Author, Dimitri Dizna 

     CEO, BINARC           

Microsoft Ignite 2021: Key Takeaways

Microsoft Ignite 2021 was dominated by discussions of cloud-based products, as Microsoft leaders insisted that the way forward for business is to pursue the network edge. Below are the Ignite takeaways that caught our attention.

Microsoft Mesh and Azure mixed reality

One of the things that we'll remember most from the conference is Microsoft Mesh's presentation, a mixed-reality environment "like Second Life on steroids," as CIO.com put it. By wearing the company's HoloLens 2 headset, users can be transported into virtual environments together where they can interact.  

Especially since Mesh integrates naturally with Teams, the possibilities are endless. This mixed-reality collaborative environment's demonstrations were eye-catching, with the highlight of the audience attending the Cirque-du-Soleil finale together. The goal is to offer coworkers the impression that they are virtually present with one another. For now, users will have to work alongside cartoon-like avatars of their colleagues provided by AltspaceVR to limit the computing and bandwidth demands of mixed-reality collaboration.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explained that "Mesh allows you to interact holographically with others, with true presence, in a natural way. For example, I can join a birthday celebration with my extended family in India, interacting as if we were physically together without any screens between us. Or I can meet my colleagues on the other side of the world, collaborating as if we were in the same room."

The hardware investment necessary will be consequential at first. For those not ready to take that leap, there are more than 100 new updates to Teams and Microsoft 365 platforms, including virtual breakout rooms with subgroup options and the possibility of creating Teams channels for people outside the organization.

There are also new integrations with Teams Rooms, including an array of physical hardware produced by Lenovo, Crestron, Poly, Logitech and others, as well as its own original gear. All of these will work with Teams software features to create state-of-the-art meeting experiences for those within and outside the room. All these options are sure to revolutionize the way we meet virtually.

Teams improvements: more connections 

Nadella is trying to draw attention to all the ways Teams has benefited organizations, saying the company is building it as "an organizing layer for all the ways we work" through hundreds of applications tied into the Teams environment.

Teams Connect will offer access to channels shared with customers, suppliers, or any partners in which they can co-author documents and collaborate in apps. Additionally, Microsoft Viva will bring Teams users the same well-being and productivity insights familiar to users of Outlook. For an additional fee, Viva Topics will make documents and expertise more easily searchable across the enterprise from within Teams.

Microsoft Viva has 4 modules:

• Viva Connections: It concentrates on providing an organization's brand image to its employees; they will get personalized data on a daily basis.
• Viva Learning: The app is meant to work as a learning center where people can share, assign and learn from different business content libraries.
• Viva Insights: Its purpose is to enhance personal well-being through functions such as virtual travel experiences.
• Viva Topics: Automatically classifies and catalogs a company's content and streamlines the search process.

However, with all these upgrades, "the risks are that it becomes this massively unwieldy thing, and the user experience gets confusing because there are too many different things going on," noted Nick McQuire, chief of enterprise research at analyst firm CCS Insight. Nonetheless, the new features will surely attract companies wanting to consolidate their conferencing tools.

Teams improvements: better security controls

With the unprecedented number of cyber attacks over the last few years, security is at the heart of Microsoft's concerns. Microsoft announced several new enhancements to empower users and organizations and to protect devices and back-end systems. For companies that are centralizing their investment in collaboration, McQuire said, "Security is arguably the number one selection criterion."

The one that has created the most buzz is that password-less authentication in Azure Active Directory is now generally available, eliminating the need for passwords in many instances.

Additionally, new Threat Analytics reports in Microsoft Defender were introduced, as well as Secured-core which is coming to Windows Server and Edge devices to enhance firmware protection. They also announced that Teams will now support end-to-end encryption to protect sensitive online conversations and end-to-end-encryption for one-to-one voice or video calls. It seems that a future update to add end-to-end encrypted meetings is in the works as well.

Enterprises will soon be able to control in which datacenter Microsoft stores documents shared through Teams, mirroring Exchange and SharePoint, which will be particularly useful for regulated or data-sensitive industries.

Teams improvements: new presenter tools

New options will also allow PowerPoint presentations to be embedded directly in Teams, enabling meeting participants to flip through slideshows at their own pace.

Presenters will have more power in deciding where to position their video image and the meeting participant gallery on their screen, with the hope that this will improve eye-contact. For McQuire, "the thing that really stood out is the whole focus on presenter tools."

The Power Platform

The Power Platform received many new capabilities covering the entire range of products, with new features aimed at helping IT administrators and organizations still to come.  

Power FX - Yet another low-code development platform

Although one may say there are already enough low-code development platforms out there, Microsoft is throwing its hat in the ring with a platform based on Excel formulas.

Power Fx is used to build canvas apps in Microsoft Power Apps and is destined to become the language across the Power Platform. This means that Excel users will potentially be able to draw on their existing knowledge to develop apps with the simplicity of formulas.

Power Automate Desktop 

The first update was related to the availability of Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, previously known as “Flows”. This new feature is free of charge for all Windows 10 users. It brings low-code RPA automation capabilities to on-premises and local desktop environments. Users will be able to automate time-consuming tasks and set up automated workflows that will connect apps and services to sync files, gather data, receive notifications, and more.

Power BI Premium

Microsoft expanded the availability of Power BI Premium. Power BI Premium is an enhancement to the Power BI solution. Power BI Premium is AI-powered, and its primary goal is to help organizations analyze and visualize data. Compared to the classic Power BI, the Premium version offers the possibility of designing end-to-end data platforms with simple drag and drops.

It also offers significant enhancements in governance and scale through features such as:

• Microsoft-owned resource management;
• Utilization metrics;
• Autoscale; and
• Integrated security.

Vertical clouds

At Ignite, Microsoft expanded its industry clouds and their features. It used to offer automation and analytics tools tailored to markets such as telecommunications, retail and healthcare. Now, the healthcare cloud feature set and language coverage have been expanded, and three new industry clouds were introduced: financial services, manufacturing and nonprofits. This will save companies in these sectors a lot of initial development work.

Mission-critical computing in the cloud

In today's world, Azure cloud services have become a key tool for companies. The platform is making more and more efforts to increase its uses and power capacity to allow users to evolve. Additional support has also been added to Azure for mission-critical cloud workloads, now offering the choice to make on-demand capacity reservations featuring service-level agreement guarantees. It provides flexibility to scale sets to help applications run under higher loads and adding new VMs that will support more memory-intensive workloads, including in single-tenant Azure Dedicated Host environments.

Azure Sentinel

Azure Sentinel is a scalable and cloud-native solution that offers smart security analytics and threat intelligence across the organization.

During the Ignite conference, Microsoft announced that the number of connectors has increased by more than 30, so Sentinel's total number of connectors have surpassed 100. You will now be able to block IPs using Azure Firewall, confine endpoints through Defender for Endpoints and update a user's risk state inside Azure AD Identity Protection.

Microsoft has introduced new workbooks and analytic rule templates for Azure Sentinel. These workbooks and analytic rule templates can help Azure Sentinel customers access and examine data from various products.

Each incident features a direct link to M365 Defender to investigate further. It also offers SIEM and SOAR capabilities required by all organizations looking to monitor data sources and identify cyber threats. Azure Sentinel collects data at cloud scale across all devices, applications, users and infrastructure, both in multiple clouds as well as on-premises.

Some entirely new Azure features were also introduced:

Azure Quantum

Azure Quantum is a full-stack, open cloud ecosystem that has been moved to the public preview stage. It is a set of quantum services that incorporates pre-built quantum solutions. The service is famous for its potential to find answers to some of the world's most challenging problems. Organizations could use Azure Quantum to solve challenges from industries like chemistry, medicine, finance and logistics, Microsoft suggested.

The foundation of this service is the qubit instead of the binary bit. A qubit can exist in multiple states, unlike the strict on-and-off of binary computing. It's that multistate circumstance that expedites processes on the quantum computing side.

Microsoft has a different approach than companies like IBM or Rigetti by choosing a different type of qubit, the topological qubit, at its machine's heart. Quantum computing entails the use of specific hardware that needs to be maintained at freezing temperatures. Despite these requirements, developers can still use standard computers to test Azure Quantum; this can be done through emulation.

Microsoft is also considering partnerships with quantum hardware companies just because its own quantum hardware efforts haven't quite reached the point where they are feasible.

