AWS re:Invent 2022: Re-Skilling your enterprise with Phil Le-Brun

The team are at AWS re:Invent 2022 for our first live shows!

Phil LeBrun, Enterprise Strategist, AWS, talks to us about why re-skilling your teams is critical not just to your transformations success, what it takes and why it’s such a leadership challenge.

Roving Reporter Rob Kernahan updates us on what else is trending on Day 1 of the show.

AWS re:Invent 2022: Cloud sustainability with Tom Metzeler

The team are at AWS re:Invent 2022 for our first live shows!

Tom Metzeler, Partner Solutions, AWS rejoins us to talk about how the cloud can help organisations reduce their impact on the environment.  And with all the talk this week of processor heavy work loads, like ML, or supermassive architectures, how can these be implemented safely?

Roving Reporter Rob reports on Day 3 and the final trends emerging.

The role of leadership in cloud value creation with Alastair Kidd

In our three launch episodes, Dave and Sjoukje look at the cloud market from three different angles: the market itself, how CxO’s are viewing that market and from a personal leadership experience perspective.

In our final launch episode, they talk to Systemic Leadership Sherpa, Alastair Kidd about how embarking on a cloud transformation journey could also be a personal development journey!  How that could help reframe your leadership action to more effectively drive business value out of the cloud and why you need to be aware of the Complexity Paradox!  Finally, they talk about Googles recent announcement about opening new regions in Europe and speculate on why.

TLDR:

  • 01:07 Intros
  • 01:51 Cloud conversation with Alastair Kidd
  • 22:10 The complexity paradox
  • 28:20 Why so many cloud regions?
  • 32:32 Chickens!

Further Reading:

https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making

https://merionwest.com/2022/10/27/the-complexity-paradox/

Cloud definitions and 2023 Trends overview

In our three launch episodes, Dave and Sjoukje look at the cloud market from three different angles: the market itself, how CxO’s are viewing that market and from a personal leadership experience perspective.

In this first episode, they discuss some basic definitions for aspects of the cloud, to level set, then go on to talk about the current trends that are being felt industry wide and that are likely to impact 2023 and beyond.  Finally, they discuss the latest in AI image creation, DALL-E, and its possibilities.

TLDR:

  • 00:39 Intros
  • 03:09 Cloud conversation: Definitions
  • 15:32 Cloud conversation: Trends 2023
  • 28:10 DALL-E

The CxO perspective on cloud with Daniel Hartert

In our three launch episodes, Dave and Sjoukje look at the cloud market from three different angles: the market itself, how CxO’s are viewing that market and from a personal leadership experience perspective.

In this second episode, they talk to CxO Advisor, Daniel Hartert to get insights into the conversations he is currently having with CxOs on driving value from of the cloud in their organisations and the challenges they face.  He also shares his personal journey with the cloud.  Finally, they talk about how current economic environment will influence decision making on cloud over the coming years.

TLDR:

  • 00:43 Intros
  • 03:00 Cloud conversation with Daniel Hartert
  • 26:59 Cloud cost
  • 32:09 A nice weekend!

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty: maintain control over strategic digital assets

Governments and organizations are focusing on digital transformation to fundamentally transform the way they operate and deliver services to their customers. Cloud adoption has increased tremendously in the last couple of years, also due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But as they move to the cloud, organizations want to maintain the same level of control over their IT resources as they have in their data centers. Concerns about cloud sovereignty, which include data, operational, and technical issues, are not new and have been increasing because of rising geopolitical tensions, changing data and privacy laws in different countries, the dominant role of cloud players concentrated in a few regions, and the lessons learned through the pandemic. As a result, governments and organizations are reevaluating their external exposure and looking for ways to maintain physical and digital control over strategic assets.

To adhere to these concerns, Microsoft has released a new solution called Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty. This solution is aimed to meet compliance, security, and policy requirements that governments and organizations are facing. With the addition of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, governments and organizations will have more control over their data, and it will increase the transparency of operations and governance processes of the cloud.
Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is designed to be a partner-led solution, where partners will play a vital role in delivering the solutions. One ofMicrosoft’s European Cloud principles is that Microsoft will provide cloud offerings that meet European government sovereign needs in partnership with local trusted technology providers. Also, Capgemini and Orange have been working closely together with Microsoft, and will start supporting clients in preparing for their migration by the end of 2022.

With Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty, Microsoft is focusing on the following pillars

Data residency

Data residency is the requirement that data must be stored within a specific geographic boundary, such as a national boundary. Azure offers data residency for many services in over 35 countries with over 60 different data center regions worldwide (and growing). This enables residency options for Azure, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365, where many clients can store and process their data locally. By implementing policies, clients can meet their regulatory requirements to store their applications and data in the required geographical boundary. For Europe, the forthcoming EU Data Boundary will ensure that data will be stored and processed in the EU and European Free Trade Association.

Sovereign controls

In addition to the specific regions and geographic boundaries where applications and data are stored and processed, Microsoft also offers a set of sovereign controls that provide additional layers to protect and encrypt sensitive data. These controls span the entire Microsoft cloud: SaaS offerings such as Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365, as well as the cloud infrastructure and the PaaS services that are available in Azure.

The following offerings can be leveraged by clients for sovereign protection:

  • Azure Confidential Computing: Azure confidential computing consists of confidential virtual machines and confidential containers. This enables data to be encrypted in rest, but also in use. Specialized hardware is used to create isolated and encrypted memory, which is called a trusted execution environment (TEE). TEEs guarantee that data and code that are processed cannot be accessed from outside the TEE. Client-owned encryption keys are released directly from a managed HSM (hardware security module) into the TEE. The client keys are secured, also when in use, and it ensures that data is encrypted in use, transit, and in rest.
  • Double Key Encryption (DKE): DKE uses two keys together to access protected content. One key is stored in Azure and the other key is held by the client. It comes with Microsoft 365 E5, and it is intended for the most sensitive data that is subject to the strictest protection requirements.
  • Customer Lockbox: Customer Lockbox ensures that Microsoft can’t access client data and content without explicit approval from the client during service operations. Customer Lockbox is offered for Microsoft 365Microsoft AzurePower Platform, and Dynamics 365.
  • Azure Arc: Azure Arc extends the Azure services, management, and governance features and capabilities to run across data centers, at the edge, and in multicloud environments. Clients can centrally manage a wide range of resources, including Windows and Linux servers, SQL Server, Kubernetes clusters, and other Azure services. Virtual machine lifecycle management can be performed from a central location. Governance and compliance standards can be met by implementing Azure Policy across these different resources. And services such as Azure Monitor and Microsoft Defender for Cloud can be enrolled as well.
  • Sovereign Landing Zone: Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty will include a Sovereign Landing Zone. This landing zone is built upon the enterprise scale Azure Landing Zone and will make deployments automatable, customizable, repeatable, and consistent. This landing zone will extend into Azure Information Protection, which also enables policy and labeling for access control and protection on email and document data. Clients can also define custom policies to meet specific industry and regulatory requirements.

Governance and transparency

The Government Security Program (GSP) provides participants from over 45 countries and international organizations, represented by more than 90 different agencies, with the confidential security information and resources they need to trust Microsoft’s products and services. These participants have access to five globally distributed Transparency Centers, receive access to source code, and can engage on technical content about Microsoft’s products and services. Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty will expand GSP to increase cloud transparency, starting with key Azure infrastructure components.

Wrap up

In this article I wanted to focus on what Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty has to offer for clients who want to leverage the Microsoft cloud for their digital transformation journey, but also want to maintain the same level of control over their IT resources as they have in their own data centers. Cloud adoption has accelerated enormously in the last couple of years, which also makes cloud sovereignty much more important for governments and organizations. Microsoft offers the tools, processes, and transparency to partners and clients to support the increasing sovereignty requirements that clients have on their transformation journey.

Due to these increasing sovereignty requirements, Capgemini has conducted research to look deeper into organizational awareness and key priorities when it comes to cloud sovereignty and the role it plays in overall cloud strategy. We have released a whitepaper with our findings, which can be downloaded here.

At Capgemini, we have a lot of experience in implementing cloud solutions across all industries. If you would like more information about how we do this for our clients, you can contact me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

You can also read my other articles here.

