From startups to global enterprises, Power BI is helping organizations visualize their performance, understand customer behavior, streamline operations, and unlock new opportunities—faster and smarter than ever.

What is Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a leading Business Intelligence (BI) and data visualization tool that transforms raw data into meaningful insights through interactive dashboards and customizable reports.

Built on the strong foundation of Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem, Power BI connects to hundreds of data sources—from Excel spreadsheets to on-premises databases to cloud platforms like Azure, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and more.

Its key components include:

• Power BI Desktop: A free application to design dashboards and reports.
• Power BI Service: A cloud-based platform for sharing, collaboration, and publishing.
• Power BI Mobile: View insights on smartphones and tablets on the go.
• Power BI Embedded: Integrate dashboards into your own apps or websites.

Why Power BI Is the Go-To BI Platform

Power BI offers a wide range of features that make it accessible, powerful, and scalable for businesses of all sizes:

1. Intuitive & Interactive Dashboards

With its drag-and-drop interface, users can quickly build dashboards without writing a single line of code. These dashboards update in real-time and can combine data from multiple sources.

2. AI & Machine Learning Integration

Power BI brings in Microsoft AI capabilities, allowing users to apply predictive models, detect anomalies, run sentiment analysis, and even get smart narratives that automatically explain trends.

3. Natural Language Processing (Q&A)

Users can ask questions in plain English like “What were the top 5 selling products last quarter?” and receive instant visual answers, lowering the entry barrier for non-technical users.

4. Robust Data Connectivity

Connect seamlessly to databases (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL), cloud services (Azure, AWS), and productivity tools (Excel, Dynamics 365, SharePoint). You can even connect via APIs or flat files like CSV and JSON.

5. Enterprise-Level Governance and Security

Power BI offers features such as Row-Level Security (RLS), Azure Active Directory integration, and Microsoft Information Protection, ensuring your data is protected, compliant, and only accessible by the right users.

Power BI in Real-World Use

Across industries, Power BI is being used in innovative ways:

• Retail & E-commerce: Real-time dashboards track sales, inventory levels, and customer segments to adjust pricing and marketing strategies instantly.
• Healthcare: Patient outcomes, resource allocation, and treatment efficiency are analyzed using Power BI dashboards.
• Finance & Banking: BI tools detect fraud, monitor financial KPIs, and analyze investment portfolios.
• Manufacturing: Power BI connects IoT sensors and supply chain systems to monitor operations, predict maintenance needs, and reduce downtime.
• Human Resources: Analyze turnover trends, hiring efficiency, employee engagement, and workforce planning through data visualization.

Benefits for Organizations

• Data Democratization: Enable everyone—not just data teams—to make data-driven decisions.
• Improved Decision-Making: See what’s happening now, not weeks later.
• Cost-Efficient: Power BI offers tiered pricing plans, including a powerful free version for individual users.
• Collaboration-Ready: Integration with Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint makes sharing and acting on insights seamless.
• Scalability: From a single analyst to an enterprise-wide rollout, Power BI scales effortlessly.

The Future of Power BI

Microsoft is continuously innovating within the Power BI ecosystem. The latest updates include:

Copilot in Power BI: AI-assisted data storytelling, DAX formula generation, and report building using natural language.

Integration with Microsoft Fabric: A unified platform for data engineering, data science, real-time analytics, and BI—all in one place.

Improved performance with Direct Lake and Delta Tables

Deeper Azure Synapse and Dataverse support

These updates aim to bring Business Intelligence + AI + Collaboration into one seamless experience.

Shot of a group of programmers working together on a computer code at night

Getting Started with Power BI

If your organization is new to Power BI, here are a few steps to get started:

1. Install Power BI Desktop (free from Microsoft).

2. Connect your data sources (Excel, SQL Server, Azure, etc.).

3. Build your first report using drag-and-drop visuals.

4. Publish to Power BI Service for sharing and collaboration.

5. Create dashboards and invite colleagues to view and interact.

Whether you’re analyzing customer data, tracking performance metrics, or forecasting future trends, Power BI gives you the tools to see deeper and act faster.

Final Thoughts

In a fast-changing world, where every decision counts, having access to clear, timely, and actionable insights is no longer optional—it’s essential.

Microsoft Power BI empowers everyone in your business to become a data hero. From analysts to executives, it enables informed decision-making, encourages collaboration, and drives innovation.

If you’re planning your next move in digital transformation—Power BI is not just a solution. It’s your competitive advantage.

Opus Solution is a business consultant in Vietnam, specializing in Microsoft-based technology solutions. We help businesses drive digital transformation through tools such as SharePoint, Power BI, Power Platform, and Azure. With an experienced team of experts, Opus delivers tailored, scalable solutions that enhance operational efficiency and unlock the full potential of enterprise data. We are committed to supporting our clients in streamlining processes and achieving sustainable growth.

The post Unlocking Business Intelligence: How Microsoft Power BI Is Transforming Data into Decisions appeared first on Opus Solution.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital Transformation refers to the strategic integration of digital technologies into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how it operates and delivers value to customers. It’s not simply about adopting new tools—it’s about transforming the organization’s culture, mindset, and processes to fully leverage technology for innovation and efficiency.

This shift often encompasses:

• Process automation
• Cloud computing adoption
• Data analytics and AI integration
• Customer experience redesign
• Remote and hybrid working enablement

At its core, Digital Transformation is about using technology to become more agile, intelligent, and customer-centric.

Why It Matters Now More Than Ever

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a wake-up call, highlighting the vulnerabilities of traditional operating models. Overnight, digital became the only channel to reach customers, employees, and partners. This urgency pushed organizations to rethink their digital strategies and invest in tools that ensure business continuity and long-term growth.

Key reasons why Digital Transformation is essential today:

1. Changing Consumer Expectations

Customers now expect fast, personalized, and seamless digital experiences across platforms. Companies must meet these expectations or risk losing market share.

2. Data-Driven Decision Making

Organizations are generating vast amounts of data. When harnessed effectively, data analytics provides valuable insights into customer behavior, market trends, and operational performance.

3. Operational Efficiency

Automating manual tasks and streamlining workflows lead to significant cost savings, fewer errors, and faster service delivery.

4. Competitive Advantage

Embracing digital tools enables companies to innovate faster, respond to disruptions, and capture new market opportunities ahead of their peers.

Key Technologies Driving Digital Transformation

Several technologies are central to this global shift:

Cloud Computing: Enables scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency by providing on-demand access to computing resources and services.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): Enhance decision-making, automate processes, and personalize user experiences through intelligent algorithms.

Big Data & Analytics: Offer powerful tools to analyze and visualize large datasets, helping businesses uncover trends and make informed decisions.

Internet of Things (IoT): Connects physical devices to the internet, generating real-time data that can improve maintenance, logistics, and user interactions.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Automates routine tasks, freeing up human resources for more strategic work.

Cybersecurity Technologies: With increased digitization comes heightened risk. Investing in cybersecurity is essential to protect digital assets and maintain trust.

Common Challenges in Digital Transformation

Despite its advantages, Digital Transformation is not without its obstacles. Some common challenges include:

Resistance to Change: Employees may be hesitant to adopt new technologies or processes. Change management and clear communication are vital.

Legacy Systems: Outdated infrastructure can be expensive to maintain and incompatible with modern solutions.

Skill Gaps: Organizations often lack the in-house expertise needed to implement and manage advanced digital tools.

Data Privacy and Compliance: Regulations like GDPR and local data protection laws require careful planning and adherence.

Addressing these challenges requires a strategic roadmap, executive sponsorship, and a culture of continuous learning and adaptation.

Steps to a Successful Digital Transformation Journey

To ensure a smooth and effective transformation, organizations should:

1. Define Clear Objectives: Understand the “why” behind the transformation and set measurable goals aligned with business strategy.

2. Assess Digital Maturity: Identify current capabilities and gaps to prioritize areas for improvement.

3. Engage Stakeholders: Include leadership, IT, and business units in the planning process to ensure alignment and support.

4. Invest in Talent: Upskill existing employees and bring in external experts when necessary.

5. Start Small, Scale Fast: Pilot new technologies or processes before rolling them out company-wide.

6. Measure and Adapt: Continuously monitor performance, gather feedback, and adjust the strategy as needed.

Real-World Example: Microsoft’s Role in Accelerating Transformation

Tech giants like Microsoft play a crucial role in helping businesses modernize. With a comprehensive suite of tools—such as Microsoft Azure, Power BI, and SharePoint Online—organizations can build scalable cloud infrastructure, visualize data in real time, and collaborate seamlessly across locations.

For instance, Power BI enables businesses to create interactive dashboards that turn raw data into actionable insights, enhancing decision-making across departments. Meanwhile, Azure supports scalable application deployment, while ensuring data security and compliance.

Conclusion: Transformation is a Continuous Journey

Digital Transformation is not a one-time project—it’s a continuous evolution. The organizations that embrace change, empower people with the right tools, and keep customer needs at the center of their strategy will emerge as leaders in the digital era.

As technology continues to evolve, staying adaptable, innovative, and open to new possibilities will be key to long-term success.

In the context of the Industrial Revolution, applying technology to operating mechanisms in each organization is extremely necessary, and is also an inevitable trend to minimize workload while still ensuring efficiency and enhance its competitive position in the market. Furthermore, applying management software into a business will also help build an organization with a clear system, promoting consistency, transparency and accuracy. Tasken eOffice, researched and built by Opus Solution – a business consultant in Vietnam – is an internal work management system as well as the management of automated, online, user-friendly approval processes, allowing businesses to operate more effectively on the path of digital transformation.

The post Navigating the Future: Embracing Digital Transformation in a Rapidly Evolving World appeared first on Opus Solution.

Here are five reasons why Microsoft is winning the industrial IoT battle:

1) Azure IoT Central as the SaaS platform

While customers can build an end-to-end IoT solution based on the foundational services available in Azure solutions, it involves complex plumbing. Azure IoT Central is ideal for customers looking to onboard their existing devices and manage them from the cloud without the need to build a custom solution. It’s a SaaS offering that abstracts Azure’s underlying IoT PaaS capabilities, making it easy for customers to derive value from the connected devices.

Azure IoT Central has a rich user experience and public-facing APIs covering the entire spectrum of IIoT, from connecting devices to building insightful dashboards. Azure IoT Central is one of the key differentiating factors for Microsoft.

2) Diverse and Rich Partner Ecosystem

An enterprise IoT solution is more than writing and deploying software to manage devices and analyzing the telemetry. It involves choosing the right hardware, integrating with legacy OT technologies, and engaging with a capable systems integration team.

Microsoft’s IIoT platform spans a wide spectrum of hardware and software offerings providing the right choice to customers. For example, the Azure Stack Edge family of devices ranges from a ruggedized, battery-operated device to a server-grade device powered by 32 vCPUs, 204 GB RAM, 2.5 TB and 2 NVIDIA A2 GPUs. Azure Stack HCI, the hyperconverged appliance, has a wide range of OEMs offering certified hardware.

As Gartner called out in the report, various IIoT players, such as PTC, GE, Siemens, ABB and Schneider, have announced that their platforms are built on Microsoft cloud, highlighting an emerging ecosystem.

The rich and vibrant hardware and software partner ecosystem is helping Microsoft deliver robust IIoT solutions.

3) Emphasis on Security

Microsoft has invested in security services such as Azure Defender for IoT, Azure Sphere and Azure RTOS that address complex security challenges often faced by enterprises.

Azure Defender for IoT delivers endpoint security for IoT devices. The platform monitors connected devices for anomalous or unauthorised activity through features like threat intelligence and behavioral analytics.

Azure Sphere is a microcontroller unit that promises secure edge-to-cloud and cloud-to-edge integration. The device is tightly integrated with Azure IoT Central and Azure IoT Hub making it easy for customers to build secure connected solutions.

Azure RTOS is a secure, real-time operating system (RTOS) for IoT and edge devices based on microcontroller units. Azure RTOS is designed to support highly constrained battery-powered devices with less than 64 KB of flash memory.

4) DevOps-friendly IoT Edge Software

Edge computing plays a vital role in industrial IoT solutions. Azure IoT Edge, an open source software from Microsoft, is designed to make developers and operators productive and efficient. It runs on both ARM64 and AMD64 platforms, acting as a conduit between the local devices and the public cloud.

Developers can write the business logic as standard Docker containers and deploy them as modules in Azure IoT Edge. Operators can integrate Azure IoT Edge with Kubernetes to manage and monitor the deployments.

Apart from the core IoT Edge platform, Microsoft has ported some of the critical components, such as Azure Stream Analytics and Azure SQL Database, to the edge. They can be easily deployed as modules in Azure IoT Edge, providing stream processing and storage at the edge.

5) Tight Integration with Data, Analytics and ML Platforms

From ingesting and processing the local telemetry data through Azure Stream Analytics to storing and processing data at scale, Azure has a rich suite of data and analytics tightly integrated with the Azure IoT platform.

Customers can ingest telemetry data from sensors that may be stored in Azure Cosmos DB or Azure Data Lake. From there, it can be leveraged to train machine learning models in Azure ML to perform predictive maintenance of devices or to deliver rich analytics through Power BI development Vietnam.

Services such as Azure Event Bus, Stream Analytics, Data Lake and Azure ML complement the IoT platform to deliver end-to-end analytics.

Forbes

The post 5 Reasons Why Microsoft Azure Is The Top Choice For Running Industrial IoT Solutions appeared first on Opus Solution.

Ground stations are used to both ingest data and communicate with satellites. Microsoft unveiled a preview of Azure Orbital at its September Ignite event as part of its larger Azure Space effort. Microsoft Azure solutions, Modular Datacenters, boxcar-like structures that provide compute and storage capabilities in remote environments, are also part of Azure Space.

In addition to building out its own ground stations, Microsoft has been collaborating with partners on Azure Orbital. Partners associated with the Azure Orbital effort, mentioned at Ignite, included Amergint, Kratos, KSAT, Kubos, Viasat and US Electrodynamics Inc.

Geospatial Data Processing

Microsoft’s announcement described a new partnership with Thales Alenia Space to deliver “near real-time geospatial data” to customers. Specifically, the geospatial data gets processed via Thales Alenia Space’s “DeeperVision” solution, which is fed by data from Azure Orbital ground stations. Image storage happens using Azure Storage Blob containers.

“This [geospatial] information is enriched by high-speed, high-volume artificial intelligence and machine learning to create an unprecedented impact on and beyond the planet,” explained Clarence Duflocq, vice president for strategy and innovation at Thales Alenia Space, in a released statement.

The geospatial data can be used to illustrate what changed in a landscape over time. Thales Alenia Space’s customers include “governments, institutions, space agencies and telecom operators.”

Satellite Services Market

Azure Orbital is a fully managed service used for earth observation, remote sensing and global communications across a variety of segments, according to Ashish Jain, a principal product manager lead for Azure Orbital, in a Microsoft video update. The signals data from satellites undergoes high-speed processing in the cloud before being sent to the customer’s virtual network, permitting further use of Azure compute, storage, AI, machine learning and cognitive services, Jain explained.

Apparently, the costs for launching satellites with payloads has been declining. Back in November, Jain said that the pricing was at about $2,000 to $3,000 per kilogram versus an earlier $50,000 per kilogram price. He added that “it’s estimated that more than 25,000 satellites will be launched in the next three to five years alone.”

Those satellites will need connections on the ground, which perhaps is why Microsoft is ramping up its new ground station business.

Opus Solution is a business consultant in Vietnam, specializing in consulting and providing solutions of Microsoft besides Azure such as Office365 Vietnam, Power BI, Sharepoint. Do not hesitate to give us a call if you need more advice on these technology solutions.

Redmondmag

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It would be a striking milestone, underscoring Microsoft’s successful transition from on-premises software to cloud-based services since Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer in 2014.

Piper Sandler, who has the equivalent of a buy rating on Microsoft stock, said Azure revenue came out to $7.20 billion in the company’s fiscal second quarter, which would mean that it contributed 17% of Microsoft’s total revenue, compared with 4% three years ago. Microsoft doesn’t disclose Azure revenue in dollars, but the Piper Sandler estimate is in line with broader sentiment. Analysts at William Blair, who also have the equivalent of a buy rating for Microsoft, estimated that Azure revenue was $7.40 billion.

Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., speaks during the WSJDLive Global Technology Conference in Laguna Beach, California, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 24, 2016. The conference brings together an unmatched group of top CEOs, founders, pioneers, investors and luminaries to explore tech opportunities emerging around the world.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

That means Azure is already significantly larger than the Windows franchise, which dates to 1985 and helped make Microsoft the most valuable and powerful tech company in the world in the 1990s. Windows generated $5.72 billion in revenue in the quarter, according to Microsoft’s earnings statement.

Azure has also exceeded Office 365 revenue from commercial customers in the quarter ended in December, Piper Sandler estimated.

Now it’s a matter of determining when Azure solutions could eclipse all of Office, including consumer subscriptions to Office 365 and traditional Office licenses. Piper Sandler says that’s likely to happen next year.

“We have quarterly Azure revenue of $11.8B by June 2022 (eclipsing Office all-in revenue of $10.9B for the first time),” Bracelin told CNBC in an email on Wednesday.

Microsoft’s Office franchise has been around since 1989, and its oldest component, the word processing software Word, has existed since 1983. It holds a controlling market share, and under Nadella, Microsoft has moved many of its business customers from buying Office software licenses to paying continually for Office 365 subscriptions.

Azure, by contrast, has only been available since 2010 — it was originally called “Windows Azure” — and technology industry research company Gartner estimated that in 2019 it was about 40% the size of market leader Amazon Web Services, which Amazon introduced in 2006.

Both Office365 Vietnam and Azure originated at Microsoft while Ballmer was CEO, but Nadella has made Azure an area of greater emphasis, forming cloud partnerships with companies that have historically been competitors, including Salesforce and Sony. Nadella also led Azure before he accepted the CEO title.

“He spearheaded major strategy and technical shifts across the company’s products and services, most notably our move to the cloud and the development of one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world supporting Bing, Xbox, Office 365 and other services,” Microsoft said of Nadella in its 2014 proxy statement after he became CEO. “This experience is fundamental to the company’s current strategic direction.”

Opus Solution is a business consultant in Vietnam, specializing in consulting and providing solutions of Microsoft such as Office365 Vietnam, Azure, Power BI, Sharepoint. Do not hesitate to give us a call if you need more advice on these technology solutions.

CNBC

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Becoming Microsoft Azure certified professional can help you kickstart your career in the IT industry, and here we list ample reasons to reiterate the same:

1. Adaptability

Azure allows you to store entire websites on it, which is one of the key reasons why Microsoft recorded a market share of 31% in the cloud service industry. Azure has a strong infrastructure and coding network with ample space.

You can create high-end applications with access to several development tools. Azure cloud has stringent and safe protocols where you can host apps developed by you.

2. DevOps

Microsoft Azure certifications provide DevOps connections that can help you manage and monitor the production of applications and the process of creating them. You can create a secure application and fix all the minor bugs and issues before launching it using DevOps.

DevOps unifies quality assurance software development and operation, making it an indispensable asset. The automated processes in DevOps allow you to test the apps in various scenarios quickly and forward them for the launch. You have to learn DevOps properly to improve overall processes.

3. Security Offering

Data security is a top-most priority during Azure certification training which is testified by the usage of top tier security protocols and tools such as Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). This ensures your data is always protected on the Azure platform.

European data protection authorities have recognised Azure cloud computing services. Azure solutions has also received the ISO/IEC 27018 Certification which is the international standard for cloud privacy.

4. Career Flexibility

You can pursue high paying roles such as cloud developer, AI engineer, security engineer, cloud administrator, data engineer, and solutions architect after the completion of Microsoft Azure certification.

The nine role-based certifications from Microsoft Azure solutions allow you to be flexible with your job profiles and increase your skills as well as versatility. As a result, you can pursue a role in several industries such as finance, healthcare, insurance, banking and more.

5. Pay Hike

Microsoft Azure certification would enhance your CV and help you land better jobs despite not being a seasoned professional in the field. You can also become a senior Azure certified professional later in your career to earn even pay hikes.

6. Structured Learning

The structured learning methodology involved in Microsoft certification also opens the gate for you to learn other essential tools such as GitHub, Hadoop, Eclipse and more.

You will receive complete assistance in learning online with tutorials, eBooks and lectures and get the opportunity to understand both the theoretical and practical aspects of the process.

7. Reduction in IT costs

Unlike specialised cloud services, Azure provides a comprehensive integration of cloud infrastructure and data centres. It is thus a revelation for small- and medium-sized businesses who can host their complete infrastructure on one cloud-based service. Azure certification cost will also easily fit in your budget, and it’s worth it looking at all the perks for the future.

You will hence be able to reduce the IT costs of your company by managing your hosted assets. You will also save money on maintaining security, redesigning software and power utilisation.

8. Enterprise Agreement Support

Microsoft provides lucrative discounts on the tools and software you buy through the enterprise agreement support. These agreements can help you earn a discount of up to 45%.

If your company is big enough to provide services to 500 devices or users, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of the lower rates. Such a company would also look for employees specialising in Azure, and you can get the job done for them.

If you are interested in learning more about Microsoft technologies, do not hesitate to give Opus Solution a call. We are a business consultant in Vietnam, specializing in consulting and providing solutions of Microsoft besides Power BI.

Recently, we have just built and launched eoffice solution, Tasken eOffice, which integrates the most advanced features, not only to help you save costs and time, but also improve the productivity of your business.

9. Improved Cloud Connectivity helps build Hybrid Solutions

Azure cloud service is integrated and dynamic, providing a wide range of connections such as content delivery networks (CDN) and virtual private networks (VPN). These hybrid connections, along with Express Route, improve usability and compatibility.

Other cloud service providers aren’t providing these services which place Azure on the top of the table.

10. Net Support

While .Net may be one of the oldest coding languages in software development, it is easily understood by experienced professionals and widely used by business enterprises. Microsoft Azure has in-built for .net applications to make it easier for both seasoned and new developers to use its functionality.

Other cloud service providers like Amazon AWS have abandoned .Net. Therefore, Azure is the trusted platform for executing .Net application for most organisations.

Conclusion

Microsoft Azure is an all-round cloud computing service provider that combines cost-effectiveness with compatibility. It provides an integrated service where you can get it all at one place from hosting your websites, creating apps to making the network secure.

Acquiring Azure certification can boost your chances of working with large-scale enterprises and become eligible for lucrative payouts.

IndiaWest

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Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention, which was at the preview stage back in July, is the latest addition to the Microsoft Information Protection family of products that are available with E5/A5 subscriptions. It specially adds data loss protection capabilities to devices, and is integrated with the Windows 10 operating system, the Microsoft Edge browser and Microsoft 365 applications.

Microsoft Information Protection

“Microsoft Information Protection” is a sort of umbrella term covering four broad-category data security products, which are available with E5/A5 subscriptions, although Microsoft Information Protection is also one of those products. Here they are, as listed at this Microsoft promo page:

• Azure Information Protection
• Microsoft Information Protection
• Microsoft Cloud App Security, and
• Windows Information Protection

Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention specifically falls under the Microsoft Information Protection product line, a Microsoft spokesperson clarified via e-mail. Typically, organizations pay for an E5/A5 subscription and get the whole Microsoft Information Protection bundle of products, rather than buying ala carte.

That’s really it in a nutshell. It can seem a little confusing because Microsoft has various data loss protection offerings, too, which appear to do the same thing. Here’s how the spokesperson characterized the Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) product line and those data loss protection capabilities:

Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) is a built-in, intelligent, unified, and extensible solution to protect sensitive data across an enterprise — in Microsoft 365 cloud services, on-premises, third-party SaaS applications, and more. MIP provides a unified set of capabilities to know your data, protect your data, and prevent data loss across Microsoft 365 Apps (e.g., Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook) and services (e.g., Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Intranet, and Exchange). MIP provides a common classification mechanism that is already used to prevent data loss in multiple workloads — e.g., via Teams Data Loss Prevention (DLP). In addition to MIP, Microsoft has long offered DLP solutions in Office365 Vietnam, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and more recently, in Microsoft Teams. We are now extending MIP and our DLP capabilities to the endpoint with Endpoint Data Loss Prevention.

The data loss protection aspect entails using a service to check if sensitive information, such as credit card numbers or Social Security numbers, are included in employee communications. The service lets IT pros set policies on what actions to take in such instances. Actions might include blocking the sharing of information, or a copy process may get blocked. End users can get warned as part of policy, if wanted.

Microsoft uses the same data classification approach across all Microsoft Information Protection solutions, a Microsoft Tech Community post explained:

Endpoint DLP uses the same classification technology as our other MIP solutions, providing consistent discovery of sensitive content across Microsoft 365 Apps (Office 365), Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams. With over 100 sensitive information types and built-in policy templates, it’s easy to turn on Endpoint DLP to identify sensitive data across common industry regulations and compliance-related data types.

IT pros would access the new Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention service via the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center portal.

What About Azure Information Protection?

The Azure Information Protection product in the Microsoft Information Protection product line is kind of a holdover. It’s there to support organizations that haven’t yet made the shift to “Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise (formerly Office 365 ProPlus),” the spokesperson explained. Azure Information Protection, despite its Azure name, protects Office 365 apps, but only on the Windows platform.

“Microsoft Information Protection is the more comprehensive solution, bringing together parts of the Enterprise Mobility & Security suite, Office 365, and Windows 10 as a part of Microsoft 365,” the spokesperson explained.

Data Loss Prevention Previews

On top of the Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention product reaching general availability release status, Microsoft announced a few previews. One of those previews is a new dashboard within the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center portal that shows alerts based on policies set with the Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention service.

In addition, Microsoft is previewing the ability to use sensitivity labels as a condition when setting up Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention policies. These labels get applied to files, with descriptors such as “public” or “confidential,” for instance. IT pros can set up the actions to take when sharing such labeled content. Actions might be specified when people try to share files with people located outside an organization, for example.

If you are interested in learning more about Microsoft technologies, do not hesitate to give Opus Solution a call. We are a business consultant in Vietnam, specializing in consulting and providing solutions of Microsoft.

“DLP policies using sensitivity labels apply to Exchange Online email messages, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams and Windows 10 devices,” the Microsoft Tech Community post clarified.

In a bit of ancillary news, Microsoft also announced the ability to use Exchange Transfer Rules controls “directly in Unified DLP for Exchange,” which is at the preview stage. The “Unified” term seems to just mean that these capabilities are available through the common management portal.

Redmondmag

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With Microsoft’s channel partners numbering in the hundreds of thousands worldwide, getting recognized in the company’s annual Partner of the Year Awards is never a small feat.

Microsoft handed out the awards in 49 categories last month, chosen from among 3,300 nominations.

Since the awards were announced, CRN has been speaking with several of the Microsoft Partner of the Year winners in key growth markets.

The solution providers stood out for their differentiated approaches in Power BI data analytics, Teams calling and meetings, and Azure-based IoT, according to Microsoft.

What follows are the top takeaways from the three solution providers: Slalom Consulting, Continuant and Mariner.

Slalom Consulting

2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year-Power BI

For Slalom Consulting, No. 30 on CRN’s 2020 Solution Provider 500, tackling Power BI data and analytics projects is all about empowering customers to understand the direction of their business, two Slalom executives told CRN.

“When you define where you’re going in your business, you need a good data visualization to do that,” said Dan Alling, Microsoft alliance manager at Slalom. “Power BI development Vietnam is an exceptional tool for providing that data to our customers.”

Seattle-based Slalom was recognized with the Partner of the Year award in Power BI development thanks to its work for an international retailer, which involved giving store managers real-time data about the products on the shelf and the flow of customers.

The work enabled the store managers to “operationally adjust in real time with dashboards—in terms of when stock-outs were going to happen, or what promotions were working, or just the overall customer experience that they ultimately were having,” Alling said. “They were able to meet customer demand through a dashboard of data that was accurate—versus just managing by gut.”

The deployment replaced a “very clunky process with non-real-time reports that weren’t updated, that weren’t at their fingertips,” he said. “Now they had a mobile-friendly view to be able to see exactly in real time what the experience was, and to be able to adjust accordingly.”

Andrew Houston, managing director of the Microsoft relationship at Slalom, said that to make the project happen, a lot of work had to be done initially in Azure solutions.

“The project was the culmination of a lot of preceding work around getting the data structures, the data environment established properly—to be able to bring in data about the customer and about the store and about the products from many different places, and get them into an Azure database,” Houston said. “And then from there, we were able to build the reporting on top of a trusted and relied data source.”

The project concluded at the end of February, just before the COVID-19 crisis reached the U.S.—hitting many retailers hard.

However, the project is “a long-term opportunity for [the customer] to build the right infrastructure and the right reporting environment,” Alling said. “The concept was developed pre-COVID. The reality will be completely felt in a post-COVID environment, where you’re going to have to be more strategic and more capable.”

For Slalom overall, the crisis has created growing demand for solutions and services. The company’s Microsoft business is up about 40 percent so far in 2020 compared with last year.

“There are a lot of customers that are realizing they have to accelerate a lot of the conversations and transformation they’ve been thinking about—and do it sooner. Because they need to build more virtual storefronts, find ways to engage with the customers who aren’t going to be physically present, find ways to engage with their teams who aren’t all in one place,” Houston said. “So a lot of the things we’ve been talking about, and that Microsoft’s been talking about, around digital transformation—those conversations and that work has started to accelerate. Because there’s a real need to figure out how to get it done faster.”

Ultimately during this crisis, “while some of our customers’ industries have been hit particularly hard, even the ones that have not been impacted directly, they’re impacted on their ability to transform their business in a new environment,” Alling said. “And so that lends well to Microsoft and Slalom, and really enabling our customers to do more with technology.”

Continuant

2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year-Calling and Meetings for Microsoft Teams

Continuant is leveraging its decades-long experience in managing telephony and unified communications services for customers in its approach to enabling Teams usage, two Continuant executives told CRN.

The solution provider has been a Microsoft partner since 2005, and throughout its partnership has been looking to take customers running on telephony solutions into UC and collaboration, said Jon Shelby, vice president of business development at Continuant.

As a result, Tacoma, Wash.-based Continuant has amassed both a large customer base and a “high level of expertise around calling and meetings,” Shelby said. “That’s led very well into the Teams migrations that we do. We have a lot of expertise around legacy environments and what customers expect out of them—and it makes for a smooth transition, and a high level of adoption, as we take those customers to Teams.”

Part of that expertise comes into play when transitioning customers from legacy phone systems to Teams because they’re not always directly comparable on features, said David Ellis, vice president of collaboration at Continuant.

“So you need a company that understands both sides of that. You need somebody who understands the legacy phone system, and understands the Teams platform, and how to translate requirements and functionality between those two platforms,” Ellis said. “I think that’s really where our market differentiator lies—we are very good at translating the old to the new, and making sure that all the business requirements and functionality is captured.”

In some cases, there have been “years and years of feature-building within a legacy environment to get those to work the way they did, and they’re different in Teams,” Shelby said. “So we have to look at adoption and change management, and how that feature is going to translate to Teams.”

For one major customer, Continuant oversaw the migration of more than 20,000 users—spread across 33 countries—to Teams from a prior voice solution in mid-2019. The customer is expected to see cost savings of $18 million in the first five years by using Teams.

Continuant’s key differentiator is its “understanding of the business requirements that tended to drive feature sets within legacy environments,” Shelby said. “We understand the business requirements and how they’re going to be applied to Teams. So when you look at the operations side of our business, the architecture, the design engineering, the deployment engineering folks—many of them came from backgrounds in Avaya, Cisco, etc. So they really have a tight connection and understand what that transition needs to look like.”

One of the big focus areas for Continuant with Teams has been around governance since Teams is a “truly unified platform—where you have calling, meetings, file-sharing, co-authoring, calendaring—everything in one pane of glass,” Ellis said.

“There’s a lot of open architecture where you can really make it work for you. And so you have to govern that and figure out how your organization is going to consume that responsibly,” he said. “And so our ECM [enterprise content management] practice really helps our clients envision what the future could look like—but then also puts healthy guardrails around that so that they can function effectively.”

The high demand for Teams has kept Continuant busier than ever this year, the solution provider’s executives told CRN. “We’re just slammed all day, every day at this point,” Shelby said.

While some customers are just now deciding to get onto Teams and seeking out help with that, others “kind of threw Teams out there in a rushed fashion” and are looking to fine-tune the deployments and usage, Shelby said.

“They’re coming back to us now saying, ‘We’ve got to clean this thing up. We need to get some adoption change management. We’ve got to make sure we’re using this the right way and get it fully deployed across our community,’” he said.

Mariner

2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year-Internet of Things

Mariner is working to vastly improve the yields in manufacturing through the use of enhanced visual inspection, deep learning and analytics, which leverage Microsoft Azure technologies, CEO Philip Morris told CRN.

“There are companies out there doing smart factory but almost no one is doing the visual inspection,” Morris said. “We now have the ability to collect telemetry from the production lines, collect quality data from the visual inspection system, and correlate the two. And then we help customers understand the conditions in which they produce the best-quality product.”

Charlotte, N.C.-based Mariner initially deployed its solution with a global glass manufacturer, which had a vision system that wasn’t highly accurate—leading to “false rejects,” where the company ended up scrapping pieces of glass that were actually of sellable quality.

Mariner’s solution—Spyglass Visual Inspection—involves training a deep learning model on an edge server, collecting images off the vision system and then performing inference on the images. The system then connects back to the production line to instantaneously provide information on whether the piece passes or fails.

For the glass manufacturer customer, Mariner was able to reduce the false reject rate from 25 percent to 0.2 percent, Morris said. The company went on to get similar results with a second customer, a manufacturer of automotive interiors.

“What we like to tell our customers is that our visual inspection system will be as accurate as your best inspector on their best day,” Morris said.

Mariner’s system currently leverages Azure IoT Edge, although the solution provider is planning to standardize on Microsoft’s Azure Stack Edge once it becomes generally available.

The solution also goes beyond eliminating false rejects, Morris noted.

“If a defect should start occurring in a frequency that exceeds the normal threshold, we can alert the customer—so that in real time they can reduce defects,” Morris said. “So it’s not just about identifying defects more accurately, but also now being proactive to try to reduce the creation of the defects in the first place.”

Following its initial customer wins, Mariner now has 50 deals in the pipeline across sub-industries including carpeting, textiles, glass and automotive, he said.

While many manufacturers are currently operating factories with reduced personnel amid the pandemic, “they still have the problems they had before COVID,” Morris said. “The more progressive manufacturers are seeing this as an opportunity to get out ahead of the competition for when things open up full blast.”

Our company – Opus Solution is a business consultant in Vietnam, specializing in consulting and providing solutions of Microsoft. Do not hesitate to contact us if you need more advice on these technology solutions.

CRN

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Use of Cloud server with Microsoft Azure solutions gives the freedom to build, manage, and deploy servers on a vast, global network using innovative frameworks and tools. Cloud technologies like Azure have redefined the way we do business with secure and scalable cloud-enabled enterprise applications. Globally, 80-90% of Fortune 500 enterprises are using Azure to drive their business. Companies can instantly build, deploy, and manage easy to complex apps with ease using Azure cloud services. Azure supports an extensive range of frameworks, operating systems, programming languages, devices, and databases, allowing companies to leverage technologies and tools they trust.

Azure is a fast-growing and industry-leading cloud service. It helps companies speed up their business process and gives the reliability of the IT infrastructures. Some of the best services Azure delivers are compute services, infrastructure as service (IaaS), web apps hosting, databases, API management, mobile apps and application integrations, analytics, and DevOps. Azure is also a competent platform for HA (high availability) and Disaster Recovery. Besides, Azure perfectly complements other existing MS products like Dynamics CRM, Outlook, Sharepoint Intranet, and Office365.

Microsoft Azure is at the forefront of growing cloud trend, making Azure certification and training the perfect choice for both individuals and corporations. Chiefly, SMEs can benefit from hosting their business infrastructure entirely on the Cloud. So, adding up Microsoft Azure certification in their employee’s credentials can help them keep pace with existing tech roles and requirements.

Let’s have a quick look at the Azure growth:

• Gartner ranked Microsoft Azure as a solo central cloud platform and industry leader for both platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
• A 2019 report from Gartner revealed that market share of Microsoft’s Azure hit 60% between 2017 and
• Synergy Research Group closely monitors trends and noticed 37% overall growth year-over-year in the public cloud. They stated that it had taken merely two years for the public PaaS and IaaS markets to double, and their prediction shows them doubling in size within the next three years.

Image source: Latest Public Cloud Market Share and Beyond

• The revenue of MS Azure has continuously grown from 72% from 2018, from USD 7.56 billion to USD 13 billion.

Image source: Spiceworks storage trends 2020 and beyond-Marketing reports

Considering more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Microsoft Azure for their app management and data storage requirements, it is no surprise that Microsoft has turned out as synonymous with cloud computing. But what, exactly, is MS Azure Cloud?

What exactly is Microsoft Azure?

Formerly called Windows Azure, MS Azure is the most popular and industry-leading cloud computing platform that provides full and hybrid-based cloud computing solutions for businesses of different sizes. It offers infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS) and supports different frameworks, programming languages, and tools. At its core, Azure also provides a Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution that gives businesses the tools they require to backup crucial data with customization for particular situations.

This cloud-based platform provides a series of cloud services for analytics, compute, storage, and networking. Azure can secure data from your SQL servers, Exchange, SharePoint, and local folders and files. This data is stored up remotely and can be accessed anytime it is needed. Azure is also Amazon Web Services (AWS) next competitor, offering over 600 different services in over 15 varied categories; Azure is rapidly catching up to AWS in terms of market share and innovation.

Five Business Benefits of Microsoft Azure

Here are the five crucial advantages to consider if you are taking a closer look at MS Azure for your business today:

1. Microsoft Azure is secure

Microsoft designed the Azure cloud platform based on the industry-leading Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) procedure. Microsoft’s global data centers are designed to ensure that data is secured and protected. It also provides excellent compliance coverage with more than fifty compliance offerings. Azure offers enterprises a maintained and monitored infrastructure, with off-site backups and a variety of security measures, such as, security monitoring, patch management, and cryptographic protection messages. Through its multiple-layered security model, Microsoft assists enterprises ward off DDoS attacks, malware, data breaches, and other evolving cyber threats. In short, you can be confident that you are getting the high-end security with Azure.

2. MS Azure comes with an amalgamation of PaaS and IaaS services

Azure comes with a blend of the platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) that allows companies to outsource infrastructure on the Azure cloud platform and pay for what they use. Platform as a service (PaaS) helps them develop solutions and build their web applications without extra expense on the underlying groundwork. Even competent Azure consultants from the Microsoft Partner Community collaborate with corporate to leverage Azure Platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to build enterprise next-gen applications apps on the Cloud for faster business growth.

3. Fully flexible and scalable

One of Azure’s crucial business benefits is that it is fully scalable, and you only pay for what you require. Like most cloud-based solutions, Azure can scale down or up to meet your business’s fickle requirements. Using the Cloud model with Azure also means that your experts can also work securely from anywhere on any device linked to the internet, leading to great collaboration throughout your organization. The public cloud framework of MS Azure allows enterprises to increase their computing power and storage space on demand, guaranteeing the utmost capacity during long-term expansion projects and short-term traffic bursts. This fantastic cloud platform has been designed to scale alongside companies, meaning customers can fine-tune their service agreements to avoid the distraction of their high-load apps.

4. Enterprise-level development tools

With Azure, companies can effortlessly build, deploy and maintain their web apps using various familiar tools (like Python, Kubernetes, .NET, Java, etc.) and programming languages (such as Visual Basic, C#, C++, and others). This scalability permits enterprises to make next-gen apps for mobile and web devices, while using multiple management resources, from container orchestration to automated updates.  Even enterprises can easily hire Azure certified consultants. Additionally, Azure’s comprehensive development platform features dedicated test environments that support enterprises to optimize their internal web applications and client-facing experiences.

5. Cost-efficient Model

Its pay-as-you-go model lets the organizations pay for what they utilize to build or expand resources using Azure could solutions. The consumption-based pricing structure of Microsoft Azure allows SMEs to manage their IT funds better and leverage the specific cloud traits they require. Besides, this usage-based model cuts down administrative costs and decreases overall infrastructure costs, thus reducing the extra load placed on internal IT management. If issues happen, users are backed by its extensive 24 hrs support group and knowledge base. The tech giant operates in fifty-five different regions globally and is accessible to 140 nations, making MS Azure well-matched to SMEs with a global reach.

Why do IT Professionals need to take Microsoft Azure Certification? 

The requirement to pursue Microsoft Azure certification is observed in high demand. It is projected that the cloud business will almost double from USD 229 billion in 2019, which demonstrates its wide-scale usage and necessities. The cloud computing platforms like AWS, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and MS Azure are the cutting-edge platforms that are high in demand and provide a promising future to the IT professionals. Through Azure Certification, the IT field professionals can quickly learn to use various cloud-based technologies and manage to secure their position at a decent pay scale. Companies can easily find varieties of MS Azure Role-Based Certifications for the interested candidates to select from and gain the facts of the new-age cloud computing system introduced by Microsoft.

Wrapping Up

As many enterprises and organizations move towards Azure Cloud services, the demand for qualified MS Azure certified professionals is high.  The certifications are aimed at different job roles in the cloud domain, such as Cloud Developer, Cloud Administrator, DevOps engineer, and Cloud Solutions Architect. MS Azure technical training courses provide great insights into Azure fundamentals, executing infrastructure solutions, developing MS Azure and web services, and operationalize Cloud Analytics solutions. Microsoft Azure certification training course will equip the IT professionals with practical and theoretical knowledge to become experts.

Nowsaday, almost every major companies and corporations are gradually applying technological solutions to their business. In order not to be left behind in this race, do not hesitate to contact our company – Opus Solution – a business consultant in Vietnam, specializing in providing potential technology solutions to enhance your business performance.

Wire19

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While an existing system could track available hospital beds, state officials couldn’t necessarily tell whether a particular facility had enough ventilators, staffing or equipment like masks or gloves to protect doctors or nurses. Hospitals focused on identifying and treating infected patients in the early days of the outbreak struggled to track resources, using a mix of everything from databases and spreadsheets to emails and Post-It notes.

In late March, the Washington State Department of Health approached Microsoft about expanding a cloud-based Hospital Emergency Response Solution powered by Azure. Developed at the request of healthcare providers seeing the first surge of patients, it allowed those hospitals to better track COVID-19 cases, which clinicians were available to treat those patients and critical equipment and supplies that were becoming hard to find around the globe.

“We all do surge planning and we cache equipment but this exceeded everyone’s planning as we saw everyone wanting the same things on a global scale,” said Erika Henry, emergency operations manager for the Washington Department of Health.

At the same time, Microsoft also began experiencing phenomenal demand for its cloud services as much of the world began sheltering at home due to COVID-19: Entire school districts moved to online learning models, Teams meetings moved from a convenience to an essential way of doing business, kids embraced video games as an outlet for interacting with friends and millions of employees across the globe moved to remote work practically overnight.

At the end of March, for instance, Microsoft Teams set a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day, up from 900 million minutes just two weeks earlier. In April, that number climbed to 4.1 billion meeting minutes in a single day. Suddenly, Microsoft 365’s teamwork hub that allows people to meet, chat, call and collaborate online was seeing unprecedented usage.

Meanwhile, employees worked across the company to ensure Azure services could continue to scale and to help customers and organizations on the front lines of the pandemic response address their most urgent needs.

Within 12 days, the state was able to launch the Washington Healthcare Emergency and Logistics Tracking Hub (WA HEALTH) built on Microsoft Power Platform, which runs on Microsoft Azure.

“This really helped us understand how do we get patients to the right care at the right place in the right amount of time and also to understand the needs for personal protective equipment across the state — who had what and where were the gaps,” Henry said.

Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure are by their nature designed to expand and scale quickly and meet elastic demand. With the more than 60 datacenter regions around the globe — including three new regions announced this past May in Italy, New Zealand and Poland — Microsoft can shift traffic if a natural disaster or power outage affects capacity in one part of the world. Computing hardware to protect against demand spikes is stockpiled in warehouses around the globe, ready to be deployed to where it’s needed most.

By March the epicenter of that demand was in Europe, as countries such as Italy and Spain imposed nationwide lockdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Around the same time, manufacturing issues in China and Southeast Asia due to the global health pandemic created a temporary disruption in the supply chain for certain datacenter hardware as dramatic spikes in usage began challenging computing capacity in some regions. In a Microsoft quarterly earnings call on April 29, the company said those hardware supply chain issues largely began resolving themselves late in the quarter that ended in March.

“The scope and the scale of the response to COVID-19 was completely unprecedented, in terms of how much of the world went digital inside a month,” said Mark Simms, a partner software architect who helped manage the COVID-19 response across Azure solutions. “So the work that we had to do to get through the initial surge in demand and free up capacity for our customers to run critical health and safety workloads was also unprecedented.”

“We made some pretty profound changes in order to do the right thing, and we did them under a very short time frame,” Simms said.

Datacenter employees began working in round-the-clock shifts to install new servers while staying at least six feet apart. Microsoft product teams worked to find any further efficiencies to free up Azure resources for other customers. The company doubled capacity on one of its own undersea cables carrying data across the Atlantic and negotiated with owners of another to open up additional capacity. Network engineers installed new hardware and tripled the deployed capacity on the America Europe Connect cable in just two weeks.

Microsoft’s plan emphasized continuity of service for all its customers, but especially for those on the front lines of the COVID-19 response: health care providers, police and emergency responders, financial institutions, manufacturers of critical supplies, grocery stores and health agencies providing critical information to the public about how quickly the virus was spreading.

The Azure Global and Customer Experience engineering teams mobilized and monitored Azure services around the clock to ensure critical customers could continue to operate smoothly and meet new challenges posed by COVID-19. Employees from across the company volunteered to switch gears to help deploy urgent projects like WA HEALTH.

Microsoft’s Regional Government Emergency Response and Monitoring Solution, on which WA HEALTH was built, uses Microsoft Power Apps Portal and Microsoft Power BI, which run on Azure, to allow healthcare workers to quickly update counts of COVID-19 cases and critical resources at the end of a shift or whenever is convenient through a web portal or by mobile phone.

As the pandemic was unfolding and cases were surging, it allowed state and local health officials to use near-real-time dashboards — based on data from more than 100 acute care hospitals around the state — to coordinate responses. It continues to allow the state to monitor trends, as well as inform decisions such as how quickly counties can move toward safely reopening their economies, Henry said.

“This was a real-time moving event, and people needed to make decisions hour by hour and minute by minute,” said Gary Bird, a principal program manager for Microsoft Power Platform who worked to deploy WA HEALTH. “You really saw the whole company lean in across all fronts to make solutions happen.”

The Washington Healthcare Emergency and Logistics Tracking Hub (WA HEALTH), which runs on Microsoft Azure, allows public health officials and hospitals across the state to track and share key information related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Balancing supply and demand

Once the pandemic hit, Microsoft’s plans to deal with unexpected spikes in usage and expand Azure’s computing resources kicked in. The company began adding new servers to the hardest hit regions and installing new hardware racks 24 hours a day. To protect the health of critical datacenter employees, Microsoft also quickly established social distancing requirements, provided protective equipment and implemented strict disinfectant policies.

Microsoft prioritized capacity for existing customers while also reserving capacity for first responders who needed to quickly scale life and safety services. It also expanded cloud support for non-profits working to protect people’s health during the pandemic.

Microsoft’s Azure and product teams worked around the clock to ensure that services like Teams, Office and Xbox could meet rapidly exploding demand from customers. Next, they looked for efficiencies across all of Microsoft services running on Azure to free up more capacity for external customers.

Microsoft Teams was the first and most obvious service to experience massive growth. But other Azure services that enable remote work, such as Windows Virtual Desktop, which saw its usage triple in one month, and Azure Active Directory’s Application Proxy had to scale those services dramatically as financial institutions, schools, call centers and other companies moved thousands of employees onto those platforms practically overnight.

Not only were new customers signing up, but suddenly existing users were relying on the tools to power every single meeting or interaction in their workday, said Mark Longton, a principal group program manager for Microsoft Teams.

“Teams went from a service that was cool and convenient and something that people realized was the future of communication to very quickly becoming a mission critical, can’t-live-without-it sort of thing,” Longton said. “Really what this did was accelerate us into the future.”

Microsoft Teams began using early data from China and Italy to plan for expected growth as the pandemic spread. As more countries went into lockdown, dozens of Redmond-based Microsoft employees gathered remotely each Sunday night to watch telemetry, look for bottlenecks and troubleshoot as unprecedented numbers of remote European workers began logging in first thing Monday morning.

“Normally, you find and fix issues organically as you grow. When you take software and put it under explosive growth – with services getting used an order of magnitude more in one day — you tend to find all of those in a really short period of time,” said John Sheehan, Microsoft distinguished engineer for Azure quality.

Once critical services were successfully scaled and stabilized, the company shifted to looking for efficiencies. Microsoft opened up performance data for all services running on Azure to engineers across the company, asking them to submit ideas that would allow Microsoft to provide more computing capacity to the wider pool of Azure customers.

In Teams, small tweaks that few customers would notice — lengthening the time it takes for the three dots to appear when someone else is typing in a Teams chat or disabling the feature that suggests a contact every time you type a new letter in the “to” field — made the system run much more leanly. Engineers rewrote the code to make video stream processing 10 times more efficient in a marathon push over a weekend.

Within a week, Teams was also able to spread its reserved capacity across additional datacenter regions, essentially sharing that load within geographies. That’s a process that could have easily taken months, said Aarthi Natarajan, Partner Director of Engineering for Teams.

“We would have probably said, ‘Let’s hit this region first and maybe then this one’ and there would have been a lot of debate,” she said. “In this case, we said, ‘No one is debating anything. We are doing this and we’re doing it globally right now.’”

To handle the Teams growth that now exceeds 75 million daily active users, Microsoft’s Azure Wide Area Network team added 110 terabits of capacity in just two months to the fiber optic network that carries Microsoft’s own data around the globe. It added 12 new edge sites that connect the network to infrastructure owned by local internet providers. Like off-ramps that help funnel vehicles off freeways and onto side roads, edge sites help reduce network congestion and allow data to flow more freely.

Microsoft also moved internal Azure workloads to avoid demand peaks in different parts of the world and to divert traffic from datacenter regions experiencing high demand.

Xbox, which runs on Azure, is accustomed to ramping up for large surges in usage that typically occur around the holidays or new video game releases. But the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders drove unprecedented growth from people connecting and exploring with their friends and family through gaming, including a 50% increase in multiplayer gameplay and a 30% increase in peak concurrent usage.

As this growth was occurring, Xbox and Azure worked quickly to move gaming workloads out of high demand datacenters in the United Kingdom and Asia — freeing up capacity for other Azure customers without negatively impacting the experiences of its own users.

“There’s no question that in those regions the people who were on the front lines of the COVID-19 efforts really needed that capacity more than us. And our telemetry gave us confidence that we could make these tradeoffs while protecting our customer experience,” said Casey Jacobs, who manages reliability for Xbox operations.

Microsoft also didn’t want to exacerbate network congestion that local internet service providers were experiencing as families began to work, attend college classes, stream movies and play games at home, often all at the same time. Xbox worked closely with regulators and other partners to help manage those risks to internet health, including changing release tactics and developing new features to decrease bandwidth usage during peak times of day.

“We simply knew that we can’t do harm to internet bandwidth that’s needed for first responders, business operations or commerce period,” said Jacobs.

Microsoft’s commitment to life and safety customers

Early on, Azure Partner Engineering Manager Jeremy Hollett started compiling a global list of customers that provide critical life and safety services — first responders, government agencies, health care providers, energy companies powering hospitals, retailers offering essential supplies, banks processing small business loans — as well as precisely what Azure services they use.

The list included RapidDeploy, which runs on the Microsoft Azure Government Cloud and can quickly deliver unified emergency response solutions for public safety agencies and 9-1-1 telecommunicators.

RapidDeploy has been able to quickly adapt its unified critical response solutions hosted in Microsoft Azure to better assist emergency responders and 9-1-1 telecommunicators during the COVID-19 pandemic. Image courtesy of RapidDeploy.

The city of Baltimore, for instance, requested a RadiusPlus tactical mapping deployment that went live in a matter of days to improve situational awareness including hospital bed count data, mapping data and other signals related to COVID-19 that could help 9-1-1 telecommunicators better route response teams.

After California issued its stay-at-home order to slow the spread of the coronavirus, officials expected an uptick in domestic violence incidents. The state asked RapidDeploy for an upgrade to RadiusPlus that would allow telecommunicators to initiate contact with victims via text so that they can more easily communicate, even when the perpetrator is nearby.

To help ensure that customers like RapidDeploy could continue to deliver lifesaving services without interruption, Microsoft began automatically approving requests for additional Azure capacity from life and safety customers providing essential services during the pandemic.

Hollett’s team also built a dashboard that allowed them to monitor the Azure services for each of those customers and quickly troubleshoot any issues.

“We essentially built a virtual war-room view of these customers. We wanted to know that they were healthy, and if something goes wrong in the night we’d know about it and jump on a call no matter what time it is,” Hollett said. “And if one of those critical life and safety customers created a support case, it elevated that flag straight to us.”

Steve Raucher, co-founder and CEO of RapidDeploy, said the company experienced zero problems spinning up solutions in Azure to address new challenges faced by agencies on the front lines of the COVID-19 response.

“The biggest indicator that everything is working is that we haven’t had any technical problems,” Raucher said. “The technology was working seamlessly before COVID-19, and there’s been no interruption since the pandemic began.”

Microsoft

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