Verosoft Design is helping businesses across industries to embrace digital transformation with The Asset Guardian (TAG), an enterprise asset management system that is driven by IoT technology capabilities and real-time data analytics. Built in Microsoft Dynamics Business Central, TAG helps companies of all sizes leverage IoT, big data analytics and machine learning models and algorithms in order to optimize processes and resources. According to President and CEO of Verosoft Design Martin Turgeon, “IoT will change the way we drive our business and interact with our customers.”

Overview

Businesses across industries are embracing digital transformation, but for many companies, the barrier to entry can be the resources required to manage increasingly complicated technology. Many partners don’t have a dedicated team to manage a digital transformation successfully. While Microsoft’s Azure platform opens the door to many new forms of digital engagement, small businesses sometimes need a resource to help bridge the gap, making digital transformation accessible.

Enter TAG

The Asset Guardian, or TAG, was developed to solve this problem. Executives and business decision makers may want to leverage IoT and Artificial Intelligence techniques, but small teams don’t always have the resources to undertake the full scale of the project. Based on Dynamics Business Central, TAG offers a vertical-centric SaaS solution that enables companies of all sizes to embrace digital transformation.

TAG empowers businesses to simplify and automate equipment and maintenance in real-time across multiple job sites, including the management of parts inventories, machinery, work orders and maintenance personnel. Using IoT through Microsoft Azure, wireless sensors and monitors on equipment can offer data-driven insights that help optimize processes, saving time and money.  But the real power comes from the addition of data analytics and AI capabilities, allowing TAG to perform a deep analysis of the telemetry and metrics gathered by IoT and, using machine learning algorithms, predict equipment failure before it happens. The system can even auto-generate work orders to minimize downtime.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Verosoft also leverages a wide variety of Microsoft products to provide value to customers. Incorporating everything from Dynamics 365 to Azure Cloud-based services, TAG is able to offer a secure and customizable platform that serves a wide variety of customers with the highest uptime possible – 99.99 per cent.

TAG in Action

Electrical Energy Experts (EEE) is an acclaimed leader in electrical testing of power systems based in Wisconsin. The company specializes in high-voltage electrical testing and maintenance in industries that cannot afford downtime: healthcare, datacentres and energy generation.

Before TAG, EEE was driven by a legacy work order management system in place for over 20 years. With complex equipment, many of the components could only be accessed on a scheduled basis with planned outages by highly qualified technicians. EEE needed a strategy that would allow them to bring additional value to their customers, using data-driven and machine learning-guided decision making to help extend equipment life and improve safety for field technicians.

Leveraging TAG, EEE has opened the door to new levels of customer service. Using integrated Microsoft solutions, customers have access to complete equipment history, including every diagnostic result presented in real-time. With a comprehensive and personalized data management solution, EEE can optimize and automate their own business processes and operations and grow to new customers.

Industry 4.0 for all companies

Verosoft brings 18 years of experience to a comprehensive partner network through TAG. Since Microsoft does not embed Enterprise Asset Management software directly into Business Central, TAG offers a solution that can run independently of or embedded into the framework. As IoT is the base of business optimization, data analytics and AI, TAG is helping a variety of customers to leverage Industry 4.0 and digital transformation in a secure, effective and affordable way.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the defining technology of our time. Organizations that take advantage of all that it has to offer are arming themselves to compete now and in the future. A recent study of European leaders highlights how businesses that are actively implementing AI are more than twice as likely to be high-growth companies. Those that are not considering their AI strategy risk being left behind. I engage with partners and customers from across Canada daily and they regularly share with me that change can be overwhelming.  When it comes to AI, many leaders do not know where to start. Curious companies committed to success need to look no further than the companies that are doing incredible innovative work right here in Canada, demonstrating what’s possible with AI. In March we brought business leaders together from across the country to showcase, celebrate and learn what’s next at Future Now in Toronto – a focused business decision maker event where we explore innovation in action.

We started and ended the morning with amazing young Canadian talent and it is clear the future is bright. Tanisha Bassan, an ‘older and wiser’ 18-year-old former Microsoft Canada high school intern and winner of the CES 2019 Young Innovators to Watch Award for her project in quantum machine learning, opened the day with her inspiring keynote on her journey and work to fight cancer. Samin Khan, an incredible Canadian student and innovator, closed the day with a demo of his simple, inexpensive prosthetic arm, smartARM. Samin and his innovation partner Hamayal Choudhry’s ingenuity earned them the grand prize at last year’s Microsoft’s Imagine Cup – a global competition of the best and brightest innovators from 33 countries. These students drove home for me what can be achieved when you embrace technology, approach a challenge with a growth mindset and are passionate about the results.

We simply must commit to accelerating the growth of AI in Canada so students like Tanisha, Samin and Hamayal can reach their full potential here at home. Microsoft Canada is investing more than $100 million in cloud technology so Canadian organizations have the tools they need to compete in the digital age. And yet, in spite of local investments and a proliferation of AI incubators and research centres in places like Toronto, Edmonton and Montreal, Canadian businesses are not taking advantages of the enormous opportunities made possible by AI. A recent study from Gartner found that Canada is a very poor 9 out of 10 when it comes to countries adopting and deploying AI in business applications. On top of this challenge, Canadian employers are facing an enormous skills gap in the digital labour force. So how should we address this incredible challenge and ensure growth for the Canadian economy?

The solution is twofold. Not only does the Canadian workforce need the skills to work in AI, but Canadian businesses need to actively adopt AI to provide the interesting and innovative work that will keep skilled workers and innovators in Canada. We are seeing amazing innovations, life changing and life-saving, happening in every sector that will inspire our future Canadian AI workforce.  A terrific proof point is the sheer number of Canadian organizations recognized by Microsoft to receive AI for Earth grants. Many innovators stand out and we heard from several at Future Now:

Benjamin Haibe-Kains, a Senior Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre at Toronto’s University Health Network, and his team are working to develop a shared database for clinicians to run biopsy results that leverages AI and the Microsoft Cloud to assist in determining personalized treatment plans for cancer patients. An initiative to enhance patient care and, ultimately, save lives.

And Humza Teherany, Chief Technology and Digital Officer at MLSE, is using data and the cloud to completely transform the fan experience and help Toronto sports fans get closer to the teams they love both in and outside of the arena.

We also provided a sneak peak at the amazing innovations that are possible with mixed reality with a demo of the recently launched HoloLens 2. The digital world has gone beyond two-dimensional screens and entered the three-dimensional world. We are seeing a new ecosystem of Mixed Reality Partners evolve, including partners like Kognitiv Spark who is working with the Canadian Army and Air Force to infuse Mixed Reality solutions and HoloLens into training support services, to ultimately improve operations and advance communications. The possibilities are truly endless.

Today was about showcasing these leading-edge examples and to helping others realize the value that AI and the power of cloud computing can bring to an organization. It was also about providing the insights organizations need to develop a new strategy and unlock the full potential of AI and machine learning.

For many business leaders, events like Future Now are just the start of their digital transformation journey. Because of this, we’ve recently launched AI Business School, a free comprehensive AI business training that helps organizations define an AI strategy, enable an AI-ready culture and understand the implications of responsible AI in business.

With all the innovation on display and the enthusiasm I heard from attendees about what’s in store, I know we are on the path to incredible and life changing innovation right here in Canada, but we need to act now. Our keynote speaker Futurist Jim Carroll said, “Do something. The time is now. The future is going to be here before you know it,” and he’s absolutely right.

Let’s continue to partner, to imagine and to bring our aspirations to life. Future Now is all about unlocking the art of what is possible, now lets go make it happen!

Learn more about how you can empower innovation with Microsoft AI.

The post Unlocking innovation in Canada – the time to act is now! appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

Here is a very interesting case about a local Microsoft partner applying their expertise to build a platform that applies artificial intelligence to enhance quality and increase productivity in key manufacturing processes.

Canvass Analytics uses AI and predictive analytics to help its customers solve high impact problems in their industrial operations. Large-scale industrial producers in manufacturing and oil and gas industries use Canvass’ enterprise-grade platform to plug in their manufacturing process data for transformational results. Their predictive analytics platform processes the industrial IoT data generated from a plant’s machines, devices, and systems to reveal patterns and correlations hidden within the data. The software can then make informed predictions using the prebuilt predictive models, suggesting future outcomes based on careful analysis of historical trends.

With these predictive insights, operators are empowered to make strategic adjustments to production processes to increase revenue, produce higher-grade products, unlock new efficiencies, and maximize yields. These improvements compound, so a single, seemingly small adjustment can have huge benefits for a large-scale producer.

One major Tier 1 automotive supplier uses the Canvass AI platform to predict quality within its welding process. By applying Canvass AI to predict defects, the platform is not only helping to significantly reduce inspection time but also ensuring that fewer defective welds leave the plants. This, in turn, dramatically reduces the repair and replacement costs incurred.

Another Canvass customer applied Canvass AI to improve the quality of its welds and reduce asset downtime. By optimizing the many parameters that influence weld quality, this customer reported improvements in operations, such as:

• Increase in consistent, First Time Quality of welds
• Reduction in waste and rework required
• Reduction in asset failure
• Increase in throughput

While many people think that AI works like magic, the Canvass Analytics team puts the potential power of AI to good use. Unlocking the power of AI also takes a strong partner and supportive infrastructure. That’s why Canvass Analytics has been working with Microsoft since day one through the BizSpark program (now Microsoft for Startups). While Microsoft cloud services provided the initial support necessary to build the Canvass AI platform, Azure has proven to be an essential component of ongoing development and operations.

The appeal of Azure was threefold. First, customers can engage with the Canvass Analytics platform on a range of devices due to the versatile design of Azure. Next, the global distribution of Azure datacenters supports organizations that are spread across the globe, including Fortune 500 companies. Finally, Microsoft’s unwavering dedication to security gives Canvass Analytics and its customers peace of mind, knowing that their data is responsibly protected. This partnership has been instrumental to Canvass’ success and has given both parties the opportunity to learn, grow, and evolve together.

While there is still an industry-wide gap between AI research and application, the experts at Canvass Analytics are closing that gap by applying their experience in practical applications. The flexibility of Canvass’ software helps customers make changes within their industrial operations and see results in just a few days. So while it may be true that AI isn’t magic, for Canvass Analytics, the power of applying industrial data to accurately predict outcomes comes close.

Learn more about connected manufacturing

The post Canvass Analytics transforms large-scale operations using industrial AI supported by Azure appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

“Digital Transformation has raised the stakes, with 69% of senior executives telling Forbes that this is forcing fundamental changes to security strategies. If you’re going to open your organization up to new customers, new markets, and anytime, anywhere access, you need to do it securely.”

– Ann Johnson, Corporate Vice President, Cybersecurity solutions, Microsoft

The Digital Climate

How can we protect ourselves in this new digital era? It’s a question that many businesses and governments are asking worldwide. In the digital world we live in today, there is a tremendous amount of opportunity. When we think about the advancements of cloud, and the ability of employees to access applications and data from almost anywhere, the face of employee mobility and teamwork has significantly changed, but that also raises concerns with regards to security. In fact, the estimated cost due to cybercrime is expected to reach $3 trillion by 2020.

In order to build resilience in the security space, we need to understand the challenges that are out there and how to combat them.

Today’s key challenges and how to securely prepare for the Cloud

As excitement builds among organizations to move to the Cloud and leverage its benefits and advantages, it is crucial to adopt a measured and proactive approach. Only in this way can organizations prepare their Cloud environments to provide optimal impact and evolve in a manner that does not expose their data or assets to unnecessary or unreasonable risk.

The challenges organizations face in this period of transformation are straightforward but often require a change in thinking:

1) It starts with Identity Management

Identity attacks are up 300% this year alone. Identity is becoming the essential control plane for security; attackers understand this and are heavily targeting this gateway to your organization.

Traditional security boundaries are blurred and are no longer the primary defense point. Identities are the key avenues to accessing any organization’s resources and data, no matter where they are. Identity-based protection is a critical starting point for a strong defense against today’s attacks, especially for profiles with privileged access.

2) Adapting to the Cloud models

The Cloud cannot be secured like a mere extension of the traditional on premises environment. This is a new environment that requires new thinking, such as accepting the notion of shared responsibility between the enterprise and the Cloud provider in order to stay future-proof.

3) Focus on the data

The data must be secured above all else. The only assets the organization will truly own in the Cloud is its data. Security strategies must be adapted to this fact and work to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data at all times.

4) Evolve all aspects of the security strategy, at speed

Do not focus solely on areas such as Protection and Detection. Ensure the security strategy for the new Cloud era also includes areas such as Prevention, Identity Management, Incident Response, Business Continuity and Recovery. And do it at speed.

Attacks are spreading incredibly fast, making it highly difficult for humans to keep up. 96% of the malware we detect is automated polymorphic malware that changes its look and shape every time it infects a new system.

As attackers adopt automation, you need to also have automation in your corner. The best protections can be beaten, and so you must be agile to quickly detect attacks and have automatic responses prepared to react.

Remaining Agile to Build Resistance

In order to build a digital resilience, you must understand the risk of cyber-attacks and understand the strategic areas to focus on in order to successfully combat them. In order to help customers stay informed, Microsoft publishes an update every 6 months called the Security Intelligence Report on the global security landscape. It’s a great resource to ensure you are maintaining a state of digital resilience.

The post Building Digital Resilience appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

I’m Greg Dashwood – Product Lead for Azure IoT for Microsoft Canada. I’d like to invite you to learn more about taking the first steps in digital transformation and experience real advice from customers who have done it at “The Future of Operations” – Jan 29th, 2019 in Calgary.

As our world becomes increasingly connected, more populated and the demand for a higher quality of living is met at a higher rate all around the world, the demands on the energy industry to support these advances continues to mount. The rapidly increasing pace and breadth of industrialization globally, emerging demands for new ways for energy to be created, stored and distributed, and slow moving but tectonic shifts in terms of how energy is being used, for example the increasing adoption of Electric Vehicles are putting a new set of challenges in front of the organizations that literally power the world.

Simultaneously there are fundamental industry wide factors that continue to put operational, margin and regulatory pressure on the players in this space, including an aging workforce, skilled worker shortage for a wide variety of entry and intermediate roles, and a renewed volatility in overall energy markets globally.

Despite these factors, many in the energy industry are tackling these issues head on, re-pivoting how they measure their business, how they fundamentally operate and how they collaborate both within their company walls and with their extended partners and channel – and technical innovation is a massive asset in driving this response. There are many trends apparent across the breadth and scale of the energy industry globally, but I want to highlight 3 trends where real leadership is readily apparent.

Adoption of a cloud operating model just makes sense

Whether you are an upstream organization with global operations, a midstream organization with a complex logistic and transmission infrastructure or a downstream distributor with a complex retail network, your IT infrastructure demands need to be globally available, agile and able to scale efficiently with your business. Which is why many world leading energy companies are driving a digital transformation strategy centered around the Azure cloud.

Chevron recently announced a multi-year partnership with Microsoft to accelerate their journey on this transformation. Their sophistication as a consumer of data, compute and IoT, their requirements for globally available computational capability, as well as a clearly defined strategy for turning this data into insight paved the way for this move to take their operations to the cloud and to the next level in terms of capability, cost efficiency and performance.

Realizing insight from Data has never been easier!

Of the thousands of decisions made every day in all shapes and sizes of energy organization, practically all of these can be made more effectively, with greater confidence, lower risk and more certainty with the right application of analytics and AI to shape these decisions.

Shell is making rapid moves in this direction, leveraging AI and Azure analytics in a number of use cases, including using machine vision to identify safety risks at the gas pump to increase safety for customers and workers. Closer to home, Plains Midstream is making rapid progress implementing cloud-based predictive analytics and related technologies for use in a predictive or condition-based maintenance solutions, all leveraging the Azure cloud.

Data is not useful unless operationalized

Data volumes in the energy industry can be massive, and the tooling and capability to turn that data into insight is now available with cloud computing capabilities, but even the best insight is of no value unless it can be cohesively integrated into operational work flows.

Our Dynamics offerings allow for this bridge between your data and analytics teams to be integrated into your operational systems, and allow direct integration with your field service tooling, financials and other key operational applications. The need to share information across operational teams is also critical to maximize value from insights gained from analytical efforts, and capabilities like Microsoft Teams allow for this to happen seamlessly, dynamically and in a globally scalable fashion. Finally, technologies like the Microsoft Hololens are allowing for global scaling of expertise regardless of where your employees sit. Leveraging capabilities like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, your highly skilled expert specialists can land this knowledge anywhere your operations require it, even on the other side of the world.

