Invaluable Insights: Learnings from the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2024

The Microsoft MVP Global Summit this month was a fantastic opportunity for our team to listen and learn from 2000+ community leaders, in person at Microsoft’s global headquarters in Redmond, WA and virtually. For those that are not familiar with this community, Microsoft MVPs are independent experts who have demonstrated deep technical expertise and leadership in their fields. They voluntarily share their industry knowledge and passion for Microsoft technologies with the community. The annual summit provides a unique and important opportunity to learn from these experts and connect with the community, providing valuable insights that influence our product roadmap.

Like many of the events in which we have a chance to interact with customers, partners, or technical experts, some of the greatest benefit is found not in our opportunity to share our latest strategy, vision, and roadmap, but in what is shared with us while we listen to feedback. Across several tracks, our engineering teams shared our vision for Azure’s adaptive cloud approach across hybrid, multicloud, edge, and IoT.

Today, I want to reflect on some of the insights and highlights our team took away from the event:

Modernizing security for a distributed environment – More than ever before, security is top of mind for every customer and partner. Our Microsoft MVPs are constantly innovating and exploring new ways to secure their applications and data across different environments and platforms. They understand the challenges and opportunities of hybrid, multicloud, and edge scenarios, where security is an important aspect contributing to overall reliability, performance, and compliance. MVPs recognize that enabling edge environments with the same advanced security features as the cloud with Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel is a major advantage.

Centrally managing resources across hybrid, multicloud, and edge – Microsoft MVPs are leveraging the Azure control plane to manage and operate resources across hybrid, multicloud, and edge scenarios with consistent tools and policies. They use Azure Arc to extend Azure services and management to any infrastructure, Azure Lighthouse to govern and secure multiple tenants and subscriptions, and Azure Stack HCI to run cloud applications on-premises or at the edge. Microsoft MVPs have subject matter expertise in designing, implementing, and operating edge environments. The use cases they shared help us understand where we have opportunities to improve how customers can manage those environments centrally from the cloud.

Application innovation at the edge – Companies are modernizing their applications at the edge by using container-based development leveraging Kubernetes, IoT, and cloud-native tooling. These technologies enable them to deliver faster, more reliable, and more secure solutions across different environments and devices. With Azure Arc and Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, MVPs are delivering a consistent experience across cloud and edge while modernizing applications at the edge. Their feedback informs the next round of Azure Arc platform investments that we are delivering this year.

Best practices – Through the excitement and deep technical expertise of our Microsoft MVPs, we received invaluable insights on our products as well as the customer environments and solution ecosystems. MVPs shared that customers face challenges when trying to build end-to-end solutions with heterogenous assets, a resource constrained device landscape, and cost pressures. We will continue our focus on documenting best practices, hardware targets, and architecture blueprints for accelerating deployments.

The granular understanding that MVPs share with the product team through customer insights, product feedback, and market trends helps us improve our solutions, making them more relevant and useful for our customers and partners. Through these personal, candid interactions with our MVPs, we also gain a deeper appreciation of the impact that our technology has on everyday life and businesses all over the world.

I want to take the opportunity to say thank you to all the Microsoft MVPs. We are incredibly grateful to benefit from your insights. You are an invaluable part of our community, and we appreciate your dedication, passion, and enthusiasm for our products and services. Thank you for being our most valuable professionals!

If you are interested in becoming an MVP, you can learn more about the program and the nomination process here: https://mvp.microsoft.com/