Everything Microsoft
The team are at AWS re:Invent 2022 for our first live shows!
Dimitris Perdikou, Head of Engineering, Home Office, UK Government shares with us the Home Office early adoption (at scale) of the cloud, seven years ago(!) and the challenges that bring when you move to second generation cloud.
Dimitris Perdikou
It’s Day 2 and the big themes of the conference are becoming clearer, our Roving Reporter Rob reports!
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.
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.
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:
Further Reading:
https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making
https://merionwest.com/2022/10/27/the-complexity-paradox/
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:
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:
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 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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
You can watch the recording of the stream here:
All sessions will be published on our YouTube channel. Please subscribe here:
This Global XR Talks, Alexander Meijers presented the following session:
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.
You can watch the recording of the session here:
