Learn how Microsoft Azure is accelerating hardware innovations for a sustainable future

This year’s theme for OCP Global Summit is Open Possibilities, and in the Microsoft Azure team, we wholeheartedly agree—we have been part of tremendous creativity and resiliency as the community continued to collaborate, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic. This year, we are excited to showcase some of our projects and technology at OCP Global Summit and share our learnings on the path of building a more reliable, trusted, and sustainable cloud alongside industry partners and the open source hardware ecosystem.

Accelerating open source innovation over the years

As OCP celebrates its 10-year anniversary, Microsoft is proud to have been one of the major contributors in the journey of reimaging datacenter designs and technology with the vibrant open source hardware community. We joined OCP in 2014, and over the years have shared the designs of our very own datacenters that powered Microsoft Azure (Open Cloud Server, OCS).  We continue to be inspired by the innovations and technology advancement made possible by industry partners and developers coming together as a community. We are glad to see Project Olympus, our open-sourced modular server architecture that was announced in 2016, achieving industry adoption and serving as the standard hardware design for over 60 datacenters regions around the world. In collaboration with the OCP community, Project Cerberus was introduced as the new industry standard for platform security in 2017, to equip datacenter designs with the critical components for robust security, firmware integrity, and hardware root of trust—deployed in Microsoft’s datacenters today. In 2020 we leaned in to innovate further by building upon datacenter foundations, and announced the Modular Building Block Architecture (MBA) initiative that provides interoperability for security, AI, and more.

Liquid cooling—from standards to production deployment to better chip performance

From early discussions on standardization in cold plates and liquid immersion cooling with OCP and partners, Microsoft achieved a milestone of deploying the world’s first two-phase liquid immersion cooling in a production public cloud environment in early 2021. We are excited to share from our latest research, that liquid cooling accentuates the benefits of overclocking, in which the chip components are operated beyond their pre-defined voltage, thermal, and power design limits to further improve performance. Our tests showed that with liquid cooling, the performance of some chipsets can increase by up to 20 percent. As liquid cooling unleashes new possibilities with fewer constraints and resources required for chip, server, and datacenter architecture, we look forward to engaging with the industry to not only further the cooling technology but also ensure safe and ergonomic operations of the immersion tanks.

Sustainably and responsibly meeting the computing demands of the future

Increasing demands for cloud computing leads to increasing demands for physical datacenters. It’s critical that Microsoft develop and operate the sites sustainably. As Microsoft committed to being carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030, we’ve created first-of-their-kind Microsoft Circular Centers, that will help us extend the lifecycle of servers and reuse them to reduce waste. We’re also working with the OCP community to collaborate on data gathering templates and contribute guidance on Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) as a method to understand and evaluate the environmental impact from our server hardware. As we expand the use of LCA and desire to apply it to assess impacts of bleeding edge technology, it is important to align on relevant metrics for measurement and accompanying supplier considerations across every stage of the hardware value chain. Microsoft will continue to actively work with the OCP community to define and further the sustainability agenda for the future of datacenters and to preserve our only planet.

Continuing to evolve and deliver cloud hardware innovation for scale

We continue to believe that collaboration through open source, community engagement, and industry partnership makes technology advancement more rigorous, faster, and better for the world. Together with OCP, we enable innovation, efficiency, scalability, and sustainability for the datacenter infrastructures of the future. We invite you to come visit Microsoft’s booth at OCP Global Summit 2021 and check out the Datacenter-ready Secure Control Module (DC-SCM) for modular server management, security, and control, as well as our two-phase liquid immersion cooling tank, and the newest addition to Project Olympus, a Modular 3U Chassis, designed for higher power devices and flexible connectivity. At OCP Global Summit’s Experience Center, you will also find us showcasing the latest 15mm E1.s form factor, which was led by Microsoft and developed in partnership with key industry players, for high-performance, high-density SSDs for next-generation servers and storage platforms.

Source: microsoft.com

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Complement your Microsoft AZ-104 Exam Prep with Practice Test

You may be often contemplated why IT professionals work hard to pass Microsoft certification exams. What’s so good about these certifications? In addition to being bizarre about the most advanced cloud technologies and aspiring to learn more about them, there are other reasons back for this. One of the most coveted Microsoft certifications is the Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate certification. You can obtain it by passing only one exam, which has the code AZ-104.

When you achieve this certification, you will manage to become an Azure Administrator who has a distinct role in any organization across the globe. Otherwise stated, such a professional will be responsible for deploying and managing an organization’s cloud infrastructure. Professional will work with a team of proficient professionals and engineers who perceive how to utilize cloud computing services to better business processes and boost their performance.

AZ-104 Exam Information

Let’s dive into the AZ-104 exam details. If you want to get through the Microsoft AZ-104 exam, you should have very clear in your mind which prerequisites for this exam are and what skills this exam evaluates. What affects the requirements for being qualified for AZ-104? Your possibilities to pass it from the first attempt will improve significantly if you have at least six months of practical experience using cloud technologies. So, you will learn the new concepts thoroughly and will enhance your odds to pass the AZ-104 exam. In general, this Microsoft exam helps applicants acquire the following skills:

• Learn Azure governance and identities and perceive how to manage them;
• Manage and execute various storage solutions;
• Deploy Azure compute resources and understand how to manage them;
• Configure virtual networking solutions and manage them appropriately;

Taking the Microsoft AZ-104 Exam? Here’s What You Need to Know!

Microsoft Azure Administrator AZ-104 Exam: Preparation Journey

Microsoft supports you pass its exams by equipping you with a complete preparation guide and other study resources. Here is a look at some of the means that you can use to prepare:

1. Enroll in an online training

Several online platforms offer Microsoft AZ-104 training. A mere Google search can disclose most of them. Make sure that you analyze each website’s content before enrolling in a training course. The best option is to enroll in a training course offered by Microsoft itself.

2. Use Study Guides

The busy applicants can get the Microsoft AZ-104 study guides from trustworthy publishers. Its significance is that they can always read it whenever you get time.

For example, you can choose to spend a few minutes of your lunch break reading the AZ-104 study guide rather than chatting with others.

3. Engage in Online Communities

Find out Microsoft online study communities and actively participate in them. Even though these forums may not have organized learning, they can give you beneficial information and lead you to an accurate path.

4. Take AZ-104 Practice Tests

Just studying is not enough. You need to take some practice tests to get an idea of what Microsoft AZ-104 looks like. Exam dumps can also help you with that.

What Are the Benefits of Passing the Microsoft AZ-104 Certification Exam?

Now that you know all the essential information of the Microsoft AZ-104 exam, you might want to know how this Microsoft certification exam can benefit your career. There are a lot of benefits that this qualifying exam may deliver to you, and here are a few of them:

1. It Proves Your Knowledge and Skills

The Microsoft AZ-104 exam works as a solid proof of your skills, which many organizations trusts. Once you pass the certification exam, you can prove to your current and potential organizations that you have solid expertise in Microsoft Teams application and proficiency to better business processes using its latest tools.

2. Improve Your Career Development

Passing the Microsoft AZ-104 exam will improve your odds of being hired many times. This is because the Microsoft Certified - Azure Administrator Associate certification is greatly respected by the hiring managers as it is proof of more productivity and dedication to development.

3. Microsoft is an Internationally Accepted Vendor

The reputation of Microsoft is popular in the job market. Both the hiring managers and professionals know that not everyone manages to crack the Microsoft AZ-104 exam. So, passing this exam will allow you to excel in the crowd of non-certified peers and make you a preferred applicant during your job interview.

4. Passing AZ-104 Exam Keeps You Acquainted With the Industry Latest Trends

The Microsoft AZ-104 certification exam covers modern concepts that you will be able to perform right away after finishing your preparation process. Thus, you will become a worthy member of your team.

Conclusion

Passing the Microsoft AZ-104 exam is the best way to follow if you want to learn more about Microsoft Teams. Other than opening the doors of international organizations, it will help you get more confidence in your skills and become more productive while performing your everyday tasks.

