The Record - Issue 19: Winter 2020

80 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om F E ATUR E with a latency of less than 10 milliseconds, ena- bling applications connected to 5G networks. Alternatively, Private Edge Zones can be placed on-premises to enable low-latency access to computing and storage services, allowing organ- isations to deploy applications and run private mobile networks. “What we’re doing now with Edge Zones is to extend the Azure cloud all the way to the far edge,” says Dougherty. “It provides the infra- structure for an operator to be able to rapidly tap into and take advantage of connectivity and those more advanced services. An edge zone gives the service provider a new set of offerings that means they can provide the infrastructure for a 5G smart factory, for example.” Fast, reliable connectivity at the network edge is particularly important to internet of things (IoT) devices, which may need to run in a variety of remote locations. Microsoft Azure’s real-time operating system, Microsoft Azure RTOS, is already deployed in over six billion IoT devices, and the company has built a large portfolio of cloud-based solutions for IoT networks and applications. The Azure IoT Central platform enables the secure provisioning of IoT applica- tions, while IoT Plug and Play simplifies device interactions with an open modelling language to reduce development time, cost and complexity. T-Systems, a division of Deutsche Telekom, is one telecommunications company taking advantage of these capabilities. Along with part- ner Ultra Tendency, it used Microsoft Azure and Azure Database for PostgreSQL to create the Telekom Data Intelligence Hub, a marketplace for data sharing that includes built-in analytics tools. The marketplace is designed to address the need for a new way to share IoT data with other parts of a business, or other companies, in a supply and distribution chain, with traditional methods of data sharing not providing the nec- essary speed, capacity or security. Features pro- vided by Azure like automatic backups, built-in high availability and elastic scalability enabled T-Systems and Ultra Tendency to save money on maintenance and operation while preparing the marketplace for the future. “Every service on the platform is pay as you go,” says Robert Neumann, CEO of Ultra Tendency. “With Azure, we’re able to give manufacturers advanced tools for creating data-driven products and services with no great upfront investment – all on a highly secure and compliant platform. Plus, we can use this solution to help public sector organisations realise the promise of smart cities, sharing IoT data on things like traffic, events, and logistics to help make citizens’ lives simpler and safer.” With operators taking advantage of 5G and cloud capabilities, the future of the telecom- munications industry may look very different in the coming years. Dougherty believes that Microsoft can play a significant role in enabling this journey. “We are going to meet the operator in all the different places in their journey towards the cloud, and this won’t happen overnight,” says Dougherty. “We’re in this for the long-haul. The environment will provide the basis for lots and lots of creativity, and there will be new ways to think about problems as this infrastructure gets built out. I think that the next five years will see dramatic change, and it’s going to be exciting to see what happens.” “I think that the next five years will see dramatic change, and it’s going to be exciting to see what happens”