Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft’s largest annual event for technology professionals and developers, kicked off today with a powerful keynote session by Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. The session was full of new announcements and product updates. This year’s keynote focused on how Microsoft Cloud is enabling organizations worldwide to “do more with less“.
According to Microsoft, in the last few years businesses worldwide have fortified their digital capabilities to stay resilient, but it is now time to focus on “digital perseverance.” Satya started the Microsoft Ignite 2022 keynote by laying down the five digital imperatives for to build “digital perseverance.” These include:
- Build Agility & Optimize Business with the Right Infrastructure
- Harness the power of AI and Automation to deliver better efficiency
- Innovate Seamlessly with a Cloud Developer Platform
- Motivate the Workforce with the Right Technologies
- Adopt Robust security to help protect everything, everyone and everywhere
Satya believes that Microsoft Cloud is the perfect solution for organizations to attain the above-mentioned digital imperatives. Whether it is data, AI, automation, hybrid work, developer tools or security – Microsoft Cloud delivers best-in-class products and solutions. With the power of Microsoft Cloud organizations can stay more secure, agile, productive and help employees complete their tasks more efficiently.
During the Microsoft Ignite 2022 session Satya explained how Microsoft is making huge investments in its AI technology, Microsoft 365, developer tools, Microsoft Cloud, and security offerings. These are very important for organizations to attain digital imperatives for successful business operations. Now, let us take you through some of the important announcements under each of these categories.
Build Agility & Optimize Business with the Right Infrastructure
- Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform: Released earlier this year, Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform unifies databases, analytics, and data governance. It addresses a major pain point for most customers wherein they had to stitch together fragmented data workloads. The cloud platform ensures that organizations can gain quicker business insights and spend more time in creating data-driven strategies.
- Azure Cosmos DB: There were new updates announced around Cosmos DB. The serverless distributed database will now deliver faster, more flexible, and scalable service to the open-source relational data with the introduction of PostgreSQL. Built on Hyperscale engine, PostgreSQL allows developers to attain better performance, speed, and scale of Azure Cosmos DB. It will also allow the open-source developers to access both unstructured and structured data from one familiar database service.
- Azure Container for PyTorch: Presently available for preview, this new service will bring together the latest PyTorch version alongside the best optimization software for training and inferencing, and all this is tested and optimized for Azure.
- Visual Studio images for Microsoft Dev Box: This new service empowers the developers with cloud-based and ready-to-code workstations. Developers can now leverage Visual Studio when creating a dev box to reduce time and focus on coding that matters.
Harness the power of AI and Automation to deliver better efficiency
- Azure OpenAI Service: This new service, available with limited access in preview, will offer developers access to Dall·E 2 (a model enabling users to generate custom images through text or images). Addition of Dall·E 2 model will significantly expand the use cases of Azure OpenAI Service. The service will help employees generate content, images and code to keep them more productive.
- Power Automate: Microsoft is bringing the power of AI to simplify workflows. Now, users will be able to create a cloud-based workflows through a request made using natural language. In this instance, AI transforms the low-code into no-code, empowering different people to create automations faster.
- Microsoft Syntex: Satya announced the launch of Microsoft Syntex, a new range of content apps and services that leverage AI to index and organize large amounts of unstructured content so that it can be easily searched and analyzed. With Syntex, users can automate various content-based workflows (e.g., contract processing, e-signature, etc.). It is integrated with Microsoft Search capabilities making it simple for people to navigate and discover content.
- Microsoft Purview Data Governance: Improved root cause analysis, traceability with SQL Dynamic lineage, and fine-grained lineage on Power BI datasets are some of the new features announced for Microsoft Purview – the unified governance platform for hybrid data estates. Users can now perform a thorough root cause analysis from a single location using Microsoft Purview. Metamodels are also available for enabling users to define organization, departments, data domains and business processes in their technical data.
- Microsoft Intelligent Document Processing: This service, powered by the AI Builder and Power Automate, will enable end-to-end processing of documents without any coding. AI Builder automates the cumbersome process of processing document and enables employees to focus on their high-priority tasks rather than the mundane ones.
Innovate seamlessly with a Cloud Developer Platform
- GitHub Copilot: Nadella during the Microsoft Ignite 2022 keynote emphasized the use of AI-assisted coding software such as GitHub Copilot, which empowers developers with tools to write better codes with much more efficiency. This includes “Explain Code,” which enables the developers to select and comprehend a line of code by translating it into simple English. Another tool is “Translate Code,” which allows the developers to convert the code from one language to another. He also mentioned that new updates and announcements related to GitHub Copilot would be made in GitHub Universe next month.
Motivate the Workforce with the right technologies
- Microsoft Places: It is a new app created with the vision of optimizing hybrid work. Microsoft Places will help bridge the gap between two different worlds – in-person and remote work. It will leverage intelligence to optimize hybrid work by connecting virtual and physical spaces. Places will enable organizations to drive increased connections, engagement and productivity while providing the holistic picture of hybrid work that’s missing today.
- Microsoft Viva: New features were announced in Microsoft Viva Insights, which will help employees, managers and leaders to improve productivity and well-being at the personal, team and organizational level. The feature of add surveys at the end of select Teams meetings will make it easy for meeting participants to gather feedback about a particular meeting. Meeting organizers with Viva Insights subscriptions can see aggregated results. Suggestions from Viva Insights will be automatically displayed in a Teams chat when a user composes a 1:1 chat outside of the recipient’s working hours. This will minimize work-related interruptions during personal time. The new Focus mode experience will help people make progress on important projects during their focus time by dividing it into short bursts of productivity followed by short breaks.
- Microsoft Teams: New Mesh avatars for Microsoft Teams meetings would soon be available in private preview. These avatars will allow users to choose how they want to show up in a meeting by creating a customized animated version of themselves. Additionally, the new Teams Premium add-on will be available in preview in December to make all sorts of meetings more personalized, intelligent, and secure. Microsoft also announced the general availability of Teams Phone Mobile, previously known as Operator Connect Mobile, an enterprise-grade mobile calling experience offered in partnership with some of the world’s most innovative telecom operators. Also, Microsoft Teams meetings would now be available natively across certified Cisco meeting devices, enabling customers to configure Teams as the default meeting experience.
- Microsoft Edge: Microsoft continues to focus on its mission to make Edge the most secure and productive browser used for businesses. Consequently, it announced Edge Workspaces. This is a shared browser space where everyone involved in a project can see the same set of websites, shared set of tabs, and latest working files in one place so they all can be on one page. This new functionality will allow team members to work together and stay updated on the project’s progress in real-time.
- Windows: Microsoft announced the Windows 365 App, a completely unique SAAS offering built for today’s distributed workforce era. This app allows users to access their Windows PC directly from the Windows 11 taskbar or Start menu with a personal, customized experience tailored to each user.
Adopt robust security to help protect everything, everyone and everywhere
- Microsoft Defender for DevOps: This new feature empowers the security teams to strengthen and manage DevOps security to minimize vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations and resolve the issues in code across multi-pipeline environments. Microsoft also announced the preview of Microsoft Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) to ensure that the security teams save time and overcome the most critical challenges with contextual cloud security.
- Microsoft Entra: It is a new identity and access management solution built to securely work across multiple cloud platforms. Microsoft Entra Identity Governance enables organizations to ensure that right people have the right access to the right resources at the right time. Within Entra Identity Governance, Workload Identities controls and secures identities for digital workloads, such as apps and services, and controls user access to cloud resources, while certificate-based authentication enables customers to adopt easily deployable phishing-resistant authentication.
- Power Platform Managed Environments: It’s a collection of features that enable the IT admins to manage Power Platform environments better and govern low-code solutions with more visibility, enhanced control, and less effort. It enables teams to innovate at scale without worrying about security.
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