When you look at Microsoft's most recent financial results, Azure is close to being a $5 billion (around £3.2 billion, AU$5.8 billion) business. That's a fraction of Microsoft's overall business, but like Office 365 it just keeps on growing – and it's where a lot of Microsoft's investment is going. That's one reason so many of the new products, features and services announced at Microsoft's recent TechEd Europe conference are in the cloud.
Some are just cloud services, like Azure Batch. This lets you split tasks that would be slow in a single virtual machine, like rendering a complex 3D scene or running complex financial calculations, and run them on multiple VMs to get a much faster result.
Azure CTO Mark Russinovich told us the advantage is "the ability to get a job done in two minutes that would usually take six hours" without having to rewrite the software you're using. "This is general-purpose high-scale computing and the scenarios are broader than what GP/GPU computing is focused on," although he did note "we're also looking at GP/GPU [for Azure]."
Hybrid offerings
But most of the other announcements focused on hybrid systems, and using cloud services to make what you do on your own computers work better.
Yes, Microsoft revealed more details of the new versions of Windows, Windows Server and Office (for both Windows and Mac OS) coming next year. They have plenty of new features from built-in two factor authentication and containers for data security and workload isolation, to major improvements for virtualising storage and networking that will give you seamless updates and failover between systems. But some key features will piggyback on cloud services.
Managing PCs and servers with the next version of System Centre (also due next year) will be rather easier if you're using Azure operational insights – a cloud service that takes all your logs and shows you a dashboard of alerts and suggestions.
Instead of running a report to see how many PCs are up to date on patches, you'll see warnings on the dashboard if you have too many unpatched systems. And instead of looking at how much disk space is left on all your servers and guessing how long that will last, the machine learning system will look at how much space gets used up every day and warn you of exactly when you'll run out.
Fresh device management tools
The new device and data management tools announced at TechEd also run in the cloud, because that's the easiest way to monitor devices people take out of the office. Office 365 already includes device management and Data Leak Prevention in Exchange Online, using Exchange Active Sync. At the end of this year it gets the additional Intune device management features you previously had to pay extra for, that let you make sure users can only get their email on a device that's set up the way you want (whether that's with a PIN or just not jailbroken). You can also remotely wipe devices and just remove business data from them – standard MDM features that will be included in your Office 365 subscription.
At the same time, DLP will protect documents in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, not just emails, using rules you set to match information like credit card numbers, blocking or encrypting them.
"We're taking what we had in Exchange and extending both the user experience and the admin experience to the rest of Office 365," Office general manager Julia White told us. And in time, "we'll extend that to Windows file servers and then in the Office applications you'll see real time policy tips – if you're using a model in Excel we can say 'hey, this has sensitive data, please encrypt it'."
Early next year the Intune service will get the promised Office for iPad management features that let you stop users moving data from Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook or OneDrive for Business into iOS apps unless they're apps you're also managing through Intune. Microsoft will have managed viewers for PDF and multimedia files, but you'll also be able to manage your own mobile apps through Intune.
"If you have an iOS app or an Android app we'll have a tool so you can go wrap that application and bring it within the managed ecosystem on the device," senior director for enterprise mobility Alex Conway told us. "Then you can use Intune to set policy around what you want to restrict. We have the basic abilities: where you can save a file and whether you can cut, copy and paste – but we expect to have more options in time."
Intune will also let you lock down devices. "Using supervisor mode, you can set policy to turn an iPad into a kiosk with just one app on it; you can't even rotate the device or change the volume if you want to set it that way," Conway said.
Azure introductions
Another new Azure service lets you set up single sign-on for your own web apps running on your own server by making them available through the Azure Active Directory Proxy (Azure AD already gives you single sign-on for cloud services like Box and Twitter). To make that easier to set up, there's a new Azure AD Connect wizard that links your Active Directory system to Azure.
The Internet of Things is another place the cloud makes sense, and Microsoft expects businesses to be using IoT devices sooner rather than later, and analysing the information from those devices in Azure with new services announced at TechEd: Event Hubs (for collecting data from sensors) and Stream Analytics (for processing that data).
It's not just London Underground putting sensors on every train, elevator and escalator to help predict when they'll need maintenance or Coca Cola tracking when Freestyle drinks kiosks need refilling – shops can use a sensor like Kinect to find out how much time people spend looking at different product displays to see if they're able to find what they're looking for. You might pull that data into Excel PowerView or PowerMaps to analyse it, then send the information to a mobile app for shop assistants to use.
Increasingly, the way businesses use technology is a mix of PCs, mobile devices, their own servers and cloud services. Microsoft is trying to come up with systems businesses will use all of those ways, plus enabling firms to manage the different devices and services they're using. That's why this year's TechEd was such a hybrid mix.
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