At the same time as advancing the reach of AI and edge computing into our daily lives at the opening of its Ignite developer conference in Orlando today, Microsoft is offering much to reassure those worried about technology getting out of control. Security and threat management are as high on the agenda as machine learning and IoT.
So among a raft of security announcements, there’s the crowd-pleasing news that Microsoft is abolishing passwords for the thousands of third-party applications that link into its Azure Active Directory service, by adding biometric or PIN login via its Authenticator mobile app.
At the same time, the company is talking up its work to combat global cybercrime. Among the 5 billion malware threats that it says it blocks each month, it cites a recent episode where its cloud-based machine learning models detected a stealth malware threat targeting just 200 small businesses across the US, which it shut down within seconds. Its Digital Crimes Unit has also worked with law enforcement agencies around the world to take down 18 bot-nets that were secretly controlling half a billion devices.
AI powered Search, humanitarian actionIn AI, there is a swathe of new capabilities, in addition to the CRM add-ons introduced for Dynamics 365 last week. One of the most intriguing is a function called Insert Data from Picture, which can read tabular data from a photograph directly into an Excel spreadsheet. Another is a new facial recognition feature in Microsoft Teams that blurs out the background during video meetings, while speech-to-text transcription generates a searchable transcript and can automatically apply captions to the recorded video.
A major new feature is Microsoft Search. This provides a consistent search bar across all Microsoft 365 applications, offering personalized, smart search results that build on the relationship mapping in Microsoft Graph and add AI technology from Bing. Smart search suggests results even before you start typing in the search box, and delivers results from any application based on the user’s context, recent history and teamwork relationships.
As a counterbalance to this enthusiastic embrace of AI in the enterprise, Microsoft today unveils a five-year, $40 million programme called AI for Humanitarian Action. This will use grants, technology investments and shared expertise to bring AI to bear in matters such as disaster recovery, protecting children, refugees, and displaced people. This is the latest addition to Microsoft’s $115 million AI for Good initiative, launched in July 2017.
IoT and edge announcementsIn IoT and edge, one of the highlights is the introduction of Azure Digital Twins, available in public preview from mid-October. Being able to create a digital model of a physical environment or asset is an essential component in many IoT applications. Since security is front-of-mind in these often sparsely attended edge computing environments, another highlight is Azure Sphere, which combines secured microcontrollers with a turnkey cloud service that guards each remote device.
Among the many other IoT and edge computing announcements targeted at developers, there’s also news for those who prefer packaged applications. Azure IoT Central, announced last December, is now generally available. This provides managed cloud-based infrastructure for IoT applications, such as a new Dynamics 365 connected field service SaaS offering.
Teams ‘growing faster than Slack’With the vendor’s business applications conference, Envision, colocated with Ignite and kicking off tomorrow, Microsoft is also talking up its productivity and business tools. It is putting the spotlight on its Teams collaboration tool, which it says is in use at 329,000 organizations. This rate of adoption is twice that achieved by its rival Slack, says Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s head of communications.
Teams this week will be gaining new functionality designed to improve its appeal in specific industries such as healthcare. These include integration to electronic health records (EHR) systems, secure image annotation and priority messaging. These will let healthcare providers message each other within Teams while respecting patient confidentiality, as required for HIPAA compliance.
Microsoft also intends to deepen the integration between Office 365 and LinkedIn, allowing document co-authoring and email correspondence from within Office 365 applications with LinkedIn contacts. Meeting invites will also be able to pick up information about attendees from LinkedIn to help with prep for the meeting.
My takeThe above is just a sampling of the smorgasbord of announcements crossing the wire this morning. I’ve not even mentioned some of the many database, Azure and windows Server announcements, or the new slimline Surface Hub. As always, Microsoft is giving the 26,000 IT professionals and enterprise developers attending the event plenty to digest.
What is interesting though is the attention being given to security and governance alongside all of this new technology. It is a telling reminder of its long experience of working with an enterprise customer base, and the effort it has had to put in over several decades to build the trust of those organizations. This is a crucial asset as it increasingly finds itself competing against digital newcomers Amazon and Google, who in many cases still have to build that trust.
Image credit - Search screenshot via Microsoft