Today, many organizations still struggle to adhere to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates even though this landmark regulation took effect nearly two years ago. A key learning for some: being compliant does not always mean you are secure. Shifting privacy regulations, combined with limited resources like budgets and talent shortages, add to today’s business complexities. I hear this concern time and again as I travel around the world meeting with our customers to share how Microsoft can empower organizations successfully through these challenges.
Most recently, I sat down with Emma Smith, Global Security Director at Vodafone Group to talk about their own best practices when navigating the regulatory environment. Vodafone Group is a global company with mobile operations in 24 countries and partnerships that extend to 42 more. The company also operates fixed broadband operations in 19 markets, with about 700 million customers. This global reach means they must protect a significant amount of data while adhering to multiple requirements.
Emma and her team have put a lot of time and effort into the strategies and tactics that keep Vodafone and its customers compliant no matter where they are in the world. They’ve learned a lot in this process, and she shared these learnings with me as we discussed the need for organizations to be both secure and compliant, in order to best serve our customers and maintain their trust. You can watch our conversation and hear more in our CISO Spotlight episode.
Cybersecurity enables privacy compliance
As you work to balance compliance with security keep in mind that, as Emma said, “There is no privacy without security.” If you have separate teams for privacy and security, it’s important that they’re strategically aligned. People only use technology and services they trust, which is why privacy and security go hand in hand.
Vodafone did a security and privacy assessment across all their big data stores to understand where the high-risk data lives and how to protect it. They were then able to implement the same controls for privacy and security. It’s also important to recognize that you will never be immune from an attack, but you can reduce the damage.
Emma offered three recommendations for balancing security with privacy compliance:
Develop a risk framework so you can prioritize your efforts.
Communicate regularly with the board and executive team to align on risk appetite.
Establish the right security capabilities internally and/or through a mix of partners and third parties.
I couldn’t agree more, as these are also important building blocks for any organization as they work to become operationally resilient.
I also asked Emma for her top five steps for becoming compliant with privacy regulations:
Comply with international standards first, then address local rules.
Develop a clear, board-approved strategy.
Measure progress against your strategy.
Develop a prioritized program of work with clear outcomes.
Stay abreast of new technologies and new threats.
The simplest way to manage your risk is to minimize the amount of data that you store. Privacy assessments will help you know where the data is and how to protect it. Regional and local laws can provide tools to guide your standards. Protecting online privacy and personal data is a big responsibility, but with a risk management approach, you can go beyond the “letter of the law” to better safeguard data and support online privacy as a human right.
Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
CISO Spotlight Series
Address cybersecurity challenges head-on with 10-minute video episodes that discuss cybersecurity problems and solutions from AI to Zero Trust.
At Microsoft Quantum, our ambition is to help solve some of the world’s most complex challenges through the world’s most scalable quantum system.
To deliver on that promise, we’ve been working together with a global quantum community to innovate across every layer of the quantum stack – from applications and software down to control and devices.
Leading cryptographers at Microsoft Research are developing quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms and protocols to prepare customers and data centers around the world for a quantum future.
Developers are already contributing to the growing quantum community through Q# and our open source Quantum Development Kit, which today has more than 200,000 downloads.
Recently, Microsoft’s Quantum Lab located at the University of Sydney made breakthroughs in qubit control technology that allow us to scale beyond the physical limitations of current conventional systems. We now have the ability to control up to 50,000 qubits through simply three wires, a cryogenic CMOS design, and a 1cm2 chip computing at near absolute zero temperatures.
Cryo-CMOS Technology. Image on left courtesy of The University of Sydney, Louise M. Cooper.
These are simply a few examples of advancements across the stack that are bringing the promise of quantum to our world, right now. Today, we’re introducing our next step in delivering quantum impact: Azure Quantum.
Learn, build, and solve with Azure Quantum
Azure Quantum is a full-stack, open cloud ecosystem that will bring the benefits of quantum computing to people and organizations around the world. Together with our partners 1QBit, Honeywell, IonQ, and QCI, we’re assembling the most diverse set of quantum solutions, software, and hardware across the industry, in Azure.
Learn. Anyone can come to Azure Quantum to learn about quantum computing through a series of tools and learning tutorials, like the quantum katas.
Build. Developers can write programs with Q# and the QDK and experiment running the code against simulators and a variety of quantum hardware.
With one program, you’ll be able to target a variety of hardware through Azure Quantum – Azure classical compute, quantum simulators and resource estimators, and quantum hardware from our partners, as well as our future quantum system being built on revolutionary topological qubit. As quantum systems evolve, your code endures.
Microsoft Quantum stack
Delivering quantum impact today
Customers across a wide range of industries are already seeing the impact of our quantum solutions built on the tools and services available in Azure.
In collaboration with Microsoft, Case Western Reserve University created an MRI scan that takes a third of the time of a conventional MRI based on quantum solutions running on classical hardware. These advances in speed could help doctors detect diseases earlier, develop new drugs for conditions where progress is hard to measure today, or use imaging to diagnose cancers rather than relying on invasive procedures like biopsies.
OTI Lumionics develops advanced materials for OLED displays for use in next generation consumer electronics. This includes fully transparent displays that can integrate under-display cameras. Using their quantum chemistry applications with Microsoft’s quantum-inspired algorithms running in Azure, the team was able to successfully simulate Alq3, an OLED fluorescent material, with greater accuracy than typical methods available today. These quantum solutions enabled the team to achieve simulation without the need for expensive high-performance computations or a scalable quantum system. This marks a milestone in chemistry simulation that could inspire more efficient and scalable methods of materials, chemical and drug discovery across the industry.
Recently, Microsoft partnered with 1QBit and IonQ to demonstrate end-to-end quantum computing in Azure Quantum. The team collaborated with Dow and identified a problem in which the molecular energy of a ring of hydrogen atoms had to be evaluated. Using 1QBit’s problem decomposition solution expressed in Q#, the team was able to run computation in Azure against IonQ’s quantum computer based on trapped ions. This demonstrates how Azure Quantum can start to fuel innovations across the quantum stack – from applications and algorithms down to simulators and hardware. By bringing these end-to-end capabilities into one platform, the quantum community will be able to unlock new solutions that scale to even greater impact in the future.
Join the global quantum community
We’re excited to continue collaborating with developers and organizations through Azure Quantum, which will launch in private preview in the coming months. We hope you’ll sign up to become an early adopter!
With Azure Quantum, our ambition is to empower every developer and every organization to experience quantum impact at every stage of this quantum revolution – today and tomorrow.
Developing a master plan to transform John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Replacing a double-deck road with a massive tunnel in Seattle. Keeping beachgoers safe from polluted waters in New Zealand with advanced analytics.
Those are just a few of the thousands of complex projects delivered each year by Mott MacDonald, a global engineering, management and development consulting firm headquartered in London. With 180 principal offices in 50 countries, the company helps solve some of the world’s most urgent social, environmental and economic challenges.
Because Mott MacDonald doesn’t create physical products, its success relies on the knowledge and expertise of its 16,000 employees. To help them share and learn more easily, the company uses Project Cortex, a new service in Microsoft 365 that is part of Microsoft’s vision to transform knowledge and help people learn and grow their skills and expertise.
Simon Denton, productivity applications architect at Mott MacDonald.
Announced this week at Microsoft Ignite, Project Cortex uses artificial intelligence to create a knowledge network that automatically connects and organizes organizations’ content into topics and generates topic cards, wiki-like “topic pages” and other new experiences in Microsoft 365.
The experiences will appear seamlessly in familiar tools like Office, Outlook and Microsoft Teams to help people find information, learn quickly and get up to speed faster within the apps they use every day. When employees see an unfamiliar acronym or project in email or chat, for example, they’ll be able to hover on the word and pop out a topic card with a description and related experts, documents and videos. A click on the card will call up a topic page, curated by AI and experts, with richer information like diagrams that link related and adjacent topics.
These capabilities “are going to further enhance our ability to reach our business goals with quicker access and connection to colleagues and their expertise — what we call our connected thinking,” says Simon Denton, Mott MacDonald productivity applications architect. “They’re going to help us build an even stronger knowledge network so people can have the right knowledge at the right time to deliver more excellent project outcomes for our clients. It’s going to be brilliant.”
The company already organizes its many experts and vast business knowledge into 47 communities that cover aviation, bridges and other practice areas. It began building its initial knowledge management system a few years ago to classify content in SharePoint and add people to Yammer groups based on interest.
Project Cortex, currently in private preview, will give Mott MacDonald even more advanced capabilities. Already secure and compliant, the product will allow automated policies based on precise document tags for added security. Its knowledge experiences, which build on an organization’s existing SharePoint content services, will permeate everyday work tools in Microsoft 365 and could one day include learning content from such platforms as LinkedIn Learning.
The solution will have powerful capture technology to make ingested content smarter. Powered by AI, it can extract information from structured content like forms, receipts and invoices. With machine teaching – having experts teach the AI how to respond – Project Cortex can also pull information from unstructured content like legal contracts and employee agreements.
It then adds metadata and classifies the documents into topics, automatically doing tasks that are traditionally manual and slow.
“We’re really excited about that,” says Denton. “We’re already talking about processing 30 years’ worth of drawings with good information on how something was built and how it needs to be maintained for the future. It’s going to unlock a lot of latent knowledge.”
The knowledge vision
Scheduled for general availability in the first half of 2020, Project Cortex is the first new product to emerge from Microsoft’s knowledge vision, which includes new capabilities in other Microsoft 365 services such as Yammer, for communities of practice; Microsoft Stream, for intelligent video creation and sharing; and Workplace Analytics, for organizational insights.
As a longtime concept for organizing and re-using information, knowledge management has never fully solved the challenges it seeks to address due to disconnected information silos, technical limits and clunky end-user experiences, says Seth Patton, general manager of Microsoft 365 marketing.
But demand for knowledge has become particularly timely due to sweeping changes in the workplace. Automation, gig economies, flex work, skills shortages and retiring baby boomers have heightened the need for organizations to retain knowledge, share it with employees and help them learn new skills and expertise faster, Patton says.
“Business leaders and CEOs are recognizing the importance of their people’s skills and talent in their organizations’ ability to succeed,” he says. “It’s a recognition that upskilling and learning are the new workplace competitive advantage.”
Personal assistant Laura Smith talks with civil apprentice Shey Sewell at Mott MacDonald offices in London.
Microsoft’s advances in AI and machine learning, SharePoint’s massive cloud content repository, the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph and integration with Office 365 apps have helped overcome previous challenges in knowledge management to help customers solve unmet needs.
“All of us have had the experience of joining a new project, team or company,” Patton says. “It takes a long time to understand the language before you can contribute and participate. With Project Cortex you can get up to speed quickly and start contributing right away.”
Microsoft Search will also integrate Project Cortex, so people will be able to find topic cards and knowledge pages when they search. Microsoft Search is an important component in the company’s knowledge vision, bringing a unified, intelligent search experience across Microsoft 365 and Bing. It also extends to externally connected content, such as file shares. As content is crawled, it’s added to the knowledge network.
As video becomes an increasingly powerful way to capture and share knowledge, Microsoft Stream applies AI to provide automatic transcription for things like recorded meetings. AI-powered voice enhancement helps reduce background noise so people can better focus on what was discussed, and they can also now create short videos from mobile devices to share in Teams and Yammer.
More than a decade after it was created, Yammer has been completely redesigned with dozens of new capabilities, as well as new integrations with Teams, SharePoint and Outlook. These new features allow people to connect and share knowledge across teams and geographic locations.
Mott MacDonald connects people in Yammer communities that span 47 practice areas so they can share knowledge, ask questions and get answers.
As another way Microsoft 365 helps people share knowledge, Workplace Analytics provides business leaders insights into how people collaborate and spend their time with new self-service dashboards. These insights provide the context of industry benchmarks, as well as AI-driven analyses of business processes and networks of people.
An example of a topic card in Outlook.
This information can help identify high-performance trends such as close relationships between effective salespeople and engineers, or correlations between good onboarding experiences and more managerial one-on-ones. Leaders can then encourage and replicate similar patterns elsewhere.
The solutions are designed to be easy-to-use, customizable solutions. For the new Project Cortex, AI does the behind-the-scenes “heavy lifting” of mining and collecting useful, internal information, says Naomi Moneypenny, Microsoft director of content services and insights. Then experts can edit, update and add content to make sure knowledge pages are current and relevant.
“Our goal is to put intelligent content and knowledge services into the flow of the work you do every day to help you find the information you need, discover what you want and make your business processes more efficient,” says Moneypenny, who leads the Project Cortex product team. “All while enhancing and enforcing your security and compliance policies.”
At Mott MacDonald, Project Cortex will help build stronger connections across the company’s large, global communities and deliver timely information that helps employees create solutions to many complex challenges, build expertise and save time, all while enhancing service to customers, Denton says.
“I’m really excited by Microsoft’s vision for creating Project Cortex,” he says. “It fits completely with our strategy for knowledge networks. The idea of connecting people to content and content to people and building this network out, powered by Microsoft 365 — it’s going to be a game-changer for us.”
Lead image: From left to right, civil engineer James Balla, project principal Jonathan Hine and civil engineer Cleopatra Meade work together at Mott MacDonald offices in London. (Photos by Mark Mercer)
Today, we’re excited to launch what’s next for the 2-1 category – the all new Surface Pro X. When we started on this journey with Surface seven years ago, we created a new category that changed the industry forever. Now, as the world becomes more mobile and more cloud based, we’ve pushed the boundaries again with Surface Pro X to create a product that is at the intersection of mobility, productivity and speed.
What we’ve learned from our customers over the years is, as much as they love the portability, power and versatility of a 2-1, many of them also want that device that’s at the cutting edge of what’s next. This set of customers has new expectations for a modern device – the ability to be connected, productive and creative, with enough pixels and graphics performance for them to do more on the go. A device that lets them be mobile as they go from meeting to meeting to airport to hotel and back home again.
So, we pushed ourselves to evolve what it means to be mobile, powerful, and always connected with no interruption to your flow. The result is an incredibly thin, light, powerful and connected Surface. Hardware and platform innovation coming together to create an amazing experience for our customers.
Something new – custom silicon
Our vision for Surface Pro X was to take a mobile architecture and push the technology to make it a fully functioning powerful PC. To do this we created a piece of custom silicon, designed in partnership with Qualcomm. Surface Pro X is powered by the Microsoft SQ1 processor, creating a device that enables an incredible combination of pixels, performance, thinness, battery life and constant LTE connectivity.
This chip brings Snapdragon mobile DNA and an integrated AI accelerator together with incredible power. While ARM chips normally run in the 2-watt range, we know how important performance is to our customers and wanted to give them the power they need to achieve their goals.
With Microsoft SQ1 we’ve started with a phenomenal 7 watts of power by changing the chip itself, reengineering the tools and architecture for an incredibly fast, powerful experience found nowhere else. We redesigned the GPU and other silicon IP to create a product that’s 3x more performant per watt than Surface Pro 6. This means better battery life, a lighter and thinner product, and unprecedented performance, all while running full Windows, all the Office apps you love, Edge and Chrome.
Get into your flow anytime, anywhere
With the combination of the custom silicon and the amazing engineering and design work that went into the hardware, Surface Pro X is unbelievably light and thin. At 5.3mm thin at its thinnest point and 1.68lbs, it’s portable, versatile and always connected with LTE advanced. So you can work anywhere, anytime, whether you’re in the office, at home, traveling or at a coffee shop.
The display is stunning. With the thinnest bezels of any 2-1 on the market, this display provides a 13” screen in a 12” form factor, the most working space possible on a 13” screen, along with beautiful high contrast and high readability, colors that are vibrant and bright, and 2880×1920 resolution at 267 dpi.
Create intuitively
With the new Surface Pro X Signature Keyboard and Surface Slim Pen, you can create intuitively with typing, pen or touch. One of the things we’ve heard consistently from our customers is that they love using Surface Pen but want to have a way to make sure they can keep it with them, so it doesn’t get lost. With the Surface Pro X Signature Keyboard, the Pen stores securely and automatically recharges so it’s always with you and always charged.
You bring our products to life
Nothing inspires the team more than seeing the amazing things our customers do with our products. Surface Pro X is available in the US and Canada today, and additional markets where Surface is sold in the coming weeks. I can’t wait to see what you create.
Companies announce their first joint solutions combining Microsoft cloud, AI and machine learning expertise with Nokia’s leadership across mission-critical networking and communications
REDMOND, Wash., and ESPOO, Finland—Nov. 5, 2019— Microsoft and Nokia today announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate transformation and innovation across industries with cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT). By bringing together Microsoft cloud solutions and Nokia’s expertise in mission-critical networking, the companies are uniquely positioned to help enterprises and communications service providers (CSPs) transform their businesses. As Microsoft’s Azure, Azure IoT, Azure AI and Machine Learning solutions combine with Nokia’s LTE/5G-ready private wireless solutions, IP, SD-WAN, and IoT connectivity offerings, the companies will drive industrial digitalization and automation across enterprises, and enable CSPs to offer new services to enterprise customers.
BT is the first global communications service provider to offer its enterprise customers a managed service that integrates Microsoft Azure cloud and Nokia SD-WAN solutions. BT customers can access this through a customer automated delegated rights service, which enables BT to manage both the customer Azure vWAN and the unique Agile Connect SD-WAN, based on Nokia’s Nuage SD-WAN 2.0.
“Bringing together Microsoft’s expertise in intelligent cloud solutions and Nokia’s strength in building business and mission-critical networks will unlock new connectivity and automation scenarios,” said Jason Zander, executive vice president, Microsoft Azure. “We’re excited about the opportunities this will create for our joint customers across industries.”
“We are thrilled to unite Nokia’s mission-critical networks with Microsoft’s cloud solutions,” said Kathrin Buvac, President of Nokia Enterprise and Chief Strategy Officer. “Together, we will accelerate the digital transformation journey towards Industry 4.0, driving economic growth and productivity for both enterprises and service providers.”
The cloud and IoT have ushered in the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, wherein enterprises are embracing data to automate and streamline processes across all aspects of their businesses. By joining forces, the two companies are bringing solutions to market that will simplify and accelerate this journey for enterprises, as well as enable CSPs to play a key role in helping their customers realize the potential of industrial digitalization and automation while also optimizing and better differentiating their own businesses.
Accelerating digital transformation for enterprises
Microsoft and Nokia are partnering to help accelerate digital transformation for enterprises by offering connectivity and Azure IoT solutions that unlock connected scenarios across multiple industries including digital factories, smart cities, warehouses, healthcare settings, and transportation hubs such as ports, airports and more.
The Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (Nokia DAC) 5G-ready industrial-grade private wireless broadband solution with on-premise Azure elements will enable a wide variety of secure industrial automation solutions that require more reliable connectivity, efficient coverage and better mobility than traditional Wi-Fi networks provide. For example, connected smart tools and machines on manufacturing floors that enable increased productivity, flexibility and safety for workers, or autonomous vehicles and robots in industrial environments that improve automation, efficiency and overall safety.
Enabling new enterprise services offered by service providers
Nokia’s Nuage SD-WAN 2.0 solution now enables service providers to offer integration with Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN for branch to cloud connectivity, with the companies planning to offer more options for branch internet connectivity in 2020. By automating branch and hybrid WAN connectivity, enterprises will have simplified, faster access to cloud applications such as Office 365, integrated security from branch-to-branch and branch-to-Azure and reduced risk of configuration errors causing security or connectivity issues.
Furthermore, the companies are integrating Nokia’s Worldwide IoT Network Grid (WING) with Azure IoT Central to make the onboarding, deployment, management and servicing of IoT solutions seamless. This integration provides CSPs with the opportunity to offer their enterprises a single platform including vertical solutions to enable secure connected IoT services, such as asset tracking and machine monitoring on a national or global scale. Enterprises will be able to use Azure IoT Central and partner solutions for faster and easier enablement and implementation of their IoT applications together with Nokia’s IoT connectivity solutions.
Driving digital transformation for CSPs
Microsoft and Nokia are collaborating to host Nokia’s Analytics, Virtualization and Automation (AVA) cognitive services solutions on Azure. These AI solutions will enable CSPs to move out of private data centers and into the Azure cloud to realize cost savings and transform operations for 5G. Predictive Video Analytics is an example of a joint solution that will ensure optimal video experiences for CSP subscribers, improving reliability by up to 60 percent.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
About Nokia
We create the technology to connect the world. We develop and deliver the industry’s only end-to-end portfolio of network equipment, software, services and licensing that is available globally. Our customers include communications service providers whose combined networks support 6.1 billion subscriptions, as well as enterprises in the private and public sector that use our network portfolio to increase productivity and enrich lives.
Through our research teams, including the world-renowned Nokia Bell Labs, we are leading the world to adopt end-to-end 5G networks that are faster, more secure and capable of revolutionizing lives, economies and societies. Nokia adheres to the highest ethical business standards as we create technology with social purpose, quality and integrity. www.nokia.com
For more information, press only:
Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, rrt@we-worldwide.com
Millions of engineers across industries such as automotive, aerospace, industrial machinery and medical devices have already built models of the systems they work on using MATLAB or Simulink. This new partnership allows users to bring simulation models built using MATLAB and Simulink to Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, enabling unprecedented scalability and making it easier for developers and engineers building autonomous systems.
“Our core interest really comes down to engineering productivity — the ability to succeed at a task in the least amount of time possible,” said Loren Dean, MathWorks senior director of engineering for MATLAB products. “This partnership allows engineers to stay in a familiar workflow to learn and apply AI without having to do the things that are non-traditional for them, like setting up the infrastructure to run a bunch of simulations at once. They’re shielded from all that.”
By running hundreds or thousands of simulations in parallel in Azure and learning from massive amounts of data at once, deep reinforcement learning algorithms can find optimal solutions to chaotic, real-world control problems that other types of AI still struggle to solve.
It turns out these problems are everywhere, said Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Business AI. Microsoft received three times more interest than it expected after opening its autonomous systems limited preview program in May.
The companies who have applied to work with Microsoft’s autonomous systems team and partners are looking to develop control systems to intelligently stitch fabric, optimize chemical engineering processes, manufacture durable consumer goods and even process food. The potential goes far beyond robotics or autonomous vehicles, Microsoft says.
“These are the kinds of diverse use cases for autonomous systems that we’re starting to see emerge,” Pall said. “As customers learn about the capabilities of our toolchain, we’re seeing them apply it in really interesting ways because these control problems exist almost everywhere you look.”
Most customer use cases Microsoft has seen so far involve helping existing employees do their jobs more efficiently, safely or with higher quality, said Mark Hammond, Microsoft general manager for Business AI and the former CEO of the startup Bonsai, which Microsoft acquired last year. As sensors in modern workplaces collect ever more data, it can become difficult for any one operator — such as someone who is guiding a drill bit or calibrating expensive equipment — to track it all. AI tools can process that data and bring the most relevant patterns to that operator’s attention, enabling them to make more informed decisions.
“The journey from automated to autonomous systems is a spectrum of solutions, and very few of the engagements we’re seeing are in that fully autonomous with no humans in the loop zone,” Hammond said. “The vast majority are assistive technologies that work with people.”
Training AI systems in virtual worlds
Traditionally, AI models have often relied on labor-intensive labeled data for training, which works well for many problems but not for those that lack real-world data. Now, Microsoft and partners like MathWorks are expanding the use of AI into more areas such as those that require learning from the three-dimensional physical world around them — through the power of reinforcement learning and simulation.
Engineers have long used simulations to mathematically model the systems they work with in the real world. This allows them to estimate how a particular change in a chemical, manufacturing or industrial process may affect performance, without having to worry about slowing production or putting people or equipment at risk.
Now, those same simulations can be used to train reinforcement learning algorithms to find optimal solutions, Dean said.
“The AI is really augmenting how these traditional systems have worked — it just gives you greater confidence in your design and gives you additional capabilities that either had to be done manually before or were difficult to solve,” Dean said.
Imagine a building engineer whose job is to calibrate all the heating and cooling systems in a large commercial building to keep each room at a comfortable temperature as people stream in and out for meetings and outside weather fluctuates — while using as little energy as possible. That could involve tuning dozens of different parameters and might take many cycles of modeling and measuring changes for that engineer to find the best balance of controls.
With the new Microsoft and MathWorks partnership, that engineering expert could use machine teaching tools to help an AI system focus on the most important dimensions of the problem, set safety limits and figure out how to reward success as the algorithms learn. This allows for greater transparency and trust in how the AI system is making decisions and also helps it work more efficiently than randomly exploring all possibilities.
The engineer could train the AI using models that he or she already developed in MATLAB or Simulink. The simulations can be automatically scaled up in the Azure cloud — which means the engineer doesn’t have to worry about learning how to host and manage computing clusters.
The end result is the building engineer uses AI to zero in on promising solutions much faster — but still uses his or her judgment to decide what works best.
“This partnership really marries the best of MathWorks’ capabilities for modeling and simulation with the best of Microsoft’s capabilities for cloud computing and AI,” Microsoft’s Hammond said.
As business computing needs have grown more complex and sophisticated, many enterprises have discovered they need multiple systems to meetvariousrequirements – a mix of technology environments in multiple locations,known as hybrid IT or hybrid cloud.
Technology vendors have responded with an array of services and platforms – public clouds, private clouds and the growing“edge” computing model – but there hasn’t necessarily been a cohesive strategy to get them to work together.
“We got here in an ad hoc fashion,” said Erik Vogel, global vice president for customer experience for HPE GreenLakeat Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Customers didn’t have a strategic model to work from.”
Instead, he said, various business owners in the same company may have bought different software as a service (SaaS) applications, or developers may have independently started leveraging Amazon Web Services,Azureor Google Cloud Platform to develop a set of applications.
At its Ignite conference this week in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft announced its solution to suchcloud sprawl. The company has launched a previewof Azure Arc, which offers Azure servicesand management to customers on otherclouds or infrastructure, including those offered by Amazon and Google.
John“JG” Chirapurath, general manager for Azure data, blockchain and artificial intelligence at Microsoft, said the new service is both an acknowledgement of, and a response to, the reality that many companies face today. They are running various parts of their businesses on different cloud platforms, and they also have a lot of data stored on their own new or legacy systems.
In all those cases, he said, these customers are telling Microsoft they could use the benefits of Azure cloud innovation whether or not their data is stored in the cloud, and they could benefit from having the same Azure capabilities – including security safeguards – available to them across their entire portfolio.
“We are offering our customers the ability to take their services, untethered from Azure, and run them inside their own datacenter or in another cloud,” Chirapurath said.
Microsoft says Azure Arc builds on years of work the company has done to serve hybrid cloud needs. For example, Azure Resource Manager, released in 2014, was created with the vision that it would manage resources outside of Azure, including in companies’ internal servers and on other clouds.
That flexibility can help customers operatetheir services ona mix of cloudsmore efficiently, without purchasing new hardware or switching among cloud providers. Companies can use a public cloud to obtain computing power and data storage from an outside vendor, but theycan also house critical applications and sensitive data on their own premises in a private cloud or server.
Then there’s edge computing, which stores data where the user is, in between the company and the public cloud – for example, on their customers’ mobile devices or on sensors in smart buildings like hospitals and factories.
YouTube Video
That’s compelling for companies that need to run AI models on systems that aren’t reliably connected to the cloud, or to make computations more quickly than if they had to send large amounts of data to and from the cloud. But it also must work with companies’ cloud-based, internet-connected systems.
“A customer at the edge doesn’t want to use different app models for different environments,” said Mark Russinovich, Azure chief technology officer. “They need apps that span cloud and edge, leveraging the same code and same management constructs.”
Streamlining and standardizing a customer’s IT structure gives developers more time to build applications that produce value for the business instead of managingmultiple operating models. And enabling Azure to integrate administrative and compliance needs across the enterprise – automating system updates and security enhancements – brings additional savings in time and money.
“You begin to free up people to go work on other projects, which means faster development time, faster time to market,” said HPE’s Vogel.HPE is working with Microsoft on offerings that will complement Azure Arc.
Arpan Shah, general manager of Azure infrastructure, said Azure Arc allowscompanies to use Azure’s governance toolsfor their virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters and data across different locations,helping ensurecompanywide compliance on things like regulations, security, spending policies and auditing tools.
Azure Arc is underpinned in part by Microsoft’s commitment to technologies that customers are using today, includingvirtual machines, containers and Kubernetes, an open source system for organizing and managing containers. That makes clusters of applications easily portable across a hybrid IT environment – to the cloud, the edge or an internal server.
“It’s easy for a customer to put that container anywhere,” Chirapurathsaid. “Today, you can keep it here. Tomorrow, you can move it somewhere else.”
Microsoft says these latest Azure updates reflect an ongoing effort to better understand the complex needs of customers trying to manage their Linux and Windows servers, Kubernetes clusters and data across environments.
“This is just the latest wave of this sort of innovation,” Chirapurath said. “We’re really thinking much more expansively about customer needs and meeting them according to how they’d like to run their applications and services.”
Top image: Erik Vogel, global vice president for customer experience for HPE GreenLake at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, with a prototype of memory-driven computing. HPE is working with Microsoft on offerings that will complement Azure Arc. Photo by John Brecher for Microsoft.
About four years ago, the Microsoft Azure team began to notice a big problem troubling many of its customers. A mass migration to the cloud was in full swing, as enterprisessigned up by the thousands to reap the benefits of flexible, large–scale computing and data storage. But the next iteration of that tech revolution, in which companies would use their growing stores of data to get more tangible business benefits, had stalled.
Technology providers, including Microsoft, have built a variety of systems to collect, retrieve and analyzeenormous troves of information that would uncover market trends and insights, paving the waytoward a new era of improved customer service, innovation and efficiency.
But those systems were built independently by different engineering teams and sold as individual products and services. They weren’t designed to connect with oneanother, and customers would have to learn how to operate them separately, wasting time, money and precious IT talent.
“Instead of trying to add more features to each of our services, we decided to take a step back and figure out how to bring their core capabilities together to make it easy for customers to collect and analyzeall of their increasingly diverse data, to break down data silos and work together more collaboratively,” said Raghu Ramakrishnan, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for data.
At its Ignite conference this week in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft announced the end result of a years–long effort to address the problem: Azure Synapse Analytics, a new service that merges the capabilities of Azure SQL Data Warehouse withnew enhancements such as on-demand query as a service.
Microsoft said this new offering will help customers put their data to work much more quickly, productively and securelyby pulling together insights from all data sources, data warehouses and big data analytics systems. And, the company said, with deeper integration between Power BI and Azure Machine Learning, Azure Synapse Analyticscan reduce the time required to process and share thatdata,speeding upthe insights that businesses can glean.
What’s more, it will allow many more businesses to take advantage of game-changing technologies like data analytics and artificial intelligence, which are helping scientists to better predict the weather, searchengines to better understand people’s intent and workers to more easily handle mundane tasks.
This newest effort to break down data silos also builds on other Microsoft projects, such as the Open Data InitiativeandAzure Data Share,which allows you to share data from multiple sources and even other organizations.
Microsoft said Azure Synapse Analytics is also designed to support the increasingly popular DevOps strategy, in which development and operations staff collaborate more closely to create and implement services that work better throughout their lifecycles.
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A learning process
Azure Synapse Analytics is the result of a lot of work, and a little trial and error.
At first, Ramakrishnan said, the team developed high–level guidelines showing customers how to glue the systems together themselves. But they quickly realized that was too much to ask.
“That required a lot of expertise in the nitty gritty of our platforms,” Ramakrishnan said. “Customers made it overwhelmingly clear that we needed to do better.”
So, the company went back to the drawing board and spent an additional two years revamping the heart of its data business, Azure SQL Data Warehouse,whichlets customers build, test, deploy and manage applications and services in the cloud.
A breakthrough came when the company realized that customers need to analyze all their data in a single service, without having to copyterabytes of information across various systemsto use different analytic capabilities – as has traditionally been the case withdata warehouses and data lakes.
With the new offering, customers can use their data analyticsengine of choice, such as Apache Spark or SQL, on all their data. That’s true whether it’sstructured data, such as rows of numbers on spreadsheets, or unstructured data, such as a collection of social media posts.
This project was risky. It involved deep technical surgery: completely rewriting the guts of the SQL query processing engine to optimize it for the cloud and make itcapable of instantly handling big bursts of work as well asvery large and diverse datasets.
It also required unprecedented integration among several teams within Microsoft, some of whom would have to make hard choices. Established plans had to be scrapped. Resources earmarked for new features would be redirected to help make the entire system work better.
“In the beginning, the conversations were often heated. But as we got into the flow of it, they became easier. We began to come together,” Ramakrishnan said.
Microsoft also had to make sure that the product would work for any company, regardless of employees’ technical expertise.
“Most companies can’t afford to hire teams of 20 people to drive data projects and wire together multiple systems. There aren’t even enough skilled people out there to do all that work,” said Daniel Yu, director of product marketing for Azure Data and Artificial Intelligence.
Making it easy for customers
Customers can bring together various sources of data into a single feed with Azure Synapse Analytics Studio, a console – or single pane of glass – that will allow a business professional with minimal technical expertise to locate and collect data from multiple sources like sales, supply chain, finance and product development. They can then choose how and where to store that data, and they can use it to create reports through Microsoft’s popular PowerBIanalytics service.
In a matter of hours, Azure Synapse will deliver useful business insights that used to take days or even weeks and months, said Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data.
“Let’s say an executive wants a detailed report on sales performance in the eastern U.S. over the last six months,” Kumar said. “Today, a data engineer has to do a lot of work to find where that data is stored and write a lot of brittle code to tie various services together. They might even have to bring in a systems integrator partner. With Azure Synapse, there’s no code required. It’s a much more intuitive experience.”
The complexity of the technical problemsAzure Synapse addressed would be hard to overstate. Microsoft had to meld multiple independent components into one coherent form factor, while giving a wide range of people – from data scientists to line of business owners – their preferred tools for accessing and using data.
“With Azure Synapse, there’s no code required. It’s a much more intuitive experience.”
~ Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data
That includes products like SQL Server, the open source programming interface Apache Spark, Azure Data Factory and Azure Data Studio,as well asnotebook interfaces preferred by many data professionals to clean and model data.
“Getting all those capabilities to come together fluidly, making it run faster, simpler, eliminating overlapping processes – there was some scary good stuff getting done,” Ramakrishnan said.
The result is a data analytics system that will be as easy to use as a modern mobile phone. Just as the smartphone replaced several devices by making all of their core capabilities intuitively accessible in a single device, the Azure Synapse “smartphone for data” now allows a data engineer to build an entire end-to-end data pipeline in one place. It also enables data scientists and analysts to look at the underlying data in ways that are natural to them.
And just as the phone has driven waves of collaboration and business innovation, Azure Synapse will free up individuals and companies to introduce new products and services as quickly as they can dream them up, Microsoft said.
“If we can help different people view data through a lens that is natural to them, while it’s also visible to othersin ways natural to them, then we will transform the way companies work,” Ramakrishnan said. “That’s how we should measure our success.”
Top photo: Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data, says Azure Synapse will deliver useful business insights that used to take days or even weeks and months. Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.
With a nearly 100-year history in film and television, Warner Bros. owns one of the world’s deepest and most significant entertainment libraries. Re-releasing older films in new formats or for new audiences is an important part of the business. It’s also a tremendous cultural responsibility to preserve some of the world’s most beloved stories in perpetuity, Colf said.
“Imagine if a title like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ or a show like ‘Friends’ wasn’t available for generation after generation to enjoy and see and understand,” she said. “We think that’s unimaginable, and that’s why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously.”
The company has redundancy plans in place to handle multiple worst-case scenarios: an earthquake or hurricane that strikes one of the coasts, a fire where the suppression systems don’t kick in or a climate control failure that allows moisture to build up and ruin film stock.
The goal is to have three archival copies of each asset stored in different locations around the world: two separate digitized copies, along with the original physical copy on whatever medium a film or television episode or animated cartoon was created.
Fortunately, original film negatives will last for centuries if stored in the right conditions. But for some older television shows — think episodes of “Alice” shot in the 1970s — the original physical copy has a limited shelf life that requires migration to newer formats. And for today’s films and television shows that are shot digitally, the archival-quality third copy has a very short migration cycle of three to five years, which is challenging to manage.
“Let’s say a TV show is pushing directly into our digital archives; there’s nothing physical,” said Steven Anastasi, Warner Bros. vice president for global media archives and preservation services. “The digital file is going in but I don’t have something I can put in a vault or in a salt mine or anything physical coming into the building.”
Microsoft Project Silica researcher Youssef Assaf drops a square of silica glass in a kettle of boiling water to demonstrate its durability. The team has baked, boiled, microwaved, demagnetized and scoured similar pieces of glass with steel wool — with no loss to the data stored inside. Photo by Jonathan Banks for Microsoft.
Warner Bros. is potentially looking at Project Silica to create a permanent physical asset to store important digital content and provide durable backup copies. Right now, for theatrical releases that are shot digitally, the company creates an archival third copy by converting it back to analog film. It splits the final footage into three color components —cyan, magenta and yellow — and transfers each onto black-and-white film negatives that won’t fade like color film.
Those negatives are put into a cold storage archive. In these highly managed vaults, temperature and humidity are tightly controlled, and air sniffers look for signs of chemical decomposition that could signal problems. If they need the film back, they must reverse those complicated steps.
That process is expensive, and there are only a handful of film labs left in the world that can do it. And the process is not optimal from a qualitative point of view, said Brad Collar, Warner Bros. senior vice president of global archives and media engineering.
“When we shoot something digitally — with zeros and ones representing the pixels on the screen — and print that to an analog medium called film, you destroy the original pixel values. And, sure, it looks pretty good, but it’s not reversible,” Collar said.
“If we can take the digital representation of those pixels and put it on a medium like silica and read it back off exactly as it was when it came out of the camera, we’ve done our preservation job to the very best of our ability. That’s what I love about this,” he said.
It’s not economical to create archival film negatives for every digitally shot television episode in the Warner Bros. library. The company hopes Project Silica might prove to be a cheaper, higher quality alternative to create physical archives of digital content.
There’s much more work ahead to reach that scale — Microsoft researchers would need to significantly increase the speed at which data can be written and read, as well as its density. Warner Bros. envisions its own infrastructure to read data from the glass archives. But both partners see promise in how far they’ve come.
“If Project Silica’s storage solution proves to be as cost-effective and as scalable as it could be — and we all recognize it’s still early days — this is something we’d love to see adopted by other studios and our peers and other industries,” Colf said.
“If it works for us, we firmly believe that this will be a benefit to anyone who wants to preserve and archive content,” she said.
The holidays will be here before you know it, and to kick off the start of November, we are unveiling the first wave of Xbox Black Friday discounts. This is just a sample of our entire Black Friday deals – tune in via Mixer for a special episode of Inside Xbox live from X019 in London on Thursday, November 14 at 12:00 p.m. PT for the full lineup of Xbox Black Friday discounts and offers. You won’t want to miss out!
First up, we are offering a 50% discount on Sea of Thieves: Anniversary Edition, the fastest-selling first-party new IP of this generation. Join this multiplayer, shared-world adventure game featuring new modes like the story driven Tall Tales or The Arena, a competitive multiplayer experience on the high seas. Xbox Live Gold is required to play Sea of Thieves: Anniversary Edition and is sold separately.
Deals are valid starting on November 24 and run through December 2, 2019. Plus, Black Friday kicks off even earlier for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Xbox Live Gold members, with Early Access beginning on November 21.
Visit Xbox.com, Microsoft Store and participating retailers globally for more details on availability and pricing as deals will vary between regions and retailers. See here for more Black Friday deals from Microsoft Store.
Xbox has something for everyone on your gift this list year, and at every price point. Be sure to tune in to Inside Xbox at X019 on Thursday, November 14 at 12:00 p.m. PT for the full lineup of Xbox Black Friday deals.
