Microsoft Ignite 2024: Embracing AI, Security, and Adaptive Cloud

Discovering the Latest Innovations and Trends at Microsoft Ignite 2024 and What They Mean for You

I’m here at Microsoft Ignite 2024, fresh from the keynote session with Satya – and as usual, Microsoft continues to transform the way people and organizations approach work, and their own lives.

It was a wild ride from end to end, with Satya warning us right off the bat that this would be a breadth of updates, followed by sessions to fill out the depth. He wasn’t wrong – and here’s my guide to the key three themes I took away, shared alongside 10,000 in-person attendees (including my fellow Microsoft MVPs) and over 250,000 virtual participants.

Security First and Foremost?

Security was woven throughout – Satya emphasized the role of Copilot and AI as a new universal interface, sitting ahead of reasoning & planning, and memory and content… and if we’re adopting this new interface, then naturally this needs to be secured.?

Satya emphasized Microsoft’s Security First Initiative, as well as the world’s largest open hack program with a bounty for helping to secure Microsoft products.?

At every level, this was message reinforced, from features targeted to securing data and access at the business level, with new data posture controls released from Purview; to a developer experience that reduces the burden on the tool-builders and craftspeople of today.??

Developers today can use GitHub Advanced Security in combination with related tools like GitHub Autofix to identify potential security vulnerabilities and stop them before they are released into the wild.?

What does this mean for you? Well, the picture sounds rosy – but this means there’s still plenty of work to do. Microsoft is now providing the tools, and in all our various roles, from craftspeople, to the people who will use these solutions day-in, day-out, the burden of governance will increase. This is necessary – but someone will need to identify your organizational sources of truth, your approach to onboarding and access control, as well as the rules your organizational will impose around data access. To maintain a secure posture, investment of time and resources is needed.?

AI isn’t a fad – it’s part of our Agentic World?

Expanding on this theme of the new universal interface, the discussion turned to how we build an agentic world, woven together between personal agents, organizational agents, business process agents, and organizations that work between organizations.?

To power this, Microsoft announced Azure AI Foundry – the same tooling which powers Microsoft’s own suite of products, bringing together an end-to-end stack of models, data, content safety, governance, and observability.?

This stack is the piece we’ve been waiting for, and as an organization you are now able to stitch together your data (systems of record, like D365), defined in your domains (domains defined in Microsoft Fabric), pulled from your data pipelines, through your infrastructure (anywhere from cloud to edge), all secured with your governance rules and principles (Purview).?

These technologies, combined with reference architectures to adopt AI at scale, really reduces the time to value to create new agents, and helps to solve common enterprise architecture problems like tracking your data supply chain, data being propagated from system to system & munged in different ways.??

What does this mean for you? These changes are positive, providing the keys to take AI proof-of-concepts to scale in a standardized way; or re-work existing production deployments to use a homogenous architecture which is easier to manage. However – your organization will need to think about how you architect Digital Core, and who will define your data domains, to ensure you can take advantage of your AI investments to reap productivity and efficiency rewards.?

Adaptive Cloud?

Finally, we round off with adaptive cloud – an intriguing approach to global infrastructure, which supports global organizations that have various different needs around data sovereignty, multi-cloud needs, edge workloads, and local datacenters.?

So… what is it? Azure Local enables you to deploy Azure services out of the cloud, and manage critical workloads in the best form factor. Replacing Azure Stack, and supporting devices from smaller servers to datacenters that may be in-house, or hosted by regional cloud vendors.?

Further, Azure Arc, as the enabler, lets you use the best of Azure Services – from serverless Azure Functions to logic apps.?

This one is a gamechanger – in my words – bring your own Azure, and take advantage of Azure-native cloud services wherever your cloud may be. Even if it is another person’s datacenter ;)?

What does this mean for you? These tools provide a single pane of glass to manage every part of your IT estate in one place, reducing your operational overheads, whilst ensuring complete visibility into what, and how your systems are deployed. Equally: “bringing your own Azure” is an odd concept to get your head around, and again to ensure this isn’t just another tool your teams log into, adoption can’t be half-in.?

Want to know more??

If you’d like to talk about any of these topics, from security, to agentic AI, to adaptive cloud – please feel free to reach out, or you can watch Avanade’s Digital IQ episodes.?

More whimiscally, you can also enjoy a great AI-generated podcast interview, generated by Fergus Kidd , using the donation of voices from myself, and Zoe Wilson . (Maybe have some popcorn.)?

Finally, if you’re in Chicago, you can find me proudly wearing my Avanade scarf, representing 微软 SI Partner of the Year 2024! Please say hi!?

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