Businesses today are experiencing the most significant change in our economy in a generation and the ability to realize the full potential of the cloud through digital transformation has never been greater. There are three core capabilities businesses need that together drive successful transformation: limitless database scale and performance, unmatched analytics and insights, and unified data governance.
Today we shared a number of announcements to help organizations evolve rapidly even in the face of sustained uncertainty. Across industries, companies are investing in these core capabilities to ensure they have the flexibility to innovate anywhere and meet evolving business needs.
Limitless database scale and performance
We are announcing the preview of SQL Server 2022, the most Azure-enabled SQL Server release yet. This enables easier cloud integration than ever before with new disaster recovery functionality for Azure SQL Managed Instance and seamless analytics over on-premises operational data with Synapse Link for SQL Server. Microsoft continues to invest in our Azure SQL family of databases providing flexible options for app migration, modernization, and development. Azure SQL Managed Instance has a number of key announcements, including business offers with significantly more memory per vCore and increased storage to 16 TB in both the general purpose and business-critical service tiers, providing more room for app growth.
Azure is also the best cloud for NoSQL and open source databases. Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database built to support production applications at any size or scale. Financially backed service-legal agreements (SLA’s) guaranteeing consistency, high throughput, less than 10 ms latency reads and writes, and 99.999 percent availability make it simple for developers to independently and elastically scale applications across any Azure region. Today we are announcing the general availability of Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, providing the ability to provision managed native Apache Cassandra clusters with automated deployment and scaling operations, accelerating hybrid scenarios, and reducing ongoing maintenance. Flexible Server (preview), a new deployment option for Azure Database for MySQL is also now generally available. With Flexible Server, customers can benefit from a fully managed service designed to provide maximum control of your databases, high availability options to ensure zero data loss, built-in capabilities for cost optimization, and increased productivity enabled by the Azure ecosystem.
Unmatched analytics and insights
When it comes to analytics and insights, Azure is simply unmatched. When we debuted Azure Synapse Analytics, we effectively removed the barriers between enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics to enable data professionals to collaborate, build, and manage their analytic solutions with ease. Since its launch, the number of Azure customers running petabyte-scale workloads has increased fivefold.
But we didn’t stop there. We introduced Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB last year, creating a simple, low-cost, cloud-native HTAP implementation that enables immediate, in-the-moment business insights. We continue our investments today with the general availability of Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse, enabling immediate insights with high-value Dynamics 365 data, and a preview of Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022. We are also announcing that Azure Synapse Data Explorer is joining the existing SQL and Apache Spark analytical runtimes in Azure Synapse—a highly scalable engine to automatically index structured, semi-structured, and free-text data commonly found in telemetry, time series, and logs to surface enriched insights that can directly improve business decisions.
Unified data governance
The need for a comprehensive data governance service has never been stronger. Azure Purview, our unified data governance service, helps businesses manage and govern their on-premises, multi-cloud, and software as a service (SaaS) data. It’s exciting to see the strong interest in Azure Purview since its general availability, with over 57 billion data assets discovered by customers already. Azure Purview ensures your Microsoft data estate is governed through deep integrations with data services in Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and more. Every organization can now build a unified data governance solution to maximize the value of their data in the cloud.
Customers like the London Heathrow Airport, for example, have already achieved tremendous success with Azure Purview. The airport’s data teams use lineage data in Azure Purview to find correlations between datasets which is critical in determining how each airport service affects broader operations.
“We used to have a lot of data about things we generally already understood but now that we’ve adopted Azure Purview, we have insight into the unknown, meaning we can aggregate multiple data sources in a more user-friendly way to discover where we can create efficiencies and make better predictions.”—Dave Draffin, Azure Cloud and Data Architect, Heathrow Airport
Get started today
Get started today to accelerate innovation for your organization no matter where your data resides. Azure’s unrivaled end-to-end data platform provides customers with the capabilities needed to drive successful transformations.
Data has clearly become the most strategic asset of our time. We look forward to seeing what you do with it.
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