Microsoft Ignite 2022: Making sense of trends in Azure

After Ignite 2022, what has the Azure community learned about Microsoft's future plans in areas like AI, automation, data management, security, and developer tools?

Compared with previous conferences, Microsoft placed slightly less emphasis on hybrid cloud and multi-cloud scenarios, although they still figured prominently. Automanage reached generally available for VMs and Arc-enabled servers, and Microsoft expanded Hybrid Benefit to encompass AKS so that customers can deploy Kubernetes clusters on Stack HCI or Windows Server.

Developing with new workstations, AI tools

Microsoft announced the preview of Azure Deployment Environments, which are intended to pair with Dev Box to support developer workflows. Dev Box provides a low-latency cloud workstation to accelerate coding projects. Load Testing, in turn, serves to test the scalability of newly developed software. As part of its pitch to developers, Microsoft also offers App Service and Spring Cloud as managed application platform services to update apps with minimal code changes.

Mirroring other recent events, Microsoft emphasized AI and automation capabilities. Customers are using these capabilities for a wide range of scenarios already, the company says. Microsoft profiled Fashable, a Portuguese company using Azure Machine Learning to reduce fast fashion waste, Investec, supporting conversational intelligence with Dynamics 365 Sales, and Komatsu Australia, which gained up to 300 hours per year by automating invoices with Automate and AI Builder. Automatic reading, tagging, and indexing are available, integrated across Azure, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365 with the newly launched Syntex offering.

Security: Helping developers, more defenses

To support security requirements, Microsoft announced Defender Cloud Security Posture Management, in public preview, with agentless scanning and attack path analysis.

“[To achieve security] you must start earlier in the development lifecycle, start at the code itself, and shift left. Customers need to connect security and DevOps teams more effectively together to help developers bake security into the experience earlier and remediate issues in the code itself. And we need to do that across developer tools, whether you’re using GitHub, Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, or other tools,” said Shawn Bice, CVP of Cloud Security at Microsoft. In a bid to get security implemented earlier, Microsoft is introducing Defender for DevOps and the public preview of Entra Identity Governance.

Purview Information Protection for the Adobe Document Cloud entered general availability. Going forward, users can define granular policy management with Purview, and those labels will transfer if a document is moved. Rob Leffert, CVP of Modern Protection and SOC said: