• 3 min read

Harness the power of data with Azure Data and AI

For any organization to succeed in a world of unprecedented uncertainty, a new level of agility is required.

For any organization to succeed in a world of unprecedented uncertainty, a new level of agility is required. Core to that agility is the ability to quickly gain insights from data at any scale, power ultra-low latency applications that deliver personalized experiences, and empower all users in an organization, regardless of size. This requires a computing platform that provides limitless scale, performance, and possibilities for what can be achieved with data.

To help organizations achieve these limitless capabilities, we shared several announcements today at Microsoft Ignite:

Unmatched analytics

Our commitment to customers is to make analytics in Azure the most performant and secure experience it can be. Azure Synapse Analytics is our limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics in a single experience, enabling data professionals to unlock timely insights to increase agility.

To help customers simplify their migration experience to Azure Synapse, we are announcing Azure Synapse Pathway. With a few clicks, customers can scan their source systems and automatically translate their existing scripts into TSQL. What used to take weeks or months can now be accomplished in minutes. Azure Synapse Pathway will support customers migrating from Teradata, Snowflake, Netezza, AWS Redshift, SQL Server, and Google BigQuery—enabling them to get up and running with Azure Synapse faster than ever.

Comprehensive data governance

To enable customers to discover and govern data better than ever before, we introduced Azure Purview, our unified data governance service, in December. Since its debut, customers have used the services to automatically scan, discover, and classify over 14.5 Billion data assets to get a holistic view of their data estates. Customers can now use Azure Purview to scan Azure Synapse workspaces across serverless and dedicated SQL pools. Synapse users can now also break down operational siloes more effectively than ever before, with the ability to natively discover data with a Purview-powered search within their Synapse workspaces.

Starting today, customers can now automatically scan and classify data residing in Amazon AWS S3, as well as data residing in on-premises Oracle DB and SAP ERP instances. This is in addition to Teradata, SQL Server on-premises, Azure data services, and Power BI, which have been supported data sources since Azure Purview’s debut.

Your apps. Faster

It’s now easier for customers to bring hybrid capabilities and cloud scale to their Apache Cassandra deployments using the new Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, a new addition to our NoSQL portfolio. Customers can easily take on-premises Apache Cassandra workloads and add limitless cloud scale while maintaining full compatibility with the latest version of Apache Cassandra. Their deployments gain improved performance and availability, while benefiting from Azure’s security and compliance capabilities.

To make it simpler for developers to take advantage of multi-document transactions and retriable writes, Azure Cosmos DB now provides MongoDB v4 transaction support. Azure Cosmos DB also offers additional enterprise-grade enhancements like continuous backup with point-in-time restore and new role-based access controls for enhanced security. We also announced the general availability of Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB, which enables near real-time analytics on operational data for the Azure Cosmos DB’s Core API and API for MongoDB.

Customers often depend on caching to meet increasing traffic demands on their applications. To support new use cases and apps with limitless global scale, Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise tiers are now generally available supporting larger cache sizes of up to 13 TB, and support for Redis 6.0. Active Geo-Replication in preview, enables global caches with multi-primary writes that are designed to deliver up to 99.999 percent availability.

Azure is the only public cloud that natively offers these comprehensive features to turbo charge your applications.

AI-powered search at your fingertips

Azure Cognitive Search is the only cloud search service with built-in AI capabilities that enrich all types of information to easily identify and explore relevant content at scale. We are announcing a new semantic search capability that brings our AI-powered search service to a whole new level enabling organizations to offer highly relevant search experience in their apps. These are the same capabilities that power search engines like Bing that are now available for any developer to use.

Enhanced migration experience

We hear from many organizations across industries that SQL continues to be the preferred database for critical workloads. That’s why we are making it easier than ever to migrate to Azure SQL using Azure Migrate, a central hub for Azure cloud migrations. Azure Migrate offers tools to discover, assess, and migrate workloads to the cloud with a few simple clicks. Customers can now easily understand all the technical and financial aspects of their cloud journey, by assessing their SQL source and destination landscapes at scale, with integrated SKU recommendations and cost estimates included.

Transform your business

Today’s exciting announcements are just part of what Azure can do to help your organization unify, manage, govern, and gain insights on all your data to improve business performance. Your data holds so much potential. We look forward to seeing what you do with it. Go limitless with Azure.


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