes a required level of access—how do you keep track of who has access to what and what exactly they're doing to your resources?

Typically, when working with a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to manage your Azure estate, you would provision guest identities for the service partner within the Azure tenant, where the resources live. While this gives you full control over the service partner’s footprint on your environment, this option often involves significant overhead on your end.

For example, you need to ensure timely deprovisioning of service partner identities when that identity is no longer associated with an engagement in your estate. Many customers often overcome some of the associated overhead by giving named accounts from the service partner a higher level of role-based access control over a larger scope than required—sometimes to their entire Azure tenant. While contributor or privileged access is critical for service partners to deliver certain services, not every operator at the service partner needs this level of standing access. However, the associated overhead of managing tens or hundreds of service partner identities, sometimes for multiple service partners, is expensive and laborious for many customers.

You need a solution to give you peace of mind that your partners can efficiently support your organization without compromising security—something that enables zero-trust security and least-privileged access principles with just enough and just-in-time access to granular scopes.

Azure Lighthouse helps you take control, stay secure, and be informed. Let’s take a look at the top four reasons why our customers are asking their service partners for Azure Lighthouse.

1. Securely onboard a service provider with Azure Lighthouse

Customers can access service partner offers in the marketplace or through deployed Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. These offers specify which users, groups, and automation accounts need authorization in order to deliver the managed service. For example, you may see an offer that grants all service partner support agents Reader access to your Azure subscription with only certain members gaining Backup Contributor access.

You can review these offers with service partners before deploying them, selecting only the scopes (subscriptions and resource groups) you want the partner to manage, giving you more control and granularity over who can do what in your environment.

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Figure 1: An example of an Azure Lighthouse ARM template offer and customer ARM template deployment workflow from the Azure Portal

2. View and manage your service partners in a centralized control plane


The Azure Lighthouse Service Providers experience in the Azure portal provides details about your service partners and their related Azure Lighthouse offers, allowing you to delegate specific resources and update to the latest versions of the offers, and discover other service partner offers. At any time, you can remove a service partner's access by deleting the delegation from within your Azure portal. This also means reduced overhead —for example, you do not have to keep up to date with any changes made to employees that aren’t your staff. If the service partner is using groups in their Azure Lighthouse offers, they can manage the group membership on their own tenant. If the service provider is using individual named users or automation accounts, then you can view and update to the latest Azure Lighthouse offer from the service partner. 

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Figure 2: An example of a customer using Azure Lighthouse to manage multiple service providers

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Figure 3: An example of a customer using Azure Lighthouse to view delegation details for a specific subscription managed by the service provider

3. Gain full visibility into changes made by the service partner in your Azure environment


With Azure Lighthouse, you can view Azure Activity Logs from your Azure Tenant, filter to scopes delegated to a service partner, and view all create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) actions taken against these Azure resources (for example, creating, updating, or deleting resources). If any individual or service principal from the service partner acts against a customer resource, the associated contact email will be logged against that action in your activity log, giving you full visibility into any changes made by the service partner on delegated scopes. Additionally, actions against this service partner’s activity are still governed—for example, Azure policies that you might have specified at a higher-scope, such as a management group, will still be enforced against service partner activity.

4. Enable further granularity and security with privileged identity management and MFA private preview


At Microsoft Inspire 2020, Azure Lighthouse announced an integration with Azure Privileged Identity Management (PIM) in private preview. The integration allows Azure Lighthouse offers to now be authored to require service partner operators to elevate to a privileged role and/or use Azure Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) before performing privileged operations on your scopes. (Currently, the Azure AD P2 or E5 license is only required on the service partner’s tenant, irrespective of the Azure AD SKU the customer may have.)

Customers can review the access type (permanent or eligible) and MFA enforcement (Azure MFA or none) within the Azure Lighthouse offers at the point of onboarding to the service partner and view details within the Azure Lighthouse Service Providers on the Azure Portal at any time. Once onboarded, the service partner operators can elevate to the privileged role for the agreed duration without any additional approvals from you. This enables the service partner to use a least-privileged approach to daily tasks, only raising their level to a role when needed to perform certain operations, while still maintaining visibility into all changes the service partner operator is performing on your scopes.

Announcing a new web experience for customers

Recently, the Azure Lighthouse product page on azure.com was redesigned to showcase the benefits of working with an Azure Lighthouse-enabled partner, including resources, videos, and customer testimonials for customers.

Azure Lighthouse was designed to enhance the professional services relationship between a service provider and a customer, maintaining transparency and customer control while reducing security exposures.

Source: microsoft.com

Tuesday, 26 January 2021

Build regionally resilient cloud services using the Azure Resource Manager

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Cloud Services (extended support) and migration to Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

Today, we are announcing the preview of Cloud Services (extended support), which is a new Azure Resource Manager (ARM) based deployment model for Azure Cloud Services. Cloud Services (extended support) has the primary benefit of providing regional resiliency along with feature parity with Azure Cloud Services deployed using Azure Service Manager (ASM). It also offers some ARM capabilities such as role-based access and control (RBAC), tags, policy, and supports deployment templates.

With this change, the ASM-based deployment model for Cloud Services will be renamed Cloud Services (classic), starting today. Customers will retain the ability to build and rapidly deploy web and cloud applications and services. Customers will be able to scale cloud services infrastructure based on current demand and ensure that the performance of applications can keep up while simultaneously reducing costs. 

Cloud Services (extended support) provides two paths for customers to migrate from ASM to ARM. One path is to re-deploy, where customers deploy cloud services directly in ARM and then delete the old cloud service in ASM after thorough validation. The second path is to execute an in-place migration that gives our customers the ability to migrate Cloud Services (classic) to ARM with minimal to no downtime.

The preview of the re-deploy path of Cloud Services (extended support) is available starting today, while the in-place migration path will be announced soon.

Additional Azure services to consider for migration to ARM

When evaluating migration plans from Cloud Services (classic) to Cloud Services (extended support), customers may want to investigate the opportunity of taking advantage of additional Azure services such as Virtual Machine Scale Sets, App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure Service Fabric. These services will continue to feature additional capabilities, while Cloud Services (extended support) will primarily maintain feature parity with Cloud Services (classic.)

Depending on the application, Cloud Services (extended support) may require substantially less effort to move to ARM compared to other options. If the application is not evolving, Cloud Services (extended support) is a viable option to consider as it provides a quick migration path. Conversely, if the application is continuously evolving and needs a more modern feature set, do explore other Azure services to better address current and future requirements.

Deployment model changes

Minimal changes are required to the service configuration and service definition files (.cscfg and .csdef) to deploy Cloud Services (extended support). No changes are required to runtime code, however, the deployment scripts will need to be updated to call new ARM-based APIs. The major differences between Cloud Services (classic) and Cloud Services (extended support) with respect to deployment are:

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◉ ARM deployments use ARM templates which is a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file that defines the infrastructure and configuration for the project. The template uses declarative syntax, which lets customers state what they intend to deploy without having to write the sequence of programming commands to create it. The Service Configuration and Service definition file needs to be consistent with the ARM template while deploying Cloud Services (extended support). This can be achieved either by manually creating the ARM template or using PowerShell, Portal, or Visual Studio.

◉ Customers must use Azure Key Vault to manage certificates in Cloud Services (extended support). Azure Key Vault lets customers securely store and manage application credentials such as secrets, keys, and certificates in a central and secure cloud repository. Applications can authenticate to Key Vault at run time to retrieve credentials.

◉ A virtual network is mandatory for any resource deployed through the Azure Resource Manager. Virtual networks and subnets in ARM are created through existing ARM APIs and referenced in the .cscfg, within the network configuration section.

Source: microsoft.com

Saturday, 23 January 2021

Key customer benefits of the expanded SAP and Microsoft partnership

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This past year has shown us how important it is to be ready for the unexpected. We spent a lot of time talking with customers, and it was rewarding to hear their stories of using technology to respond quickly to changing business needs. This was especially true for those who were well down the path of digital transformation. For example, Coats was an early mover to the cloud and was able to adapt quickly to the increased demand for thread to make the world’s personal protective equipment (PPE). In April, Carhartt shifted US production to manufacture medical gowns and masks, and with the help of Microsoft Teams, was able to continue its work to migrate mission-critical business applications to SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure.

Another great example is Walgreens Boots Alliance. They had planned to start a migration of their massive 100 TB SAP HANA database in March, just as the pandemic began. Thanks to the use of Microsoft Teams and the well-defined reference architectures and programs we’ve built with SAP as part of the Embrace initiative, the migration was completed successfully in less than 20 hours. Walgreens Boots Alliance is now the largest SAP S/4HANA scale-out deployment on Azure. They have been able to adapt quickly to give customers the options they need for mobile shopping, curbside pickup, and new pharmacy services. For so many collaboration projects like these SAP migrations, Microsoft Teams has proven essential.

These mission-critical SAP applications are the lifeblood of many organizations, and customers are increasingly moving them to the cloud to gain agility and resilience, and to transform with a cloud platform that supports greater data insights and future innovation. 

New Azure integrations to automate migration, strengthen security, and modernize applications

SAP customers broadly favor Azure to move on-premises SAP S/4HANA to the cloud. To help them further in accomplishing their goal of running SAP ERP and S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure, SAP and Microsoft are making new joint engineering investments that go beyond simplifying migration to drive operational efficiency, improve security and resilience, and drive transformation in the cloud. With these new investments, customers can:

◉ Accelerate migration through additional guidance and automation from SAP and Microsoft on the initial setup and architecture design of SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure, including guidance on data migration tool usage.

◉ Increase operational efficiencies to support a modern DevOps approach with automated turnkey operations of SAP S/4HANA in Azure that cover the entire application lifecycle.

◉ Strengthen security by combining SAP and Azure signals and integrating technologies such as enhanced network security, end-to-end authentication, and threat protection.

◉ Empower developers with an innovation-ready cloud platform that supports integration with Business Technology Platform to deliver event integration, simplified administration and provisioning of users, and faster and simpler landscape creation.

Teams integration across SAP solutions to improve productivity

Our two companies combine the market-leading business applications with the market-leading business collaboration platform. Together, we will drive joint innovation to integrate Microsoft Teams with SAP’s business software applications. By doing so, we aim to simplify processes, enable collaboration without switching applications, and guide users of the solutions intuitively. Ultimately, the integration scenarios can help to achieve enhanced workplace productivity by offering our customers significant value to work better together with their employees, customers, and partners—anywhere and anytime. With these investments, customers can:

◉ Improve collaboration with business partners: Respond more quickly to changing demands by bringing critical data and tools from SAP S/4HANA into Microsoft Teams, so users don’t have to switch applications. For example: seamlessly share critical line of business information, like supplier details from SAP S/4HANA with your colleagues and customers as you chat, meet, and manage within Teams.

◉ Simplify and modernize remote selling: Empower sellers to connect better with customers through the integration of SAP Sales Cloud with Microsoft Teams. For example, without switching applications, customer calls can be initiated directly from the customer relationship management (CRM) application, ensuring transparency and consistency within CRM and saving time through user-friendly workflows.

◉ Foster collaboration for employees: By integrating Microsoft Teams across SAP products including SAP S/4HANA and SAP SuccessFactors, you can give employees simple, intuitive, and engaging ways to stay connected and stay informed.

The SAP and Microsoft teams are already working together on bringing many of these enhancements to our customers soon. The announcement today deepens our 25-year partnership in helping our joint customers succeed. We look forward to hearing how our customers use these unique Azure and Teams integrations with SAP solutions to evolve and transform their businesses to achieve critical business goals.

Source: microsoft.com

Tuesday, 19 January 2021

Helping retailers navigate the future

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Each new year introduces new opportunities and challenges, but 2020 was exceptional. The pandemic massively disrupted retail organizations due to ongoing shelter-in-place orders and social distancing requirements. Consumers adapted, driving nine years’ worth of e-commerce growth in 90 days.

Retailers responded by dramatically accelerating their digital transformation journeys to focus on prioritizing customer health and safety, reimagining channel retail experiences, and enabling data-driven decision making.

So, as we prepare for NRF 2021—the association’s first all-digital-event—we are reflecting on the industry’s incredible, ongoing adaptation to pandemic-driven trends and the impact in 2021 and beyond.

Resilience: driven by people, enabled by technology

The unmatched performance of Microsoft Azure allows our customers to intelligently manage secure workloads across multiple sites and domains, scale those workloads to process millions of requests per second, and improve the logistics to manage each order. Azure Data and AI services help retailers respond to market forces, improve decision-making, and put customers first by breaking down their data silos to manage, merge, shape, and analyze the data and, as a result, uncover actionable insights.

With Azure, retailers get the best of at-scale cloud, data, and AI workloads including industry data models that enable data management, governance, and domain excellence in one cloud platform from a provider that does not compete with them. As a result, retailers can build better digital feedback loops—the connections between their customers, their people, their stores, their data, and the insights at the heart of each—on a platform from a trusted partner.

Take, for example, Albertsons Companies’ migration from an aging on-premises server farm to Microsoft Azure. The move enabled a modern, on-demand shopping experience for customers and sharpened the group’s competitive edge. State-of-the-art AI and cognitive services combined with an innovative developer environment helped Albertsons quickly introduce easy-to-use apps to make shopping faster and offer consumers a more personalized, streamlined experience.

To help determine which products customers want, Walgreens needed process, analyze, and report on vast amounts of store data every day. In three months, Walgreens was able to migrate its entire on-premises data warehouse for inventory management into Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. After moving to Azure Synapse Analytics, Walgreens has dramatically improved certain aspects of operations, lowered its total cost of ownership, and modernized business processes and decision making.

Connected, customized experiences

With the power to harness, normalize, and shape their data using Azure’s open ecosystem, retailers can unleash the benefits of AI and machine learning to help transform business outcomes by:

◉ Reimagining retail. Microsoft Azure enables connected devices and experiences with easy, scalable, and secure services for retailers. Using the Spatial Analysis feature of Computer Vision, part of Azure Cognitive Services, retailers can deploy powerful AI models based on store and customer data. This allows them to assess store activity to ensure social distancing and sanitization requirements are met. It also can be used to deliver insight on how customers interact with displays and products. Further, using Azure Digital Twins, retailers can effectively model a virtual representation of their layout, supply chain, logistics, and more. AI can also be used to provide personalized real-time recommendations for customers and deliver intelligent conversational agents​ that improve customer experiences and offer meaningful incentives and promotions with customer loyalty programs. 

In today’s retail environments, the scalability of a commerce platform is key. The new Elera Commerce microservices platform provides connections to Toshiba, third-party, or retailer APIs, allowing customers to be agile and adaptive as they make changes to key areas such as mobile POS, returns, dark stores, centralized pricing, loyalty programs, and promotions. Leveraging Azure Cosmos DB’s automatic partitioning of data and massive elastic scalability, Toshiba’s Elera platform was jointly deployed for production to enable a centralized omnichannel refunds capability bringing operational efficiency and significantly improving customer experience. This enterprise-grade solution enables customers to modernize their retail platforms in less time.

◉ Knowing their customers. Shoppers expect exceptional service, and they’re willing to give brands access to their data to enable convenience and personalization. But organizational silos often create obstacles between accessing that coveted information and putting it to work. In fact, 55 percent of business leaders report data silos and data management difficulties as roadblocks.

To deliver on consumers’ personalization and convenience expectations, retailers need to develop authentic and accessible end-to-end experiences, which requires understanding their customers and all their data. Using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, retailers can leverage industry standards via the Common Data Model and an open ecosystem approach. With the ability to analyze data from across their organization, they can discover key insights and apply them to unique solutions that match their priorities and meet their shoppers’ needs.

◉ Building a resilient supply chain. In today’s digital-physical hybrid shopping world, an intelligent, resilient supply chain is a significant competitive advantage. It enables retailers to optimize for speed and cost, achieve sustainable profitability, and build industry-scale feedback loops. It also enables direct-to-consumer opportunities.

Retailers can optimize enterprise resource planning in the cloud with SAP-certified infrastructure on Azure as well as running the comprehensive set of SAP Digital Supply Chain solutions on Microsoft Azure.

Provide industry leading robotic micro-fulfillment solutions that reduce costs, warehousing space, and improve delivery metrics with Attabotics. Orchestrate a last mile experience with FarEye. And scale supply chain visibility, allowing them to dynamically update supply-chain planning, and automate decision-making using Blue Yonder.

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To enable transformation across all these areas, Microsoft Systems Integrator Accenture has developed a new offering called Retail Applied Intelligence, known as ai.RETAIL. The solution is designed to deliver profitable growth using leading AI, purpose-built for retail to enable a deep understanding of customers, scale personalization, and balance speed and cost throughout the supply chain.

Intelligent solutions for future-ready retail

We look forward to supporting our retail customers with an intelligent, industry-focused, secure platform delivered by a trusted partner—Microsoft Azure. Today we announced the preview of the Microsoft Cloud for Retail, and Azure is excited to be a foundational platform of this industry specific cloud solution.

Source: microsoft.com

Saturday, 16 January 2021

Azure and HITRUST publish shared responsibility matrix

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Healthcare solutions offered in the cloud are drawing unprecedented attention today with the ongoing global pandemic and the accompanying need for social distancing. Microsoft has been on the forefront of empowering health organizations to leverage the power of the cloud.

Protecting health information and complying with health regulations are critical components of any healthcare solution in the cloud, and Azure has long had a rich set of healthcare compliance offerings, including HDS, HIPAA, MARS-E, NEN 7510, and the increasingly important HITRUST CSF—a certifiable framework that provides organizations with a comprehensive and efficient approach to regulatory compliance and risk management.

Today we're announcing with the Healthcare Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) the availability to our customers of the HITRUST Shared Responsibility Matrix, which provides clarity on roles and responsibilities for implementing solutions in Azure that meet the rigorous HITRUST standard for protecting sensitive health data.

In collaboration with privacy, information security, and risk management leaders from the public and private sectors, HITRUST develops, maintains, and provides broad access to its widely adopted common risk and compliance management frameworks, related assessment, and assurance methodologies.

The HITRUST CSF provides the structure, transparency, guidance, and cross-references to authoritative sources organizations globally need to be certain of their data protection compliance. The initial development of the HITRUST CSF leveraged nationally and internationally accepted security and privacy-related regulations, standards, and frameworks—including the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), Payment Card Industry (PCI), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Control Objects for Information Technologies (COBIT)—to ensure a comprehensive set of security and privacy controls, and continually incorporates additional authoritative sources. The HITRUST CSF standardizes these requirements, providing clarity and consistency, and reducing the burden of compliance. The HITRUST CSF has become a widely adopted security and privacy framework across industries globally.

The HITRUST CSF integrates and harmonizes more than 40 authoritative sources and includes more than 2,000 controls. HITRUST certifies IT offerings against these controls. HITRUST CSF Certified status demonstrates that an organization has met key regulations, achieved industry-defined requirements, and is appropriately managing risk. When customers leverage only on-premises IT infrastructure, they have complete responsibility for implementing HITRUST CSF controls. Customers using a cloud service such as Azure can lessen their burden because the cloud represents a shared responsibility between the customer and the cloud service provider.

The Shared Responsibility Matrix eases the task of understanding which of the many HITRUST controls that can apply to an Azure customer are the responsibility of the customer, which are shared, and which are already fully covered by Azure.  For example, domain one of the CSF, Information Protection Program, is largely the responsibility of the customer as it mostly involves policy, training, and documentation. Domain 18, Physical and Environmental Security, is entirely the responsibility of Azure because all physical infrastructure is controlled by Microsoft. Other domains, such domain eight, Network Protection, involve shared responsibility for the security and configuration of network security.

“HITRUST helps organizations ensure that the highest standards of information protection requirements are met when sensitive data is accessed or stored, and the adoption by Microsoft of the Shared Responsibility Matrix for Azure helps ensure that necessary controls are implemented, and shared responsibilities are understood and met. Microsoft is an organization that can be counted on for keeping information safe.”—Becky Swain, Director of Standards Development, HITRUST

An additional benefit to Azure customers for using the Shared Responsibility Matrix is the HITRUST inheritance capability, which allows for Azure customers to inherit controls from Azure’s HITRUST assessment and apply it to their own assessments easily, saving time and resources. When a customer is completing their HITRUST CSF Assessment, they can select “Request Inheritance” through the HITRUST MyCSF SaaS platform for any requirements you plan to inherit from Azure. Microsoft will then approve all the relevant controls from the request and notify the customer.

Another way Azure customers can accelerate their HITRUST deployment is through the use of the Azure HITRUST Blueprint sample. The free Azure Blueprints service helps enable cloud architects and information technology groups to define a repeatable set of Azure resources that implements and adheres to an organization’s standards, patterns, and requirements. The HITRUST Blueprint sample provides governance guard-rails using Azure Policy that helps customers assess specific HITRUST controls, and deploy a core set of policies for any Azure-deployed architecture that must implement HITRUST controls.

In a new webinar Nidhi Sanghavi, principal program manager for Azure, discuss implementing HITRUST on Azure, along with Guillermo Gomez, senior product marketing manager, who demonstrates applying an Azure Blueprint for HITRUST.

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The Shared Responsibility Matrix and Azure Blueprints exemplify Azure’s leadership in compliance.  Azure offers more than 90 compliance offerings, including over 50 specific to global regions and countries, and more than 40 compliance offerings specific to the needs of key industries including health, government, finance, education, manufacturing, and media.

Microsoft continues to be on the forefront of empowering healthcare organizations to leverage the power of the cloud. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, an end-to-end, industry-specific cloud solution includes released and new healthcare capabilities that unlock the power of Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform. It makes it faster and easier to provide more efficient care and helps customers support end-to-end security, compliance, and interoperability of health data, and harnesses the power of the Microsoft cloud to transform the healthcare journey and help:

◉ Enable personalized care that enhances patient engagement by allowing patients to access their health organization on their terms with personalized experiences.

◉ Empower health organizations through access to tools that enable collaborative workflows. 

◉ Improve clinical and operational insights to predict risk and help improve quality care.

◉ Reimagine healthcare with innovative new technologies like HoloLens in operating theaters, enabling surgeons to see up-to-date information on patients and better visualize procedures.

◉ Protect health information and comply with healthcare regulations.