How to get going on this journey?

As with your business, the technology advancements in this space are moving extremely rapidly. There are a vast multitude of ways these solutions can help your organization and we want to help you get acquainted with the amazing capabilities on the table. To take us up on this offer, register now for the Future of Operations in Calgary on January 29th for an end to end overview on all of the technology areas mentioned in this article, and specific guidance on how to evaluate, prioritize and plan how to get started with implementing these capabilities within your organization.

I look forward to seeing you in Calgary!

The post The Future of Operations – Digital Innovation is now table stakes appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Canada.

When it comes to groceries, Canadians want it all – a big selection of high-quality food at low prices (and with sales and loyalty benefits with purchase). Couple that with the increasing desire for food to come from local and ethical sources and for organic or prepared foods, it’s no wonder that Statistica estimates annual retail sales of food and beverage in Canada at $188 billion.

While other retail has experienced a digital transformation, grocery shopping has mainly remained unchanged since the dawn of the grocery store: Canadians travel to stores, browse aisles, wait in line to purchase and then transport everything home. With variables in weather, perishable foods, complex food safety requirements and the traditionally high-frequency, low-volume business model of food service, full-service grocery delivery has remained out of reach.

Sustainable Produce Urban Delivery, or SPUD, is changing that simple truth. Building on their roots as a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) company, SPUD delivers more than just fresh produce: the catalogue now includes a full range of groceries, including produce, dairy, bakery, meat, seafood, packaged goods and ready-to-eat meals. The company runs an online store with a small, high-turnover inventory, so food items don’t expire or get damaged on the shelf; with perishables, SPUD only orders based directly on customer needs, so they don’t over-order short-shelf life items. The result is dramatically lowered food waste.

And it doesn’t stop there: SPUD has offered its Food-X-Urban Delivery platform to local companies to help make delivery a reality. Housed in a new facility in Burnaby, other grocery retailers can access SPUD’s industry-leading technology, warehousing, home delivery, and food preparation platform. Integrating directly with the retailer’s point of sale systems to provide live visibility of inventory, allowing orders to be fulfilled swiftly and efficiently.

So how does it all work? SPUD uses state-of-the-art technology to facilitate their full operations. With a proprietary inventory management tool built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, the company has end-to-end visibility into operations and analytics. Combined with Office 365 and Azure cloud services, SPUD takes full advantage of Microsoft integration and scale.

Read here to learn more on how SPUD uses AI, ebikes and Microsoft Cloud!

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Changing roles – DevOps

Developers, especially those who work in an Agile shop, have little difficulty with the migration to DevOps. They’re used to being assigned to one application or set of capabilities, so they tend to be deep vertically into one technology limiting the scope of their reach within that application, suite or platform.

Infrastructure and security professionals have traditionally been more horizontally aligned. It is rare that the infrastructure disciplines limit their scope to a particular application. They usually provide services across multiple applications. These roles struggle more with being attached to one product/application team. Traditionally, these resources relied on standards, streamlined and repeatable processes to keep the quality and the value high. Similar access, bandwidth, compute, storage, security features are provided to every application using the shared resources. The value these roles brought to our organisations was in the efficiency in which we leveraged their resources (technology, process or human) and how well we spread them across all our offerings. The value equation has changed. Velocity is what drives business. Efficiency only saves costs. Making the market requires a different mindset, thus leveraging our resources differently.

DevOps Teams run the entire Application

Soup to Nuts. Development, QA, Infrastructure, Security, Operations are all accountable for one application, its feature iterations, its uptime, its performance; almost everything. Integrate Agile and the project team is measured on how well it was able to keep its commitments to release a feature within a set time frame. It’s about releasing to the user community within a sprint. This means that you will deploy new code into an existing environment to provide a new capability to the technology consumer within a short time frame. Moving code to production must be nimble and quick and must be able to rollback quickly without taking down the system.

Releasing a feature by infrastructure is now obsolete. A pipeline handles the integration of the code within the code base and a build will be automatically be generated. This new accountable application team becomes essential to the development and operations of the application. All roles on the team become part of support.

Infrastructure based roles assigned to DevOps teams will evolve their roles. While they will still have some purview over shared resources, they will be measured along with the rest of the team on how well features were deployed on a set timeline in their assigned vertical. They will care about they same things they always did, but automation will compel them to learn to code.

Cloud and Infrastructure as Code

While cloud can be managed through graphic user interfaces, to manage at scale and participate in automated deployments, people need to learn to provision and configure using infrastructure as code.

“Born in the cloud” applications are immutable and not reliant on their operating systems (OS), which means that should OSs be required, they can and should be rebuilt on the fly. They aren’t patched, and you don’t troubleshoot them. You rebuild them using the latest build and the app doesn’t care. But you need to deploy them through code as the application counters may trigger scale outs and scale backs of compute, storage etc. Under the conditions where an event is triggered, your “infrastructure as code” can be invoked.

Platform services in the cloud are the future. Typical Infrastructure as a Service requires more care and feeding then Platform services where compute, storage, operating system and other base components are tackled by the cloud provider. Code is key to managing these services.

Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery (CICD) Pipelines

CICD pipelines are highly effective in the management of releasing a feature. They help us automate the code releases into production. As soon as the code for a set features is ready for production it can be integrated into an existing code base and delivered to the user facing environment. This is done with no down time typically and is fully automated. There is still quality assurance and user acceptance testing occurring in a pre-prod environment, but the whole code release occurs with no manual intervention.

Bottom Line: Innovative Digital Capabilities Drive Value

In a digital economy, innovative digital capabilities will drive value generation for companies developing new products or layering on value to existing ones. Financial benefit will be driven by getting out there first and iterating on versions quickly as you take feedback from your consumer. Being the first to innovate will require agility in IT and they will have to automate processes to ensure timeliness, accuracy and still protect your reputation. DevOps needs to permeate more traditional shops and siloed groups need to be united in the support of a platform or a specific application

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Outsourcing is an important component of an organizations evolving service delivery model, used to enhance company capabilities and allow IT to support operations and enable both business and citizen services.

Since its inception, this model has been evolving. It started with companies like EDS outsourcing entire organizations IT Operations to the move to multi-sourcing – working with multiple alternate service delivery partners for different “swim lanes” such as desktop, data centre, network, service desk, etc. We have witnessed significant changes but none more profound than the disruption cloud computing brings.

Digital transformation will never be seamless but combining best practices with outsourcing can produce great results.

Companies like Uber and Airbnb have disrupted via the digital business model. That disruption is far reaching and includes the business model for IT Operations, including how organizations design their own operations models, shared services and which components they elect to outsource.

Five key things to consider when looking at how Cloud Economics impacts IT Outsourcing:

1. Viewpoint – Traditionally IT Operations was seen from an infrastructure lens of what it supported (i.e. physical servers or virtual machines). While infrastructure has a place in a hybrid model, that primary focus now shifts to the end application or solutions being provided.
2. Costs – Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) decreases costs at the time of move and on an ongoing basis as the environment is continually optimized for the cloud. This causes a shift from Capital to Operating Expense models.
3. Capabilities – Freeing up spend as well as combining the data with new cloud platform capabilities creates new opportunities to invest in business enablement and innovation of differentiating capabilities. Plan for it.
4. Solutions – How we think about solutions changes from standalone customized to standardized cloud-based frameworks built upon and aggregating different cloud platforms.
5. Operations – The requirements and responsibilities of managing IT Operations changes to reflect the new design of these environments.

Enabling our customers and partners

Our mission at Microsoft is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. The Cloud Era of IT Outsourcing is key to enabling the full benefits of our cloud services.

Our Enterprise Services and Partner teams are working with the rest of Microsoft, our customers and partners to make this a reality. This includes helping our customers define the right strategy and model for their new environment as well as how to transition. We are doing this in partnership with our key partners including enabling our traditional strategic outsourcers to transform their models as well as assisting the development of new cloud managed service providers.

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Some organizations are very large and their IT department have to manage hundreds, or thousands of applications running on several thousand virtual machines (VMs). Many are overwhelmed by the thought of workload migration.  For some, it’s difficult to know where to start.  They need to determine:

• the complexity and business value of migrating workloads
• which workloads to move first
• how to prioritize the workloads
• which cloud computing model to use (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS)
• the regulatory and compliance implications of moving workloads to the cloud
• the impact on data security and the current enterprise processes
• which roles, training, additional skills are required to operate the workloads in a Cloud environment
• the approach to adoption and change management – ensuring that investments in the Cloud will provide value to the organization
• how moving to the cloud allows the organization to meet its goals

An organization doesn’t just wake up one day and decide to migrate workloads to the cloud. There must be a compelling reason to use cloud: what business value will be derived by using public cloud services? This vision and goal then drives what applications should be in the cloud and which should not. This vision and goal should also drive the prioritization of migrating workloads to the cloud.

Aligning benefits to your Cloud Strategy

The benefits of cloud are changing. No longer is cost savings the biggest driver in moving to the cloud.  Greater scalability, faster access to infrastructure, and faster time to market are leading drivers today.

When moving to the cloud, it is important to align benefits to your cloud strategy. Public cloud services offer benefits that enable CIOs to make significant advances in all of the following areas:

• Service Performance
• Innovation
• Elasticity
• Security

From the benefits listed above, there are some questions organizations should  be asking themselves:

• What do these potential benefits mean to your department?
• How will you capitalize on these to deliver benefits to the business?
  • What workloads will you move to the cloud and in which order?
  • Which applications will you move and in what order?
  • IaaS, PaaS, SaaS –  in which order?
• How ready is your department to move to the cloud?
  • Do you need to train staff in new skills?
  • Do you need to address the fear of job loss?
  • Do you need to adjust ITIL operational support processes?

Having a clearly defined cloud strategy drives the identification, planning and prioritization of migrating workloads to the cloud. Without one, your organization will struggle with your cloud adoption goals. Microsoft Services can help you with defining your cloud strategy and workload identification, planning and migration. Our next blog will describe Microsoft’s workload migration approach. Please reach out to myself on LinkedIn if your government ministry or department is looking to develop a cloud strategy and/or requires help in identifying workloads to migrate.

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On a personal note, it was especially exciting for me because this was my very first time attending the show. Even though I’ve been in the industry for decades (I was the Desktop Development Lead on Honeywell’s industrial historian 25 years ago), I have never been able to attend– till this year. As a first-time attendee, I can tell you that the show is massive, overwhelming, and very exciting all at the same time. Protip – if you’re planning to go next year, make sure you book early. The hotels fill up fast.

Microsoft had a strong presence at the show, and here’s a summary of some of the great solutions we have for the manufacturing industry, along with some exciting new announcements.

Connected Factory

The most difficult part of any transformation can often be figuring out where to begin. I’ve spoken with many customers who all say the same thing – they see the potential inherent in digital transformation, they want to start doing it, but they are finding it very hard to figure out where to start!

To help with this, we came up with a Connected Factory IoT Solution Accelerator. This preconfigured solution lets you connect and monitor your industrial equipment and devices in the cloud—including your machines already operating on the factory floor.

The solution leverages Azure services including Azure IoT Hub and Azure Time Series Insights (more on this below). It also uses the OPC Foundation’s cross-platform OPC UA Net Standard Library reference stack for OPC UA connectivity, as well as a rich web portal with OPC UA server management capabilities, alarms processing and telemetry visualizations.

The web portal and the Azure Time-Series Insights can be used to quickly see trends in OPC UA telemetry data and see Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and several key performance indicators (KPIs) like number of units produced and energy consumption.

Microsoft announced a new OPC Global Discovery Server module for Microsoft Azure IoT Edge at HMI that will detect all OPC Servers and their related endpoints. The endpoints and their related security configuration can be viewed through the Connected Factory user interface.  To ensure communications are secure, certificates can be retrieved from Microsoft Key Vault and sent directly to the OPC Server.

You can view a live demo here -> http://www.microsoftazureiotsuite.com/demos/connectedfactory

Azure Time Series Insights

Andrew Shannon and Chandrika Shankarnarayan from the Azure TSI team were at HMI to show some of the new TSI features such as a new tag hierarchy, the ability to save cold data to blob storage, and new JavaScript “widgets” that can be used to make impressive websites.  Most of the customers I demoed TSI to had never seen it before and were quite impressed with it, particularly its speed. The demo powerful as it was showing millions of real-time windmill data points from one of my Calgary based customers, TransAlta Utilities.

Time series data—sensor readings taken at intervals—has traditionally been a challenge to store and analyze. Azure TSI makes this very easy, enabling manufacturers to use a single place for the long-term storage of this data – while being massively scalable and protected. Once the data is in the IoT Cloud, you can use it to obtain meaningful insights without worrying about the infrastructure required to host the data.

Learn more about Azure Time Series Insights here 

OPC integration with fully managed Azure IoT Central

Valerie Naldi showed an interesting prototype of production OPC data in IoT Central.  As IoT Central is a fully managed SaaS offering, this would be a very low-touch approach to visualize, analyze and alert on plant floor data.  As a bonus, administrators can see OPC UA configuration data as well.

Azure Sphere

There are over 9 Billion Microcontroller Units (MCU) powered devices built and deployed every year. These tiny chips are the brain of intelligent devices, hosting compute, memory and storage in a space smaller than your thumbnail.

Connectivity goes both ways though. Devices that send data to the Internet can also receive data – and if incorrectly secured, these devices can become compromised by malicious actors. To mitigate this threat, Microsoft recently announced Azure Sphere, a platform for securing and powering this new class of IoT devices at the intelligent edge.

The platform consists of three elements – Azure Sphere Certified MCUs, the Azure Sphere OS, and the Azure Sphere Security Service.

This combination of on-device hardware and software with the power of the cloud provides processing power five times that of traditional MCUs, a highly secure operating system designed specifically for IoT as well as a turnkey cloud security service that will monitor and detect threats, and automatically update security protocols—providing lifetime protection for every Azure Sphere device.

As MCU chips proliferate, Azure Sphere will allow manufacturers to produce the next generation of connected devices while increasing IoT security at every level.

Learn more about Azure Sphere here

Azure IoT Edge

IoT in the cloud is extremely powerful, but not all analytics need to be managed in the cloud. There are use cases where you want a device to respond as quickly as possible to an anomaly, and not have to wait to hear back from a central service. Or, in bandwidth limited areas, there may be value in doing data aggregation and cleanup on the device, and only moving insights to the cloud.

Azure IoT Edge is made up of three components:

• IoT Edge modules are containers that run Azure services, 3rd party services, or your own code. They are deployed to IoT Edge devices and execute locally on those devices.
• The IoT Edge runtime runs on each IoT Edge device and manages the modules deployed to each device.
• A cloud-based interface enables you to remotely monitor and manage IoT Edge devices.

There are many IoT Edge devices available for all use cases. Here are just a few examples from the show floor.

Dragonboard 410C
Raspberry Pi 3 Compute Module
Nexcom NISE 50-IoT

Learn more about Azure IoT Edge

Closing

As I said at the beginning, I’ve been in the industry for more years than I care to remember. Over these years, I’ve seen some very distinct shifts in how manufacturing companies are doing business.

Today, most companies are moving their historians (industrial databases) to a hybrid on-prem/cloud model, thereby breaking it out of the traditional siloed structure. This has the knock-on effect of democratizing the data within the company, and roles that didn’t traditionally have access to these databases are now able to access it. Many companies are exploring how they can better use their existing data to create new applications or augment existing ones.

A similar story is playing out when it comes to device telemetry. I’m seeing an increasing shift in how companies are pushing this intelligence to the cloud, and using the data in ways that were simply not possible when they were limited to vendor-specific solutions.

Couple this data with Machine Learning and Predictive Algorithms, and you can see that we’re moving into a new world – it’s not just about doing things faster or more efficiently anymore.  For the first time I can remember, technology is ahead of the business.

Hannover Messe was a great showcase of how the rate of change is accelerating rapidly, even in industries that traditionally moved relatively slowly. Microsoft is at the forefront of this acceleration, and I know that our solutions are getting even stronger as I write this!

I plant to be at Hannover Messe next year, and I hope to see you there as well.

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