Azure Percept

Azure Percept is a new family of AI-enabled edge hardware and services. It provides an end-to-end system that functions from hardware to machine learning and is intended to give AI-driven insights without the need for an internet connection. Azure Percept offers its users the possibility to develop, implement and operate their AI models in hardware such as edge cameras or audio devices. It can also integrate with other Azure services such as AzureAI and Azure IoT.

The solution comes with a development kit, and users can get started with the offering through the Azure Percept Studio experience. This entire workflow is available through a low-code/no-code approach. Azure Percept DK is a flexible development kit containing a carrier board and mounting tools that can support numerous prototyping scenarios for device builders, solution builders and customers.

There is separate equipment that ships separately from the development kit and includes two sensor boards: the Azure Percept Vision and Azure Percept Audio, both with embedded hardware-accelerated modules. The Azure Percept Vision device features two Sony IMX219 Camera sensors with 6P Lens that sustains 8MP resolution at 30FPS. The Azure Percept Audio device offers speech AI capabilities to the Azure Percept DK.

Azure Synapse Pathway

Azure Synapse Pathway is the latest improvement of the Azure SQL Data Warehouse that aims to bridge the gap between data integration, enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics to produce real-time data insights. This downloadable tool allows users to migrate from their current data warehouse to Azure Synapse Analytics. The existing SQL code is automatically optimized for your source system (e.g. Snowflake) to SQL code optimized for your new target system (e.g. Azure Synapse Analytics).

This preview version of Azure Synapse Pathway currently backs the translation of database, schema and tables from IBM Netezza, SQL Server and Snowflake. Soon it will also be able to support Teradata. Eventually, Redshift, BigQuery and Hive-based Hadoop solutions will be added. This will extend the surface area of conversion to database views, procedures, functions and more to streamline the automation of analytics workloads into Azure Synapse.

Azure Purview

Azure Purview is a fully managed data governance service that allows users to gain a bird's-eye view of their data landscape. This tool permits customers to manage and govern their data. Purview automatically scans, classifies and governs datasets. Customers can utilize the same technology to check Synapse workspaces for both dedicated SQL pools as well as serverless.

Here are some other new features of this Azure Purview version:

• Scan and classify AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) data in public preview.
• Obtain connectors for more on-premises sources such as ERP sources like SAP S/4 HANA and SAP ECC. In addition, it will also connect to Oracle DB as a data source.
• Scan Azure Synapse Dedicated and Serverless Pools.
• Scan Azure resource groups and subscriptions.
• Obtain powered search in Azure Synapse workspaces.
• Realize a hierarchical business glossary within Azure Purview Data Catalog.
• Obtain support for private endpoints.

Azure Arc

Azure Arc is an emerging solution that extends Azure management and services to any infrastructure. As a result, customers will be able to code and export their applications from Azure to any Kubernetes environment regardless of its location.

During the Ignite conference, Microsoft announced Azure Arc has become available to any company looking to connect, manage and govern any Kubernetes cluster across separate data centers, multi-cloud environments and edge while meeting regulatory and compliance requirements. All these can be easily performed from the Azure Portal.

The new Azure Arc version has also unlocked other features such as:

• possibility to extend machine learning (ML) capabilities to hybrid and multi-cloud environments to train ML models; and
• opportunity to use GitOps to deploy applications in any location.

Machine learning where you want it

Traditionally, giants such as Microsoft have provided cloud-only solutions for training or running ML models. However, the hybrid cloud control plane Azure Arc is now offering enterprises a way to run ML workloads on-premises, in a multi-cloud environment or at the network edge. McQuire added, "What is new about Arc and the integrations with Azure ML is, Microsoft is saying you can use your existing infrastructure."

On the other hand, Azure Percept presents itself as a set of pre-built AI models, development tools, and reference hardware for building cloud-connected low-power AI systems with audio capabilities and cameras on the network edge. It's based on a Zero Trust security model and offers zero-touch WiFi provisioning.

Semantic search as a service

Among other new products and updates, Microsoft released a semantic search capability in Azure Cognitive Search. By leveraging techniques such as concept matching and synonym search, users will obtain search results that are more relevant and personalized. This search service for mobile and web app development will allow companies to use the same capabilities powering search engines like Bing to perform in-app contextual searches.

It also includes a new SharePoint connector that will streamline the SharePoint content's ingestion and exploration.

Microsoft's goal is to focus on building and multiplying successful AI and machine learning deployments in the enterprise, which is where they have concentrated resources and research this year.