Microsoft Offers ‘Internet Of Things’ Suite On Azure Cloud Platform

Tuesday at AzureCon, Microsoft Corp.is announcing new solutions spanning containers, security, infrastructure and the Internet of Things (IoT) that enable organizations of all sizes to transform their business in today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world.

Microsoft has announced the Azure Container Service – this is an open source scheduling and orchestration service which will help the users build a partnership with Docker and Mesosphere. The service will be available for preview by the end of the year.

“I found it interesting that [Microsoft is] going to ship Linux cluster container management on Linux ahead of Windows”, said Al Hilwa, research program director at IDC.

The offer builds on BT’s vision of the Cloud of Clouds by enabling its corporate customers to establish a privacy-enhanced, managed connection to consume Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 capabilities with the highly predictable performance and the reliability that comes with dedicated connectivity.

Internet of Things and big data: transforming business through data insights, intelligent cloud is powered by data – and innovation is limitless when that data can be shared, gleaned for insights across connected assets, devices and systems. “Freescale is pleased for its FRDM-K64F board to be Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT”.

Expect more partners to join Microsoft’s IoT ecosystem. Consolidating all this data together for analytics purposes can be a daunting task for some companies and Microsoft aims to simplify the process with the Azure IoT Suite. It also announced an expanded version of Azure Data Lake, which will now include a store and analytics service in addition to its existing managed Hadoop-as-a-service offering, Azure HDInsight.

Microsoft is also planning to introduce the N-series, a new family of Azure virtual machines with GPU capabilities.

Microsoft said it will also be launching a new Azure Security Center. Microsoft is able to analyze information gathered from customer deployments and compare it with global threat intelligence to detect threats and provide security recommendations for clients.

The enhancements made in Azure Active Directory “are an improvement from on-premises AD and will make Azure more secure”, Stealthbits Product Manager Alex Berger told the E-Commerce Times.

The Azure Security Center will be broadly available for Azure customers by the end of the year. Does Sturgeon’s Law still hold true?