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Over the past decade, the value-added potential of cloud computing has helped transform it from a novel idea to a competitive must-have for businesses around the world.
However, in recent years, push factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the shift to the user-centric Web3 internet, increasing privacy and security concerns, and the rise of new technologies such as AI and blockchain have made companies more receptive to the conversion of the isolated nature of the business processes they have used in the past.
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For many businesses today, from family businesses to multinational corporations, a variety of native digital options supporting operations has helped introduce organizations to the rapid digitization of modern business.
On the consumer front, there are now similar digital products on a more commercial scale. As of mid-2022, more than five billion consumers worldwide will be accessing and using the internet every day. From errands and appointment scheduling to business deals and financial transactions; Technology has rapidly digitized the way we think, work and act on a daily basis.
By the turn of the century, the widespread adoption of computers, cell phones, and the Internet—at a commercial level—enabled consumers to become more connected, and corporations to expand their market reach at a stratospheric pace.
Cloud-based computing at the forefront of modernization
Tom Keane, a former Microsoft executive and head of development for Azure, Microsoft’s native cloud-based software, spoke about the revolutionary expansion of cloud computing and shared his industry perspective and how cloud computing is becoming an industrial game changer around the world.
“Developing a new product with a new technology paradigm, a new business model and new challenges meant the industry had to rethink how it positioned itself for long-term adoption. Launching such advanced software back then meant we had new customers using a platform few had done before. This was all new to us at Microsoft and the industry at large,” he shared.
During his career at Microsoft, Keane led the Office 365 team, Microsoft’s first-ever commercial cloud offering. What started as a small project soon exploded, and today Office 365 drives about half of office productivity and 70% of businesses use Microsoft Azure for native cloud-based services.
Today, the software powers countless businesses and users, hosting and managing data that generates up to 85% of global GDP. The platform is operated from over 300 data centers in 65 regions and 34 countries.
In the early stages, the team behind this newly discovered technology worked with numerous governments, regulators, oversight bodies, and enterprises to ensure that Azure met or exceeded its customers’ expectations and requirements for privacy, residency, and compliance.
The fundamental discoveries of this software led to a shift in cloud-based technology that initially presented a difficult concept to sell to businesses, schools, consumers and corporate headquarters.
Now businesses and individuals can host online meetings and video calls, while schools and universities can now become virtual educational institutions. All these skills are now present in a single area that has quickly caught on and become a revolutionary story of the global market.
The end goal is to ensure that the most critical and complex and regulated workloads can be hosted on a single cloud-based system. This would allow businesses to store important information and protect customer data from potential cyber threats.
Regardless of how we interact with this technology, be it through smartphones or through virtual calls; These discoveries have provided individuals with a solution to an almost overlooked problem.
Once developers were able to understand the consumer, the concerns, and the pain points, it was easy for them to successfully launch new and improved cloud computing products and services based on traditional models.
The basis of continuous development
Early cloud computing software programs were built with security and privacy in mind. When adopting Azure, the Microsoft team not only committed to the highest level of trust and transparency, but also to compliance standards and regulatory compliance.
These types of platforms use unique intelligence to detect threats early and derive actionable insights by analyzing vast data sources, including hundreds and billions of Bing websites, emails, Windows device updates, and monthly authentications.
The need for new software was to be future-proof in its application and to provide individual updates as rollouts continued. The rapid spread of cloud technology in developed countries and internet services in developing regions has provided developers with the opportunity to develop a combination of machine learning, behavioral analysis and AI to do all this in real time and better understand consumer needs.
Software products and services such as social media, e-commerce, Youtube handles, online commerce and financial technology that access users’ private and personal information required advanced security measures for improved user experience.
Over time, as demand for more advanced systems increased, built-in security controls became a non-negotiable and industry standard practice. These efforts would make managing personal information, user identities, and network devices on computers and smartphones more secure.
“If you look at the numbers under the marketplace, you see that 95% of Fortune 500 companies are using Azure today,” he said. The popularity of cloud computing has become a staple for multinational companies that operate in multiple regions and employ thousands of people around the world.
industrial applications
There are few – if any – industrial needs that cloud computing cannot or cannot meet. A long and extensive list of services provided is a testament to the importance and benefits of cloud-based services today.
For example in the fields of application development and AI, can be used for development and testing, which helps users to simplify and speed up development and testing on any platform. It can also be used for DevOps, which brings people, processes and products together to deliver value.
For e-commerce, cloud computing can be used to provide customers with whatever they want with personalized, scalable, and secure shopping experiences, and it also supports low-code application development and microservice applications that can help users create functional and reliable ones Build applications at scale and at low cost so they can bring them to market faster.
This software can also support mobile app development, managed server services, data modernization initiatives, AI for business-critical solutions that can analyze images, understand speech, and make data-driven predictions, as well as data mining, confidential computing, and a range of cloud migration tests.
“Companies need to take a product-centric growth approach with this technology and work very closely with their largest customers. You often see both developers and leaders of the engineering team working directly with customers.”
In 2012, Keane was part of the regulatory compliance program that helped launch cloud computing for financial services, which only became widespread in the better half of 2014. A few years later, in 2017, he worked on a project that created a cyst for gaming, retail, media, entertainment, health, life science, and consumer products businesses.
From sharing and storing critical information to space and low-orbit satellite connectivity, cloud computing is now moving toward new frontiers of industrial applications. In early 2020, Azure Space was launched, which helped parent company Microsoft with satellite communications that can be offered to businesses and users.
With a focus on helping users regardless of industrial use case, company size or specific use case, Cloud Computing offers offerings for every industry and business segment.
The financial services can be used to personalize customer experiences, modernize legacy financial systems and streamline risk management, while government applications can be used to facilitate remote access and cross-agency collaboration while protecting the security and privacy of devices, data and services guarantee security levels specified by the customer.
Cloud computing in healthcare helps improve patient experiences and engagement while strengthening provider collaboration and improving operational insights. Additionally, manufacturing, retail and energy can help customers discover operational efficiencies, reduce costs, generate new revenue streams, personalize user experiences, optimize supply chains and accelerate response rates.
Look to the future
Cloud-based technologies are transforming the industries in which they are deployed is an untold story. From today’s perspective, however, the efforts of the developers brought cloud computing into the world and praised it as a success.
Although he left Microsoft after 21 years of service, his interests are still in technology, AI and the tools and skills needed to create positive change for people around the world.
“I’m incredibly excited to see what digital technology is bringing to every industry right now,” he said recently. “This means manufacturing companies can rethink what they can do with a connected car, and financial services institutions can rethink what they can do with ample computing power and automated and augmented intelligence.”
