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Earlier this year, we announced our vision to empower any developer to become a space developer through Azure. With over 90 million developers on GitHub, we have created a powerful ecosystem and we are focused on empowering the next generation of developers for space. Today, we are announcing a crucial step towards democratizing access to space development, with the preview release of Azure Orbital Space SDK (software development kit)—a secure hosting platform and application toolkit designed to enable developers to create, deploy, and operate applications on-orbit.

By bringing modern cloud-based applications to spacecrafts we not only increase the efficiency, value, and speed of insights from space data but also increase the value of that data through the optimization of ground communication.

Many of the fundamental technological improvements that have accelerated the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) in the past decade remain untapped by space development missions today. With the Azure Orbital Space SDK, we will help bring those improvements to space through modern agile software deployment, container-based development, use of higher-level languages, and cloud-managed networking. Extending the power of the Azure cloud into space means that spacecraft development will take less time, cost less, and bring more people into the space development ecosystem.

What is the Azure Orbital Space SDK?

The Azure Orbital Space SDK was created to be able to run on any spacecraft and provide a secure hosting platform and application kit to create, deploy, and operate applications on-orbit. This “host platform” runs onboard the spacecraft including a containerized, scalable compute infrastructure with resource and schedule management capabilities.

The application kit provides a set of templates, samples, and documentation to make it easy to get up and running as a space developer with template applications for common workload patterns, such as earth observation image processing. There is also a “virtual test harness” that allows developers to easily test their applications on the ground against an instance of the host platform.

How the Azure Orbital Space SDK is changing what’s possible

By moving the application onboard the spacecraft through the Azure Orbital Space SDK, we enable time and cost savings while radically altering and expanding the capabilities of the spacecraft.

Remote sensing

Remote sensing from space provides the perspective we need to better understand our world and powers commercial, economic, humanitarian, intelligence, and military scenarios—from damage assessments after weather events, to vessel detection, to crop monitoring and land classification.

Most remote sensing satellites have limited connectivity windows and bandwidth to communicate data back to the ground. As the fidelity of sensors increases, the amount of data they generate eclipses the available bandwidth. Being able to prioritize images that are useful, or even being able to send insights rather than the raw data down to the ground significantly reduces costs, accelerates speed, and fundamentally increases the value of the satellite.

Through the Azure Orbital Space SDK, developers can write and host more intelligent applications on-board satellites, meaning that they can capture data and use time more efficiently, and even autonomously reconfigure applications at the ultimate edge. Instead of building a unique solution each time developers deploy a spacecraft application, the Azure Orbital Space SDK creates a common template for performing imaging tasks, making it easier to transfer models and applications from one satellite configuration to another.

Communications

Satellite communications is one of the most well-known and widely used space capabilities. It allows us to watch live events around the world, provides internet and cloud connectivity to remote locations both on earth and in space, and supports the backbone of cellular networks. By bringing applications and intelligent computing on board satellites through the Azure Orbital Space SDK, we enable a more sophisticated management of satellite communications – resulting in lower costs and higher efficiency for satellite-based communication networks

Telecommunications networks have transitioned to software-defined networks and application–centric approaches to manage their communications infrastructures. The inclusion of satellites in 5G standards is the push for satellite networks to follow the same digital transformation. The Azure Orbital Space SDK will provide a compute fabric with networking capabilities for hosting telecommunication workloads, allowing operators to move applications more easily from ground-based cell sites to satellites in orbit, enabling better resiliency and network utilization.

Ultimately, by combining the Azure Orbital Space SDK with our portfolio of Azure Orbital products, we are bringing the power of cloud networking to the edge in space.

Azure Orbital Space SDK Partnerships

In April, we launched the Azure Space Partner Community and unveiled our initial cohort of space community partners, including Loft Orbital, Ball Aerospace and Thales Alenia Space. Today, we are announcing the newest member of our partner community—Xplore—who will help us continue to shape the future of space technologies and services.

Xplore

Xplore provides unique data including optical, video, and hyperspectral imagery via the XCRAFT, its highly capable, multi-sensor satellite. The XCRAFT’s sophisticated sensors produce terabytes of data per day and will utilize powerful compute, storage, and communication solutions to deliver the unique insights derived to customers.

Microsoft and Xplore are partnering to use Azure Orbital Space SDK to gather new insights into how edge computing solutions can better enable both government and commercial customers to achieve their mission objectives. Together, our teams will investigate numerous on-orbit compute use-cases from downlink optimization to multi-sensor data fusion.

Loft Orbital

Loft Orbital is a space infrastructure and services company providing customers rapid, reliable, and simplified access to space. Loft has developed a highly modular satellite platform that enables them to provide a truly plug and play path to orbit for customer payloads and missions.

The Microsoft and Loft Orbital partnership will enable developers to easily develop, test, and deploy software-only “virtual payloads” to the Loft Orbital infrastructure. Together we are developing new technologies and products that will enhance the flexibility of on-orbit operations and provide seamless connectivity to the terrestrial cloud.

Earlier this year Microsoft and Loft conducted a successful test of demonstrating the integration of Loft spacecraft with the Azure Orbital Ground station.  Next year, we’ll build upon this success with the launch of YAM-6, a dedicated free-flying orbital testbed for customers to explore how our joint space infrastructure, connectivity, and on-orbit compute technologies will make access to space even easier than before.

Ball Aerospace

Ball Aerospace is a systems integrator with a heritage of designing and building government satellite programs and mission applications. Ball continues to innovate on behalf of its customers by combining their long expertise in exquisite satellite systems with modern tools and processes, enabling a more agile approach to space mission development and operations.

Together, Ball Aerospace and Microsoft are collaborating on the execution of series of on-orbit testbed satellites showcasing this highly agile future. These missions will leverage the Azure Orbital Space SDK to demonstrate modular and reconfigurable on-orbit processing technologies, necessary to support the complex missions for the United States Government.  The new software and hardware technologies demonstrated in these testbeds will unlock new capabilities for customers, granting the ability to support future concepts for smaller, agile, multi-mission capabilities across all federal space programs.

Thales Alenia Space

Thales Alenia Space is a leader in orbital infrastructures and is developing high-power, edge-computing solutions for space.

Microsoft is partnering with Thales Alenia Space to demonstrate and validate on-orbit compute technologies for multiple remote-sensing applications.   Our team’s future orbital testbed, launching to the International Space Station (ISS) in late 2023, brings together Thale’s edge computing hardware and Microsoft’s Azure Orbital Space SDK platform with visible and hyperspectral sensors, empowering the next generation to explore how space and on-orbit compute can improve our world. Developers on our platform will explore different on-orbit compute use cases, from AI-based hyperspectral image processing and to multi-sensor fusion algorithms, both computationally demanding workloads that benefit from Thales Alenia’s high-performance edge compute architecture.

In collaboration with Microsoft Research (MSR), Microsoft, and Thales Alenia Space, we are reducing the barriers for research in space through a range of outreach initiatives. One such initiative is the new Azure Space Academic Outreach program, that will work with research teams in remote sensing, computer vision, and climate science to demonstrate the potential of next-generation on-orbit compute for Earth observation. The first pilots exploring this program are the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center; however, we hope to open this up to more participants over the coming year.

What we’ve done and what’s coming next

The Azure Orbital Space SDK is a key part of the Azure Space portfolio and joins our investments together to create a value chain that is unique in the industry today—from space to ground to cloud. Over the past two years we’ve moved from a vision of combining the power of the cloud with the possibilities of space, into a reality with the launch of our our Azure Orbital Ground Station, the recently announced Azure Orbital Cloud Access, and today the Azure Orbital Space SDK.  Integral to Microsoft‘s approach across these announcements has been partnership, and we have partnered with space industry leaders to deliver incredible value to our customers, with most recently the partnership with DIU to support their hybrid space architecture and the development of the internet of space.

The Azure Orbital Space SDK will change what is possible onboard spacecraft, but also more importantly change the applications and insights we gather on earth and inform critical decisions and communications across the planet.

Learn more

Stepping out of her comfort zone was a big decision for Nelly Lee. The Singapore native and single mother built a successful 20-year career in the travel industry, where she was considered an expert in her field. Still, Lee felt the urge to reinvent herself, one that was accelerated by the global disruption of the travel industry in the aftermath of the pandemic.   

“I was thinking I should give myself a chance to see I could do something different to take care of my daughter and my parents,” Lee said. “Yes, in my previous job, the knowledge and stability was all there. But I wanted to show myself that even though I don’t have a degree in tech, that didn’t matter.”  

Changing careers mid-stream can be tough for anyone. There’s an even higher degree of difficulty when moving into the technology field, where other applicants and co-workers have years of knowledge and hands-on experience. Generation Singapore wants to help level the playing field so everyone has a chance at a better career.   

In 2020, Microsoft and Generation Singapore co-created #GetReadySG, a national skills initiative in partnership with several Singaporean government technology organizations. The initiative is designed to upskill and/or reskill up to 1,000 job seekers over a two-year period and then match them with meaningful employment opportunities in tech. The program is designed for young professionals and mid-career switchers who want to gain in-demand digital skills at a subsidized cost.  

As Lee considered making her career change, she learned about Generation Singapore. She consulted with her brother, a software engineer, before her second interview to find out more about the program. Soon after, Lee was admitted into #GetReadySG, where she began learning skills that would benefit her move into the tech sector.   

“When I got into the course, it was so alien to me,” Lee recalls. “I didn’t know what a virtual machine was. I would screen share with my brother to help me get a better understanding. I’d ask him, ‘What is this?’ ‘What is that?’ But I started to slowly digest things.”  

In addition to the classroom work, Lee learned valuable skills during her internship, which all participants in the program must complete.   

“This program is very different from others where you take a course and at the end of the day you go and search for your own job,” Lee said. “Because of the apprenticeship you get a six-month chance to learn and adapt to the working world.”

The #GetReadySG program also provides participants with the opportunity to be mentored by tech industry professionals as they approach the start of their internship and plan for full-time work. Lee was paired with Sindhu Chengad, an Azure and Open Source business leader in Microsoft’s Singapore office, and they developed a relationship that proved valuable for both parties, especially because it can be difficult for women to have female role models.   

“We’ve been working together for the last six months,” Chengad said. “I know how challenging it can be to keep a career on track, and I’ve always found it helpful when people have taken a chance on me and helped guide me. Nelly’s story is such an inspiring story. For a mom to think about disrupting her own career to come into a completely new space and to upskill yourself is super challenging. I’m super proud of where Nelly started and where she is today.”  

As Lee worked through her internship, she set her sights on a full-time job, one in which she could earn a better salary with the goal of moving into her own home. She quickly landed a DevOps position supporting a large international technology company that allows her to work from home and take on a variety of technical challenges. 

“I wanted to do something more technical because I find it more interesting,” Lee said. “I do a lot of server work, deployment, fixing bugs. There’s still a lot of learning going on. But my team is very patient and they explain many things. It’s very comforting and it makes me feel like I can contribute more.”  

The #GetReadySG program has placed hundreds of graduates in several tech companies throughout Singapore, giving well-trained individuals a chance to fill the gaps in human resources that many companies in the country have been dealing with over the past few years.   

“There’s a tremendous amount of commitment and resilience that every graduate brings into this program. It’s indeed a tough journey to break barriers in switching to a new career, that’s why I’m really proud of them,” said Prateek Hegde, CEO of Generation Singapore. “We might have a well-designed program and supported them all the way, but majority of the credit goes to every individual who persevered throughout every process and gave their best. I hope to witness more women follow Nelly’s footsteps.”  

For Lee, the decision to switch careers was life-changing, and she urges others in her position to consider betting on themselves and learning the skills needed to enter the tech industry.   

“This is totally out of what people think of me,” Lee said. “Many people didn’t think I would make this step. But I am very happy. It’s an achievement for myself.”  

Top image: Nelly Lee took advantage of GetReadySG, a national skills initiative co-created by Microsoft and Generation Singapore, to retrain for a career in technology after 20 years in the travel industry. She now works in DevOps supporting a large international technology company. Photo by Ore Huiying for Microsoft. 

In Thailand, there are more than 1.7 million people with disabilities, but only 30 percent of them have a job. That’s an issue Methawee Thatsanasateankit thought she could help solve.

Thatsanasateankit co-founded Vulcan Coalition in 2020 with the objective of both developing new AI services in Thai language and improving the quality of life of people with disabilities.

According to neuroscience studies, some individuals who are blind or deaf have heightened perceptions that allow them to compensate for their sensory loss.

“We learned that people with disabilities almost have a superpower,” Thatsanasateankit said. “So, we saw an opportunity to match them to this type of work.”

That combination would assist a major problem in Thailand, where the startup is based: a lack of workers capable of labeling the large amounts of data being produced in Thai language.

Data labeling involves identifying raw data, like audio files or videos, and adding informative labels for context. This allows a machine learning model to learn from the data, which enables apps like chatbots and voice recognition services.

Thatsanasateankit and fellow co-founder Niran Pravithana developed a curriculum they could present to the Thai government to show that people with disabilities could perform well as data labelers through this reskilling effort. Vulcan partnered with the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security to educate 2,000 people in data labeling. The Vulcan Academy portal serves as a training and testing tool for potential candidates.

“When we first told people that we would like to employ them as data levelers, they were a little bit scared because it was out of their comfort zone,” Thatsanasateankit said. “People have told them that they couldn’t do many types of work. We had to convince them to take the course. But now it’s something they can be proud of because they can tell other people they do this high-value job.”

Punnaphoj Aeuepalisa is a blind senior software engineer at Vulcan Coalition. He helped create the platform used by individuals to label data through speech-to-text and other processes, and is a key voice in how the company is developing AI programs moving forward.

“I have had an interest in computer science since I was a child,” Aeuepalisa said. “I enrolled at university in the computer engineering department. After graduation, I met the chief research officer at Vulcan and he told me he’d like to form an engineering department of people with disabilities. So, I joined the team and we do many products and platforms using our system. There are also many projects we are doing in collaboration with outside organizations.”

Microsoft’s global mission to empower every person and every organization to achieve more took root in the worldwide AI for Good program, which brings the full technological capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud and AI platforms to make the world more sustainable and accessible to everyone.

Not only was Vulcan Coalition recognized by Microsoft for its steps in AI for Accessibility, it also won the Thailand Virtual Hackathon for a hardware and software solution that automized health and check-in processes for visitors with disabilities, including automatic visual detections of masks powered by AI on the Microsoft Cloud.

The Vulcan team utilized its deaf members to label and train AI using visual data in the Vulcan Data Labeling Platform. The company earned a USD 25,000 grant and rewards aimed at further supporting the project’s development, including mentoring and support for an AI for Good grant application and fast-tracked listing on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

“Without Microsoft’s help, it would be harder for a small startup like us to be recognized by larger companies,” Thatsanasateankit said.

Now, Vulcan Coalition is working with banks, human resource and home automation companies to create chatbots, AI processes and models for use across the country. Approximately 30 percent of revenue from Vulcan’s AI service will be shared with the staff to support their long-term sustainability.

In Thailand, a company must hire one employee with a disability for every 100 employees. In some cases, Vulcan said companies simply pay the money to the individuals and don’t offer a real work opportunity.

For Vulcan, it partners with companies who are eager to utilize skilled workers. The company estimates that within two years of the program’s start, it will have matched 600 people with disabilities into AI jobs. For the workers, it offers them a dignified source of income apart from getting trained in high-demand tech skills.

“Our workforce has been very intrigued about our project. They want to know how it’s going and how our work can be used in the future,” Aeuepalisa said. “They are very interested and very proud of what they are doing.”

Top image: Punnaphoj Aeuepalisa, a senior software engineer at Vulcan Coalition, helped create a platform to label data through speech-to-text and other processes. Photo by Adryel Talamantes for Microsoft.

There’s nothing quite like watching a basketball game and cheering on your favorite team as they battle it out for points before the buzzer sounds. From the players and employees to the technology, all need to work in lockstep to deliver a truly immersive experience.

As fans, we expect personalized experiences that bring the virtual world and the real world together on and off the court. This means brand new viewing experiences and virtual reality, real-time highlights of our favorite basketball games, and seamless ways to connect with other fans (and rivals!) when we want, how we want.

Having the right technology partner and cloud-based app transformation strategy is necessary to help organizations like the National Basketball Association (NBA) continue to deliver such unforgettable experiences and exceed fan expectations. Successful app modernization requires teamwork, which is why we’re proud to share our latest customer story featuring our partnership with the NBA.

Inside the customer playbook: NBA’s IT Application Development Group

Our latest customer story takes you into the world of the NBA’s IT Application Development Group, a dedicated team responsible for developing and maintaining the NBA’s applications for internal and external users. The NBA leveraged Microsoft Azure application platform services for app modernization to accelerate the time to market of apps for multiple use cases that have elevated the NBA experience wherever fans, referees, and employees engage.

This process involved consolidating the apps and data the NBA was running from multiple locations into one place, including those that were on-premises. Modernizing a large app estate requires the NBA’s IT Application Development Group to plan for many tasks, from configuration and security to provisioning and scaling, and optimizing the networking and storage needs. Utilizing cloud technologies such as Azure App Service enabled the NBA to accelerate time to market by offloading these routine but important tasks to a fully managed application platform. They further streamlined the app development process with low-code and no-code capabilities using Azure and PowerApps.

How did this translate for fans, referees, and employees? Here’s a sneak peek of the use cases that you can read in detail in our customer story:

Fans: See how the NBA used virtual simulations and digital in-game experiences, to ensure fans felt connected to the game (and one another) when gathering in person was still difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic. Referees (but really, fans!): Learn about REPS (Referee Engagement and Performance System), an app designed to aid referees and management in evaluation, collaboration, training, and development to ensure game consistency—and no bad calls. Employees: Discover NBAOne, an internal mobile-first app the NBA created for its 1,800 employees consolidating no fewer than 50+ different applications into a single-sign-on experience. This simple-to-use app helped employees do everything from booking game tickets to marking time off, significantly improving their day-to-day employee experience.

Achieving a faster time to market

When it comes to delivering new experiences, we know that faster time to market is what keeps customers coming back. Azure brings not only the technology but also a number of fully managed services to support faster app and data modernization at scale:

• Leverage fully managed application and data services such as Azure App Service, Azure Spring Apps, Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, and Azure Cosmos DB.
• Quickly deploy line of business apps with low-code application development using Power Apps and Azure.
• Build on containers with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Manage continuous deployment and development workstreams with AzureDevOps.
• Get unmatched technical expertise through Microsoft United Support.

As a versatile platform with global scale, built-in security, and high availability, Azure is the all-star in your playbook to accelerate time-to-market with modern apps.

Choose your modern apps transformation strategy

Every customer is a potential fan, and when it comes to choosing the right technology partner, accelerating time to market, enabling higher productivity, and global scale are factors that deliver memorable customer experiences time and time again. We’re thrilled to have the NBA partner with Azure on this important mission and love the opportunity to this customer story.

Is your organization exploring app modernization? Learn more about Application and data modernization and how Azure can help you accelerate time to market to deliver incredible experiences.

Midway through the Dutch Grand Prix, radio traffic between 20 Formula 1 drivers and their busy crews buzzed with the usual chatter about lap times, tire conditions and pleas to “push now” – a frantic wall of sound rivaling the powerful engines roaring around the track.

But precisely 59 minutes and 27 seconds into that Sept. 4 race, one sentence from the comms chorus grabbed the attention of Matthieu Dubois, chief strategist for BWT Alpine F1 Team, based in Enstone, England and Viry-Châtillon in France. What Dubois detected was a simple instruction to Lando Norris, a driver with McLaren, Alpine’s top rival.

“Lando, both safety car windows are open, please confirm,” the McLaren race engineer told Norris, who was leading both Alpine drivers at the time.

A large data display on BWT Alpine F1 Team’s pit wall instantly transcribed the McLaren engineer’s spoken words. Leveraging Microsoft Azure, Dubois had plucked that snippet from the radio din by simply typing the keyword “window.”  It would change the race for Alpine.

“That was crucial information,” Dubois recalls. “McLaren was telling their driver that a safety car was on track (due to another car stopping). So, they were telling Norris to pit.”

With that intel, Dubois instructed BWT Alpine F1 Team driver Fernando Alonso to also pit for fresh tires. His quick decision allowed Alpine to exploit a brief stretch when every car slowed for the caution period – and when Alpine’s top competitor was momentarily off the track.

Driving on the new tires, Alonso soon posted one of the day’s fastest laps (averaging 128 mph). Then, Alonso passed Norris, finishing sixth overall, and nosing out the McLaren driver by a mere half second. That result earned BWT Alpine F1 Team eight points in the Formula 1 standings, pushing Alpine further ahead in their season-long fight with McLaren.

“We gained position with the help of this information,” Dubois says. “Data is probably most of our world now.”

In Formula 1, every race week is jampacked with live data. Each team fields two cars that are essentially mobile IoT devices. The cars are equipped with a few hundred sensors that send a constant flow of telemetry back to the teams, revealing everything from engine temperature to brake wear, while collectively generating more than 600,000 numbers per second.

Still more data is produced at the teams’ technical centers as new car parts are manufactured and tested during the days leading up to the races. In total, Formula 1 teams gather as many as 50 billion data points each week.

In data processing terms, that’s a mighty big heap of bits and bytes. The trick is to unify those raging data streams into a single source of real-time insights that’s accessible across an entire organization.

For the 2022 season, BWT Alpine F1 Team built a cloud-hosted, data science platform that relies on Azure infrastructure to deliver decisive insights from the team’s manufacturing and testing work and from its practice laps and race-day sprints.

The platform helps Alpine shape design decisions and make real-time race adjustments, team members say.

According to one more slice of data – Formula 1’s team standings – the technologies have helped boost BWT Alpine F1 Team during 2022. With one grand prix race remaining in the 2022 season – Nov. 20 in Abu Dhabi – Alpine has amassed enough points to reach fourth place, on pace for its highest finish since 2018. McLaren sits in fifth place.

“The entire organization is here solely to make the car go faster,” says Pierre d’Imbleval, BWT Alpine F1 Team’s vice president of information systems and IT. “In our business what matters is always to get the information sooner and to shrink the time we have.”

But the team’s cloud-based infrastructure also helps fuel smart and safe race strategies – tactics that require less velocity.

“We are so dependent on data,” d’Imbleval says. “Almost every race, there is a moment of truth where you get a combination of data that tells you to slow down a bit to save the lifetime of your brakes or your engine.

“During races, we are so close to the failure point on certain parts that it’s super important to monitor all data at every moment.”

It’s equally vital to monitor competitors’ radio traffic. But the BWT Alpine F1 Team crew no longer must physically listen to all that cross-communication – a public broadcast that’s piped into the paddock. Instead, they now merely glance at a large screen on their pit wall to read selected phrases uttered by the other teams.

To accomplish that, the Alpine staff fed audio files from past races into Azure to train a computer model that now delivers nearly real-time transcripts from every driver and race engineer.

This enables the Alpine crew to search for keywords, such as “tires overheating,” allowing the team to quickly adjust their race strategy.

“We need to make decisions in fractions of seconds,” says Sergio Rodriguez, BWT Alpine F1 Team’s data science and engineering manager.

Indeed, modern success in Formula 1 is not so much about big data as it is about fast data. And the need for speed is just as pressing at Alpine’s two manufacturing hubs as it is on the track.

The team designs and assembles its chassis at a facility in Enstone and builds its hybrid V6 engines at a technical center in Viry-Châtillon, a Paris suburb. Hundreds of engineers and mechanics work at each site, developing, testing and assembling new parts, many aimed at improving the cars’ aerodynamics or power.

The process is painstaking yet often performed at pace. The team creates computer-simulated models of new parts then calculates how those virtual prototypes would react to, say, drag or downforce, ultimately predicting how they would perform in a real-world race car.

“That involves big data clusters,” Rodriguez says. “Once we say, ‘This looks good,’ we manufacture a small version of the part and put it in our wind tunnel. We pass wind through it. We check pressures. All this data we gather as well.”

BWT Alpine F1 Team is relying on its cloud-hosted, data science platform to “unlock the information we have in the data,” which saves precious time when pushing new parts from the factories to the cars, Rodriguez says.

“The work that we are doing in the factories this year is almost more important than the work we are doing (at the track) on the weekends,” Rodriguez adds.

“Every Formula 1 team is building new parts and improved versions of their cars every weekend. But if you are able to bring out a new part one race before your competitor, that’s one race that you are going to be in front of him,” he adds.

This season, BWT Alpine F1 Team accomplished that feat for the British Grand Prix on July 3. In Enstone, team engineers and mechanics worked nearly non-stop in the hours before the race to design and build a new floor.

“We had people in the factory over the weekend finishing the floor,” Rodriguez says. “We were improving it overnight, then taking it back for Saturday testing, and then we brought it back to the track on Sunday. We managed to overtake McLaren thanks to this push from the factory.”

At the British Grand Prix, Alonso finished fifth, 2.37 seconds ahead of McLaren’s Norris, who finished sixth.

“The data is fundamental in all of this – in our efforts to improve efficiency, in our efforts to bring new developments to the car faster,” Rodriguez says.

The floor upgrade increased downforce, enabling the car to “stick to the track in the corners,” Rodriguez says. “The faster you can go in the corners, the faster you can go during the race.”

And in the world of Formula 1, fast is everything.

Top photo: Fernando Alonso races during the Mexican Grand Prix in October 2022. All images courtesy of BWT Alpine F1 Team.

On August 4, 2022, Microsoft publicly shared a framework that it has been using to secure its own development practices since 2019, the Secure Supply Chain Consumption Framework (S2C2F), previously the Open Source Software-Supply Chain Security (OSS-SSC) Framework. As a massive consumer of and contributor to open source, Microsoft understands the importance of a robust strategy around securing how developers consume and manage open source software (OSS) dependencies when building software. We are pleased to announce that the S2C2F has been adopted by the OpenSSF under the Supply Chain Integrity Working Group and formed into its own Special Initiative Group (SIG). Our peers at the OpenSSF and across the globe agree with Microsoft when it comes to how fundamental this work is to improving supply chain security for everyone.

What is the S2C2F?

We built the S2C2F as a consumption-focused framework that uses a threat-based, risk-reduction approach to mitigate real-world threats. One of its primary strengths is how well it pairs with any producer-focused framework, such as SLSA.¹ The framework enumerates a list of real-world supply chain threats specific to OSS and explains how the framework’s requirements mitigate those threats. It also includes a high-level platform- and software-agnostic set of focuses that are divided into eight different areas of practice:

Each of the eight practices are comprised of requirements to address the threats and reduce risk. The requirements are organized into four levels of maturity. We have seen massive success with both internal and external projects who have adopted this framework. Using the S2C2F, teams and organizations can more efficiently prioritize their efforts in accordance with the maturity model. The ability to target a specific level of compliance within the framework means teams can make intentional and incremental progress toward reducing their supply chain risk.

Each maturity level has a theme represented in Levels (1 to 4). Level 1 represents the previous conventional wisdom of inventorying your OSS, scanning for known vulnerabilities, and then updating OSS dependencies, which is the minimum necessary for an OSS governance program. Level 2 builds upon Level 1 by leveraging technology that helps improve your mean time to remediate (MTTR) vulnerabilities in OSS with the goal of patching faster than the adversary can operate. Level 3 is focused on proactive security analysis combined with preventative controls that mitigate against accidental consumption of compromised or malicious OSS. Level 4 represents controls that mitigate against the most sophisticated attacks but are also the controls that are the most difficult to implement at scale—therefore, these should be considered aspirational and reserved for your dependencies in your most critical projects.

The S2C2F includes a guide to assess your organization’s maturity, and an implementation guide that recommends tools from across the industry to help meet the framework requirements. For example, both GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) and GHAS on Azure DevOps (ADO) already provide a suite of security tools that will help teams and organizations achieve S2C2F Level 2 compliance.

The S2C2F is critical to the future of supply chain security

According to Sonatype’s 2022 State of the Software Supply Chain report,² supply chain attacks specifically targeting OSS have increased by 742 percent annually over the past three years. The S2C2F is designed from the ground up to protect developers from accidentally consuming malicious and compromised packages helping to mitigate supply chain attacks by decreasing consumption-based attack surfaces. As new threats emerge, the OpenSSF S2C2F SIG under the Supply Chain Integrity Working Group, led by a team from Microsoft, is committed to reviewing and maintaining the set of S2C2F requirements to address them.

Learn more

View the S2C2F requirements or download the guide now to see how you can improve the security of your OSS consumption practices in your team or organization. Come join the S2C2F community discussion within the OpenSSF Supply Chain Integrity Working Group.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. 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.

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¹Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA).

²8^th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain Report, Sonatype.