Azure Trends

Azure additions and enhancements have shown trends in areas where organizations could find opportunities to build new solutions or improve existing ones. Microsoft has largely driven the evolution by building on lower-level services that were available earlier on Azure, expanding and advancing Azure’s PaaS portfolio, and enabling Azure technologies to be used in places other than the company’s data centers. The improvements could give customers better capabilities and deployment flexibility, but use of high-level Azure services could foster a dependence on Microsoft-specific implementations, and customers should continue to be prepared for changes that could disrupt processes.

Artificial Intelligence Driven by Machine Learning

Azure services can use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) that work with customer data and Microsoft’s Bing data and engine to discover and expose insights for tasks such as predictive maintenance, fraud detection, and customer sentiment analysis and building natural language assistants that can use public and organizational data. Azure services and offerings that address these tasks include the following: