Elly Yates-Roberts |
Microsoft has launched new capabilities to create a smarter and more streamlined and secure internet of things (IoT). These solutions aim to help customers embrace IoT to drive better business outcomes and improve safety by predicting and preventing equipment failures, optimising space and energy management in smart buildings, improving patient outcomes and worker safety, tracking assets across a supply chain, and more.
“At Microsoft, we are committed to building a trusted, easy-to-use platform that allows our customers and partners to build seamless, smart, secure solutions regardless of where they are in the IoT journey,” said Sam George, corporate vice president of Azure IoT at Microsoft. “That’s why we are investing US$5 billion in IoT and intelligent edge — technology that is accelerating ubiquitous computing and bringing unparalleled opportunity across industries.”
Microsoft is working to make IoT seamless with its IoT application platform IoT Central. It provides solution builders with the built-in security, scale and extensibility needed to develop enterprise-grade IoT solutions. New features include:
• 11 new industry-focused application templates to accelerate solution building across retail, healthcare, government and energy
• Application programming interface (API) support for extending IoT Central or integrating it with other solutions
• IoT Edge support to help customers deploy cloud workloads directly to connected devices
• Custom user roles for fine-grained access control to data, actions and configurations in the system
The firm is also making IoT smarter through the Azure IoT Hub, which helps enterprise developers reduce costs and optimise operations through IoT cloud applications. Azure Maps customers can now add geospatial weather intelligence into their applications for weather-based targeted marketing, in partnership with AccuWeather.
In addition, Microsoft will make the Azure Sphere generally available in February 2020. Microsoft Azure Sphere aims to secure the intelligent edge and IoT from the silicon hardware to the cloud, while also giving customers flexibility and control. For example, Qualcomm and Microsoft have partnered to develop mobile hardware for the Azure Sphere IoT operating system.
Find out more about Microsoft’s efforts to enhance IoT.