Your favorite Microsoft Inspire 2022 recap

Oh yeah, also, Kin + Carta was named Microsoft US Partner of the Year as a Sustainability Changemaker. Wait. What!? Yes, it is true and absolutely a great honor. As a certified B-Corp, sustainability is central to all of our projects. It was fantastic to be recognized by Microsoft for our work in helping our clients reduce their carbon footprint on our way to our goal to save our clients 1,000,000 metric tons of CO2 by 2027.

Sadly, this will not allow me to rule over the Seven Kingdoms.

It does allow public sector entities to use Azure while still meeting their security, compliance, and policy guidelines. This starts with a Sovereign Landing Zone which is an infrastructure and policy as code solution that will quickly set up infrastructure that conforms to that country's regulations. Customers who still want to have some of their applications and data on-prem can leverage policies created in Azure via Azure Arc.

Data Residency

Microsoft has over 60 Datacenters and over 100 compliance offerings that will allow public sector entities to meet their data residency, compliance, and audit needs. They will be able to support 35 countries' data residency requirements.

Sovereign Controls

Through Microsoft Confidential Computing, which uses specialized hardware to create isolated and encrypted memory, customer-owned encryption keys are confidentially and securely used to encrypt customer data. This can be leveraged without changing a line of code. This spans across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure.

Governance and Transparency

Microsoft will allow physical access to their data centers (under NDA) for those entities that need that for compliance. Customer Lockbox for Azure, M365, Power Platform and soon to be released for Dynamics 365, allows customers to approve or deny access to their data by Microsoft service operators.

Public sector entities have varied and region-specific needs that are not required for commercial companies. This offering will allow them to leverage the scalability, security, and speed to value of the cloud.

As someone who lived through the endless database wars of the past century between SQL and Oracle, this is kind of mind-blowing to see these two long-time rivals collaborating to bring value to their clients who want to use both. We deal with Fortune 500 clients and many of them who are using Azure are also using Oracle and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Thanks to this joint agreement, you can access OCI through Azure as if it was any other Azure resource. You get a latency of 2 milliseconds or less when accessing OCI from Azure. And it is free! No charges for data ingress/egress from or to either cloud. You only pay your normal charges for using an Oracle DB on OCI. What is next? Linux for Windows? Oh right, that already happened.

Finally, a really cool HoloLens/Microsoft Mesh demo. This is a great use case for Augmented Reality (AR); helping people on the factory floor get real-time and analytical information about the machines in front of them so they can make real-time decisions on the spot. This demo showed how HoloLens could display current and historical performance data for the machine in front of the user.

I am not a big fan of avatars but it was very cool to see how you could use the Azure Bot Framework and Azure Cognitive Services Text to Speech to create an assistant that can tell how you could make changes to reduce energy consumption based on historical data.

Microsoft Inspire did what it was supposed to do: get me all fired up about helping our clients get the most from all of the many benefits that Azure has to offer to help your business scale, reduce costs and reduce your carbon footprint. And to seriously think about dressing in black more often.

Further reading:
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability - Roadmap
Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty
Microsoft - Oracle DB for Azure
Oracle - Oracle DB for Azure