Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlined key digital imperatives that will help organizations address global challenges such as the transition to new energy sources and the inequalities that exist in today’s world.
Speaking at the Microsoft Asia-Pacific Innovators Forum in Singapore today, Nadella said these requirements include Migrating to the cloudUsing data and artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber security, among others.
Effectively explaining how Microsoft’s enterprise offerings — from cloud services and productivity and collaboration software to developer and security tools — can address each need, Nadella said companies that want to “do more with less” need to think deeply about those needs.
At the event attended by Microsoft partners, customers and government officials, Nadella spoke extensively about the role of cloud computing in paving the way for the world’s energy transition.
“Deploying a unit of computing is the most efficient use of energy, especially at times when demand and supply have to match,” Nadella said. “You don’t want to waste any capital, and that’s the best way to match supply and demand.”
But moving to the cloud is not the only thing Lifting and migrating existing applications – Organizations need to build cloud-native applications to be more energy efficient, he said. Citing research from Gartner, he noted that by 2025, 95% of applications will be cloud native.
Against this backdrop, Nadella was bullish on the overall growth of Azure cloud services, with more data centers being planned for the region. This comes at a time when cloud capabilities are increasingly distributed across datacenters, multiple clouds and edge environments, which he said can be managed with the Azure Arc management platform.
Nadella singled out Malaysian oil and gas giant Petronas as an example of a company in the Asia-Pacific that is using Azure’s distributed cloud computing fabric. “They have massive commitments and demand for their own energy transition plans HPC [high-performance computing] For their back-office needs,” he said.
On data and AI, Nadella cited research from Gartner, which expects 10% of the world to be data-driven. Generative AI models By 2025, driving new applications that will require a robust data platform.
But instead of combining different data solutions, Nadella urged companies to consider a data fabric Cosmos DB, a NoSQL and relational database.
“You complement that with Azure SQLAnd you have the best selection of online databases, connected in real time Synapse analysis engine. And it’s all managed and managed by Purview,” he said.
“Just as moving to the cloud means you’re not stacking and racking up servers, having an unlimited data estate equates to what Azure Data Platform provides for you.”
With data platforms as a foundation, Nadella said companies can start building big AI models and turn them into platforms. “The idea is not for you to start from scratch, so we’re taking everything from our partner OpenAI and exposing them as APIs. [application programming interfaces] medium Azure OpenAI APIs,” she said.
With $10tn expected to be lost to cybercrime by 2025, Nadella opened his keynote by highlighting Microsoft’s efforts to help organizations prevent cyberattacks.
“For us to meet that challenge, we have to go from end to end,” he said. “You can’t sew products together – you have to have one Zero-Trust Architecture Whether it is designed into the product Identity managementEndpoint security, application security or infrastructure security.
“And then it’s not enough – you need signals because, after all, it’s an intelligence thing. So, the trillions of events we see every day are being used to make these products more secure.”
Microsoft counts some of the largest companies across the region as clients. These include Thai financial services firm SCBXSri Lankan conglomerate John Keel’s Holdings and Zwelig Pharma, one of Asia’s largest healthcare services groups.
At the forum, Balbir Singh Dhillon, head of Zwelig Pharma’s productivity platform, said the company first moved to the cloud with Azure, starting with its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. It has been running ever since SAP HANA in-memory database A move to Azure that reduced its hosting fees by 40%.