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Protect workloads with inline DDoS protection from Gateway Load Balancer partners

DDoS attacks are rapidly evolving in complexity and frequency. As we highlighted in our 2021 Q1 and Q2 DDoS attack trends review, we see that attacks in Azure have been trending toward shorter durations, mostly short-burst attacks. Workloads that are highly sensitive to latency, such as those in the multiplayer online gaming industry, cannot tolerate such short burst DDoS attacks, which can cause outages ranging from two to 10 seconds that result in availability disruption.

Today, we are announcing the preview of inline DDoS protection which will be offered through partner network virtual appliances (NVAs) that are deployed with Azure Gateway Load Balancer and integrated with Azure DDoS Protection Standard in all Azure regions. Inline DDoS protection mitigates even short-burst low-volume DDoS attacks instantaneously without impacting the availability or performance of highly latency-sensitive applications.

Azure DDoS Protection Standard is the recommended product to protect your resources against L3/4 attacks in Azure. Third-party inline L7 DDoS protection, combined with Azure DDoS Protection Standard, provides comprehensive L3 to L7 protection against volumetric as well as low-volume DDoS attacks. Azure customers using third-party DDoS protection services for inline mitigation now have the option to use the marketplace offering along with Azure DDoS Protection Standard. This solution enables comprehensive inline L7 DDoS protection for high performance and high availability scenarios using different providers.

Gateway Load Balancer enables the protection of such workloads by ensuring the relevant NVAs are injected into the ingress path of the internet traffic. Once chained to a Standard Public Load Balancer frontend or IP configuration on a virtual machine, no additional configuration is needed to ensure traffic to and from the application endpoint is sent to the Gateway Load Balancer.

Easily deploy inline DDoS protection with partner network virtual appliances

Deployment of inline DDoS NVA can be done in a few easy steps:

1. Find your virtual appliance in Azure Marketplace.

2. Deploy the NVA instances.

3. Create a Gateway Load Balancer and place the NVA instances in the backend pool.

4. Chain the Gateway Load Balancer to your public IP or Standard Load Balance frontend.

Gateway Load Balancer provides transparent flow (bump in the wire) using an overlay network with low latency, preserving the health of the host as well as the NVAs during the DDoS attacks.

Inbound traffic is always inspected with the NVAs in the path and the clean traffic is returned to the backend infrastructure (gamer servers).

Traffic flows from the consumer virtual network to the provider virtual network and then returns to the consumer virtual network. The consumer virtual network and provider virtual network can be in different subscriptions, tenants, or regions enabling greater flexibility and ease of management.

Enabling Azure DDoS Protection Standard on the VNET of the Standard Public Gateway Load Balancer frontend or VNET of the virtual machine will offer protection from L3/4 DDoS attacks.

1. Unfiltered game traffic from the internet is directed to the public IP of the game servers Gateway Load Balancer.

2. Unfiltered game traffic is redirected to the chained Gateway Load Balancer private IP.

3. The unfiltered game traffic is inspected for DDoS attacks in real-time through the partner NVAs.

4. Filtered game traffic is sent back to the game servers for final processing.

5. Azure DDoS Protection Standard on the gamer servers Gateway Load Balancer protects from L3/4 DDoS attacks and the DDoS protection policies are automatically tuned for game servers traffic profile and application scale.

Source: microsoft.com

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Key foundations for protecting your data with Azure confidential computing

The exponential growth of datasets has resulted in growing scrutiny of how data is exposed—both from a consumer data privacy and compliance perspective. In this context, confidential computing becomes an important tool to help organizations meet their privacy and security needs surrounding business and consumer data.

Confidential computing technology encrypts data in memory and only processes it once the cloud environment is verified, preventing data access from cloud operators, malicious admins, and privileged software such as the hypervisor. It helps keep data protected throughout its lifecycle—in addition to existing solutions of protecting data at rest and in transit, data is now protected while in use.

Thanks to confidential computing, organizations across the world can now unlock opportunities that were not possible before. For example, they can now benefit from multi-party data analytics and machine learning that combine datasets from parties that would have been unwilling or unable to share them, keeping data private across participants. In fact, RBC created a platform for privacy-preserving analytics for customers to opt-in for more optimized discounts. The platform generates insights into consumer purchasing preferences by confidentially combining RBC’s credit and debit card transactions with retailer data of what specific items consumers purchased.

Industry leadership and standardization

Microsoft has long been a thought leader in the field of confidential computing. Azure introduced “confidential computing” in the cloud when we became the first cloud provider to offer confidential computing virtual machines and confidential containers support in Kubernetes for customers to run their most sensitive workloads inside Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Microsoft is also a founding member of the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), a group that brings together hardware manufacturers, cloud providers, and solution vendors to jointly work on ways to improve and standardize data protection across the tech industry.

Confidential computing foundations

Our bar for confidentiality aligns and extends the bar set by the CCC to provide a comprehensive foundation for confidential computing. We strive to provide customers the technical controls to isolate data from Microsoft operators, their own operators, or both. In Azure, we have confidential computing offerings that go beyond hypervisor isolation between customer tenants to help protect customer data from access by Microsoft operators. We also have confidential computing with secure enclaves to additionally help prevent access from customer operators.

Our foundation for confidential computing includes:

◉ Hardware root-of-trust to ensure data is protected and anchored into the silicon. Trust is rooted to the hardware manufacturer, so even Microsoft operators cannot modify the hardware configurations.

◉ Remote attestation for customers to directly verify the integrity of the environment. Customers can verify that both the hardware and software on which their workloads run are approved versions and secured before allowing them to access data.

◉ Trusted launch is the mechanism that ensures virtual machines boot with authorized software and that uses remote attestation so that customers can verify. It’s available for all VMs including confidential VMs, bringing Secure Boot and vTPMs, to add defense against rootkits, bootkits, and malicious firmware.

◉ Memory isolation and encryption to ensure data is protected while processing. Azure offers memory isolation by VM, container, or application to meet the various needs of customers, and hardware-based encryption to prevent unauthorized viewing of data, even with physical access in the datacenter.

◉ Secure key management to ensure that keys stay encrypted during their lifecycle and release only to the authorized code.

The above components together form the foundations for what we consider to be confidential computing. And today, Azure has more confidential compute options spanning hardware and software than any other cloud vendor.

Innovative new hardware

Our new Intel-based DCsv3 confidential VMs include Intel SGX that implement hardware-protected application enclaves. Developers can use SGX enclaves to reduce the amount of code that has access to sensitive data to a minimum. Additionally, we will enable Total Memory Encryption-Multi-Key (TME-MK) so that each VM can be secured with a unique hardware key.

Our new AMD-based DCasv5/ECasv5 confidential VMs available provide Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) to provide hardware-isolated virtual machines that protect data from other virtual machines, the hypervisor, and host management code. Customers can lift and shift existing virtual machines without changing code and optionally leverage enhanced disk encryption with keys they manage or that Microsoft manages.

To support containerized workloads, we are making all of our confidential VMs available in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) as a worker node option. Customers can now protect their containers with Intel SGX or AMD SEV-SNP technologies.

Azure’s memory encryption and isolation options provide stronger and more comprehensive protections for customer data than any other cloud.

Customer successes across industries

Many organizations are already leveraging the great data privacy and security benefits of Azure confidential computing.

Secure AI Labs have been using a private preview of our AMD-based virtual machines to create a platform where healthcare researchers can more easily collaborate with healthcare providers to advance research. Luis Huapaya, VP of Engineering at Secure AI Labs Inc, mentions, “Because of Azure confidential computing, Secure AI Labs can realize all of the benefits of running in Azure without ever sacrificing on security. One could argue that running a virtual payload within Azure confidential computing might be more secure than running in a private server on-premise. It also offers remote attestation, a pivotal security feature because it provides a virtual payload the ability to give cryptographic proof of its identity and verify its running inside an enclave. Azure confidential computing with AMD SEV-SNP makes our job a lot easier.”

While regulated industries have been the early adopters due to compliance needs and highly sensitive data, we are seeing growing interest across industries, from manufacturing to retail and energy, for example.

Signal Messenger, a worldwide messaging app known for high security and privacy, leverages Azure confidential computing with Intel SGX to protect customer data, such as contact info. Jim O’Leary, VP of Engineering at Signal says, “To meet the security and privacy expectations of millions of people every day, we utilize Azure confidential computing to provide scalable, secure environments for our services. Signal puts users first, and Azure helps us stay at the forefront of data protection with confidential computing.”

We are excited to see organizations bring more workloads to Azure with confidence in the data protection of Azure confidential computing to meet the privacy needs of their customers.

Azure confidential cloud

Azure is the world’s computer from cloud to edge. Customers of all sizes, across all industries, want to innovate, build, and securely operate their applications across multi-cloud, on-premises, and edge. Just as HTTPS has become pervasive for protecting data during internet web browsing, here at Azure, we believe that confidential computing will be a necessary ingredient for all computing infrastructure. 

Our vision is to transform the Azure cloud into the Azure confidential cloud, moving from computing in the clear to computing confidentially across the cloud and edge. We want to empower customers to achieve the highest levels of privacy and security for all their workloads.

Alongside our $20 billion investment over the next five years in advancing our security solutions, we will partner with hardware vendors and innovate within Microsoft to bring the highest levels of data security and privacy to our customers. In our journey to become the world’s leading confidential cloud, we will drive confidential computing innovations horizontally across our Azure infrastructure and vertically through all the Microsoft services that run on Azure.

Source: microsoft.com

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3 ways to enhance your cloud journey: break, prepare, and optimize your apps in Azure

At our Microsoft Ignite conference this week, we’re sharing new ways to continue to enhance your cloud adoption journey. First, we are excited to announce the preview of Azure Chaos Studio—a fully managed experimentation service to help you track, measure, and mitigate faults with controlled chaos engineering, systemically improving the resilience of your cloud applications. Second, we continue to build a better, easier, and more comprehensive approach to guide your cloud environment preparation, with Azure landing zone—an environment for hosting your workloads, pre-provisioned through code—without losing sight of the application to be deployed. And third, to maximize your organization's investment in the cloud, we have fresh guidance on cloud economics to build your cloud business case with key financial and technical guidance from Azure.

1. Azure Chaos Studio: Track, measure, and mitigate faults in your applications 

Are you confident in knowing how your mission-critical Azure apps will respond to different failure scenarios? Today we’re announcing the preview of Azure Chaos Studio, which enables customers to model and deliberately introduce faults that simulate real-world outages and validate how your application performs under those scenarios. These are the same tools used by Microsoft engineers to build the resilience of cloud services. Chaos Studio enables customers to build on your terms, seeing how apps will respond to real-world disruptions. Gain chaos engineering insights and accelerate the discovery of hard-to-find issues, from late-stage development through to production, all within Azure.

With Azure Chaos Studio you can:

◉ Spend more time learning about application resiliency, without managing tools and scripts.

◉ Get started quickly with agent-based faults that disrupt within resources, and service-based faults that disrupt resources at the control plane.

◉ Validate product quality wherever and whenever you want with CI/CD pipeline integration, using both to monitor production quality through continuous validation.

We continue to work on building a comprehensive and continuously expanding library of fault types (including resource pressure faults for CPU, memory, and disk, network faults to add latency or block access to resources, and faults for service-specific disruptions like Cosmos DB failover, VM Shutdown, and Redis restart) for you and your team to understand how your application would perform in such scenarios and to help you implement a cohesive strategy to make informed decisions to make your application more reliable. 

2. Azure landing zone: Eyes on the target end-state

As you approach every new cloud project, preparing your environment for cloud application is critical for your success. Whether you are creating a brand-new application or modernizing an existing one, adopting cloud technologies is a journey—where you're traveling towards a target end-state. Azure landing zone conceptual architecture is the master architectural plan, based on Microsoft best practices and reference implementations described in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. Its scaled-out controls enable you to innovate safely, in alignment with the cloud operating model that works best for your organization, and progress through different stages, arriving at your destination at your own pace.

If the target Azure landing zone conceptual architecture fits within the operating model and resource structure you're already planning to use, we can help you deploy it with a ready-made deployment experience. To help you successfully prepare your cloud environments for any projects, including migration to the cloud, modernization of existing apps, or building cloud-native apps on Azure, with proper scaled-out governance and security in the cloud, quickly, we have developed Azure landing zone accelerators. These are Azure-portal-based templates that allow you to deploy a pre-configured environment implementation with key components in place, such as management groups and policies providing a full implementation of the conceptual architecture based on standards and best practices. Simply point and click through the template by answering a few environment architecture questions to customize it to your needs, in your Azure Portal experience, and to deploy your environment automatically and quickly.

3. Cloud economics: Make your cloud investment count

“More than 70 percent of the customers have cost optimization as their top cloud initiative.” Through research and many customer interactions, we have made available new cost management approaches to guide your business strategy and goals definition. Our updated approach is here to help you understand the cloud economics of your investments and now includes financial tools and templates to build your business case and optimize your cloud investment.

We have also created a Power BI template, backed by an Excel model, that can help you forecast your costs early on as you’re planning your cloud journey. Use the Power BI template and on-premises compute unit list to understand how you can take advantage of Azure offers and benefits like Azure Hybrid Benefit and reserved instances to save against pay-as-you-go pricing and optimize your costs.

Check this new video guidance and learn about some lesser-known tips for estimating and managing your cloud spend. From the Azure Cost Management Portal to Power BI for custom views and reporting, to API-based integration that feeds cost data into your existing financial systems, we'll help you to keep track of your cloud spend and optimize your investment in the cloud.

Source: microsoft.com

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Transform your business with Microsoft's unrivaled end-to-end data platform

Businesses today are experiencing the most significant change in our economy in a generation and the ability to realize the full potential of the cloud through digital transformation has never been greater. There are three core capabilities businesses need that together drive successful transformation: limitless database scale and performance, unmatched analytics and insights, and unified data governance.

Today we shared a number of announcements to help organizations evolve rapidly even in the face of sustained uncertainty. Across industries, companies are investing in these core capabilities to ensure they have the flexibility to innovate anywhere and meet evolving business needs.

Limitless database scale and performance

We are announcing the preview of SQL Server 2022, the most Azure-enabled SQL Server release yet. This enables easier cloud integration than ever before with new disaster recovery functionality for Azure SQL Managed Instance and seamless analytics over on-premises operational data with Synapse Link for SQL Server. Microsoft continues to invest in our Azure SQL family of databases providing flexible options for app migration, modernization, and development. Azure SQL Managed Instance has a number of key announcements, including business offers with significantly more memory per vCore and increased storage to 16 TB in both the general purpose and business-critical service tiers, providing more room for app growth.

Azure is also the best cloud for NoSQL and open source databases. Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database built to support production applications at any size or scale. Financially backed service-legal agreements (SLA's) guaranteeing consistency, high throughput, less than 10 ms latency reads and writes, and 99.999 percent availability make it simple for developers to independently and elastically scale applications across any Azure region. Today we are announcing the general availability of Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, providing the ability to provision managed native Apache Cassandra clusters with automated deployment and scaling operations, accelerating hybrid scenarios, and reducing ongoing maintenance. Flexible Server (preview), a new deployment option for Azure Database for MySQL is also now generally available. With Flexible Server, customers can benefit from a fully managed service designed to provide maximum control of your databases, high availability options to ensure zero data loss, built-in capabilities for cost optimization, and increased productivity enabled by the Azure ecosystem.

Unmatched analytics and insights

When it comes to analytics and insights, Azure is simply unmatched. When we debuted Azure Synapse Analytics, we effectively removed the barriers between enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics to enable data professionals to collaborate, build, and manage their analytic solutions with ease. Since its launch, the number of Azure customers running petabyte-scale workloads has increased fivefold. 

But we didn’t stop there. We introduced Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB last year, creating a simple, low-cost, cloud-native HTAP implementation that enables immediate, in-the-moment business insights. We continue our investments today with the general availability of Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse, enabling immediate insights with high-value Dynamics 365 data, and a preview of Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022. We are also announcing that Azure Synapse Data Explorer is joining the existing SQL and Apache Spark analytical runtimes in Azure Synapse—a highly scalable engine to automatically index structured, semi-structured, and free-text data commonly found in telemetry, time series, and logs to surface enriched insights that can directly improve business decisions. 

Unified data governance

The need for a comprehensive data governance service has never been stronger. Azure Purview, our unified data governance service, helps businesses manage and govern their on-premises, multi-cloud, and software as a service (SaaS) data. It’s exciting to see the strong interest in Azure Purview since its general availability, with over 57 billion data assets discovered by customers already. Azure Purview ensures your Microsoft data estate is governed through deep integrations with data services in Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and more. Every organization can now build a unified data governance solution to maximize the value of their data in the cloud.

Customers like the London Heathrow Airport, for example, have already achieved tremendous success with Azure Purview. The airport’s data teams use lineage data in Azure Purview to find correlations between datasets which is critical in determining how each airport service affects broader operations.

“We used to have a lot of data about things we generally already understood but now that we’ve adopted Azure Purview, we have insight into the unknown, meaning we can aggregate multiple data sources in a more user-friendly way to discover where we can create efficiencies and make better predictions.”—Dave Draffin, Azure Cloud and Data Architect, Heathrow Airport

Source: microsoft.com

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5 trends transforming business—2021 IoT Signals report

The technology behind the internet of things (IoT) has been a long time in the making. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s when home automation solutions began hitting the market that IoT started becoming a household term.

Fast-forward a couple of decades and IoT has exploded, not only in power and sophistication but in importance, helping to fuel the fourth industrial revolution. Today, businesses across every industry are using IoT to drive efficiency, productivity, safety, and growth across their operations.

And it’s only picking up steam, as evidenced by the newly released 2021 IoT Signals report. As IoT evolves—along with innovations like AI, digital twins, and edge computing—businesses are combining these technologies to connect complex environments and deliver results never before imagined.

Below, we’ve highlighted five key adoption trends from the 2021 IoT Signals report. Plus, we’ll share how advancements in Azure IoT technology are helping customers streamline and secure solutions and revolutionize business.

5 key trends in IoT adoption for 2021

Now in its third edition, IoT Signals compiles inputs from more than 3,000 business and IT decision makers and developers, surfacing insights across industries and revealing trends, emerging technologies, common challenges, and more. This year’s edition also takes a deeper dive into areas such as security and best practices, implementation strategies, and IoT for sustainability.

1. 90 percent of the organizations surveyed are adopting IoT

IoT isn’t slowing down. Levels of IoT adoption remain high, on par with 2020, with 90 percent of adopters stating that IoT is critical to their success. The top reasons for adopting IoT include quality, security, and resource optimization. In fact, organizations that adopt IoT in the areas of cloud security, supply chain, and sustainability consider IoT as even more critical to their overall success.

2. COVID-19 continues to accelerate IoT adoption across industries

One of the unexpected impacts of the global health pandemic is that 44 percent of the organizations surveyed plan to invest even more in IoT as a result of COVID-19, compared to 31 percent in 2020. Most of these companies are already using IoT, and close to half attribute increased revenue to the technology. 

3. Reducing technical complexity helps speed IoT time to market

Technical challenges can slow progress, often stalling projects in the proof-of-concept (PoC) phase. The need to solve existing challenges before adding or using IoT thwarts a third of implementations and contending with technology demands impacts 28 percent. Solving these challenges can help organizations benefit from IoT more quickly and pave the way for widespread IoT adoption.

4. Unsurprisingly, IoT security is a major priority

In fact, 91 percent of survey participants expressed concerns about IoT security. Data privacy tops the list of security worries at 46 percent, followed by network-level security at 40 percent. Other concerns include device security endpoints, managing and tracking each device, and ensuring software and firmware updates are made. Interestingly, organizations are not using a common best practice approach to security, with only 43 percent designing measures that assume breaches at every level of their IoT projects.

5. The vast majority of IoT adopters integrate emerging technologies

Most organizations are leveraging technologies such as AI, digital twins, and edge computing as part of their IoT solutions. 81 percent of organizations that leverage edge computing or digital twins as part of IoT state that these technologies are core or secondary components. We will go into more detail on emerging tech below.

Streamlining highly secure IoT solutions

While IoT adoption is trending upward, it’s clear that solutions must be more secure and easier to implement. The Azure team continues to prioritize investments that remove friction and technical complexity and streamline solutions at scale. We’re also continuing to prioritize stringent, built-in, cloud-to-silicon security measures to help safeguard data, devices, and operating environments.

