The new wave of edge computing

According to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.3 per cent in 2019 to total $206.2 billion. The connectivity between people and data is creating billions of new relationships that are all powered by the cloud.

Microsoft's cloud is driving strong growth for Microsoft, with commercial cloud revenue topping a $23 billion a year and Intelligent Cloud revenue marking $8.6 billion, up 24 per cent from a year ago led by server products and services. Over the years Microsoft has emerged as the prime choice for the enterprise cloud, with more than 90 per cent of the Fortune 500. All these enterprises are transforming using Microsoft Azure as the cloud foundation and to ensure the omnipresence of cloud computing, Microsoft continues to emphasize the growth of its business-focused cloud service, Azure.

Microsoft Azure is an ever-expanding set of cloud services which is driving new levels of organizational productivity, intelligent data-driven experiences, and deepened business. As of October 2018, Microsoft in its quarter results announced that it continues to benefit from public cloud adoption and the company’s Azure division, which grew 76% compared with the year-earlier period.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, sharing his thoughts on Azure during Q1 2019 results said, “Azure is the only hyperscale cloud that extends to the edge across identity, data, application, platform, as well as security and management. We introduced 100 new Azure capabilities this quarter alone, focused on both existing workloads like security and new workloads like IoT and edge AI.”

He added, “With Azure Confidential Computing, Azure is now the first cloud to provide a secure platform for protecting the confidentiality and the integrity of data while in use adding to our existing security protections to encrypt data in transit as well as in rest. We're investing to make Azure the best cloud for enterprise data. Our data services spanning SQL Database, Cosmos DB, Data Warehouse, and Data Lake provide the most comprehensive data platform needed for enterprise data estates. Azure ML builds on this foundation to further democratize data and AI to unlock insights, helping data scientists build and train AI models faster then deploy them through the cloud or to the Edge.

To strengthen its cloud computing empire, Microsoft announced some major developments in Azure this year.

Hybrid cloud, the forward-thinking strategy

Today, many organizations have moved to a cloud-first technology strategy whereas many enterprises are still early on in implementing this strategy. The Microsoft Azure team has explicitly focused on removing all barriers for enterprise customers. On September 24, 2018 Microsoft announced the private preview of the Azure IoT Hub and Azure Event Hub services, strengthening its leadership stand in the hybrid cloud vertical. With this announcement, Microsoft stands to offer one of the most comprehensive end-to-end IoT solution platforms in the industry, from Azure Sphere, to Azure IoT Hub, and Azure IoT Central.

To boost the customer experience, Microsoft At Inspire 2018, announced that Azure SQL Data Warehouse has set new performance benchmarks for cloud data warehousing by delivering at least 2x faster query performance compared to before. AI, cloud computing and IoT technology are already having a real-world impact on many big businesses. At Ignite 2018, Shell and Microsoft showcased a pilot project that uses Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub and Azure Databricks to identify potential safety risks at Shell’s retail gas stations in the massive stream of data captured by closed-circuit video cameras — and quickly enough for employees to respond to potential problems

Azure is the ever-expanding cloud

Microsoft’s robust platform services offerings are built on our trusted cloud infrastructure. At Sibos 2018, Microsoft announced a proof of concept cloud partnership with SWIFT, to host its infrastructure and native payments on Microsoft Azure, to make the cloud enabling faster, more efficient and secure for banks. To strengthen its cloud base for the enterprises across the globe, Microsoft in June expanded the footprint of Microsoft Azure Stack to a total of 92 countries/regions.

In 2017, at Ignite, Microsoft also launched Azure Stack in 46 countries/regions and given the customer demand since then, they worked with their hardware partners to double the number of countries/regions Azure Stack supports. Moreover, increasingly developers and media companies are trusting and relying on Azure Media Services to build the ability to encode, protect, analyze and deliver video at scale.

On May 7, 2018, at the Build 2018 conference, Microsoft announced a major new API version for Azure Media Services, along with new developer focused features, and updates to Video Indexer. At Build 2018, Microsoft shared major updates to Video Indexer such as availability of Video Indexer in three new regions, localization of UX to six languages etc. Recently in November, Piramal Glass partnered deployed Microsoft Azure IoT Hub to help Piramal Glass acquire data from sensors on production lines to identify quality parameters at each stage and get insights on line efficiencies in real-time. This resulted in improved production efficiency and cost reduction up to 70%.

Azure – Powering the Next Generation of Emerging Technology

Microsoft has always believed that the modern business landscape is ruled by data, with analytics and AI now essential for driving transformation. Earlier this year in April at the Hannover Messe 2018, Microsoft Azure announced partnerships across various industry verticals to empower companies to boost productivity with artificial intelligence and automation. One of the partnerships was with Siemens, wherein they announced their IoT ecosystem Mindsphere to be available on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, giving our joint customers the ability to make their IoT applications available on our cloud and hence streamlining their processes more efficiently.

In order to take this wave ahead, in June this year, Microsoft introduced new capabilities in Azure that will make it easier to deliver, build and manage powerful analytics and AI solutions. They also announced the preview of Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, the only cloud scale data lake designed specifically for mission critical analytics and AI workloads. Further to this, Microsoft also announced the general availability of new capabilities in Azure Data Factory, which integrated data from multiple sources to validate, enrich, and transform data for insights. In September Microsoft rebranded the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) as Azure DevOps. The VSTS is a service that allows developers to collaborate on code development and deployment. Microsoft Azure commenced the next big step towards the journey of simplifying IoT for the customers in October, when they announced the live preview of Azure Digital Twins. Azure Digital Twins provides organizations with the foundation they need to create for the next wave of innovation in IoT to create a more intelligent and connected world that empowers people and organizations to achieve more.

Whether an enterprise of today or tomorrow, customers are turning to Azure for its enterprise-proven capabilities spanning basic computing, networking, and storage, to mobile and web app services, to advanced cloud scenarios such as Internet of Things (IoT), cognitive services and machine learning.