New solutions deliver IoT innovations from cloud to
edge
REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 28, 2019 /CNW/ -- Microsoft Corp. on Monday
announced new capabilities that further simplify the customer
journey and deliver highly secured IoT solutions. These solutions
help customers embrace IoT as a core strategy to drive better
business outcomes, improve safety and address social issues by
predicting and preventing equipment failures, optimizing smart
buildings for space utilization and energy management, improving
patient outcomes and worker safety, tracking assets across a supply
chain, and more.
The proliferation of IoT devices is enabling companies to bring
cloud intelligence to the edge, to create solutions that are
adaptive and responsive to their environments. According
to IDC,1 41.6 billion devices — including
smartphones, smart home assistants and smart appliances — will be
connected to the internet by 2025. Even sooner, by 2021, 94% of
businesses surveyed will be using IoT, according to a recent
Microsoft IoT Signals research report and, in nearly every case
(97%), those companies are concerned about potential security
risks.
"At Microsoft, we are committed to building a trusted,
easy-to-use platform that allows our customers and partners to
build seamless, smart, secure solutions regardless of where they
are in the IoT journey," said Sam
George, CVP of Azure IoT at Microsoft. "That's why we are
investing $5B in IoT and intelligent
edge — technology that is accelerating ubiquitous computing and
bringing unparalleled opportunity across industries."
Delivering new IoT innovations from cloud to edge
Our core focus is addressing the challenge of securing connected
devices at every layer while advancing IoT to create a seamless
experience between the physical and digital worlds. In the past
year, we launched more than 100 new services and features that make
IoT solutions more secure and scalable, reduce complexity, and
create opportunities in new market areas.
Making IoT seamless
IoT Central is a
fully managed IoT app platform that provides solution builders with
built-in security, scale and extensibility needed to develop
enterprise-grade IoT solutions. New features to IoT Central
simplify challenges of building and deploying scalable and
affordable enterprise applications:
- 11 new industry-focused application templates to
accelerate solution builders across retail, healthcare, government
and energy.
- API support for extending IoT Central or integrating it
with other solutions, including API support for device modelling,
provisioning, lifecycle management, operations and data
querying.
- IoT Edge support, including management for edge devices
and IoT Edge module deployments, which enable customers to deploy
cloud workloads, including AI, directly to connected devices.
- IoT Plug and Play support, for rapid device development
and connectivity.
- The ability to Save & Load applications to enable
application reusability.
- More Data Export options for continually exporting data
to other Azure PaaS services, such as storage for rich
analytics.
- Multitenancy support for building and managing a single
application with multiple tenants, each with their own isolated
data, devices, users and roles. And updates to that single
application are visible to all tenants for easy manageability.
- Custom user roles for fine-grained access control to
data, actions and configurations in the system.
- New pricing model for early 2020, designed to help
customers and partners have predictable pricing as usage
scales.
Making IoT smarter
Azure IoT Hub helps enterprise developers reduce costs
and optimize operations through IoT cloud applications. New
capabilities with IoT Hub message enrichment add the ability to
stamp messages coming from devices with rich information before
they are sent to downstream cloud services, making integration
easy. IoT Hub integrates with Azure Event Grid, making it easy to
consume IoT Hub device messages from an even broader variety of
downstream services.
Azure Maps customers can add geospatial weather
intelligence into their applications to enable scenarios like
weather-based routing, weather-based targeted marketing and
weather-based operations optimization, in partnership with
AccuWeather. Azure Maps will now be available on Gov Cloud,
simplifying the onboarding process for customers.
Azure Time Series Insights is announcing new preview
capabilities including:
- Multilayered storage provides the best of both worlds:
lightning fast access to frequently used data ("warm data") and
fast access to infrequently used historical data ("cold
data").
- Flexible cold storage: Historical data is stored in a
customer's own Azure Storage account, giving customers complete
control of their IoT data. Data is stored in open source Apache
Parquet format, enabling predictive analytics, machine learning and
other custom computations using familiar technologies including
Spark, Databricks and Jupyter.
- Rich analytics: Rich query APIs and user experience
support interpolation, new scalar and aggregate functions,
categorical variables, scatter plots, and time shifting between
time series signals for in-depth analysis.
- Enterprise-grade scale: Scale and performance
improvements at all layers, including ingestion, storage, query and
metadata/model.
- Extensibility and integration: New Time Series Insights
Power BI connector allows customers to take queries from Time
Series Insights into Power BI to get a unified view in a single
pane of glass.
Through our Express Logic acquisition, Azure RTOS continues to
enable new intelligent capabilities. It unlocks access to billions
of new connected endpoints and grows the number of devices that can
seamlessly connect to Azure. Renesas is a top microcontroller unit
(MCU) manufacturer that shares our vision of making IoT development
as easy and seamless as possible, and we are excited to announce
that Azure RTOS will be broadly available across Renesas' products,
including the Synergy and RA MCU families. It is already integrated
into the Renesas Synergy Software Package and will be integrated
out of box with the Renesas RA Flexible Software Package.
Making IoT more secure
We have added new features to Azure Security Center for IoT with
the announcement of a Security Partner program and support for
national clouds, and we are excited to announce the upcoming
general availability of Azure Sphere in February
2020.
Enabling a future of intelligent and secure computing at the
edge for organizations, enterprises and consumers will require
advances in computer architecture all the way down to the chip
level, with security built in from the beginning. Microsoft Azure
Sphere is taking a holistic approach to securing the intelligent
edge and IoT from the silicon to the cloud in a way that gives
customers flexibility and control. For example, Qualcomm
recently announced a partnership with Microsoft to develop
mobile hardware for Microsoft's Azure Sphere IoT operating
system.
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) enables digital
transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an
intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every
organization on the planet to achieve more.
1 IDC, Worldwide Global DataSphere IoT Device and
Data Forecast, 2019–2023, Doc # US45066919, May 2019
View original content to download
multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/microsoft-announces-new-capabilities-for-a-seamless-smart-and-secure-iot-world-300945907.html
SOURCE Microsoft Corp.