Microsoft has announced the availability of Azure Australia Central. These dual Azure cloud regions are located within Australian owned Canberra Data Centres. Representing a new architecture for Microsoft, the two regions are designed for low latency mission critical workloads.
Targeted at Australian and New Zealand Government clients, the new Azure regions offer stability, performance and resilience for public cloud products. In addition, selected Microsoft Office 365 and Azure products have been awarded protected certification by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). These two factors ensure Australian Government Agencies have a clear path to the Digital Transformation Agency’s (DTA) Cloud First strategy without compromising on security, availability or performance.
Microsoft also revealed their technical roadmap for Azure with significant investment in performance including even more powerful Virtual Machines, offloading technology for networking with plans for 50Gbps and beyond, revolutionary new storage and compute products as well as Quantum computing, Blockchain and a plan to provide separation using enclaves to prevent Microsoft having any access to client data.
These exciting updates will ensure Azure continues its position as the premiere cloud provider.
As a Microsoft Partner with significant Government experience, HSD can guide your agency through its own Digital Transformation.Microsoft has announced the availability of Azure Australia Central. These dual Azure cloud regions are located within Australian owned Canberra Data Centres. Representing a new architecture for Microsoft, the two regions are designed for low latency mission critical workloads.
Targeted at Australian and New Zealand Government clients, the new Azure offerings offer stability, performance and resilience for public cloud products. In addition, Microsoft Office 365 and Azure have been awarded protected certification by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). These two factors ensure Australian Government Agencies have a clear path to the Digital Transformation Agency’s (DTA) Cloud First strategy without compromising on security, availability or performance.
Microsoft also revealed their technical roadmap for Azure with significant investment in performance including even more powerful Virtual Machines, offloading technology for networking with plans for 50Gbps and beyond, revolutionary new storage and compute products as well as Quantum computing, Blockchain and a plan to provide separation using enclaves to prevent Microsoft having any access to client data.
These exciting updates will ensure Azure continues its position as the premiere cloud provider.
To coincide with the launch Mark Russinovich, Chief Technology Officer of Azure, shared his perspective on how Azure is driving innovation in performance, security and application development as the cloud platform for mission-critical applications. He covered Azure technologies available now and in the near future for compute, accelerated networking, confidential computing, containers and blockchain – among many others.
Both Mark and James Kavanagh, who is the Engineering Lead for Azure Australia & New Zealand, emphasized the ability for organisation’s across many disciplines from Government to Health Care to Education to modernize or augment their existing systems using the Azure platform.
While there were many highlights to the keynote the standouts for HSD were:
- Azure Confidential Computing (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-azure-confidential-computing):
- With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also when in use from the following threats:
- Malicious insiders with administrative privilege or direct access to hardware on which it is being processed
- Hackers and malware that exploit bugs in the operating system, application, or hypervisor
- Third parties accessing it without their consent
- With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also when in use from the following threats:
- Coco Framework (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-microsoft-s-coco-framework-for-enterprise-blockchain-networks/)
- The Coco Framework, an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks that meet all key enterprise requirements—providing a means to accelerate production enterprise adoption of blockchain technology.
- Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)
- FPGA’s make it possible to hit up to 30Gbps of throughput on Azure servers, by getting NICs to do the work rather than leaving networking to the CPU alone. (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/networking-innovations-that-drive-the-cloud-disruption/)
- FPGA’s being used by Project Brainwave (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/microsoft-unveils-project-brainwave/) for real-time AI
HSD is proud to be a Microsoft Partner during these exciting technical times. HSD, utilising the Azure platform, can help your agency through it’s own Cloud journey whether that be Digital Transformation, System Modernization or capability augmentation.
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