At #MSInspire, I shared how we’re innovating across the Microsoft Cloud with both best-of-category products, as well as best-of-suite solutions, to help our customers do more with less.
I’m looking forward to Inspire next week, where we’ll share how we’re creating new opportunity for partners to help customers do more with less across the Microsoft Cloud. Please join us.
We’re expanding our employee experience platform Microsoft Viva to include new capabilities to meet the needs of specific roles, with the introduction of Viva Sales.
Microsoft is reimagining the selling experience and empowering every salesperson with Viva Sales, a new application where sellers use Microsoft 365 and Teams to automatically capture data in any #CRM system. Viva Sales empowers sellers to stay in the flow of their work, where they are moving deals along using Teams and Office while enriching their CRM system with new customer data. https://lnkd.in/dKei9Rkj
With Azure Arc, we’re bringing the power of Azure anywhere, helping customers in every industry innovate across their datacenter, multi-cloud, and edge environments.
One of the things I hear most often from our customers is how new #cloud-based applications are imperative for driving business forward – which is why I’m excited to announce the general availability of #Azure Machine Learning for hybrid and multicloud deployments with Azure Arc! Our Microsoft team is committed to meeting customers where they’re at so they can efficiently and securely bring new solutions to life. I’m amazing by the ways customers have used Azure and Azure Arc to create innovative solutions. View today’s on-demand sessions to learn how you can use Azure Arc to extend Azure platform capabilities to datacenters, edge, and multicloud environments.
We need to go from talking about digital transformation to delivering on the digital imperative for every organization. Here’s a clip of my message to our partner ecosystem today at #MSInspire.
I’m looking forward to Inspire next week, where we’ll share how we’re creating new opportunity for partners to help customers do more with less across the Microsoft Cloud. Please join us.
We’re thrilled Netflix has selected Microsoft as its advertising technology and sales partner. We want publishers to have more long-term viable ad monetization platforms, so more people can access the content they love wherever they are.
Congratulations to our Partner of the Year winners! You exemplify what’s possible when we connect the potential of technology to the challenges of our customers – and the world.
Two years into our sustained commitment to address racial inequity both inside and outside Microsoft, it’s inspiring to see how entrepreneurs like Gilbert Campbell, Ryan Johnson, Christopher Peay, and Charisse Bremond Weaver are creating new opportunity in their communities.
We’re expanding our employee experience platform Microsoft Viva to include new capabilities to meet the needs of specific roles, with the introduction of Viva Sales.
Microsoft is reimagining the selling experience and empowering every salesperson with Viva Sales, a new application where sellers use Microsoft 365 and Teams to automatically capture data in any #CRM system. Viva Sales empowers sellers to stay in the flow of their work, where they are moving deals along using Teams and Office while enriching their CRM system with new customer data. https://lnkd.in/dKei9Rkj
With Azure Arc, we’re bringing the power of Azure anywhere, helping customers in every industry innovate across their datacenter, multi-cloud, and edge environments.
One of the things I hear most often from our customers is how new #cloud-based applications are imperative for driving business forward – which is why I’m excited to announce the general availability of #Azure Machine Learning for hybrid and multicloud deployments with Azure Arc! Our Microsoft team is committed to meeting customers where they’re at so they can efficiently and securely bring new solutions to life. I’m amazing by the ways customers have used Azure and Azure Arc to create innovative solutions. View today’s on-demand sessions to learn how you can use Azure Arc to extend Azure platform capabilities to datacenters, edge, and multicloud environments.
People with disabilities continue to be underrepresented in part because their needs and demographics aren’t widely counted. We’re working with The World Bank and other partners to help address this critical data challenge.
Understanding #disability around the world is key to tackling the disability divide. Yet data on disability remains fragmented around the world. Proud to partner with The World Bank, Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo and her incredible colleagues on a new Disability Data Hub to help tackle this.
Read more below: https://lnkd.in/geTZKx99
There has never been a greater demand for specialized cybersecurity expertise—or a greater opportunity for our partners to support our customers with new services and solutions. Over the last year, the permanent shift to hybrid work has empowered businesses to be remote and mobile. Increased adoption of public and private clouds has unlocked innovation, agility, and scale. At the same time, ransomware grew 105 percent over the past year and continues to become more sophisticated.1 The global cybersecurity talent shortage is now 2.72 million, and economic uncertainty has put the spotlight on extracting the highest possible return on investments.2
This week, as we join our partners at Microsoft Inspire, much of our conversation is focused on how, together, we can help our customers prioritize their security initiatives while getting the most out of the solutions they already have.
Security services are a critical need for the year ahead
Every year I am so energized by the expertise and creativity of our partners. Much of what we learn comes from them, so we commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ from Forrester Consulting to better understand the high-level trends driving their security, compliance, and identity opportunities. It’s incredible to see that the Microsoft Security partner opportunity grew 21 percent year-over-year across the board in Microsoft 365 security, cloud security, compliance, and identity:
With the shift to hybrid work, workplace security has seen the most growth. It’s exciting to see that customers are taking advantage of the expanded security capabilities we’ve added to Microsoft 365, and enlisting partners to help them protect frontline workers, implement data discovery for Microsoft Teams, and activate more Microsoft 365 workloads securely. With many organizations struggling to staff their in-house security teams, partners are creating and delivering managed services built on top of Microsoft Sentinel for security information and event management (SIEM) and extended detection and response (XDR), as well as management, monitoring, and remediation across Microsoft 365.
There’s also an incredible demand for cloud security services—particularly multicloud. The rapid shift to cloud services has created an ever-evolving threat landscape, driving the need to better protect cloud resources, workloads, and applications. Without the expertise or resources to do that, customers are looking to partners to help with secure cloud migrations, managed services for the security operations center (SOC), and security management of all levels of cloud-based infrastructure.
Compliance-related managed services are the newest and fastest-growing area for most partners. More partners are starting to expand their general security services to include compliance, typically starting with information protection, communications governance, and insider risk, which are natural extensions of security practices. A trend we’re seeing is an increase in very large information protection deployment opportunities, as well as governance advisory services, which are central to the successful adoption of Microsoft compliance solutions.
As the foundation for all the previously mentioned points, our identity solutions are also fueling significant partner growth. Securing access for every identity—human and non-human—is critical in today’s connected world. Partners are capitalizing on these investments with repeatable identity-specific security solutions, off-the-shelf connectors, and managed services. Identity-first implementations of Zero Trust continue to be key areas of interest for security decision-makers, and partners serve a critical role in collaborating on plans, priorities, and architecture decisions.
Microsoft Security partners are expanding their existing offerings and creating new offerings in all these areas, packaging their unique experience, expertise, and IP for effective and efficient service delivery. Security deployment, advisory, solutions development, and managed services are needed now more than ever. In fact, within the USD247 billion cybersecurity market, security services spending is projected to reach USD77 billion by the end of 2022.3
Optimization through consolidation
Given the breadth of challenges our customers are facing, and recent economic headwinds, many organizations are looking to consolidate their security portfolios to optimize costs and reduce complexity. In fact, 78 percent of chief information security officers (CISOs) have 16 or more tools in their cybersecurity vendor portfolio, and according to Gartner®, “most organizations recognize vendor consolidation as an avenue for more efficient security, with 80 [percent] executing or interested in a strategy for this.”4
Microsoft integrates more than 50 different categories across security, compliance, identity, device management, and privacy—and most customers save 60 percent on average by leveraging Microsoft’s comprehensive security solutions compared to a multi-vendor strategy. All Microsoft Security product families work together as one comprehensive solution across clouds and across platforms, helping customers to reduce tool sprawl, maximize value out of what they already have, and reduce complexity. With recent announcements of Microsoft Entra and Microsoft Purview, we’ve also aligned our product portfolio with how our customers view the totality of their security challenges.
Consolidation isn’t just about tools—the lines between security workloads are blurring as well. Virtually every customer scenario includes elements of secure infrastructure, threat detection and response, identity management and secure access, compliance, and privacy—in fact, 90 percent of the Fortune 100 companies use four or more of these solutions. Our partners agree, and many are moving beyond their core specialty to provide a wider range of services to customers, creating new revenue streams and expanding their expertise as a result.
Maximizing the value of current investments
Assisting customers to deploy and fully leverage products they already own is one of the strongest ways our partners can deliver customer value. This week, Microsoft is announcing an entirely new partner investment to help partners drive customer success and product usage. Starting October 1, 2022, partners who help customers deploy their untapped security capabilities within Microsoft 365 E5 and Microsoft Azure will be eligible for up to USD25,000 per account. Microsoft is excited to provide this co-investment to ensure partners remain competitive in their offerings.
Once security products have been deployed, customers often need assistance analyzing and triaging security data to monitor their ecosystem. Microsoft is seeing a surge in organizations looking for a trusted managed detection and response (MDR) partner to help offload time-consuming work and augment their existing in-house security teams. Gartner estimates that 50 percent of organizations will be using MDR services by 2025, and with more than 785,000 customers currently using Microsoft’s advanced security products, the partner opportunity is tremendous. To meet this need, Microsoft has recently announced investments in our managed XDR partner community, including working with them to verify their XDR solutions for use with Microsoft products. Partners with a verified XDR service will have increased access to co-marketing funding to support their business and direct integration with Microsoft field sellers through co-sell opportunities. Partners can learn more about investing in managed XDR partner success.
At Microsoft, we are continually looking for ways to deliver more value with our solutions—and to make it easier for our partners to do the same. For example:
Most organizations don’t have IoT security at all, and those that do often need help integrating it into their broader SIEM and XDR programs. Microsoft Defender for IoT positions partners to solve both problems for customers. With new native integration with Microsoft 365 Defender that enables you to see vulnerable IoT devices in the Microsoft 365 Defender console and complete coverage across IoT, enterprise IoT, and operational technology (OT) devices, Defender for IoT can now secure all endpoint types, correlate incidents across the entire kill chain, and provide faster detection and response for attacks that previously may have been left undiscovered.
Despite facing similar risks as enterprises, small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) often lack the same level of resources. Microsoft Defender for Business provides next-generation protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), threat and vulnerability management, and automated investigation and remediation—all in a cost-effective package that’s easy to implement and use. Server support is now available in preview. Integration with Microsoft 365 Lighthouse and Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) solutions enable Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners to build on that value by delivering a fully managed service. Partners can learn more with the Microsoft Defender for Business partner kit.
Simplifying the cloud for the public sector and government entities empowers them to accelerate their digital transformation journey. Azure Confidential Computing now helps customers encrypt their data while it’s in use, so trusted partners can now migrate customer applications that handle sensitive data to Azure without rewriting them, and public sector customers can have confidence that their data is protected. And, to empower public sector customers to take advantage of the full power of the cloud while respecting their digital sovereignty, Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty provides a means to build, move, and operate data and workloads in the cloud while meeting legal, security, and policy requirements.
Recognizing our partners of the year
Microsoft recently announced a simplified and more flexible way to be identified as a Microsoft Security Solution Provider. If you’ve historically been a silver or gold security partner or Enterprise Mobility Management partner, you now have the opportunity this coming year to be recognized through the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program (MCPP) as a security solution partner.
Once identified, Microsoft offers a wide variety of co-marketing opportunities you can take advantage of in your own programs and in collaboration with Microsoft to differentiate your business, not the least of which is the opportunity to be recognized by Microsoft as the Security or Compliance partner of the year.
I’d like to congratulate Ernst and Young as the 2022 Security Partner of the Year in recognition of the use of the Zero Trust framework that fully leverages Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Microsoft Azure Key Vault. I’d also like to recognize Edgile as the 2022 Compliance Partner of the Year for their integration of a comprehensive security framework that extends the capabilities of enterprises to also measure the maturity of their data governance. I want to congratulate these partners for their incredible work, as well as all the winners of the 2022 Microsoft Security Excellence Awards. I also want to express my gratitude to our entire partner community for all you do to advance our shared mission of security and to make the world a safer place.
Top takeaways for our partners
Microsoft partners have an amazing opportunity to showcase their security proficiency, drive new growth, and create real-world impact. We invite all our partners to download our commissioned Forrester report to spur ideas on how to differentiate and expand their business. I’ll close with a few ideas:
If you don’t have a security practice yet, now is the time! Explore a managed security services practice, such as managed XDR.
If you’re already offering your customers security services, you should consider going bigger! Lean into governance, risk management, and compliance and privacy with Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Priva.
Be sure to check out our sessions at Microsoft Inspire that go deeper into these topics as well:
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.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
For many organizations, trusting their data to the cloud requires having a complete understanding of and control over the environment in which that data resides and how it’s being processed. Microsoft understands this, and we are committed to building a trustworthy cloud—one in which security, privacy, and transparency are built into its core. A key part of this vision is confidential computing—a set of hardware and software capabilities that give data owners visibility into the data environment and verifiable security protection of their data in use.
The Confidential Computing team at Microsoft Research is collaborating with hardware developers to create trusted execution environments (TEEs), where data stays encrypted not just when stored (encryption at rest) and in transit, but also during use. This work underpins the Azure confidential cloud platform, where users can upload encrypted code and data and get encrypted results back with strong privacy.
At Microsoft Build 2022, the company announced serverless confidential containers with lift-and-shift support, the next step in the evolution of confidential computing. This service builds on the Confidential Containers work conducted at Microsoft Research. Confidential Containers offers a verifiably secure container environment in Azure where users can confirm that the software performing computations on their data is exactly the software they expect to be running, that it will do what they want it to do with their data, and that they can trust the results it returns. Confidential Containers enables users to take existing container workloads, and with a small amount of configuration, use them in a confidential environment.
Smaller trusted computing base
Confidential Containers decreases the size of the trusted computing base (TCB)—the totality of elements in a computing environment that must be trustednot to violate the confidentiality of computation. The TCB can include software, hardware, and human administrators, among other things. By removing elements from the TCB, the components that can be compromised are reduced, decreasing the attack surface. Confidential Containers removes Microsoft administrators from the TCB, minimizing it as much as possible while still enabling customers to run existing workloads without modifying them.
This reduced TCB provides an option for organizations that currently run computations on their data on premises because they are concerned about the security of their data in the cloud. Even though setting up a computation environment in the cloud offers flexibility, data can be exposed to anyone who operates the servers on which the system runs. With Confidential Containers, the individuals who can access the data can be tightly controlled. This can be a single designated employee of the organization that owns the data or the business partner that is processing the data. It is never a Microsoft employee or another third party.
A secure hardware environment enables data protection in use. Confidential Containers runs on AMD processors backed by AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP), which provides a TEE. This hardware-enforced security boundary provides a shield so that nothing outside the encrypted memory space can read the data.
Users of Confidential Containers create a policy defining precisely what can run in the confidential container environment and how. The AMD SEV-SNP hardware produces an attestation report, which provides a succinct representation of everything in the confidential environment, including information about the code that will be enforcing the policy. Users can request this attestation report any time before providing the container with a key to unlock the encrypted dataset for processing.
Sensitive data handling in the cloud
Before the development of HTTPS, businesses could not securely run a storefront on the public web because communication over the internet was not secure. In the same way, today individuals and organizations cannot run containerized computation over sensitive data in the public cloud. Confidential Containers addresses this need.
This is a game-changer for organizations that must comply with local and international regulations on how sensitive data is handled. For example, healthcare organizations that store encrypted patient information in the cloud are required by HIPAA regulations to download that data to perform computations on premises. This multistep process entails decrypting the data once it has been downloaded to an organization’s servers, performing the required computations, and then re-encrypting the data before re-uploading it to the cloud. It also requires ensuring that the on-premises environment contains the security architecture necessary to comply with HIPAA and other regulations.
Because Confidential Containers provides advanced security safeguards for data in use in Azure, organizations no longer need to perform these time-consuming steps. This also means they no longer need to maintain servers on premises. Moreover, Azure users can define even stricter policies for their container environment in the cloud than they have in place in their on-premises environment.
Secure multiparty computations
Another benefit of Confidential Containers is they enable secure multiparty computations. A single organization can securely process multiple datasets that contain sensitive information, or multiple organizations with datasets that must remain secure can share those datasets with the assurance that their data will not leak. Organizations can perform computations on multiple datasets, such as for training a machine learning model, and gain better results than they would if performing computations on a single dataset, all without knowing what is in those datasets.
Easy deployment and lift-and-shift of Linux containers
Creating a confidential container is straightforward for Azure users who are currently using or getting ready to use containers, requiring a small amount of configuration to move existing workloads. Linux users can easily lift-and-shift their Linux containers to Confidential Containers on Azure.
Unlimited potential with Confidential Containers
We believe that in the future, all computing in the cloud will be confidential, and we’re excited to share Confidential Containers—a technology that plays a role in making this happen. The capabilities it provides will have implications that we have yet to imagine. We’re particularly excited by the potential of multiparty computations. The ability to perform computations in a protected environment on multiple datasets brings limitless possibilities, unlocking great value to Azure users.
Confidential Containers is currently available for limited preview and will be available for public preview later this year. Sign up for the Confidential Containers preview.
If you’re just starting out with Windows 11 – or looking for refreshers on making the most out of it – there’s a new video series that will help you with staying organized, keyboard shortcuts, personalizing your experience, apps and tools.
“Meet Windows 11” recently debuted with three short videos that will get you up and running on Windows 11. The first one goes over basics such as universal search, desktop groups and Microsoft accounts. The second video helps you personalize your Windows experience by suggesting several features, such as creating collections for websites you browse, choosing desktop backgrounds and using widgets. The third video explores new and refreshed apps, such as the Photos app, Microsoft Store and Phone Link.
Read the accompanying articles through the links above to get more information and help with Windows 11.
When COVID-19 vaccines began arriving in Ghana in 2021, Mrunal Shetye and his colleagues scrambled to get the life-saving doses to millions of people anxious to protect themselves and their families. They juggled purchase orders, approval letters and countless other details as part of the ambitious global vaccine rollout.
“There were hundreds of emails on a single subject and at one point, we literally had a whiteboard to document which shipment was coming when,” says Shetye, chief of Health and Nutrition for UNICEF in Ghana. “The details were very difficult to track.”
A year later, the profusion of emails and document searches has yielded to a streamlined information hub built by UNICEF and Microsoft for COVAX, the global mechanism to help distribute COVID-19 vaccines in a more equitable way. The effort has delivered more than 1.5 billion doses to 146 countries in the largest vaccine rollout in the world. More than 80% of the doses have gone to low- and lower middle-income countries. COVAX is co-led by UNICEF, which manages procurement and supply; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; the World Health Organization; and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
With the information hub, Shetye can now call up a dashboard and see a single line item for a COVAX shipment and related documents. His colleagues at UNICEF’s Supply Division and his health partners in Ghana can see the same information so everyone is on the same page. The system helps him prepare for shipments, manage COVID-19 vaccine stocks and supplies, and assist health workers with vaccination campaigns throughout the country.
“The whole thing became just more manageable and understandable,” Shetye says.
A Ghana health manager, left, and UNICEF staffers examine a shipment of COVID-19 vaccines in Ghana. (Photo by Francis Kokoroko, courtesy of UNICEF)
Launched in 2021, the information hub, which tracks COVAX’s vaccine supply chain, has become a key part of the initiative’s mission to get vaccines to low- and middle-income countries that might otherwise be left behind. It’s brought efficient deliveries of COVID-19 vaccines and syringes to conflict settings like Syria and Yemen, and to remote places like the Himalayas in Nepal and the tiny Pacific island country of Vanuatu.
The platform also helps health and humanitarian workers collaborate across time zones and countries on deliveries to low-income countries like Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Rwanda, where COVAX’s 1 billionth dose landed in the Rwandan capital of Kigali in January of 2022.
Despite much progress, the need for the work is still vital. Many of the world’s 82 poorest countries have COVID-19 vaccination rates below 20%, according to The New York Times. In contrast, about two-thirds of the world’s richest countries have reached the World Health Organization’s goal of fully vaccinating 70% of their populations.
“The aim of COVAX is to make COVID-19 vaccines available to all of the populations, regardless of where they are and what the level of income of their countries is,” says Gemma Orta-Martinez, supply chain manager of Monitoring and Strategic Data at UNICEF. “The info hub is a critical tool that UNICEF and partners use to provide transparency and access to essential information.”
A doctor in Ethiopia receives a COVID-19 vaccine. (Photo by Tewodros Tadesse, courtesy of UNICEF)
In the early days of COVAX shipments, the lack of a transparent, cohesive view of the supply chain made the challenges of shortages, lockdowns and inadequate cold-chain storage even harder. UNICEF employees, no strangers to vaccine operations, had to use disparate, inefficient systems to monitor timelines and inventory that were constantly changing.
Musonda Kasonde, UNICEF regional chief of supply for the Middle East and North Africa, recalls the stress of trying to provide realistic delivery times for countries asking when vaccines were coming.
“One of the main challenges in the beginning was trying to understand who had what where,” she says. ‘’For me, having those dashboards and access to that information was really the turning point in our fight against the pandemic.”
The UNICEF platform also plays a critical role in helping countries turn vaccines into vaccinations, especially now that supplies and logistics have stabilized. Countries using the platform to prepare for shipments and manage inventory can more easily organize the storage, transportation, distribution, community outreach and health worker trainings needed to get vaccines into people’s arms.
COVID-19 vaccines arrive in Afghanistan. (Photo by Omid Fazel, courtesy of UNICEF)
“You can track what is coming,” says Kasonde. “You can make sure that the cold chain is in place and national regulatory requirements are in place, and then you have a much smoother delivery in country.”
The information hub came together as a collaboration between UNICEF’s Supply Division and Microsoft’s Tech for Social Impact team, which works with nonprofits. To respond quickly to the pandemic, the team tapped into Microsoft’s Disaster Response team, which places employees on volunteer technical missions that help organizations respond to crises like hurricanes and earthquakes.
The platform was a complex project requiring scalability, flexibility and security to handle vast amounts of sensitive global data. It needed rigorous identity management for hundreds of users with different levels of authorized access. It had to be easy to use. And it needed to launch quickly to address the unfolding health crisis.
Microsoft engineer Erik Hanson and architect manager Marialina Bello knew they wanted to do meaningful work during the pandemic and had the expertise and leadership skills for the job. They quickly volunteered.
“We were able to really bring the breadth of Microsoft and just say, ‘How can we help?’” says Hanson, who was the platform’s technical coordinator, while Bello served as primary mission coordinator. “What is most impressive is the speed we were able to rally a crew with different backgrounds and skillsets from around the world.”
Microsoft engineers in the United States, Italy and Australia worked with UNICEF engineers in Denmark and India to build the platform in a few months using Azure DevOps, GitHub, Power BI and other modern tools.
Project AirSim uses the power of Azure to generate massive amounts of data for training AI models on exactly which actions to take at each phase of flight, from takeoff to cruising to landing. It will also offer libraries of simulated 3D environments representing diverse urban and rural landscapes as well as a suite of sophisticated pretrained AI models to help accelerate autonomy in aerial infrastructure inspection, last-mile delivery and urban air mobility.
Project AirSim is available today in limited preview. Interested customers can contact the Project AirSim team to learn more.
It arrives as advances in AI, computing and sensor technology are beginning to transform how we move people and goods, said Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft corporate vice president for Business Incubations in Technology & Research. And this isn’t just happening in remote areas home to wind farms; with urban density on the rise, gridlocked roads and highways simply can’t cut it as the quickest way to get from Point A to Point B. Instead, businesses will look to the skies and autonomous aircraft.
“Autonomous systems will transform many industries and enable many aerial scenarios, from the last-mile delivery of goods in congested cities to the inspection of downed power lines from 1,000 miles away,” Pall said. “But first we must safely train these systems in a realistic, virtualized world. Project AirSim is a critical tool that lets us bridge the world of bits and the world of atoms, and it shows the power of the industrial metaverse – the virtual worlds where businesses will build, test and hone solutions and then bring them into the real world.”
Accelerating aerial autonomy
High-fidelity simulation was at the heart of AirSim, an earlier open-source project from Microsoft Research that is being retired but inspired today’s launch. AirSim was a popular research tool, but it required deep expertise in coding and machine learning.
Now, Microsoft has transformed that open-source tool into an end-to-end platform that allows Advanced Aerial Mobility (AAM) customers to more easily test and train AI-powered aircraft in simulated 3D environments.
“Everyone talks about AI, but very few companies are capable of building it at scale,” said Balinder Malhi, engineering lead for Project AirSim. “We created Project AirSim with the key capabilities we believe will help democratize and accelerate aerial autonomy – namely, the ability to accurately simulate the real world, capture and process massive amounts of data and encode autonomy without the need for deep expertise in AI.”
With Project AirSim, developers will be able to access pretrained AI building blocks, including advanced models for detecting and avoiding obstacles and executing precision landings. These out-of-the-box capabilities eliminate the need for deep machine learning expertise, helping expand the universe of people who can start training autonomous aircraft, Malhi said.
North Dakota-based Airtonomy uses Project AirSim to train autonomous aerial vehicles that inspect critical infrastructure like wind turbines. Photo courtesy of Airtonomy.
Airtonomy, which participated in an early access program for Project AirSim, used it to help customers launch remote inspections of critical infrastructure quickly and safely, without the time, expense and risk of sending a crew to remote locations – and without deep technical backgrounds.
“We create autonomous capture routines for the frontline worker – people who don’t use drones and robots on a regular basis but need them to act like any other tool within their service vehicle,” Riedy said. With Airtonomy, not only does the drone inspect the asset automatically, the captured data is automatically contextualized at the moment of capture. These features can be extended to any asset in any industry, enabling novel and automated end-to-end workflows.
“It’s amazing to see those responsible for our nation’s infrastructure use these tools literally with a push of a button and have a digital representation at their fingertips for things like outages, disaster response or route maintenance. Project AirSim is transforming how robotics and AI can be used in an applied fashion,” he said.
Using data from Bing Maps and other providers, Project AirSim customers will also be able to create millions of detailed 3D environments and also access a library of specific locations, like New York City or London, or generic spaces, like an airport.
Microsoft is also working closely with industry partners to extend accurate simulation to weather, physics and – crucially – the sensors an autonomous machine uses to “see” the world. A collaboration with Ansys leverages their high-fidelity physics-based sensor simulations to enable customers with rich ground truth information for autonomous vehicles. Meanwhile, Microsoft and MathWorks are working together so customers can bring their own physics models to the AirSim platform using Simulink.
As simulated flights occur, huge volumes of data get generated. Developers capture all that data and use it to train AI models through various machine learning methods.
Gathering this data is impossible to do in the real world, where you can’t afford to make millions of mistakes, said Matt Holvey, director of intelligent systems at Bell, which also participated in Project AirSim’s early access program. Often, you can’t afford to make one.
Given that, Bell is turning to Project AirSim to hone the ability of its drones to land autonomously. It’s a tough problem. What if the landing pad is covered in snow, or leaves or standing water? Will the aircraft be able to recognize it? What if the rotor blades kick up dust, obscuring the vehicle’s vision? AirSim let Bell train its AI model on thousands of ‘what if’ scenarios in a matter of minutes, helping it practice and perfect a critical maneuver before attempting it in the real world.
The future of autonomous flight
The emerging world of advanced aerial mobility will launch a diverse cast of vehicles into the skies, from hobbyist drones to sophisticated eVTOLs (electric vertical take-off and landing) aircraft carrying passengers. And the potential use cases are almost limitless, Microsoft says: inspecting powerlines and ports, ferrying packages and people in crowded cities, operating deep inside cramped mines or high above farmlands.
In Project AirSim’s high-fidelity environments, AI models learn through trial and error exactly which actions to take at each phase of flight. Image from Microsoft.
But technology alone won’t usher in the world of autonomous flight. The industry must also chart a pathway through the world’s airspace monitoring systems and regulatory environments. The Project AirSim team is actively engaged with standards bodies, civil aviation and regulatory agencies in shaping the necessary standards and means of compliance to accelerate this industry.
Microsoft also plans to work with global civil aviation regulators on how Project AirSim might help with the certification of safe autonomous systems, Pall said, potentially creating scenarios inside AirSim that an autonomous vehicle must successfully navigate. In one case there is blinding rain, in one case deep winds, in one case it loses GPS connectivity. If the vehicle can still get from Point A to Point B every time, Pall said, that could be an important step toward certification.
We’re thrilled Netflix has selected Microsoft as its advertising technology and sales partner. We want publishers to have more long-term viable ad monetization platforms, so more people can access the content they love wherever they are.
Congratulations to our Partner of the Year winners! You exemplify what’s possible when we connect the potential of technology to the challenges of our customers – and the world.
Two years into our sustained commitment to address racial inequity both inside and outside Microsoft, it’s inspiring to see how entrepreneurs like Gilbert Campbell, Ryan Johnson, Christopher Peay, and Charisse Bremond Weaver are creating new opportunity in their communities.
We’re expanding our employee experience platform Microsoft Viva to include new capabilities to meet the needs of specific roles, with the introduction of Viva Sales.
Microsoft is reimagining the selling experience and empowering every salesperson with Viva Sales, a new application where sellers use Microsoft 365 and Teams to automatically capture data in any #CRM system. Viva Sales empowers sellers to stay in the flow of their work, where they are moving deals along using Teams and Office while enriching their CRM system with new customer data. https://lnkd.in/dKei9Rkj
With Azure Arc, we’re bringing the power of Azure anywhere, helping customers in every industry innovate across their datacenter, multi-cloud, and edge environments.
One of the things I hear most often from our customers is how new #cloud-based applications are imperative for driving business forward – which is why I’m excited to announce the general availability of #Azure Machine Learning for hybrid and multicloud deployments with Azure Arc! Our Microsoft team is committed to meeting customers where they’re at so they can efficiently and securely bring new solutions to life. I’m amazing by the ways customers have used Azure and Azure Arc to create innovative solutions. View today’s on-demand sessions to learn how you can use Azure Arc to extend Azure platform capabilities to datacenters, edge, and multicloud environments.
People with disabilities continue to be underrepresented in part because their needs and demographics aren’t widely counted. We’re working with The World Bank and other partners to help address this critical data challenge.
Understanding #disability around the world is key to tackling the disability divide. Yet data on disability remains fragmented around the world. Proud to partner with The World Bank, Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo and her incredible colleagues on a new Disability Data Hub to help tackle this.
Read more below: https://lnkd.in/geTZKx99
Xbox is on a mission to bring the joy of gaming to everyone on the planet. Over the next 12 months, fans will experience our most creative and diverse line up of back-to-back game launches yet.
Gaming is for everyone, everywhere, and we’re committed to bringing the joy and community of gaming to billions of players around the world on Xbox, PC, and other devices, with the power of Xbox Cloud Gaming.
As we make Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability generally available today, see how Grupo Bimbo, the world’s largest baking company, is already using the platform to help achieve net zero carbon emissions, one of its key sustainability goals.
We often say that you can’t fix a problem you don’t understand. Today, Microsoft is releasing a new Digital Equity Data Dashboard to help create better understanding of the economic opportunity gaps in towns, cities and neighborhoods across the United States. The new tool was developed by our Chief Data Science Officer Juan Lavista Ferres and the Microsoft AI for Good Lab, and aggregates public data from the Census Bureau, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), BroadbandNow and Microsoft’s own Broadband Usage Data. It goes census tract-by-census tract, examining 20 different indicators of digital equity – such as broadband access, usage, education and poverty rates – to create one of the most complete pictures of digital equity in these areas to date.
Digital equity – access to affordable internet, affordable devices and digital skills – is a foundation for empowerment, digital transformation and economic opportunity. With states looking to drive historic investments in digital opportunity thanks to the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program, the Digital Equity Act and more, it’s clear we can no longer just consider the immediate lens of broadband availability as a major indicator of opportunity. The pandemic made clear that being digitally connected – either through broadband or mobile internet – is a fundamental necessity for every citizen, and not just for school and work. The last two years has acted as an accelerant, driving essential activities online, from everyday businesses and services, such as banking and telehealth, to simply ordering food at a restaurant.
The dashboard was created with the best data possible as a resource to assist policymakers in identifying key places and communities within their state so they can direct funding and programmatic investments. Take Ferry County, Washington, for example, where the FCC claims that only 0.4% of households lack access to broadband, which by itself provides a bright view of the county’s digital opportunity. But our dashboard shows that 97% of the county aren’t using the internet at broadband speeds. Furthermore, more than a third of households don’t have a desktop or laptop to use the broadband available to them.
The dashboard also confirms what we have long known: the digital divide isn’t just felt in rural areas – it also deeply impacts cities. In Los Angeles County, where we’re working with partner Starry to expand access to affordable broadband, more than a quarter of residents aren’t using the internet at broadband speeds, and roughly one in five households lacks a desktop or laptop computer, cutting off millions from the digital world.
The dashboard offers the opportunity to examine a city neighborhood-by-neighborhood, helping identify which areas most urgently need digital equity investments. Take my old neighborhood of Lindsay Heights in Milwaukee, Wis., for example, where as much as 65%, almost two-thirds, of households don’t have a desktop or laptop, and more than 50% don’t have a broadband subscription. Yet, just to the southeast, only 14% of households don’t have a desktop or laptop and 16% don’t have a broadband connection, a huge difference in just a few miles. By analyzing and illustrating the data at this deep level, lawmakers can now better identify where to focus time and resources to close these inequity gaps.
At Microsoft, we know technology can change lives, but only if it is available, accessible and affordable. Studies have repeatedly shown that investing in broadband infrastructure results in significant social returns, from new business formation rates to lower unemployment rates. We hope that this dashboard will empower the policymakers to implement programs that foster sustainable and inclusive economic opportunity and deliver on this fundamental need to close the digital divide. It is vital that states use the best data available to make targeted investments that translate into true long-term progress, otherwise more and more people will be left on the wrong side of the digital tracks.
We’re excited to announce that Microsoft has joined the Eclipse Foundation Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Working Groups as an Enterprise and Corporate member, respectively. Our goal is to help advance these technologies to deliver better outcomes for our Java customers and the broader community. We’re committed to the health and well-being of the vibrant Java ecosystem, including Spring (Spring utilizes several key Jakarta EE technologies). Joining the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile groups complements our participation in the Java Community Process (JCP) to help advance Java SE.
Over the past few years, Microsoft has made substantial investments in offerings for Java, Jakarta EE, MicroProfile, and Spring technologies on Azure in collaboration with our strategic partners. With Red Hat, we’ve built a managed service for JBoss EAP on Azure App Service. We’re also collaborating with Red Hat to enable robust solutions for JBoss EAP on Virtual Machines (VMs) and Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO). With VMware, we jointly develop and support Azure Spring Apps (formerly Azure Spring Cloud), a fully managed service for Spring Boot applications. And with Oracle and IBM, we’ve been building solutions for customers to run WebLogic and the WebSphere product family on VMs, Azure Kubernetes Service, and ARO. Other work includes a first-party managed service to run Tomcat and Java SE (App Service) and Jakarta Messaging support in Azure Service Bus. Learn more about these Java EE, Jakarta EE, and MicroProfile on Azure offerings.
Our strategic partners
Microsoft is actively improving our support for running Quarkus on Azure, including on emerging platforms such as Azure Container Apps. The expanded investment in Jakarta EE and MicroProfile is a natural progression of our work to enable Java on Azure. Our broad and deep partnerships with key Java ecosystem stakeholders such as Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, and VMware power our Java on Azure work. These strategic partners share our enthusiasm for the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile journeys that Microsoft has embarked upon.
“We’re thrilled to have an organization with the influence and reach of Microsoft joining the Jakarta EE Working Group. Microsoft has warmly embraced all things Java across its product and service portfolio, particularly Azure. Its enterprise customers can be confident that they will be actively participating in the further evolution of the Jakarta EE specifications which are defining enterprise Java for today’s cloud-native world.”—Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation.
“We welcome Microsoft to the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Working Groups. We are pleased with our collaboration with Microsoft in delivering Oracle WebLogic Server solutions in Azure, which are helping customers to use Jakarta EE in the cloud. We look forward to more collaboration in the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Working Groups.”—Tom Snyder, Vice President, Oracle Enterprise Cloud Native Java.
“IBM’s collaboration with Microsoft has shown Jakarta EE and MicoProfile running well in a number of Azure environments on the Liberty runtime, so it’s exciting to see Microsoft now joining the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Working Groups. I look forward to seeing Microsoft bringing another perspective to the Working Groups based on their experience and needs for Azure customers.”—Ian Robinson, Chief Technology Officer, IBM Application Platform.
“It is great to see Microsoft officially join both MicroProfile and Jakarta EE as they’d been informally involved in these efforts for a long time. I hope to see Microsoft’s participation bring experience from their many users and partners who have developed and deployed enterprise Java applications on Azure for several years.”—Mark Little, Vice President, Software Engineering, Red Hat.
“We are excited to see Microsoft supporting the Jakarta EE Working Group. Jakarta EE serves as a key integration point for Spring applications and we look forward to the future evolution of common specifications like Servlet, JPA, and others. Microsoft delights developers with their continued support of the Java ecosystem along with their work with VMware on bringing a fully managed Spring service to Azure.”—Ryan Morgan, Vice President, Software Engineering, VMware.
Looking to the future
As part of the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile working groups, we’ll continue to work closely with our long-standing partners. We believe our experience with running Java workloads in the cloud will be valuable to the working groups, and we look forward to building a strong future for Java together with our customers, partners, and the community.
