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.
Friday 29 January 2021
Tested Study Hacks to Pass Microsoft AZ-303 Exam
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.
2. View and manage your service partners in a centralized control plane
3. Gain full visibility into changes made by the service partner in your Azure environment
4. Enable further granularity and security with privileged identity management and MFA private preview
Tuesday 26 January 2021
Build regionally resilient cloud services using the Azure Resource Manager
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:
◉ 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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
City and infrastructure operations
Urban and infrastructure planning
Smart streetlights: core infrastructure for smart city solutions
Interoperability with DTDL
Smart buildings, energy, and sustainability
Smart City Live Expo
Saturday 9 January 2021
Is Microsoft AZ-204 Exam What You Need?
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.
Thursday 7 January 2021
Introducing Azure Health Bot—an evolution of Microsoft Healthcare Bot with new functionality
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.
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:
"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
Use case two: Fraud detection
Use case three: Predictive maintenance
Use case four: Marketing analytics (customer 360⁰ view)
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.
A peek under the hood
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.