A great example is Azure IoT Central, which provides a common platform for creating and managing secure, enterprise-grade IoT solutions. Recent innovations are helping organizations to minimize technical and security hurdles and bring solutions to market more quickly. In late 2020, we released IoT Plug and Play, which simplifies secure, end-to-end IoT solutions through no-code device configuration, drastically reducing cost and development time. We’ve also added Azure IoT support for multi-tenant solutions, making it easier to scale, manage, and safeguard IoT across multiple organizations.

Integrating emerging technologies with IoT

Augmenting IoT with emerging technologies like AI, edge computing, and digital twins is a priority for most IoT adopters. Together with IoT, emerging technologies are connecting highly complex environments to power experiences and scenarios never before imagined. Microsoft offers a range of solutions that are helping bring these projects to fruition.

AI and IoT

According to IoT Signals, 79 percent of businesses are successfully adopting AI within their IoT solutions. The top reasons cited include predictive maintenance at 67 percent, followed by prescriptive maintenance at 65 percent. Additionally, 56 percent of organizations are combining AI and IoT to create a better user experience.

At the same time, 46 percent of businesses with AI strategies are struggling to get their projects past the PoC stage. Azure AI simplifies integration by enabling access to high-quality AI models—including vision, speech, language, and even decision-making—using simple API calls. Azure AI integrates with Azure IoT solutions, enabling organizations to unleash a multitude of custom use cases. For example, RXR Realty, one of the largest real estate companies in New York, combined Azure AI with Azure IoT to monitor building health, supporting a safer return to the office during COVID-19.

Edge computing and IoT

By shifting AI, analytics, and business logic to edge devices, edge computing can help solve speed, latency, security, and reliability challenges. Combining edge computing with IoT opens a world of possibilities.

52 percent of IoT Signals respondents indicate that they are very familiar with edge computing as compared to 42 percent one year ago. Of those organizations, 79 percent have an edge computing strategy, 81 percent of whom are combining edge computing and IoT. The most common use cases include cloud security at 40 percent, device and asset security at 36 percent, and quality assurance at 35 percent.

These organizations also face technical challenges in getting solutions out of PoC, which means removing friction and complexity are vital. Built on Azure IoT Hub, Azure IoT Edge simplifies running cloud workloads at the edge on certified IoT devices. Using familiar coding languages, developers can enable data processing at the device level, ensuring only what’s needed is sent to the cloud. Additionally, the tiny but mighty Azure RTOS seamlessly connects popular microcontroller units (MCUs) to the power of Azure IoT, providing embedded developers the ability to quickly build applications on resource-constrained devices.

To make it easier to combine AI and IoT at the edge, we recently introduced Azure Percept. This comprehensive solution contains prebuilt AI models and built-in security measures and works out-of-the-box with Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning. The city of Kortrijk in Belgium used Azure Percept to gain insights into pedestrian movement and density to help keep people safer and improve city operations.

Digital twins and IoT

The ability of digital twins to replicate physical environments and model relationships and interactions is truly revolutionary. The technology has caught the attention of IoT Signals survey participants, most of whom indicate that they are aware of digital twins and 77 percent of whom have a strategy in place. Of the 81 percent that incorporates digital twins into their IoT solution, three quarters report improved quality as a benefit. In addition, 63 percent enjoy increased revenue and 59 percent experience reduced operation costs.

Again, these adopters list technical complexity as a challenge. To help alleviate complexity, Azure Digital Twins combines digital twins and IoT into a single platform. It allows organizations to model entire connected environments using an open modeling language. For example, Doosan worked with Bentley Systems to create a digital replica of wind farms using Azure Digital Twins. The digital twin enables them to maximize energy production and remotely monitor facilities. Other companies, like Johnson Controls, are using Azure Digital Twins to transform how buildings and spaces are built and managed.

Download the 2021 IoT Signals report

We’ve only just scratched the surface of how IoT is reshaping business and how Azure IoT is rising to the challenge of providing secure, streamlined solutions. As technologies evolve, IoT is becoming simpler and more affordable. To learn how IoT is accelerating growth for businesses like yours, we urge you to download the 2021 IoT Signals report.

Source: microsoft.com

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