Build Agility, optimize your business and create data driven experience with Microsoft Azure

Organizations are embracing digital capabilities to thrive during uncertain times, with leaders committing to accelerate innovation and business optimization. Discover how the latest capabilities will help you innovate on your terms, transition mission-critical workloads to Azure, and modernize your infrastructure, and how the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform provides a trusted integrated data fabric to help you focus on creating value.

• Do more with less—migrate, optimize, reinvest: We’re excited to announce that our flagship Azure Migration and Modernization Program now helps you plan and deploy cloud security services as you migrate, including support for Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel. Azure Migration and Modernization Program now enables you to take advantage of Azure innovation across hybrid environments with Azure Arc deployment support for workloads that need to remain on-premises. Azure savings plan for computing was announced. This is a flexible pricing model that allows you to save up to 65 percent on computing services, compared to pay-as-you-go prices.

• Azure delivers to keep your business efficient and resilient: We are expanding the Azure Disk Storage portfolio with the general availability of Premium SSD v2 for greater flexibility. The collaborative SAP ERP increases user productivity and focuses by integrating workflows across SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Office for close collaboration. New foundational Azure confidential computing services help protect data in use with additional capabilities for services like Azure Virtual Desktop and SQL Server on VMs.

• Delivering more time and value through data-driven experiences: Azure Cosmos DB is expanding beyond NoSQL to support distributed PostgreSQL, bringing everything developers to love about PostgreSQL to Azure Cosmos DB. The general availability of the SAP Change Capture Data Connector in Azure Data Factory enables customers to bring in SAP data for advanced analytics. Azure Synapse Analytics now offers one-click access to Microsoft Graph Data Connect, enabling users to copy select Microsoft 365 datasets into Azure and unlock collaboration and productivity insights. Microsoft Purview combines unified data governance with risk and compliance solutions. Business workflows, now generally available, and business metamodels, now in preview, make it easier to maximize the business value of your data and drive cross-functional data governance. A new Partner Ecosystem enables ISVs to build on top of the open and governed Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform—delivering an enriched, cost-optimized experience for customers across all industries.

• Transform your business with Azure, anywhere: Azure Hybrid Benefit now includes AKS so you can deploy Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server at no additional cost in your own data centers or edge environments. We’re bringing new hybrid deployment options to AKS, on Windows devices and Windows IoT, enabled by Azure Arc. Additionally, you can now create new AKS clusters and deploy them to Windows Server or Azure Stack HCI in your data center all from the Azure portal or CLI.

Deliver efficiency with AI and Automation across your business

Coming out of the pandemic, we’ve seen an even greater desire to lower operating costs, anticipate trends, reduce carbon footprints, and improve customer and employee experiences. We’re calling this unwavering commitment to innovation “digital perseverance” and see automation and artificial intelligence as key ingredients. At Microsoft Ignite, we’ll explore how organizations can activate automation and AI directly in their business workflows and empower developers to use those same intelligent building blocks to deliver their own differentiated experiences. Learn more below and in Jessica Hawk’s blog post.

• Drive seller productivity and deeper customer engagement with Dynamics 365 and Viva Sales: We are infusing automation and AI into Dynamics 365 to help professionals focus on what matters most—creating great customer experiences. Today we are announcing that conversation intelligence capabilities are now available to all Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales customers at no additional cost, guiding sales conversations in real time by recommending talking points and sales literature to share with the customer. In addition, sellers receive insights on customer emails within Outlook, which can be updated directly in the CRM.

• Empower people and automate processes with Microsoft Syntex: We’re excited to introduce Microsoft Syntex: Content AI integrated with the flow of work. It integrates innovations across the Microsoft Cloud, from Microsoft 365 to Azure, to Power Platform, and Microsoft Purview. Syntex automatically reads, tags, and indexes high volumes of content and connects it where it’s needed in context—in search, in applications, and as reusable knowledge. It also manages your content throughout its lifecycle with AI-powered security and compliance, backup and restore, and tiered archive storage. Critically, Syntex puts people at the center, with content integrated into collaboration and workflows like eSignature.

• Improve operational efficiency by automating repetitive processes with Power Platform: Building on the success of GitHub Copilot, we’re bringing similar capabilities to Power Automate with descriptions to cloud flows. Now, a maker can describe in natural language the flow they want to build and a suggestion of relevant flows is generated. The maker then adds connections to finalize their flow.

• Quickly and easily embed AI into business apps with Azure Applied AI and Cognitive Services: Azure OpenAI Service, available in limited access preview, now offers access to DALL·E 2. DALL·E 2 can create original images from a natural language description, helping organizations enhance brainstorming, develop, and refine visual assets, quickly respond to marketing opportunities, and personalize customer experiences.

• Build and deploy responsible ML models faster to enhance productivity at any scale with Azure Machine Learning: To enhance collaboration, we’re introducing registries that enable teams to share machine learning artifacts at the tenant and organization level for greater repeatability and scale. To help customers do more with less, we’ve also consolidated open-source tools within the Responsible AI dashboard, now generally available, for easier debugging directly within a data scientist’s workflow.

• Drive the next level of insights, efficiency, and sustainability with the industrial metaverse: Businesses and technologists around the world are struggling to define the Metaverse and what their role will be in it. At Ignite, Judson Althoff will distinguish how Microsoft is thinking about the phenomenon for consumers, businesses, and industries.

Re-Energize your workforce in the office, at home, and everywhere in between

Engaged, empowered employees are what will give organizations a competitive advantage in today’s shifting macroeconomic environment. Microsoft 365 is the cloud-first platform that helps organizations enable a digitally connected, distributed workforce to work in new ways while simplifying IT and reducing costs. Learn more below and in Jared Spataro’s blog post.

• Enabling today’s digitally connected distributed workforce: Today, we’re taking an exciting step forward with Microsoft 365 to bring customers a unified experience with the new Microsoft 365 app. The app is the home for your favorite productivity tools and content, providing new ways to help you find, create, and share your content, all from one place. The app will launch first on the web in November 2022 and will be available on Windows and mobile in January 2023.

• Transforming meetings for hybrid work: We are excited to announce a new add-on built on Teams to help make meetings more personalized, intelligent, and secure. With Microsoft Teams Premium, you can easily set up meetings with new meeting guides, focus on what matters with the intelligent recap, uplevel safeguards for confidential information, facilitate advanced virtual appointments and more. Premium features will begin to roll out in December as a part of the Teams Premium public preview and will be generally available in February. Today, together with Yealink, we’re bringing you the SmartVision 60, the first 360-degree, center-of-room intelligent camera. The SmartVision 60 produces multiple video streams with AI active speaker tracking—and soon: people recognition. Today, we’re announcing that Cisco is now a Teams Rooms Certified Devices partner. For the first time ever, Teams meetings will be available natively across certified Cisco meeting devices, enabling customers to configure Teams as the default meeting experience.

• Introducing the Connected Workspace: We’re creating a new category: the Connected Workplace, and launching a new product to address these unique challenges in hybrid work. Introducing Microsoft Places, our new connected workplace platform that will reimagine hybrid and in-person work. This platform delivers solutions that coordinate where work happens, modernize the office with intelligent technology, and optimize the workplace for changing needs. Microsoft Places is coming in 2023.

• Bringing the metaverse to business: Just yesterday, we announced with Meta that we’re bringing Teams immersive meeting experiences to Quest. Currently in private preview, Mesh avatars for Teams lets you create custom avatars to represent yourself—so you can take a break from the camera but still have a physical presence in Teams meetings.

• A new cloud computing paradigm built for the distributed workforce: With the new Windows 365 app, you can access your Cloud PC directly from the Windows 11 taskbar or start menu, letting you easily and quickly stream your full Windows desktop to any device. Today, we are also announcing the availability of Windows 365 Government for Government Community Cloud and Government Community Cloud High customers in the United States. And, coming soon, organizations will be able to provision Windows 365 Cloud PCs for a shift or part-time employees. There is also more to share after the recent Windows 11 2022 update. Generally available in November, Windows Update for Business reports will leverage Azure Workbooks to make deployment reports more modular and customizable. Organizational messages, coming to public preview in November, make it easy to message employees directly in the Windows UX. We’re also adding branch office printer management and diagnostic reporting to Universal Print, as well as support for evaluating apps after an in-place upgrade with Test Base for Microsoft 365.

• Unlocking new collaboration patterns: For managing content at scale, Microsoft Syntex brings the power of AI to content collaboration. Syntex services such as content processing, content summarization, and e-signature automate your business workflows and transform your digital work. Syntex is now available to all Microsoft 365 customers on a pay-as-you-go basis. Last year we introduced Microsoft Loop, which breaks down barriers between apps to enable fluid co-creation. so people think, plan, and create together. Today, we’re excited to announce that the Loop app is in private preview.

• Empowering everyone to thrive with Microsoft Viva: Just a few weeks ago, we introduced new capabilities in Microsoft Viva to help companies deliver an employee experience optimized for the way people now work. These include new integrations in Viva Goals, the introduction of Viva Pulse—which lets managers and team leaders take the pulse of their teams for quick and confidential input— and finally, Viva Amplify, the new centralized communications management and publishing tool that helps employee communication teams and leaders communicate more effectively with their employees all from one place to reach people wherever they work.

Accelerate Innovation with the world’s most complete cloud developer platform

Customers are looking for guidance on how to accelerate innovation through their application and digital experiences while modernizing their existing enterprise application investments without incurring significant costs. More importantly, customers realize business performance can be achieved through developer productivity by optimizing their innovation cycle with secure DevOps and by empowering developers through low code. Learn more below and in Ashmi Chokshi’s blog post.

