Azure Updates: Quantum advance; Datacenters; Cloud solutions

Microsoft announced that the Azure Quantum team achieved an important breakthrough in quantum computing. With the advance, Microsoft is closer to being able to support topological qubits in quantum computing. Microsoft team member Jennifer Langston explained in a statement:

The Azure Quantum team has engineered devices that allow them to induce a topological phase of matter bookended by a pair of Majorana zero modes. These quantum excitations don’t normally exist in nature and must be coaxed into appearing under incredibly precise conditions. Scientists have sought to create and observe these excitations since they were first theorized about in 1937. More recently, they’ve realized that Majorana zero modes can play an important role in protecting quantum information and enabling reliable computation. The Azure Quantum team has also been able to produce what is known as a topological phase and to measure the topological gap, which quantifies the stability of the phase.

In theme with International Women’s Day, Microsoft reminded the Azure community that there are currently 2.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs. Recent Microsoft research suggests that 83 percent of survey respondents believe there are opportunities for growth in this area. The company also shared several programs it supports to increase women in cybersecurity and digital technology more broadly.

Azure Data CTO Raghu Ramakrishnan shared the release of a new dynamic data lineage extraction for SQL databases in Purview. As a result, Purview Data Map will be able to pull runtime logs and handle queries executed in the SQL engine to carry out data manipulation.