In this episode of “Digital Now,” Charlie Bell, executive vice president, Microsoft Security, explains that while the cloud gives companies tremendous flexibility and the ability to innovate quickly, it gives bad actors those same opportunities.
Most Microsoft customers, he says, are on a journey, contending with an evolving threat with fragmented solutions that straddle cloud and on-premises technology. The destination, he explains, is a “digital civilization” where the entire organization is protected.
“Digital Now” is a video series hosted by Andrew Wilson, chief digital officer at Microsoft, who invites friends and industry leaders inside and outside of Microsoft to share how they are tackling digital and business transformation, and explores themes like the future of work, security, artificial intelligence and the democratization of code and data.
Harrison of BloombergNEF also said that it’s important that companies like Microsoft are active in seeking policies that favor clean energy.
“Lobbying with utilities and working with regulators to open up more access for clean energy buying is a massive role that Microsoft and other companies are currently playing,” he says.
Microsoft’s advocacy for clean energy starts in-house.By 2025, Microsoft will shift to 100% supply of renewable energy, meaning that the company will have PPAs for green energy contracted for 100% of carbon-emitting electricity consumed by all its datacenters, buildings and campuses.
By 2030 Microsoft will have 100% of its electricity consumption, 100% of the time, matched by zero-carbon energy purchases. By 2050, Microsoft has committed to removing from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted, either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975. Datacenters can play a role in helping reach these goals.
Moreover, the ability to ensure the cloud meets Europe’s needs and serves Europe’s values is a core part of a new set of European Cloud Principles Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith announced in May of this year, after discussions with a number of European partners.
Supporting the market for renewables
Using innovative approaches, Microsoft has been demonstrating how datacenters can conserve power, reduce emissions and even contribute energy back to the grid.
In Finland, waste heat from two new datacenters will contribute to the district heating system that provides warmth to more than 250,000 people in winter. The Microsoft datacenter region in Sweden uses rainwater and outside air to cool servers, while using the heat they produce to keep work areas warm for employees. Also in Sweden, Microsoft is piloting batteries to displace diesel generators as backup systems.
Microsoft’s datacenters in Ireland use batteries to maintain an uninterruptible power supply. In a collaboration between Microsoft and Enel X, those batteries can provide grid services through an instantaneous interaction with the power grid. On days when wind and/or solar power production is fluctuating, Microsoft’s backup batteries can be used to help maintain a steady flow of energy to power customers.
That means fossil-fuel burning power plants will be needed less often to maintain steady power, cutting emissions and fuel costs.
“The great thing about the project in Ireland was that those batteries were already there,” says Janous of Microsoft. “What it required was providing that digital layer of intelligence to determine what does the grid need to help balance the frequency on the system?
“Those assets, which are ubiquitous in datacenters, are all over the world. And it creates a huge opportunity to be able to see the datacenter as something more than a consumer of energy, but also a producer and a partner to grid operators to improve reliability and ultimately the energy transition that we’ve been talking about.”
Looking ahead
It is the technology companies’ “work in digitalization, artificial intelligence and information systems that could be potential game-changers in creating the smarter, more flexible energy systems needed to get to net-zero emissions,” write Kamiya and Varro in the IEA analysis.
Harrison of BloombergNEF also cited the potential for the development of digital tools to help grid operators shift loads during periods of high demand. He says the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) could help create energy efficiency in a variety of ways.
AI can be used for everything from smoothing out supply-chain issues to creating more accurate local weather forecasting to helping providers find ways to capture more energy.
While AI and machine learning will add to demand for cloud computing, Janous notes that those advanced tools are also likely to be essential in solving some of the biggest problems we’re facing.
“Energy transitions are historically very slow because they involve massive amounts of infrastructure,” he says. “We need close partnerships with grid operators and energy companies in Europe to help them figure out what are the most efficient and fastest ways to accelerate this transition” to renewable energy sources.
“We need the digital tools that datacenters provide to accelerate that transition.”
Notebooks are gaining popularity in InfoSec. Used interactively for investigations and hunting or as scheduled processing jobs, notebooks offer plenty of advantages over traditional security operations center (SOC) tools. Sitting somewhere between scripting/macros and a full-blown development environment, they offer easy entry to data analyses and visualizations that are key to modern SOC engagements.
Join our community of analysts and engineers at the third annual InfoSec Jupyterthon 2022, where you’ll meet and engage with security practitioners using notebooks in their daily work. This is an online event taking place on December 2 and 3, 2022. It is organized by our friends at Open Threat Research, together with folks from Microsoft Security research teams and the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC).
Although this is not a Microsoft event, our Microsoft Security teams are delighted to be involved in helping organize it and deliver talks. Registration is free and it will be streamed on YouTube Live both days from 10:30 AM to 5:00 PM Eastern Time. We’ll also have a dedicated Discord channel for discussions and session Q&A.
Do you have a cool notebook or some interesting techniques or technology to talk about? There are still openings for talks and mini talks (30-minute, 15-minute, and 5-minute sessions). Submit your proposal here.
In this episode of “Digital Now,” two key architects of Microsoft’s intelligent data platform describe how Microsoft and its customers are undergoing a cultural shift in which data has become a complementary discipline alongside software and code.
“Digital Now” is a video series hosted by Andrew Wilson, chief digital officer at Microsoft, who invites friends and industry leaders inside and outside of Microsoft to share how they are tackling digital and business transformation, and explores themes like the future of work, security, artificial intelligence and the democratization of code and data.
Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president, Azure Data, and Karthik Ravindran, general manager, Enterprise Analytics and Data Governance, explain that data doesn’t belong to one particular team, but is an organizational asset that can be responsibly democratized to provide valuable insights.
“I think having data scientists who can generate real-time insight, having an organization that’s data-led not system-led are really powerful tenets of a modern strategy,” agrees Wilson.
Medical imaging has long been at the forefront of the adoption of digital tools in healthcare. Over the past three decades, radiology has evolved from an analog film-based workflow to leading the development and adoption of the most sophisticated health IT tools and workflows in the entire healthcare system.
The success of this evolution depended on the foresight of medical imaging leadership to make capital investments in powerful computing networks, which led to an unprecedented ability to share and ingest large imaging files across the healthcare enterprise to serve a growing digital-first clinical service. But while leading the digital transformation has led to tremendous advantages, newer challenges have emerged including ever-increasing imaging volumes with many different modalities, combinations, and sources of data, all of which challenge traditional health IT resources.
If history is any guide, we believe medical imaging will once again lead to another modern transformation, one that allows health systems to unlock the security, scalability, and elasticity of the cloud. As in other industries, migrating and integrating medical imaging workloads to the cloud, alongside clinical and other data, will achieve new levels of operational efficiency, break down data silos for advanced workflows and intelligent analytics, and finally, provide on-demand modern infrastructure to deliver AI and machine learning workloads that enable disease detection and improved precision care.1
This year at RSNA 2022, Microsoft + Nuance are excited to engage in conversations around how cloud technology, AI, and machine learning will change the future of the medical imaging industry.
Here are a few of the key highlights of where you’ll find Microsoft + Nuance at RSNA 2022:
1. Join us on the symposium stage
Join us on Monday, November 28, 2022, from 1:30 PM to 2:30 PM CT, in the South Building, Level 1, Room S101AB for a discussion on “From Discovery to Delivery: Integrating data with AI to bring precision therapies into practice” with Fredrick Gustavsson, Chief Technology Officer and VP of Product, Sectra; Dr. Matt Lungren, Chief Medical Information Officer, Nuance; Steven Borg, Senior Director, Health Data and AI, Microsoft Health and Life Sciences; and John Barto, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Microsoft Health and Life Sciences. Hear their thoughts on how we are using AI to discover insights in patient specific data early in the care continuum and deliver those insights directly into the radiologist workflow for targeted diagnosis. Learn more by registering for the symposium.
2. Build with us in hands-on workshops
We’re excited to host a series of hands-on workshops with subject matter experts throughout RSNA 2022, covering topics like advancing responsible AI, empowering analytics, and taking the first step to migrate to the cloud.
A journey of a thousand miles: Taking the first step to migrate to the cloud (without interrupting your current flow)
In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn that moving your data to the cloud doesn’t have to be daunting. You can start with a few simple additions to your current infrastructure and start seamlessly moving your data to the cloud. Register to join one of our three sessions—on November 27, November 28, or November 29.
Advancing responsible AI: Model building and deployment
Participants will gain behind-the-scenes access to the synergy between Microsoft and Nuance AI solutions. We will take attendees on an end-to-end journey from dataset curation, AI model building, checking the model for fairness and bias, model deployment, and post-deployment model monitoring. Register to join one of our four sessions—on November 27, November 28, November 29, or November 30.
Empower your analytics: Harnessing the power of AI to unlock meaning and deliver insights
In this workshop, you will discover how Nuance mPower Clinical Analytics and Microsoft Azure capabilities make it easy to extract, analyze, and report on your data, enabling improved outcomes, quality, and performance. Register to join one of our two sessions—on November 28 or November 29.
3. Join us in the Imaging AI in Practice booth
Learn more about AI in practice at the Imaging AI in Practice booth every afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00 PM on the half hour for a demo walkthrough. The Imaging AI in Practice (IAIP) demonstration is an interoperability demonstration to showcase new technologies and communication standards needed to integrate AI into the diagnostic radiology workflow. The demonstration follows a fictional patient through a real-world clinical scenario involving both emergent and long-term care.
4. Meet us at the Microsoft+ Nuance booth
Join us in booth #3300, where we will highlight Microsoft + Nuance products and synergy. Come engage with us—we would love to share insights, discuss best practices, and answer all your questions. Learn more by requesting a meeting or demo in the booth.
Next Steps
Join us at RSNA 2022 in Chicago, Illinois from November 27 to December 1, 2022. We look forward to sharing more about how the Microsoft + Nuance vision comes to life to reimagine the medical imaging world and improve patient care. For more information and to register for workshops and sessions, please visit our registration page.
Microsoft + Nuance at RSNA 2022
RSNA 2022 brings together some of the most innovative minds in radiology to discuss reimagining patient care.
This holiday season, are you looking for gift ideas for someone who loves maps or geography? Or are you looking for a unique gift for someone who is hard to buy for? There are all kinds of great gift ideas for map geeks, relating to maps and geography, that we at the Bing Maps API team wanted to share.
Books
Mark Monmonier is the author of several wonderful books that look at the societal impacts of maps. Check out his webpage here, my favorite of his is “How to Lie with Maps”.
Ken Jennings, best known for his impressive winning streak on Jeopardy! in 2004 is the author of several books. His 2011 book “Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks” explores the world of map nerds of the US. It’s a fun fast read that describes Ken’s own obsession with maps and explores the other groups that our over their favorite geographies and maps.
Frank Jacobs’s book “Strange Maps- An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities” explores maps from many centuries that span all continents, geographies, space and maps of imaginary places. As far as gifts for geography lovers go, this isn’t your typical atlas. There is also a blog by the same name Strange Maps that will give you a preview of the maps that are in his book.
The Onion, www.Onion.com, is a humor media publisher on radio, print and online. “Our Dumb World” is a parody of a standard desk atlas and pokes fun at all places in the world. While known for their sarcasm, The Onion’s Atlas generally received positive reviews for its humor and satire and would be a great gift for a geography lover with a sense of humor!
If you’re going to get someone a map-related gift, why not show them the bigger picture? Peter Barber, the head of map collections at the British Library compiled an amazing collection of maps that span centuries. His book “The Map Book” has 175 maps that range from prehistoric times to modern digital maps.
There are many other great books that would be amazing gifts for map and geography lovers, check out the Good Reads site and search for maps or geography.
Games and Puzzles
This is a big category, many video games now use maps as a key component to their story and navigation around the game. Classic board games like Risk, Settlers of Catan and Where in the World all utilize maps and geography as part of the game. Sid Meier’s Civilization is still one of my all-time favorite PC games, there are now several versions of the game on a variety of platforms and it remains a clssic gift for map geeks..
If you are looking for map games, educational and otherwise, check out this link.
Geo-caching: Introduce your map geek to the world of geocaching, or buy them accessories for their quest. Check out Geocaching.com for subscriptions and gear guides.
Electronics
What map geek wouldn’t love a GPS? This can be a confusing proposition to find the right one for the need that you have. Check out resources like Best GPS Reviews, Best Consumer Reviews and Outdoor Gear lab for help.
If your map geek is charting the stars, there is a wide range of telescopes out there that they may love. Much like the GPS, this is an area that has a lot of information to wade through, check out the reviews at Optics Planet.
Many digital cameras now have GPS for tagging the location of photos as well as on-board maps. These cameras allow for photos to be displayed over maps and show the location of the pictures. Check out this article on About.com.
For the active map geek, check out the Microsoft band which helps track your activities and map your runs, hikes, or bikes. Also check out the wide variety of GPS-enabled watches, Runner’s World has a great article that reviews all the different styles and functions.
Think outside the box
Want to take pictures or video of your adventures, check out the variety of quad copters mounted with cameras that will give a unique perspective. Check out the Phantom 4 from DJI.
In the market for a low budget gift for a geography lover? Consider some cost-effective options for T-shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers at Café Press; search for geography or maps or add your own photo of one of their favorite places! Zazzle also has a great section of map and geography related items.
Do you have a map geek in the family that loves to sew? Check out these cool DIY quilting kits for various cities from Haptic Lab. That will keep them busy for the holidays! If they can’t sew, check out their other collections like handmade cities quilts.
As a developer, as someone who has been in love with writing code my entire life, I believe it’s time for a new developer experience. Software has advanced in all aspects of our work and life. Running, maintaining and building software for a global population has never been more complex. We are at a turning point. GitHub has built one, integrated platform where the world’s developers can build, create, collaborate and have the best times of their lives doing it. One, integrated platform for one purpose: Putting the developer first. From writing code with Copilot and Hey GitHub, running an ML model in a Codespace, automating your pull requests with Actions and Advanced Security, to the more than 15,000 integrations in our Marketplace that unlock the value of a true platform in GitHub. We have built the place that gives developers everything they need to be creative, to be happier, and to build the best work of their lives. Read the Universe blog below for the latest on how we’re enabling this new developer experience. https://lnkd.in/e-zjdP8g
Trust is essential for people and organizations to use technology with confidence. At Microsoft, we strive to earn the trust of our customers, employees, communities, and partners by committing to privacy, security, the responsible use of AI, and transparency.
At Microsoft Research, we take on this challenge by creating and using state-of-the-art tools and technologies that support a proactive, integrated approach to security across all layers of the digital estate.
Threats to cybersecurity are constant and they continue to grow, impacting organizations and individuals everywhere. Attack tools are readily available and well-funded adversaries now have the capability to cause unprecedented harm. These threats help explain why U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order in 2021 calling for cybersecurity improvements. Similarly, the European Union recently called for stronger protection of its information and communication technology (ICT) supply chains.
Against that backdrop, Microsoft Research is focused on what comes next in security and privacy. New and emerging computing frontiers, like the metaverse and web3, will require consistent advances in identity, transparency and other security principles, in order to learn from the past and unlock these technologies’ potential. Developments in quantum computing and advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence offer great potential to advance science and the human condition. Our research aims to ensure that future breakthroughs come with robust safety and privacy protections, even as they accelerate profound changes and new business opportunities.
At Microsoft Research, we pursue ambitious projects to improve the privacy and security of everyone on the planet. This is the first blog post in a series exploring the work we do in privacy, security and cryptography. In future installments, we will dive deeper into the research challenges we are addressing, and the opportunities we see.
Spotlight: On-Demand EVENT
Microsoft Research Summit 2022
On-Demand Watch now to learn about some of the most pressing questions facing our research community and listen in on conversations with 120+ researchers around how to ensure new technologies have the broadest possible benefit for humanity.
Digital identities
While the internet was not originally built with an identity layer, digital identities have grown to become foundational elements of today’s web and impact people’s lives even beyond the digital world. Our research is aimed at modernizing digital identities and building more robust, usable, private and secure user-centric identity systems, putting each of us in control of our own digital identities.
This work includes researching cryptographic algorithms that enable privacy-preserving open-source user-centric identity systems. Such systems would let people present cryptographically signed electronic claims and selectively choose which information they wish to disclose, while preventing tracking of people between presentations of the claim. Our approach would preserve an individual’s privacy and work with existing web protocols to provide easy and safe access to a wide range of resources and activities.
Our research also includes investigating innovative ways for people to manage their identity secrets reliably and safely without having to provide any centralized party with full access to them. Success in this area will also require scalable and verifiable methods to distribute identity public keys, so people can know who exactly they are interacting with.
Advances in graphics and machine learning algorithms have enabled the creation of easy-to-use tools for editing. While useful in many ways, this technology has also enabled fraud and manipulation of digital images and media – or deepfakes. Early fakes were easy to spot, but current versions are becoming nearly impossible for machines or people to detect. The potential proliferation of fakes that are indistinguishable from reality undermines society’s trust in everything we see and hear.
Rather than trying to detect fakes, Microsoft Research has developed technology to determine the source of any digital media and whether it has been altered. We do this by adding digitally signed manifests to video, audio or images. The source of these media objects might be well-known news organizations, governments or even individuals using apps on mobile devices.
Since media creation, distribution, and consumption are complex and involve many industries, Microsoft has helped standards organization to stipulate how these signatures are added to media objects. We are also working with news organizations such as the BBC, New York Times, and CBC to promote media provenance as a mitigation for misinformation on social media networks.
Hardware security foundations
To promote cyber-resilience, we are developing systems which can detect a cyberattack and safely shut down protecting data and blocking the attacker. The systems are designed to be repaired quickly and securely, if compromised. These systems are built with simple hardware features that provide very high levels of protection for repair and recovery modules. To enable reliable detection of compromised systems, we are also developing storage features that can be used to protect security event logs. This makes it harder for attackers to cover their tracks.
Security analytics
Modern-day computers and networks are under constant attack by hackers of all kinds. In this seemingly never-ending cat-and-mouse contest, securing and defending today’s global systems is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. Managing the massive quantities of security data collected is increasingly challenging, which creates an urgent need for disruptive innovation in security analytics.
We are investigating a transformer-based approach to modeling and analyzing large-scale security data. Applying and tuning such models is a novel field of study that could change the game for security analytics.
Privacy-preserving machine learning
A privacy-preserving AI system should generalize so well that its behavior reveals no personal or sensitive details that may have been contained in the original data on which it was trained.
How close can we get to this ideal? Differential privacy can enable analysts to extract useful insights from datasets containing personal information even while strengthening privacy protections. This method introduces “statistical noise.” The noise is significant enough that AI models are prevented from compromising the privacy of any individual, but still provide accurate, useful research findings. Our recent results show that large language models can be particularly effective differentially private learners.
Another approach, federated learning, enables large models to be trained and fine-tuned on customers’ own devices to protect the privacy of their data, and to respect data boundaries and data-handling policies. At Microsoft Research, we are creating an orchestration infrastructure for developers to deploy cross-platform, cross-device federated learning solutions.
Protecting data in training or fine-tuning is just one piece of the puzzle. Whenever AI is used in a personalized context, it may unintentionally leak information about the target of the personalization. Therefore, we must be able to describe the threat model for a complete deployment of a system with AI components, rather than just a single part of it.
Read more about our work on these and other related topics in an earlier blog post.
Confidential computing
Confidential computing has emerged as a practical solution to securing compute workloads in cloud environments, even from malicious cloud administrators. Azure already offers confidential computing environments in multiple regions, leveraging Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) available in multiple hardware platforms.
Imagine if all computation were taking place in TEEs, where services would be able to access sensitive data only after they had been attested to perform specific tasks. This is not practical today and much research remains to be done. For example, there are no formal standards to even describe what a TEE is, what kind of programming interface a TEE cloud should have, or how different TEEs should interact.
Additionally, it is important to continuously improve the security guarantees of TEEs. For instance, understanding which side-channel attacks are truly realistic and developing countermeasures remains a major topic for research. Furthermore, we need to continue researching designs for confidential databases, confidential ledgers and confidential storage. Finally, even if we build both confidential computing and storage environments, how can we establish trust in the code that we want to run? As a cloud provider, our customers expect us to work continuously on improving the security of our infrastructure and the services that run on it.
Secure-by-design cloud
In the future, we can imagine Azure customers compiling their software for special hardware with memory tagging capabilities, eliminating problems like buffer overflows for good. To detect compromise, VM memory snapshots could be inspected and studied with AI-powered tools. In the worst case, system security could always be bootstrapped from a minimal hardware root of trust. At Microsoft Research, we are taking a step further and asking how we can build the cloud from the ground up, with security in mind.
New cryptography
The advance of quantum computing presents many exciting potential opportunities. As a leader in both quantum computing development and cryptographic research, Microsoft has a responsibility to ensure that the groundbreaking innovations on the horizon don’t compromise classical (non-quantum) computing systems and information. Working across Microsoft, we are learning more about the weaknesses of classical cryptography and how to build new cryptographic systems strong enough to resist future attacks.
Our active participation in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Post-Quantum Cryptography projects has allowed Microsoft Research to examine deeply how the change to quantum-resistant algorithms will impact Microsoft services and Microsoft customers. With over seven years of work in this area, Microsoft Research’s leadership in quantum cryptography will help customers prepare for the upcoming change of cryptographic algorithms.
We’ve joined with the University of Waterloo and others to build a platform for experimenting with the newly proposed cryptographic systems and applying them to real-world protocols and scenarios. We’ve implemented real-world tests of post-quantum cryptography, to learn how these new systems will work at scale and how we can deploy them quickly to protect network tunnels. Our specialized hardware implementations and cryptanalysis provide feedback to the new cryptosystems, which improves their performance, making post-quantum cryptosystems smaller and stronger.
ElectionGuard is an open source software development kit (SDK) that makes voting more secure, transparent and accessible.
Advances in cryptography are enabling end-to-end verifiable elections and risk-limiting audits for elections. Our open-source ElectionGuard project uses cryptography to confirm all votes have been correctly counted. Individual voters can see that their vote has been accurately recorded and anyone can check that all votes have been correctly tallied—yet individual ballots are kept secret. Risk-limiting audits use advanced statistical methods that can determine when an election audit has hit a pre-determined level of confidence with greater efficiency than traditional audits.
The cryptography tools that enable verifiable voting are Shamir Secret Sharing, Threshold Encryption, and additive Homomorphic Encryption. The math is interesting, and we will explore that in future blog posts, but there’s much more than math to ElectionGuard.
Securing the future
Through our work, we aim to continue to earn customer trust, striving to ensure that Microsoft’s products and services and our customer’s information will remain safe and secure for years to come.
Forthcoming entries in this blog series will include more details on the areas covered in this post and more. Much of our work is open-source and published, so we will be highlighting our GitHub projects and other ways you can interact directly with our work.
Have a question or topic that you would like to see us address in a future post? Please contact us!
Organizations worldwide seek reliability in their supply chains to meet the demand of their customers. If there is anything that companies have learned from the years past, it’s to plan for the unexpected. Using history to make decisions for the future no longer works. Customer demand is constantly changing, whether it’s influenced by the economic climate or making environmentally conscious purchase decisions.
At the Microsoft Supply Chain Reimagined digital event, you heard how conversations about supply chains have been elevated to the board room as they are pivotal to gain a competitive advantage for any organization today. We heard from supply chain practitioners, both within Microsoft and from our customers, on the need to address the fragmented ecosystems of supply chain technologies. This is critical for enabling end-to-end visibility of supply chains in near real time. Without this visibility, customers are struggling to unify data to proactively predict and mitigate disruptions.
Microsoft Supply Chain Center
Earlier this week, we announced the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform to help address these challenges. An open, extensible, and adaptive platform enables companies to unify experiences across different planning and execution systems. At the core of the Supply Chain Platform is the Microsoft Supply Chain Center, which introduces a ready-made command center for users to manage disparate supply chain data. Microsoft Supply Chain Center is now available in preview.
Watch the video:
Connect your ecosystem
Most organizations rely on legacy systems and one-off “best-in-breed” applications to manage their supply chain rather than a single, integrated platform, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage.
Recent research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services commissioned by Microsoft shows that 65 percent of executives cite lack of access to real-time supply chain data as a technological obstacle to their supply chain operationsand only 11 percent have a modern, integrated digital solution for their supply chain.*
We are helping companies address this challenge with the Supply Chain Center. Its data manager harmonizes data across existing and new enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain systems in the company. For example, it can unify and harmonize data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP, Oracle, Overhaul, C.H. Robinson, FedEx, FourKites, and many more. An open, flexible platform helps maximize their existing investments without needing to replace them. Now companies can have better data visibility in near real time across their entire supply chain to better assess risks.
Microsoft customers, like Kraft Heinz, joined the discussion during the Supply Chain Reimagined event to share how the Supply Chain Platform will empower them to gain reliability and scalability by identifying trends faster than ever before. Kraft Heinz can not only assess risks faster but also collaborate efficiently across its teams and suppliers to mitigate those risks proactively.
With Supply Chain Center, we want to make it easy for companies to adopt new supply chain solutions in an incremental manner to digitally transform different functional areas of their supply chain while ensuring that those new solutions adopted in the future are interoperable with their existing landscape to achieve faster time to value. It’s all about doing more with less.
Enhance supply chain visibility
Once companies overcome the challenge of data visibility, the Supply Chain Platform enables them to generate actionable insights from this unified data to predict stockouts or shipment delays and prevent overstocking. Companies can track orders all the way until they reach their end consumer and proactively mitigate any constraints along the way to meet customer commitments. This type of end-to-end visibility is only possible with a unified platform approach.
Customers like Daimler Truck North America manage hundreds of thousands of parts across their global supply chain. Using the AI-powered supply and demand insights capabilities of the Supply Chain Center, which harnesses data flowing from the rest of the platform, they predict any parts shortages in their supply chain ahead of time so that they can proactively mitigate them and deliver on their promises to their customers, dealerships, and partners.
Another customer, iFIT, leverages Supply Chain Center to generate intelligent insights that will enable it to place products closer to where its customer demand is rather than just relying on history. It was able to improve efficiency from 30 percent to 75 percent in its forward stocking inventory, which means it can fulfill customer demand in two days versus two weeks, resulting in more satisfied customers.
The research with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services also finds that nearly one third of the companies struggle with poor collaboration between internal supply chain teams and external partners.*
The best part about leveraging the Microsoft ecosystem is that the supply chain team can rapidly act on these recommendations by collaborating internally or with external suppliers with built-in Microsoft Teams capabilities right from within the Supply Chain Center without having to toggle between multiple systems.
Gain agility to meet market demands
The Supply Chain Platform helps companies adapt to changing business needs with ease. Companies like GN Group, which offers brands like Jabra and Resound, are using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, a market-leading solution of the Supply Chain Platform, to future-proof its business and gain the flexibility to adapt to changing needs. Other customers like ChemTreat, Inc. are able to improve proactive planning with Dynamics 365 to mitigate part shortages. With Dynamics 365, organizations can shorten delivery lead times by running material resource planning (MRP) frequently throughout the day in a matter of minutes, optimize inventory with a real-time view of inventory across channels, and fulfill order promises by reserving inventory for high priority orders.
Companies can gain flexible capacity by rapidly deploying pop-up warehouses with robotic automation to meet seasonal demand more effectively, and the warehouse employees can gain additional agility using the mobile warehouse app to execute the warehouse processes.
Companies like Barnas Hus, a leading children and baby product retail chain in Norway, worked with KPMG to implement the warehouse management capabilities of Dynamics 365 to power its new state-of-the-art warehouse that utilizes robotics to accurately pick, sustainably pack, and ship products to its stores, giving it the inventory visibility that it always needed.
Another customer, Peet’s Coffee, uses the advanced warehouse management capabilities of Dynamics 365 to serve multiple channels: direct-to-consumer, retail coffee bars, customer warehouses, e-commerce customers, and direct store delivery (DSD) warehouses. Dynamics 365 provides Peets Coffee the flexibility it needs to support a diverse range of channels.
Improve efficiency and productivity
For many manufacturers, the current state of their operations is disconnected and rigid. With the Supply Chain Platform, companies can take advantage of intelligent automation to reduce costs, maximize operating margins, and improve employee experiences. With Dynamics 365, companies can build connected and intelligent manufacturing processes with an intuitive, touch-friendly production floor execution interface. New process advisor capabilities in Microsoft Power Automate provide customers with deep insights to identify bottlenecks in processes to drive optimization and efficiencies with low-code automation.
The Supply Chain Platform has enabled customers like Jansen to extend Dynamics 365 with Power Apps and Power Automate to create bespoke processes on the production floor that get the right information to the right operator with the least amount of manual intervention. The power of unifying all data in Dynamics 365 has enabled production planners at Jansen to provide more efficient production sequences, minimizing materials and equipment changeovers so that they can meet customer orders on time by reducing time and enhancing operator productivity.
Organizations can further enhance the visibility on their production floor with native integration to any manufacturing execution system (MES) without replacing it. They can optimize the use of equipment and resources with AI-driven, capability-matching production scheduling.
Another customer, Alterra Mountain Company, has increased asset utilization and gained complete visibility into asset costs and conditions across its ski resorts in North America. It performs proactive maintenance to decrease unplanned asset downtime and downstream disruptions and optimize maintenance spend and spare parts inventory.
The research with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services also showed that more than 30 percent of the companies struggled with finding the right talent with supply chain skills and expertise.*
The Supply Chain Platform keeps frontline workers safer while accelerating upskilling, reducing errors, and increasing yield with step-by-step holographic work instructions. Use mixed reality and built-in Teams capabilities to collaborate in real-time with experts, improving productivity and reducing environmental impact from unnecessary travel.
Enhance security and sustainability
Organizations are encountering increased volumes and more sophisticated threats to their environments than ever before. Unmanaged Internet of Things (IoT), industrial control system (ICS), and operational technology (OT) devices are a force driving new advances in the industry but have also tripled the size of the attack surface area. Securing these devices is a mission-critical objective for any organization. The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform helps organizations create a secure supply chain by detecting and preventing any cyber threat by improving cyber security, physical management, and endpoint security across their entire supply chain network with multiple levels of security and continuous updates and patches.
The Supply Chain Platform also helps accelerate sustainability initiatives all the way from sustainable design, to sourcing, to manufacturing, and fulfillment. With Supply Chain Center order management capabilities, retailers can streamline returns sustainably with out-of-the-box connectors to FedEx. They can implement boxless returns with supporting carriers for less packaging waste and fewer consolidated trips instead of individual customer returns.
The rules-based fulfillment orchestration engine in Supply Chain Center enables organizations to fulfill orders sustainably while meeting their customer’s order promise. For instance, rules-based setup allows companies to balance miles travelled from fulfillment center to customers to minimize their emissions with service-level agreements (SLAs) to ensure on-time delivery.
Companies can establish ethical and sustainable sourcing practices with Dynamics 365. Sustainability scoreboards help them make data-driven decisions about supply chain changes to improve their metrics and further their sustainability goals.
Another way to operate sustainably is to drive circularity. Essentially—instead of throwing away goods at the end of their life, finding ways to reuse or recycle them to reduce carbon emissions. This could also be a new revenue stream for companies.
Our own Microsoft Circular Centers have a unique process to optimize warehouse routing and management systems to process decommissioned servers from Microsoft datacenters. By leveraging the low-code Microsoft Power Platform solutions, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management was extended to build a reverse logistics solution that helped reuse, resale, and recycle the decommissioned data center assets. This is helping to put Microsoft on the path to achieving its sustainability goals by 2030.
To further support organizations to achieve their sustainability goals, last month at Microsoft Ignite we introduced new capabilities in Sustainability Manager, a Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solution that enables organizations to store and reduce indirect value chain emissions (also known as “Scope 3” emissions—the supply chain of your suppliers), which account for a disproportionate share of most organizations’ carbon footprints. The solution includes prebuilt calculation methodologies for more than half of the 15 categories of Scope 3.
Partner to empower customers in supply chain transformation
With the Supply Chain Platform, partners can bring their industry and domain expertise to create integrated solutions leveraging Microsoft Supply Chain Center, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Azure, Teams, and Microsoft Power Platform. We will continue to support our customers with a rich partner ecosystem, including advisors and implementers like Accenture, Avanade, EY, KPMG, PwC, and TCS. In addition, to help customers find the best solution for their supply chain needs, we’ll continue working with solution providers such as Blue Yonder, Cosmo Tech, Experlogix, Flintfox, inVia Robotics, K3, o9 Solutions, SAS, Sonata Software, To-Increase software, and many more.
Ready to take action?
Take a free trial of Microsoft Supply Chain Center, which is now in preview.
If you’re one of the nearly half of holiday shoppers looking to scoop up gifts on sale this season, we have great news – Microsoft Store’s Black Friday sale starts today, Nov. 17. Savings on everything from Surface devices, Xbox consoles, tech accessories, digital games and more make finding something for everyone on your list a breeze. And if you’re stumped, take the guesswork out and book a free, online personal shopping appointment with a Microsoft product expert. Bring us your hard-to-shop-for family and friends, and we’ll help you find the perfect gifts.
When you shop the Microsoft Store, you can start purchasing early and be confident you’re getting a great deal. The Microsoft Store Promise gives shoppers extra peace of mind with extended holiday returns through Jan. 31, flexible payment options and a lower price when you buy with us.
Don’t miss out on top Microsoft Store Black Friday savings and visit Xbox Wireto learn more.
Save $500 on the Surface Laptop 4 + Surface Pen and 3-year Complete Protection Plan bundle: Even the trickiest person on your list will love this device that has it all, with a perfect balance of sleek design, speed, immersive audio and a battery life that will last through the workday or even a long study session. For added peace of mind, the Microsoft Complete Protection Plan gives you extended coverage and support on your new Surface, including accidental damage protection.
Save 20% on the Surface Laptop Go 2 with Mobile Mouse and 3-year Complete Protection Plan bundle: Sleek and portable, this device is an all-around crowd pleaser for a commuting student, an adult who already has a home PC and everyone in between. Featuring a 12.4-inch vibrant touchscreen, great typing experience and an ultra-portable mouse, this bundle is sure to bring holiday cheer to any recipient.
Save up to $200 off select Surface Pro 9(starting Nov. 20): Get your loved one who’s always on the go a flexible tablet that’s as powerful as a laptop and features a virtually edge-to-edge 13-inch PixelSense touchscreen that makes working, streaming and playing from anywhere effortless. Offer ends Nov. 28.
Save up to $300 on select Surface Laptop 5(starting Nov. 20): Give the student in your life the gift of the perfect school-to-study-break device equipped with exceptional picture quality, cinematic sound and enhanced camera experiences that’ll bring their gaming, movie watching and video conferencing to a whole new level. A variety of colors help your student stand out from the crowd: Platinum, Matte Black, Sandstone and (new this year) Sage. Offer ends Nov. 28.
Save $50 off Xbox Series S: Share next-gen speed and performance with a gamer in your life and let them choose from thousands of games while making the most of every minute with Quick Resume, lightning-fast load times and gameplay at up to 120 FPS* – all powered by the Xbox Velocity Architecture. While supplies last.
Save up to 67% on select Xbox games including Deathloop, FIFA 23 X1, Gotham Knights and Forza Horizon 5 Standard: Treat the gamer who already has a full Xbox setup to new titles that will keep them entertained well into the new year. Offer ends Nov. 30.
Save up to 70% on select PC games including Big Farm Story and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy + Marvel’s Avengers: Delight the PC gamer in your life with some of the year’s best games at great prices. Offer ends Nov. 30.
Save up to 50% on select movies and TV shows including Jurassic World Dominion – Extended Cut, The Batman + Bonus and John Wick Triple Feature + Bonus: Bring the family together with a great selection of the latest hit movies and commercial-free TV shows. Offer ends Nov. 30.
Microsoft Store helps take the stress out of holiday shopping all season long
The Microsoft Store Promise gives shoppers extra peace of mind whether you start early or need some last-minute gifting help! Enjoy fast and free 2-3-day shipping, flexible payment options, extended free holiday returns and an extended holiday low-price promise that gets you a lower price product on a physical product you purchase from Microsoft Store. **Terms apply.
If you’ve got other online shopping to do, you can save even morethis holiday season (and year-round) with the Microsoft Edge web browser’s built-in shopping tools, which help you save time and money across multiple devices (including your phone and computer). Features like Coupons in Microsoft Edge find discounts and promo codes on retail websites before you check out. Plus, you can get cashback in more stores on Microsoft Edge compared to extensions. Also, save time by tackling your shopping list with Collections, found at the top right-side of the browser, for an easy way to save and organize all your links in one spot to reference as you shop throughout the holiday season.
Don’t forget to check back on microsoft.com for more savings all season long, happy shopping!
*120 FPS requires supported content and display; use on Xbox Series S as content becomes available.
**Available with eligible consumer purchases only made between 10/3/22 – 12/31/22 at Microsoft Store online in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada and at the Microsoft Experience Center in New York, NY. Purchases can be returned through January 31, 2023. Business, commercial, and reseller customer purchases not eligible. Items purchased from Microsoft Store can be returned by following instructions for return for refund on the returns page or by visiting the Microsoft Experience Center in NY. Items purchased from Microsoft Experience Center can only be returned by visiting the Microsoft Experience Center in New York during the return period. Applicable return policy applies to each purchase. Please see Microsoft Terms of Sale for terms applicable to Microsoft Store purchases. Promotional items given, or discounted products bought with, a qualifying product are not valid or must be returned if the qualifying product is returned. For Surface purchases, you may be entitled to additional benefits under the Microsoft Store Promise for Surface; the Microsoft Experience Center honors the Microsoft Store Promise for Surface. Microsoft reserves the right to modify or discontinue offers at any time.