• Enabling customers to modernize applications with minimal code changes and increased developer velocity: With Azure App Service and other Azure application platform services, you can innovate more and build more value for your business. Azure application platform service is a fully managed service that enables customers to focus on app innovation rather than managing, configuring, securing, and updating the underlying infrastructure (because Azure does that for you).

• Low-code web development: Power Pages is now generally available. Power Pages is an enterprise-grade connectivity platform for organizations to build and launch external self-service websites, allowing them to connect with their customers, partners, and communities and share business data, collaborate, and automate business processes with them at scale and securely.

• Streamline low code governance in your organization: Power Platform enables IT to gain visibility and control over applications at scale with Managed Environments, now generally available. Managed Environments is a brand-new capability to streamline and simplify governance at scale. It gives you more control with sharing limits, security and reliability validations, and the ability to customize the maker onboarding experience.

• Land low code as a critical tool for skilling today’s workforce: Power Platform has empowered millions of people to do more with less and build mission-critical apps for their businesses. Now with the new Power Up program, people without development backgrounds can transform their careers through a guided training program and community.

• Increasing productivity and quality for hybrid development teams: We are excited to announce the private preview of GitHub Advanced Security, which brings GitHub’s industry-leading, developer-focused security tooling to Azure DevOps. GitHub Advanced Security provides a native application security solution within our development workflow, enabling the management of open-source dependencies, custom code, and secrets across the software lifecycle. Azure Deployment Environments, now in public preview, enables teams to quickly spin up application infrastructure needed to run their project in the cloud while maximizing security, compliance, and cost-efficiency. Microsoft Dev Box and Azure Deployment Environments pair together to give developers a complete cloud-powered workflow for any project, that can be fully managed by IT admins.

• Drive application innovation and modernization at scale with cloud-native architectures: Today, we are also proud to share the public preview of Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager which allows customers to easily manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters, run multi-cluster workloads and services, and ensure consistent configuration, access, and governance across your Kubernetes environment.

Protect everything, everyone, everywhere with comprehensive security 

Protecting businesses against growing security threats is a huge priority for our customers. Companies of all sizes have increased their spending on cybersecurity solutions to protect their operations over the last year. With today’s economic uncertainty and ongoing talent shortages, organizations need comprehensive security that allows them to protect more without expending more. With Microsoft Security’s multi-cloud solutions, customers can simplify their approach to security through vendor consolidation and realize up to 60% cost savings. Essentially, doing more with less. Today, at Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing new innovations across our comprehensive portfolio to help customers secure more with less. Learn more below and in Vasu Jakkal’s blog post.

• Endpoint protection for 50% less: Starting on November 1 and for a limited time, we are excited to give new and existing customers 50% off Microsoft Defender for Endpoint P1 and P2 licenses. This gives organizations looking to modernize their security portfolio the opportunity to move away from legacy anti-virus solutions. This is the first step to an integrated SIEM + XDR solution that improves visibility across identities and endpoints, so they can be more unified and increase SecOps efficiency.

• Build your security from the start: We announced that Microsoft Defender for DevOps and Microsoft Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is now available in public preview. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, our integrated cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), customers can seamlessly integrate security from development to runtime and accelerate threat protection across multi-cloud environments.

• Protect at machine speed: We are excited to introduce the public preview of automatic attack disruption in Microsoft 365 Defender, which helps protect organizations at machine speed where it all comes together—in the SOC. Once an attack is detected in the environment, affected assets like compromised identities and endpoints are automatically isolated. This game-changing capability limits lateral movement and reduces the overall impact of an attack while leaving the SOC team in control of investigating, remediating, and bringing assets back online.

• Build your trust fabric with flexible and secure access: We announce Microsoft Entra Identity Governance, now available in public preview, which helps organizations ensure that the right people have the right access to the right resources at the right time. This release extends our earlier investments to converge identity governance and access management solutions and delivers a comprehensive identity governance product for both on-premises and cloud-based user directories.

• Decrease insider risk and prevent sensitive data from being shared: Microsoft Purview helps protect sensitive data all along its journey, from data source to point of consumption. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Microsoft Purview Information Protection for Adobe Document Cloud, combining the power of native classification and labeling with the power of Acrobat to seamlessly secure PDFs. Also, in the public preview, several new data loss prevention capabilities—including granular policy management and contextual evidence for policy matches on endpoint devices—will prevent the unauthorized sharing or transfer of sensitive data.

• Manage securely across platforms and clouds: In April 2022, we announced a plan to launch a series of premium advanced endpoint management solutions to help increase endpoint security, improve user experiences, and reduce the total cost of ownership. Today, we’re excited to share that our advanced endpoint management plan will launch in March 2023. The suite will include capabilities such as endpoint privilege management, intelligent automation, data insights, remote help, and automated app patching. All these capabilities will be integrated into Microsoft Intune, which is now the new name for our expanding family of endpoint management products.