Source: microsoft.com

Tuesday, 12 January 2021

Connecting urban environments with IoT and Digital Twins

As urbanization continues to take hold and cities face challenges to become more sustainable and livable, urban planning and operations strategies must adapt. The current pandemic has changed the way we live, accelerating cities’ future vision as a necessity of the present and what it means to live in a connected and resilient urban environment. Now more than ever, public and private organizations are coming together to push transformative solutions and change the way we plan and operate infrastructure and urban environments for all.

Microsoft, along with its partner ecosystem, continues to be deeply engaged with cities and communities around the world by providing capabilities and solutions that span the intelligent cloud and edge, advancing of AI driven by ethical principles, and continuing commitment to trust and security. Earlier this year, IDC MarketScape recognized Microsoft as the leading worldwide IoT application platform for Smart Cities, highlighting its secure, mature, and capable Azure IoT, AI, and Digital Twins services. In addition to IDC, Guidehouse Insights also recognized Microsoft as the leader in its leaderboard for Smart Cities platform suppliers, highlighting Azure’s ability to support a broad portfolio of smart city solutions using common platform technologies.

As cities continue to invest in connected solutions, a study by ESI ThoughtLab on hyperconnected cities shows that as solutions become more interlinked their return on investment (ROI) grows. To unlock their full economic, social, environmental, and business value, cities need to use digital technologies to transform and interconnect key areas of their ecosystem—from roads to cars, buildings to energy grids, citizens to government, and cities to cities. Microsoft’s focus to deliver new technology innovations in IoT, AI and Digital Twins is enabling connected solution integration that drives breakthrough insights and experiences from planning to operations of urban environments and their infrastructure.

Towards connected urban environments

The concept of digital twins—a digital model and representation of real-world environment brought to life with real time data from sensors and other data sources—has entered the realm of smart cities and promises to enable city administrations and urban planners to make better decisions with the help of data integration and visualization from across the urban space. While urban planners have already been using 2D and 3D models and computer-aided design for years, the integration of real-time data from IoT devices, location, weather, traffic, people movement, and other sources has been a gamechanger for urban planning and operations.

Earlier this year, we announced an update to Azure Digital Twins platform which enables modeling and creating digital representations of connected environments like buildings, factories, farms, energy networks, railways, stadiums, and cities, then bring these entities to life with a live execution environment that integrates IoT and other data sources. To drive openness and interoperability, Azure Digital Twins comes with an open modeling language, Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL), which provides flexibility, ease of use, and integration into the rest of the Azure platform. Furthermore, to enable urban experiences that are geospatially aware, Azure Maps provides several geospatial services including access to real-time traffic, public transit, and weather data.

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City and infrastructure operations


Modeling the complex interactions and high-value intersections between people, places, and things is unlocking new opportunities, creating new efficiencies, and improving public and private spaces.

Siemens MindSphere City Graph is a solution that offers a new way to optimize city operations. It creates a digital twin of urban spaces allowing cities to model, monitor, and control physical infrastructure. Through the integration of IoT data, legacy systems, and other data sources, stakeholders of a city gain insights and understand changes as they happen. MindSphere City Graph provides the openness for solution providers to integrate and deliver sustainable value for a city while enabling open data for cities through an open standard approach.

MindSphere City Graph uses Azure Digital Twins to build digital models of entire environments within an urban space and bring these digital twins to life in a live execution environment with integration of real-time data. City Graph uses the open Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) to model the environment and enable interoperability leveraging Smart City standards. The first deployment has been successfully rolled out in Aspern with Aspern Smart City Research (ASCR) by Siemens Advanta and focused on the improved forecasting of the charging demand of eCars and the understanding of their impact on the energy infrastructure.

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Available charging poles for one location and forecasted heat map of charge point availability.

We are excited to share that MindSphere City Graph was honored with the World Smart City 2020 Award in the Urban Environment category during this year’s Smart City Live Expo, which recognizes the most innovative and successful projects being implemented and developed for urban environments. The award is a prestigious international competition to recognize groundbreaking projects, ideas, and strategies that make cities around the world more livable, sustainable, and economically viable.

We are also excited to share that Aspern Smart City Research (ASCR) has been honored with the IDC 2020 Smart Cities and Communities Europe and Central Asia Awards in the Resilient Infrastructure category, made possible by MindSphere City Graph based on Azure Digital Twins. The award is the first of its kind recognizing technology-enabled, groundbreaking and innovative projects, that deliver citizen-centric outcomes. 

Urban and infrastructure planning


Digital cities are embracing a data-driven approach from planning to performance, leveraging digital twins for operating city infrastructure, urban planning, visualization, and simulation, to support infrastructure resilience and enhance stakeholder collaboration and resident engagement.

Bentley Systems provides the architectural and engineering solutions used to design, build, and operate much of the world’s infrastructure. In the world of infrastructure development, complex computer-aided design (CAD) data is the backbone of planning, execution, and operation of major infrastructures, such as road and rail networks, public works, and utilities. Bentley’s iTwin platform captures geometry and metadata of a project and its environment as the source of truth that drives daily decisions throughout its lifecycle. Using Azure Digital Twins, Bentley can bring these infrastructure backbones to life through the integration of real-time IoT data, enabling iTwin users to visualize operational data, time-series data, and analytics in rich, contextual 3D and 4D models, reducing the time it takes to assemble a complete picture of the present and future.

With Bentley’s OpenCities Planner digital cities can use reality modeling to rapidly build a highly precise 3D geometric model of existing infrastructure and combine with engineering data to perform 3D spatial analysis and visualization during all the stages of infrastructure lifecycle at a city level. Bentley Systems and Microsoft recently announced an alliance to accelerate infrastructure digital twin innovations and scale advancements for urban planning and smart cities.

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Smart streetlights: core infrastructure for smart city solutions


Streetlights are uniquely positioned in the transformation of the urban environment. Combined with LED conversion, smart lighting has been recognized as one of the most actionable and ready-to-implement technologies for cities to transition to a low-carbon economy in the next decade. Smart streetlights have widely demonstrated ROI for reduced energy consumption and maintenance spending. Streetlights, once networked, are also increasingly being used as a platform for other smart city applications including public safety, air quality and environmental monitoring, connectivity, EV charging, and parking.

Schréder, a worldwide leader in outdoor lighting present in over 70 countries across the globe, sees lighting as a backbone to building a truly smart city. It has built a cloud-native smart Lighting Management platform, Schréder EXEDRA, that can remotely monitor and analyze streetlights leveraging Azure and Azure IoT as a core platform for its highest levels of trust, transparency, standards conformance, and regulatory compliance. With this new platform, city managers can gain flexibility, energy savings, and the ability to manage their assets. They are able to dim the streetlight brightness according to specific needs, generate and manage tickets, easily create reports, and interact with other sensors and devices installed in public spaces.

ENE.HUB, a subsidiary of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, is a fully integrated smart city infrastructure as a service provider. ENE.HUB’s flagship product, SMART.NODE™ is a comprehensive and self-contained smart pole solution that discretely integrates a range of smart city services including smart LED lighting, communication services, energy services, environment services, transport services, safety, and media services. The data gathered is integrated through a central management system and analytics platform built on Azure allowing users to control, interact and analyze real-time data to enable responsive action and keep cities and public spaces efficient, safe, and vibrant.

Dimonoff, which has 14 years of expertise in controlling and remote management of connected assets like streetlights, works closely with infrastructure managers of cities, university campuses, as well as real estate development companies and lighting manufacturers, to guarantee the full implementation of largely scalable smart solutions. Dimonoff has worked on multiple citywide deployments of streetlight controls. Dimonoff SCMS runs on Microsoft Azure and enables facility and site managers to automate the control, monitoring, and maintenance management of streetlights and other assets, increasing the sustainability of their infrastructure.

Interoperability with DTDL


Common representation of places, infrastructure, and assets will be paramount for interoperability and enabling data sharing between multiple domains. The Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) is an open modeling language to describe models and interfaces for digital twins: the telemetry they emit, the properties they report or synchronize, the commands they respond to, and the relationship between them.

Starting with Smart Building solutions we partnered with RealEstateCore to release the DTDL-based RealEstateCore ontology which provides common ground for modeling smart buildings leveraging well-established industry standards, accelerates developers time to results, and enables interoperability between DTDL-based solutions from different solution providers. Similarly, we are working with our partners for DTDL based smart cities ontologies starting with ETSI CIM NGSI-LD models which have been adopted by organizations like OASC.

Smart buildings, energy, and sustainability


From cities to campuses, now more than ever, buildings of all kinds, from commercial offices to public buildings and more, remain in need of transformative solutions that will enable people and communities to work and live safely. At Microsoft, we continue to push innovation forward to unlock the full potential of smart buildings that will not only allow the reopening of buildings, but provide lasting value for property owners, managers, tenants, and occupants which in turn enables cities to build back resilient with thriving communities. We also continue to demonstrate the next level of energy efficiency by delivering innovative projects. For example, enabling buildings to be distributed energy resources to power them with green energy generated from their own rooftops that reduces carbon footprint and utility bills, using cutting-edge AI with project Bonsai to optimize the energy usage to new heights.

Smart City Live Expo


Microsoft will be at the Smart City Live Expo, an annual gathering for urbanization, to connect smart city technologies and partners with cities on a digital transformation journey. One of the key themes for this year will be on how technology can help cities continue to meet new challenges, both today and in the future.

Source: microsoft.com

Saturday, 9 January 2021

Is Microsoft AZ-204 Exam What You Need?

Getting certified by a renowned vendor like Microsoft isn’t a trend that fades over time. It’s been proven and tested by thousands of professionals all around the world. So, if you want to become a skilled Azure developer, there’s no better way to strengthen your knowledge than to pursue the Microsoft Azure Administrator: Azure Developer Associate certification path through its AZ-204 exam. Here are some great reasons why this credential is worth the shot.

Deliver AI-powered application search with Azure Cognitive Search and BA Insight

Data is growing exponentially, and over 80 percent of data is unstructured, creating a challenge for organizations to find and surface the right information to their customers. What organizations need is a solution that enables them to uncover latent insights from all their content by quickly identifying relevant information and meaningful patterns.

Knowledge mining is a category in AI that brings together multiple AI capabilities, making it easier for developers to get to insights faster. Azure Cognitive Search powers knowledge mining solutions to easily identify and explore relevant content at scale.

With Azure Cognitive Search, cloud search has evolved to include AI capabilities, across ingestion, enrichment, and exploration of structured and unstructured content. With APIs and tools, developers can build solutions that power rich search experiences over a variety of content in web, mobile, and enterprise applications.

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Customers across multiple industries have leveraged Azure Cognitive Search to deliver enhanced app search experience. Amway has used Azure Cognitive Search to power applications and help sellers better explore and understand product information. As a result, search time for sellers reduced significantly, empowering them to help four times more customers every day. The Atlantic utilized Azure Cognitive Search to transition to a digital system for its archives. This helped the writers at Atlantic to derive insights from a sea of stories and build connections between past and present.

A myriad of partners, such as PwC, Archive360, Wix, and OrangeNXT, have also built Azure Cognitive Search powered search solutions to support their customers across finance, retail, manufacturing, and other industries.

BA Insight has built Search for Workplace solution powered by Azure Cognitive Search and other Azure AI services. It enables enterprise users to stop looking for information store-by-store and brings the knowledge to the users across all their content, regardless of where the information is. Users get recommendations for personalized information and can connect to content repositories, applications, and databases via out-of-box connectors or create custom connectors via SDK. Auto Classifier removes the burden of tagging from users when generating new content and tags existing content accurately and consistently. The in-app search experience enables users to conduct their searches from within the applications they use every day, seamlessly integrating into their existing work practices.

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This solution can be deployed via BA Insight’s Enterprise Search as a Cloud Service or within a customer’s environment. With Enterprise Search as a Cloud Service, organizations can benefit from a fully managed enterprise search deployment that delivers a highly personalized, intelligent, and relevant user experience—without the burden of custom development. It is integrated with applications like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, Microsoft Edge, and ServiceNow.

Recently, BA Insight Chairman and CEO, Massood Zarrabian, and Liam Cavanagh, Principal Program Manager for Azure Cognitive Search, sat down to chat about the Search for Workplace solution. Watch and learn more in this podcast.

BA Insight also has a special offer—you can leverage the Art of Possible offer by BA Insight to get a “real world” view of how the solution works with your content, engage in search strategy session to discuss your current environment and challenges, and get hands on testing for select team of your users.

Source: azure.microsoft.com

Thursday, 7 January 2021

Introducing Azure Health Bot—an evolution of Microsoft Healthcare Bot with new functionality

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Since the start of the pandemic, Microsoft Healthcare Bot has been at the leading edge of helping organizations be more agile with patient engagement. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Walgreens, Premera, and Providence are just a few of the many organizations that are leveraging Microsoft Healthcare Bot to create bots to triage symptoms, answer lab and COVID-related questions, locate nearby clinics, and more. Over the last year, the Healthcare Bot has been used to build thousands of bots and deliver close to 1 billion messages to over 80 million people worldwide, spanning 25 countries.

Today we are announcing that the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service is moving to Azure, further empowering organizations to benefit from Azure’s enhanced tooling, security, and compliance offerings. Customers will be able to seamlessly migrate from Microsoft Healthcare Bot to Azure Health Bot with a few simple steps and no downtime. Additionally, we continue to bring new capabilities to Azure Health Bot, such as new templates for checking eligibility for COVID-19 vaccines and providing answers to related questions.

Azure Health Bot empowers developers in healthcare organizations to build and deploy AI-powered, compliant, conversational healthcare experiences at scale. It combines built-in medical databases with natural language capabilities to understand clinical terminology and can be easily customized to support clinical and operational use cases. The service enables customers’ compliance with industry requirements including HIPAA.

As a native Azure service, Azure Health Bot benefits from Azure’s security investments as well as the most comprehensive compliance coverage of any cloud service provider. Now customers can use standard Azure management tools that they are familiar with and rely on the 99.9 percent SLA commitment. While currently available in two regions (East US and West Europe), it will expand availability to eight regions over the coming months.

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With this move to Azure, we are making it easier than ever before to build bots for healthcare-specific scenarios. Our customers have been using Microsoft Healthcare Bot to drive patient engagement in a variety of use cases and we are excited to see further innovation.

“As part of our Well-Being Initiative, we created the Stress Self-Assessment tool using the Azure Health Bot.This tool offers an anonymous way for nurses to check on themselves and receive guidance to safeguard their well-being. The bot helps nurses discover and make use of a variety of evidence-based ways to build strength and maintain health, like peer support, guided relaxation, apps with well-being tools, and webinars.” —Kate Judge, Executive Director, American Nurses Foundation

“We did not want to build from scratch, but we wanted a robust, scalable platform, that was highly secure. The health bot, built in partnership with Microsoft, started handling 30,000 enquiries a day within a few weeks of first getting up and running.” —Fran Thompson, Interim Chief Information Officer, Health Service Executive (HSE) Ireland

If you are an existing customer of Microsoft Healthcare Bot, you can easily migrate to Azure Health Bot in a few minutes with no downtime. While we highly encourage you to migrate to Azure Health Bot for the best experience, we will continue to support your existing service at least for the coming 12 months.

Source: microsoft.com

Tuesday, 5 January 2021

4 common analytics scenarios to build business agility

Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that is designed to bring the two worlds of big data and data warehousing into a unified, enterprise-grade, powerful platform. In this blog post, we look at four real-world use cases where global organizations have used Azure Synapse Analytics to innovate and drive business value through data. For a more detailed and in-depth coverage of how data analytics can help your business, see our e-book Analytics Lessons Learned: How Four Companies Drove Business Agility with Analytics and sign up for Azure to start exploring your data with Azure Synapse.

Why Azure Synapse?

Azure Synapse provides a complete, out-of-the-box solution designed to accelerate time-to-insight and empower business agility. Azure Synapse is the only end-to-end platform that unifies data ingestion, big data analytics, and data warehousing. It offers turnkey setup and configuration options on fully managed infrastructure to help you get results fast. It offers greater control and flexibility in terms of pricing by enabling you to choose the best pricing option for each workload with both serverless and dedicated options.

Use case one: Just-in-time inventory

Aggreko is a global leader in the supply of temporary power generation, temperature control systems, and energy services, providing backup energy and power supply whenever and wherever their customers need it. Aggreko uses Azure Synapse to increase operational efficiency with the just-in-time supply of their specialist equipment.

Aggreko’s data ingestion pipeline was set up to run every eight hours because it took four hours to run the ingestion (batch) jobs. Moreover, the data warehouse had to be rebuilt every day due to storage limitations. This meant that there was a lag of 8-24 hours between when the data arrived and when it was available for data analytics pipelines:

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By adopting Azure Synapse, Aggreko was able to significantly improve its time-to-insight by reducing ingestion complexities and improving speed. Ingestion time was reduced from four hours to less than five minutes. This in turn meant that for Aggreko, data is now available for analytics pipelines in near real-time (less than five minutes’ lag). The team also estimated that they have saved 30-40 percent of their time—this time was spent solving technology problems in their legacy systems. By adopting Azure Synapse, data is now available for instant exploration, which means that the Aggreko team has more time to focus on solving business problems.

"Azure Synapse gives us a single environment to explore and query the data without moving it. So at a spectrum of the volume of data, we can achieve exponentially faster insights, by querying directly over the lake before outputting insight to Power BI." —Elizabeth Hollinger, Director of Data Insights at Aggreko

As mentioned before, this use case is based on a real-world scenario where Aggreko adopted Azure Synapse as their analytics platform.

Use case two: Fraud detection


Clearsale, a leading fraud detection company based in Brazil, used Azure Synapse to modernize their operational analytics data platform. Clearsale helps customers verify an average of half a million transactions daily using big data analytics to detect fraud across the world. Clearsale’s dataset doubles in size every two years, and the company needs to provide fraud detection services within seconds. This requires a great level of scalability and performance:

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Using Azure Synapse, Clearsale has significantly reduced the time it takes to train new models to improve their fraud detection capability. Using their previous on-premises platform, it used to take close to a week to ingest, prepare, and train the machine learning models. Using Azure Synapse, this has now been slashed to under six hours. This is a massive improvement that has enhanced their capability, improved efficiency, and reduced operational overhead.

Use case three: Predictive maintenance


GE Aviation's Digital Group is a world leader in manufacturing airplane engines and developing aviation software. On top of manufacturing, GE also provides advanced data analytics to many airlines around the world. For each flight, GE ingests the time series data for the entire flight, which includes as many as 350,000 data points. Understandably, running data analytics on such volumes of data can be challenging. To solve this, the team adopted Azure Synapse:

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Using Azure Synapse made it significantly easier and quicker for GE to build complex predictive machine learning models. Building something similar using their previous system would have required many complex steps, across multiple systems and environments. For GE, the native integration between Microsoft Power BI and Azure Synapse proved to be extremely useful. They can now explore data quickly and when an anomaly is found in the Power BI reports, analysts are able to do drill-down analysis to see why the spikes occurred and what corrective maintenance is needed.

Use case four: Marketing analytics (customer 360⁰ view)


Imagine a large multinational retail company that has stores in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The company sells consumer goods, electronics, and personal care items through its brick and mortar stores as well as through digital online channels. The company wants to leverage data analytics to build an end-to-end view of their customers. The goal is to improve customer experience and increase profit. To achieve this, the data team found Azure Synapse to be the best platform to achieve this:

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Azure Synapse enabled the data team to unite their data, developers, and business users in ways that were not possible before. Azure Synapse has simplified ingestion and data processing and made it easy for the organization to have a central data store that holds all operational and historical data that can be refreshed in near real-time. Azure Synapse has also simplified data exploration and discovery without the need to transform data from one format to another or move the data to other systems. This has enabled the data team to experiment, map, and correlate different datasets to produce curated (gold) data that is ready for consumption.

Source: microsoft.com

Saturday, 2 January 2021

How Azure Machine Learning powers suggested replies in Outlook

Microsoft 365 applications are so commonplace that it’s easy to overlook some of the amazing capabilities that are enabled with breakthrough technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft Outlook is an email client that helps you work efficiently with email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and more in a single place.

To help users be more productive and deliberate in their actions while emailing, the web version of Outlook and the Outlook for iOS and Android app have introduced suggested replies, a new feature powered by Azure Machine Learning. Now when you receive an email message that can be answered with a quick response, Outlook on the web and the Outlook mobile suggest three response options that you can use to reply with only a couple of clicks or taps, helping people communicate in both their workplace and personal life, by reducing the time and effort involved in replying to an email.

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The developer team behind suggested replies is comprised of data scientists, designers, and machine learning engineers with diverse backgrounds who are working to improve the lives of Microsoft Outlook users by expediting and simplifying communications. They are at the forefront of applying cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technologies and leverage these technologies to understand how users communicate through email and improve those interactions from a productivity standpoint to create a better experience for users.

A peek under the hood


To process the massive amount of raw data that these interactions provide, the team uses Azure Machine Learning pipelines to build their training models. Azure Machine Learning pipelines allow the team to divide training steps into discrete steps such as data cleanup, transforms, feature extraction, training, and evaluation. The output of the Azure Machine Learning pipeline converts raw data into a model. This Machine Learning pipeline allows the data scientists to build a training pipeline in a compliant manner that enforces privacy and compliance checks.

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In order to train this model, the team needed a way to build and prepare a large data set comprised of over 100 million messages. To do this, the team leveraged a distributed processing framework to sample and retrieve data from a broad user base.

Azure Data Lake Storage is used to store the training data used for training the suggested replies models. We then clean and curate the data into message reply pairs (including potential responses to an email) that are stored in Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS). The training pipelines also consume the reply pairs stored in ADLS in order to train models. To conduct the Machine Learning training itself, the team uses GPU pools available in Azure. The training pipelines leverage these curated Message Reply pairs to learn how to suggest appropriate replies based on a given message. Once the model is created, data scientists can compare the model performance with previous models and evaluate which approaches perform better at recommending relevant suggested replies.

The Outlook team helps protect your data by using the Azure platform to prepare large-scale data sets that are required to build a feature like suggested replies in accordance with Office 365 compliance standards. The data scientists use Azure compute and workflow solutions that enforce privacy policies to create experiments and train multiple models on GPUs. This helps with the overall developer experience and provides agility in the inner development loop cycle.


This is just one of many examples of how Microsoft products are powered by the breakthrough capabilities of Azure AI to create better user experiences. The team is learning from feedback every day and improving the feature for users while also expanding the types of suggested replies offered. Keep following the Azure blog to stay up-to-date with the team and be among the first to know when this feature is released.

Source: microsoft.com