Microsoft Azure Diary: Azure Confidential Computing Encrypts Data In Use

September 2016: Microsoft Brings Blockchain Infrastructure To Azure

Microsoft announced the next phase of support for blockchain on its Azure cloud platform with the release of the Bletchley v1 infrastructural substrate.

Microsoft officially launched Project Bletchely in June, with the goal of bringing an open, modular blockchain fabric to Azure, which could pave the way for businesses to make use of a cloud-based distributed database that can store the transaction history of all manner of records.

With the launch of Bletchely v1, users can setup a blockchain distributed ledger without the need to configure underlying infrastructure, which is take care of by the Azure platform.

July 2016: BlackBerry Packs Good Dynamics Apps Into Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure customers can now access BlackBerry’s enterprise mobility management products via the public cloud platform.

Enterprises can now choose to install and deploy the Good Dynamics Secure Mobility Platform by BlackBerry, through Microsoft Azure, to assemble a broad range of business apps, including collaboration apps, ISV apps and custom-developed apps.

July 2016: Microsoft Azure Cloud Revenue Grows 102 Percent

Cloud revenue helped Microsoft beat Wall Street’s expectations and close its last fiscal quarter of 2016 with £16 billion in revenues and £2.4 billion profit.

Revenue from Microsoft Azure grew more than 100 percent year over year, as the company said usage of the platform had doubled.

The results position Microsoft in its best position yet to challenge rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the public cloud market.

May 2016: SAP HANA Will Run On Microsoft Azure Public Cloud

Fresh from agreeing a tie up with Apple, SAP is expanding its partnership with Microsoft, allowing customers to deploy SAP HANA on the Azure public cloud and benefit from closer integration between each company’s services.

An existing relationship between the two parties has already allowed SAP software such as ERP, Business Suite, Business All-in-One, Mobile Platform, Adaptive Server Enterprise database and the developer version of HANA to run on Azure.

But now Azure will be certified to run all types of development, test and production HANA workloads, including the S/4HANA enterprise software suite which was made available last year.

April 2016: Rolls-Royce Chooses Microsoft Azure For IoT Engine Monitoring

Aircraft engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce is set to use Microsoft’s Azure IoT Suite alongside Cortana Intelligence Suite to offer airlines operational intelligence about the company’s engines.

Rolls-Royce, whose engines are used in more than 50,000 flights around the world every month, offers customer airlines ‘TotalCare’ – a program that allows airlines to pay for the hours they were able to fly rather than for repairs. Because of this, Rolls-Royce benefits from collecting engine data that can help airlines improve operation.

April 2016: Microsoft Azure Launches Face Tracking, Emotion Detection In Preview

Microsoft has released a free public preview of Azure Media Face Detector, a tool that can find and track human faces within a video.

The platform is part of Microsoft’s wider strategy to make its Azure cloud service a comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service product in the hopes of better competing against Infrastructure giants AWS and Google.

Azure’s ‘Face Detection’ can keep track of multiple faces within in a video (with the most obvious use-case being CCTV), all whilst the faces are moving. During the tracking process, the platform will try to give faces consistent IDs, even the faces are blocked or move off screen temporarily. Time and location metadata is then returned in a JSON file.

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