I am happy to share that Azure Application Gateway now supports mutual transport layer security (mTLS) and online certificate status protocol (OCSP). This was one of the key questions from our customers as they were looking for more secure communication options for the cloud workloads. Here, I cover what mTLS is, how it works, when to consider it, and how to verify it in Application Gateway. What is mTLS? Mutual transport layer security (TLS) is a communication process where both parties verify and authenticate each other’s digital certificates prior to setting up an encrypted TLS connection ..read more

Persistent volatility in the retail market is forcing businesses to re-evaluate how they address key challenges. Prebuilt, edge-to-cloud, retail-specific technology solutions can help retailers increase the value of their data, empower store associates, elevate customer shopping experiences, and enable real-time sustainable supply chains. Many retailers leverage Microsoft Cloud partners to get more insights out of their data using Microsoft Azure coupled with edge technologies, Internet of Things (IoT), and AI. Together these can not only help manage daily operations, but can also create more ..read more

IoT technologies continue to evolve in power and sophistication. Enterprises are combining cloud-to-edge solutions to connect complex environments and deliver results never before imagined. In the past eight years, Azure IoT has seen significant growth across many industry sectors, including manufacturing, energy, consumer goods, transportation, healthcare, and retail. It has played a leading role in helping customers achieve better efficiency, agility, and sustainability outcomes. In 2021, Gartner positioned Microsoft as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Industrial IoT Platforms for ..read more

When summer 2021 ended, many organizations faced the formidable challenge of how to return to their places of work and school safely. Tuskegee University (Tuskegee) was one of them—not only was the safe return of students and faculty to school a priority but since Tuskegee is in a community with no hospital, controlling exposure was essential. At the time, Tuskegee encountered many challenges, including but not limited to a statewide shortage of testing kits, inability to handle the broadscale logistics of testing, contact tracing, and figuring out a simplified way to report on statu ..read more

While every industry is vulnerable to a ransomware attack, manufacturers are at a particular risk. While digitization and automation have helped transform the industry, it has simultaneously opened up new attack vectors within organizations. Now the most targeted industry, the manufacturing industry, has seen a 300 percent increase in cyberattacks in a single year. Beyond the tremendous growth in attacks, manufacturing companies make an ideal target for hackers due to the high value of the companies themselves, the high costs of unplanned downtime, and the highly visible impact that downtime h ..read more

For Microsoft Azure IoT, our approach is connecting devices at the edge to the cloud seamlessly and securely to help customers achieve desired business outcomes. At this year’s Embedded World 2022, we’ll share how our Azure IoT solutions are delivering enhanced device security, seamless cloud integration, and device certification. One of the key ways we’re delivering cost-efficient and energy-efficient solutions to IoT customers at Embedded World is with new Arm64 support. Partners such as NXP, with i.MX 8M SoC processors, are bringing full Windows IoT Enterprise capabilities in ..read more

This post was co-authored by Stuart Bailey, Product Director, Capita Healthcare Decisions This blog is part of a series in collaboration with our partners and customers leveraging the newly announced Azure Health Data Services. Azure Health Data Services, a platform as a service (PaaS) offering designed exclusively to support Protected Health Information (PHI) in the cloud is a new way of working with unified data—providing care teams with a platform to support both transactional and analytical workloads from the same data store and enabling cloud computing to transform how we develop and deli ..read more

The convergence of HPC+AI has opened new pathways for companies and developers worldwide to develop innovative, transformative applications. While this presents a plethora of new business opportunities in fields like academic research, climate modeling, and energy sustainability, they also push the boundaries of compute, data, and process capabilities of the underlying infrastructure so they can perform the way they were intended. Microsoft Azure is committed to providing those capabilities through a continual improvement cycle that incorporates the newest and fastest processors into the cloud ..read more

Since March 1, 2022, a new Azure region in North China will gain unrestricted access by customers, which adds the fifth Azure region to the China market and doubles the capacity of Microsoft’s intelligent cloud portfolio in China. Announced in 2012, and officially launched in March 2014 with two initial regions, Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet was the first international public cloud service that became generally available in the China market. Following Azure, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform operated by 21Vianet successively launched in China in ..read more

The Asia-Pacific region has long been a strong manufacturing base and the sector continues to be a strong adopter of the Internet of Things (IoT). But as the latest Microsoft IoT Signals report shows, IoT is now much more widely adopted across verticals, and across the globe, with smart spaces—a key focus for many markets in the Asia-Pacific region—becoming one of the leading application areas. The newest edition of this report provides encouraging reading for organizations in the Asia-Pacific region. The global study of over 3,000 business decision-makers (BDMs), developers, and internet tech ..read more