In today's competitive landscape, business leaders are under immense pressure to achieve more with fewer resources. As a result, organizations across various sectors and sizes are increasingly turning to cloud technologies as a means to enhance their digital resilience and operational efficiency.
Having engaged in discussions with our valued customers regarding their unique business requirements and the obstacles they encounter, we recognize the challenges you face. At Microsoft Ignite this year, we are fully committed to addressing these challenges by empowering you with innovative cloud solutions, enabling you to focus on your organization's core strengths—innovation, creativity, and differentiation.
Our vision is to become the global leader in cloud computing, serving as the trusted partner for organizations across all industries and stages of their cloud journey. Whether you're just beginning your cloud migration or seeking to optimize your existing infrastructure, we possess the expertise, capabilities, and platform to support you every step of the way. In line with this commitment, we are excited to unveil several new advancements designed to help you maximize your resources and extract the full potential from your current investments.
Performance, scale, mission-critical capabilities: Azure delivers to keep your business efficient and resilient
As our customers increasingly integrate digital capabilities with robust cloud foundations, the methodology behind cloud migration becomes a central concern, particularly for critical workloads.
In close collaboration with the technology vendors upon whom you traditionally rely to operate all your workloads, we ensure that Azure is equipped to facilitate the modernization of your on-premises applications. In this regard, we are excited to introduce several new capabilities:
Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Microsoft Azure are now available, offering seamless extension or migration of existing on-premises Nutanix workloads to Azure without the need for modification or retooling, thereby maintaining a consistent environment.
Updates to Azure VMware Solution (AVS) include the preview of stretched clusters, providing 99.99 percent uptime for mission-critical applications, along with Customer Managed Keys for enhanced control over access to encrypted data.
The collaborative SAP ERP, currently in preview, enhances user productivity by integrating workflows across SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Office, enabling seamless collaboration without application or context switching.
Updates to Azure Center for SAP solutions offer end-to-end deployment and management experiences for SAP on Azure, including support for registering Windows-based systems and installing SAP S/4HANA 2020/2021, coupled with enhanced cost transparency and quality checks.
An exemplary case is that of the National Basketball Association (NBA), which migrated its SAP solutions and other resources to Microsoft Azure, streamlining operations and enhancing fan engagement. This transition enabled them to allocate more time to generating fan-centric experiences, thus enriching the interactions people have with the NBA.
Recognizing that optimizing investments liberates resources essential for crafting meaningful customer experiences, we are delighted to announce several advancements aimed at delivering enhanced price performance, mission-critical capabilities, and security:
Expansion of the Azure Disk Storage portfolio with the general availability of Premium SSD v2, offering increased flexibility in managing performance and costs.
Investment in modernizing infrastructure, exemplified by the introduction of new Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Kubernetes Service featuring Ampere Altra Arm–based processors, delivering exceptional price performance for scale-out Linux workloads.
Introduction of Azure Elastic SAN, a new cloud-native, fully managed, and highly scalable storage area network service available exclusively through Azure.
Introduction of foundational Azure confidential computing service to safeguard data in use, complemented by the integration of confidential computing capabilities into services like Azure Virtual Desktop and SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.
Delivering data-driven experiences that give you more time and value
We continue to enhance the way Microsoft Azure integrates across infrastructure and data services so you can keep your business efficient and resilient.
In May, we launched the Microsoft Intelligent Data platform, integrating our best-in-class database, analytics, and data governance products for a seamless experience.
Today’s announcements empower our customers to do more with less, add layers of intelligence to applications, unlock predictive insights, and govern data anywhere.
Developers can build on their terms with the new innovation in cloud-native distributed data and open-source. Azure Cosmos DB is expanding beyond NoSQL to support distributed PostgreSQL, bringing everything developers love about PostgreSQL to Azure Cosmos DB.
General availability of the SAP Change Capture Data Connector in Azure Data Factory enables customers to bring in SAP data for advanced analytics. Azure Data Factory’s new Microsoft Graph Data Connector for Microsoft 365 datasets transports your office data into Azure, so you can unlock collaboration and productivity insights. We’re also continuing to remove friction from end-user experiences, allowing you to share your Power BI datasets across tenants through Power BI B2B data sharing.
Microsoft Purview combines unified data governance with risk and compliance solutions. Business Workflows, now generally available, and Business Metamodel, now in preview, make it easier to maximize the business value of your data and drive cross-functional data governance.
And, our new Partner Ecosystem, enables ISVs to build on top of the open and governed Microsoft Intelligent Data platform, delivering an enriched, cost-optimized experiences for customers across all industries.
Transform your business with Azure, anywhere
We want you to be able to stay agile and flexible when extending Azure to your on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments. We meet you where you are, so you can blend your own enterprise and operational edge investments with Azure’s global infrastructure to leverage the best Azure has to offer—on your own terms.
With Azure Arc, we built a bridge that extends the Azure platform so our customers can build cloud-native applications and services with the flexibility to run them across their existing datacenters, edge, and multicloud environments.
For example, Wells Fargo turned to Azure Arc to streamline a scalable compute platform across on-premises and cloud environments. And to get that same fully managed, cloud-native experience, they are extending Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to their own datacenters. This offers the flexibility to adapt to ever-changing regulations and compliance requirements by running AKS wherever it’s needed. In turn, they’re able to bring new products and services to market faster and delight their customers.
I’m pleased to announce new Azure Arc capabilities to save you money and enable further innovation.
Expansion of the Azure Hybrid Benefit to include AKS so you can deploy the Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server in your own datacenters or edge environments at no additional cost. This ensures a consistent, managed Kubernetes experience from cloud to edge for both Windows and Linux containers.
Azure Automanage is now generally available for Azure Virtual Machines and Arc-enabled servers. Within minutes, you can automatically configure servers to best-practice Azure services with a simple “point, click, set, forget” experience—whether they run Windows, Linux, or are already located in Azure, on-premises, or even in other clouds.
Do more with less: Migrate, Optimize, Reinvest
We’re focused on finding ways to help you save and get maximum value out of your cloud investments, wherever your business might be in its journey.
We already have pricing benefits and offers, like Azure Hybrid Benefit, to help you achieve savings while adopting and operating in Azure. We also understand you may need additional help to ensure workloads remain secure and protected with hybrid flexibility as you move.
At Microsoft Ignite we’re announcing enhancements and benefits to make this even easier.
Our flagship Azure Migration and Modernization program (AMMP) now helps you plan and deploy cloud security services as you migrate, including support for Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel. You can also take advantage of Azure innovation across hybrid environments with Azure Arc deployment support for workloads that need to remain on-premises.
A new Azure savings plan for compute allows you to save up to 65 percent on select compute services compared to pay-as-you-go prices.
If you’re further along in the journey to cloud, you need to optimize what you’ve already invested. Tools like Microsoft Cost Management and Azure Advisor help you better manage and understand your cloud spend with best practice guidance and personalized insights.
We want you to be able to take these cloud savings and reinvest them into critical areas like crisis management, security, and intelligent cloud-native solutions that help your business stay resilient, grow, and create new value.
You can read more about how we’re investing in Azure to help you do more with less and there’s a great breakout session this week that will help you bring it all together for your business.