Microsoft reveals the future of Azure

Computing catches up with Mark Smith, senior director of the cloud & enterprise business group at Microsoft

Microsoft is making big investments in artificial intelligence, which is set to become an increasingly important part of its Azure cloud offering.

That's according to Mark Smith, senior director of the cloud & enterprise business group at Microsoft.

"Since Microsoft first set out on our Enterprise Cloud Strategy, businesses' IT strategies have truly transformed," Smith told Computing.

He continued: "The need for cloud technology to be a part of that strategy has evolved from an 'if' to a 'when', with Gartner stating that by 2020 a corporate 'no-cloud' policy will be as rare as a 'no-internet' policy is today.

"Microsoft is making huge investments across a variety of Azure services including artificial intelligence (AI), advanced threat detection and IoT, with an extensive roadmap.

"Beyond this, we also provide customers with new, innovative hardware options such as the introduction of virtual machines into our UK data centres, that deliver the high performance and scalability that other hyperscale cloud providers aren't yet offering customers."

At the same time, customers are becoming more demanding, he added.

"Enterprise customers are looking to innovate faster than ever before, taking products and services to market quickly using PaaS technologies, while also saving costs by leveraging public cloud infrastructure.

"This trend is set to continue over the next 1-2 years, along with a particular increase in demand for larger and more complex workloads such as SAP and CAD, as well as the massive compute and storage requirements of advanced machine learning and AI as enterprises begin to get to grips with these technologies."

Smith also discussed the concept of serverless computing, which he said is increasingly important to his organisation's customers.

"Serverless computing is a key element of public cloud computing, and it gives our customers and partners another choice on how to develop and deploy their apps. Essentially, it's all about helping developers be more productive and focus on their solutions by simply removing the concern on all the resources running in the background.

"Serverless is gaining traction with start-ups, digital agencies and internal innovation departments that need to quickly create and deploy services without worrying about the underlying architecture. Capabilities such as Azure Functions, an Open Source project, deliver the portability many customers need whether running services on premise or public cloud," said Smith.