By Carolyn Norton | Practice Director of Cloud Services | Velosio
The advantages of cloud technology are widely recognized, including enhanced scalability, growth opportunities, and innovation potential. These all hold significant value for most businesses. As we head towards 2024, worldwide spending by businesses on cloud computing infrastructure is forecast to top $1 trillion for the first time. Microsoft Azure is certainly no exception — over 56% of organizations worldwide, and 95% of Fortune 500 organizations use Azure cloud services.
What is Azure?
Launched in 2010, Azure is a private and public cloud computing platform created by Microsoft. Microsoft Azure Cloud solutions contain infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS), offering used for services including virtual computing, storage, networking, and analytics. As Azure’s growth rate over time demonstrates, there is great demand for these services in organizations worldwide.
The Azure Cloud platform is comprised of more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life — to solve today’s challenges and create the future. You can build, run, and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice. In case you missed my video on the benefits of moving to Microsoft Azure, you can catch it here.
Azure offers a secure foundation with multi-layered security provided by Microsoft across physical data centers, infrastructure, and operations in Azure. Users benefit from state-of-art security delivered in Azure data centers globally and rely on a cloud that is built with customized hardware, has security controls integrated into the hardware and firmware components, and added protections against threats such as DDoS.
Azure users benefit from a team of more than 3,500 global cybersecurity experts who work together to help safeguard your business assets and data in Azure.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, will continue trending in 2024. Microsoft recently announced new data and AI solutions to help healthcare organizations unlock insights and improve patient and clinician experiences.
Healthcare data continues to grow rapidly, and organizations are struggling to keep up with higher volume, greater variety, and increased velocity. According to the World Economic Forum, hospitals produce 50 petabytes of siloed data per year — that’s equivalent to approximately 10 billion music files. Ninety-seven percent of this data goes unused, leaving many valuable insights locked away. Putting all this data to good use is the key to unlocking clinical and operational breakthroughs that can make a meaningful difference in the lives of patients and their healthcare journey. And in the new era of AI, the importance of data continues to grow as organizations realize that without a solid data strategy, they are only scratching the surface of what’s possible with AI.
In May of 2023, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Fabric — an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI. For healthcare and all industries, Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need. Fabric integrates technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a single unified product, empowering data and business professionals alike to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI.
Fabric is infused with Azure OpenAI Service at every layer to help customers unlock the full potential of their data, enabling developers to leverage the power of generative AI against their data and assisting business users to find insights in their data. With Copilot in Microsoft Fabric in every data experience, users can use conversational language to create dataflows and data pipelines, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models, or visualize results. Customers can even create their own conversational language experiences that combine Azure OpenAI Service models and their data and publish them as plug-ins.
Copilot in Microsoft Fabric builds on Microsoft’s existing commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise. Copilot inherits an organization’s security, compliance, and privacy policies. Microsoft does not use organizations’ tenant data to train the base language models that power Copilot.
Microsoft Copilot Solutions
Speaking of Copilot, this will be a hot trend in 2024 as Microsoft polishes and releases all its Copilot iterations for organizations. Microsoft 365 Copilot’s general availability day is here: as of November 1, 2023, organizations were able to buy the service for $30/user/month. It’s a key pillar in what Microsoft calls “the age of copilots” in which AI-based tools reshape the way we work. For its part, Microsoft 365 Copilot brings generative AI (genAI) directly into Microsoft 365 programs such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and Teams. It allows organizations to use natural language to ask Copilot to perform tasks on our behalf.
Forrester predicts that Microsoft 365 Copilot will reach 6.9 million US knowledge workers in 2024. The research firm goes on to predict that even with relatively conservative assumptions, the solution pays for itself: If it provides four hours of time savings per month — just one hour per week — an employee would only need to earn $7.50/hour to break even on the cost of Microsoft 365 Copilot over the course of a year.
Optimizing your Cloud Spend in 2024
In 2023, Microsoft introduced the GPT-powered AI chat capability for Microsoft Cost Management. This feature, currently in preview, makes it even easier to optimize your cloud costs and will be available for general consumption in 2024. Microsoft Cost Management is available to every customer with an Azure subscription and allows organizations to closely monitor, allocate, and optimize cloud expenditures. Further cost optimization insights can be gained through Azure Advisor, another free tool which offers personalized recommendations to optimize cloud resource usage and costs.
For a proactive approach to cost management, the Azure Pricing Calculator and Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator empower businesses to comprehend projected cloud costs prior to deployment, aiding in informed decision-making.
From Hybrid Cloud to an Adaptive Cloud Approach
Azure stands out as the sole hybrid cloud solution offering consistent experience, with its superior capabilities in boosting developer productivity. It ensures a robust, multi-layered security framework, boasting the most extensive compliance offerings among cloud providers. Additionally, Azure presents a more cost-effective choice for Windows Server and SQL Server, being significantly less expensive than AWS — up to five times in some comparisons.
In 2024, the trend for many organizations is shifting from traditional hybrid cloud models to a more adaptive cloud approach. This new strategy enables businesses to excel in rapidly changing environments by integrating disparate teams, geographically spread-out facilities, and extensive systems into a cohesive operational, security, application, and data framework within Azure. This concept of an adaptive cloud is an extension of Microsoft’s ongoing initiatives, particularly building upon the advancements made with Azure Arc.
Microsoft’s Azure Arc plays a crucial role in this evolution. Azure Arc allows businesses to extend Azure’s capabilities to their on-premises environments, including other public clouds, thereby creating a truly hybrid experience. In the adaptive cloud model, Azure Arc’s capabilities are expanded to offer even more seamless integration and management.
The adaptive cloud in Azure aims to unify disparate systems and teams. By breaking down silos, it enables a more cohesive operation model, improving efficiency and reducing complexities in managing cloud resources. Adaptive cloud infrastructures are designed to thrive in dynamic environments. They can quickly adjust to changes in workloads, data traffic, and application demands, providing optimal performance and resource utilization. By consolidating application and data models, Azure’s adaptive cloud facilitates better data management and application development. This integration enables more efficient data processing, analytics, and application deployment.
Azure Update Manager
With the evolution of the IT landscape, there is a growing demand for seamless management of resources across the cloud and edge. Microsoft recently announced Azure Update Manager, previously known as Update Management Center. Azure Update Manager provides a SaaS solution to manage and govern software updates to Windows and Linux machines across Azure, on-premises, and multi-cloud environments. It is an evolution of Azure Automation Update management solution with new features and functionality, for assessment and deployment of software updates on a single machine or on multiple machines at scale.
Security
Generally, the cloud provider is responsible for securing the overall system, but it’s still up to you, the customer, to ensure that your data is secure within that system.
You need to make sure you understand your role and take the necessary steps to protect your data. No doubt, as companies move to the cloud, more and more responsibilities are handled by the cloud provider, in this case, Microsoft.
However, it’s always your job to maintain and secure your data, devices, and user accounts.
Microsoft Security Copilot, launched in March 2023, is a groundbreaking generative AI security product designed to bolster cybersecurity measures for organizations. It represents a significant advancement in the field of cybersecurity by incorporating advanced AI technologies. Here’s an overview of what it is and how it helps organizations with security:
What is Microsoft Security Copilot?
Security Copilot is the first of its kind to enable security professionals to operate at the speed and scale of AI. It merges an advanced large language model with a security-specific model developed by Microsoft, creating a powerful tool that combines general AI capabilities with specialized security expertise.
How Does It Help Organizations with Security?
Security Copilot’s AI-driven approach significantly improves the speed and accuracy of threat detection and response. It enables security teams to quickly identify and mitigate cybersecurity threats, a critical capability in the rapidly evolving digital threat landscape. By leveraging AI, Security Copilot allows organizations to defend against cyber threats at machine speed. This scalability and efficiency are vital for handling the increasing volume and complexity of cyber threats faced by organizations today.
The AI integration in Security Copilot not only aids in immediate threat response but also enhances the overall understanding of the threat landscape. This broader perspective is crucial for developing more effective long-term security strategies and policies. As it integrates with existing Microsoft Security products and plans to expand to third-party systems, Security Copilot ensures that organizations can enhance their cybersecurity posture without disrupting their current security infrastructure.
How to use Microsoft Entra Authentication
One of the main features of an identity platform is to verify, or authenticate, credentials when a user signs into a device, application, or service. In Microsoft Entra ID, authentication involves more than just the verification of a username and password. To improve security and reduce the need for help desk assistance, Microsoft Entra authentication includes the following components:
· Self-service password reset
· Microsoft Entra multifactor authentication
· Hybrid integration to write password changes back to on-premises environment
· Hybrid integration to enforce password protection policies for an on-premises environment
· Passwordless authentication
Microsoft continually updates Azure. To stay on top of latest releases, check here regularly.
Keep in mind that no one is expecting you to manage all these changes on your own.
To help with the decisions and tradeoffs that will arise, Velosio is here to assist your team. Velosio’s cloud team is experienced in helping organizations navigate the cloud landscape and has achieved Microsoft Advanced Specialization for Azure. We understand the challenges and complexities involved in cloud migration, and we have a proven track record of success. By leveraging the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), we follow a structured approach to guide organizations through their cloud journey. Contact us to discuss a cloud strategy for 2024 and beyond.