XPLR.Lowlands: September 13 (virtual)

On September 13, we hosted our first XPLR.Lowlands meetup. This was a full virtual event, streamed from our community studio. We hosted the following sessions:

Sessions

Navigating the world of AI infrastructure as a data scientist: Gabrielle Davelaar & Ekaterina Sirazitdinova

Traditionally hardware has always been a job for a High Performance Specialist. With the arrival of State-of-the-Art models such as GPT-3, Turing and Megatron-Turing more compute has been proven to be necessary. This talk is about how to navigate through the world of GPU’s, bandwidth, parallelization from a data science perspective.

A Quick Trip Across the Metaverse and Realities: Thomas Lewis

The volume is increasing from news around the Metaverse as well as Mixed Reality across Virtual and Augmented Reality. It can be a bit confusing. Also, what is Microsoft doing in all of these spaces? Join us for a fast-paced tour of all the realities, what Microsoft is doing in this space, understanding why this is a space for us to invest in and a look into the future.

Recording

You can watch the recording of the stream here:

All sessions will be published on our YouTube channel. Please subscribe here:

Global XR Talks – April 2022

This Global XR Talks, Alexander Meijers presented the following session:

Introduction to Microsoft Remote Assist and Guides

Microsoft offers a broad range of solutions modernizing field services with Mixed Reality for technicians. It empowers them by offering modern tools like Mixed Reality devices, Video calls, Annotations and File Sharing capabilities. These tools allow field service workers to solve complex problems even faster, collaborate together with experts and gives them easy access to work orders. Another one of them is creating customized training modules for new workers on the factory floor. Using Dynamics 365 and Microsoft HoloLens 2 we are able to create augmented training which allows new workers to be more quickly in learning their daily job, support workers in complex tasks and even guide audits. This session will give you an introduction to both first-party apps of Microsoft.

Watch the recording

You can watch the recording of the session here:

Global AI Bootcamp – Behind the Scenes

We are reaching the end of the Global AI Bootcamp 2022, and we’d like to introduce you to organizers from all over the world to learn more about their events: who are they and what content (did) they provide? In 6 different episodes (and timezones) we’ll focus on specific regions, and like the bootcamp, we’ll go around the world to connect to everyone.

The Global AI Bootcamp is a series of free one-day events organized across the world by local communities that are passionate about artificial intelligence on Microsoft Azure. Check out the official Global AI Bootcamp website, for more information and an overview of all the events.

Behind the Scenes Down Under

Learn about PyTorch on Azure Machine Learning and join us in a friendly chat with organizers from Australia and New Zealand.

Speaker: Sabrina Smai

Community organizers: Akanksha Malik & Anupama Natarajan

Behind the Scenes Africa

Learn about Semantic Search on Azure and join us in a friendly chat with organizers from Morocco and Mauritius.

Speaker: Derek Legenzoff – Senior Program Manager @Microsoft

Community organizers: Hassan Fadili & Zakiya Buhora

Behind the Scenes South America

Learn about Semantic Search on Azure and join us in a friendly chat with organizers from Morocco and Mauritius.

Speaker: Amira Youssef – Princiap Program Manager @Microsoft

Community organizers: Patricio Cofre & Luis Beltrán

Behind the Scenes South America

Learn about the Azure Percept devices and join us in a friendly chat with organizers from Chili and Mexico.

Speaker: Amira Youssef – Principal Program Manager @Microsoft

Community organizers: Patricio Cofre & Luis Beltrán

Behind the Scenes North America

Learn about Document Processing on Azure devices and join us in a friendly chat with organizers from Canada and the USA.

Speaker: Neta Haiby – Group Product Manager Azure AI @ Microsoft

Community organizers: Ron Dagdag & Ehsan Eskandari

Behind the Scenes North America

Learn about Document Processing on Azure devices and join us in a friendly chat with organizers from Canada and the USA.

Speaker: Neta Haiby – Group Product Manager Azure AI @ Microsoft

Community organizers: Ron Dagdag & Ehsan Eskandari

Behind the Scenes Asia

Join us in a friendly chat with organizers from India and Taiwan.

Community organizers: Kasam Ahmed Shaikh & Ning Chen

Behind the Scenes Europe

Learn about the responsible AI Dashboard and join us in a friendly chat with organizers from the UK and the Netherlands

Speaker: Mehrnoosh Sameki – Senior Program Manager @ Microsoft

Community organizers: Alyona Galyeva & Terry McCann

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