One thousand components of beautiful

There are approximately 1,000 components in the latest Aston Martin sports car, the DB11. Behind every component is an employee who takes pride in personally attesting to its quality. It's a shared commitment that shines through the entire manufacturing process, from a designer's initial drawing of the car's silhouette to Palmer personally inspecting the first 1,000 DB11s that rolled off the line.
"What's unique about working at Aston Martin is that everything that each person does can be traced back to something that happens in a car," says Sally Leathers, Chief Engineer for Electrical & Electronics at Aston Martin Lagonda. "It was fantastic for me to be able to look under the bonnet of the DB11 and say, 'That's my engine, I made that.' I know that the rest of the management team feels the same way. Innovation and creativity thrive when we can share our best practices and our enthusiasm. We're like a big family, where everyone is excited about the same thing."
Those 1,000 components come together to make a beautiful whole, thanks to collaborative processes that can take between 200 and 2,000 hours, and involve hundreds of people for each car. "The cars we create mirror our organization," says Sproule. "Collaboration is our culture. So, the more we share ideas, the more we drive innovation and creativity. The more we share data and work in teams, the more efficient our production. That's why we use Office 365."

The second century

As Aston Martin revs up production under a bold new plan for the next 100 years, sharing data and ideas within teams and across departments is even more important. In the company's Second Century Plan, Andrew Palmer challenged the business to deliver seven new car models, at 7,000 units per year, in a seven-year cycle. It began with the DB11. In 2017, there will be a new Vantage, and in 2018 a new Vanquish. In 2019, Aston Martin will introduce the DBX, its first SUV, giving the brand an entry into a new market. Along the way, it will relaunch the Lagonda and begin development of the connected car, expanding the company's portfolio and engaging a whole new generation of customers.
"Our challenge is to empower people to achieve a product launch pace unprecedented in 104 years," says Sproule. "At the same time, how do we maintain that personal connection to the cars and our famous artisanal quality? We see the collaboration tools in Microsoft 365 as essential for our business transformation."

Improved collaboration

Overseeing an expanded portfolio of projects under the Second Century Plan is complicated by the fact that Aston Martin is a multi-site company, thanks to a new vehicle development base at the MIRA Technology Park in Warwickshire and a new manufacturing facility in South Wales. Testing sites and suppliers are located around the world, but along with Microsoft Exchange Online cloud-based email, Mark Stringer, Director of Program Management at Aston Martin Lagonda, uses Skype for Business Online to erase the distances with real-time video calls that keep the momentum high.
"Whether we're communicating a timing plan to a supplier or discussing a test run in southern Italy, Microsoft collaboration tools are invaluable," says Stringer. "I remember one morning on the test track with the DB11, we were collecting performance updates to present to the board of directors that afternoon. It was getting late and as I drove back to Gaydon, my colleague in the back seat worked on a laptop using his mobile phone as a hotspot to add the final stats to our Microsoft PowerPoint presentation and upload it to OneDrive. Back at Gaydon, we walked directly into the meeting, our presentation finalized and ready to go."

Enhanced business insight

Now that Aston Martin is accelerating production, the value of its data becomes even more important. "Data is one of the vital assets of any car company. We probably create more data now in a year than the company generated in the previous 103 years," says Palmer. "And to enhance agility, you need the tools and the processes to make good decisions using that data."
Aston Martin uses Microsoft Power BI dashboards to get a handle on its data. "With Power BI, we're turning information into insight," says Neil Jarvis, Director of Information Technology and Information Security at Aston Martin Lagonda. "The simplicity of the dashboards and the richness of the data is generating interest across the company."
The goal is always to deliver a car on budget and on time. But when issues arise, employees use Power BI dashboards to zero in on a troublesome metric and solve the problem. "We find Power BI hugely useful for combining information from a multitude of sources so we can immediately see a red flag in a metric or project status," says Stringer. "The sooner we see the problem, the faster we can solve the issue so we stay on track with the schedule."

Energized creativity

Designing an exquisite car starts with a single idea, but it requires a team to make it real. Four years before Stringer and his colleague presented the DB11 performance stats to the Aston Martin board, the car model existed in a designer's mind only. It took the collaborative efforts of concept engineering, manufacturing, product marketing, and finance teams to drive that vision to the end of the production line. "If we communicate perfectly with other departments, then we achieve a holistic view and everyone is aligned," says Marek Reichman, Chief Creative Officer at Aston Martin Lagonda. "Otherwise, we get a beautiful sculpture that doesn't go anywhere."
According to Reichman, the ability to access and share information energizes the creative process and drives teamwork at Aston Martin. "To achieve our goals for the next century, our designers can't wait around for information. Twenty-four hours makes a difference in the design studio," he says. "We use Microsoft cloud productivity tools every day to make sure the teams have the right information, exactly when they need it. That maximizes their creative energy, which translates into the visual excitement you see in the car's designand that's what our customers respond to."

New platform strategy

From her perspective as chief engineer, Leathers describes electronics as the lifeblood of the car, touching every single component in the vehicle and defining the human-machine interface. Similarly, electrical engineers have to coordinate with people in every area of product development, including body, powertrain, chassis, and interior trim. This is especially important given the new production quotas expected of her department.
"To deliver the cars on time, we're designing one type of underbody and set of electrical components that we can reuse for different vehicle platforms," says Leathers. "That means we need to communicate in different ways, with more interaction between platform engineers and the vehicle program application engineers who modify the platform to create different cars. Before, teams worked in silos on each different model, so there was less requirement for collaboration."
To facilitate this teamwork, Leathers and her colleagues use Microsoft SharePoint Online team sites to store all the information generated during the development of a car from prototype to the final model. "Whether it's project timelines, budgets, CAD designs, or presentations for the board, it's easy to search and find what you need on SharePoint," Leathers says. "I also have self-service access to data in the Power BI dashboards built by the project management team, so I can manage my resources easily."
Building each component in a car requires careful planning, from design schedules to supply lead times to build lead times to iterative improvements to final production. Leathers and her teammates use Project Online to "glue it all together."
"Managing timing is crucial," says Leathers. "We use task dependences in Project Online to ensure that everything stays on track, even if a supplier suddenly can't make a delivery date. That way we know that our critical compatibility points among different design elements are always aligned, which means we get a more cohesive product and a higher quality car earlier in the development phase. Ultimately, this means a better car for the customer."

Better resource management

Stringer and his program management team also use Microsoft Project Online to rationalize the new pace of production. He manages a portfolio of new vehicle programs, from concept to production, liaising with designers, engineers, manufacturers, and marketers across the company. Instead of working on one program at a time, Stringer now oversees up to 10 programs concurrently.
"To manage this level of activity, we had to change the way we work to be even more collaborative and efficient with our time and resources," says Stringer. "We consider Project Online absolutely critical to the new way we do business. Within our 10 programs, internal resourcesbetween 20 and 30 percent of total costsebb and flow over time. As we look at the whole portfolio, we can tweak resource allocation and timelines across programs. We use the same number of people but more intelligently, so we are more efficient and deliver more revenue."

Secure by design

Closer collaboration requires mobile, reliable access to information so team members never have to wait to get an answer or move to the next stage in development. But the value of the company's intellectual property means that for Aston Martin, mobility must never come at the expense of security. As the company moves forward with its Second Century Plan, Jarvis is looking to Microsoft cloud technologies, such as Microsoft 365 Enterprise to help. This solution combines Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security.
"Everything we use needs to be secure by design, so by adopting Office 365, we could move our data off employee devices to OneDrive, where it's safeguarded in the Microsoft cloud environment," Jarvis says. "Employees depend less on a given device, they can work from anywhere, and we have the degree of security that we require for our intellectual property. And with the Digital Rights Management capabilities within Office 365, we gain a further element of control, specifying who can access documents that we share internally and externally. Microsoft 365 takes us one step further with the integrated simplicity of cloud-based management and evergreen services, while delivering additional intelligent security solutions to help us avoid advanced threats before they hit our network."

Increased reliability for public site

Aston Martin takes advantage of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform to host its public-facing website. The website is home to a popular tool for customers to build their dream Aston Martin car. Called the Car Configurator, it is a key marketing device that reinforces the personal, interactive approach to customer relationships and it's important that the site performs as well as any Aston Martin car.
"Pushing our customer-facing systems into the Microsoft cloud platform makes sense from both an availability and a security perspective" say Jarvis. "The infrastructure that Microsoft has deployed in building the Azure cloud is impressive. Add to that, the Microsoft diligence in maintaining the environment, means that we don't worry about the integrity of our data and we achieve far better availability figures at much lower cost."
Jarvis is adamant that everything his IT team does aligns with the goals of the Second Century Plan. "IT is a cornerstone of our strategy for the future," he concludes. "The IT tools we choose for employees have to deliver a sustainable return on investment. At Aston Martin, we're using Microsoft cloud technologies, including Office 365, to help navigate the road ahead."

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As digitalisation takes over the world, manufacturers everywhere need to change to survive, developing new capabilities that can drive competitiveness and growth. But what does this really involve and how do you succeed? In a new whitepaper series, we address this question and much more. We share the opportunities for industrial, high-tech, automotive and aerospace manufacturers to grow, adapt and evolve to address the changing needs of their customers and capture new business potential. Transforming manufacturing for the digital age Digital transformation is not simply about technology it requires business leaders to re-envision existing business models and embrace a different way of bringing together people, data and processes to create value for customers. The challenges facing businesses today are familiar: engaging customers, empowering employees, optimising operations and transforming products. While the challenges may not be new, three factors are shifting both what customers expect as the result of being armed with information in a way not previously possible and what companies can deliver to meet those expectations.

1. Volumes of data continue to rise, totalling nearly 50 zettabytes by 2020 that's 20,000 times the total amount of data that existed in the world less than three decades before. The digitalisation of 'things,' heightened individual mobility and collaboration and a host of other factors continue to accelerate data proliferation.
2. Advancements in data analytics and intelligence have enhanced our ability to draw value from the data transforming information into insight that can be acted upon, even pre-emptively and at the point of business processes to maximise impact.
3. And the ubiquity of cloud computing puts this disruptive power in the hands of organisations of all sizes, increasing the pace of innovation and competition.

The convergence of these factors reflects technology's omnipresent nature, where access to digital services plays an increasing role in everything we do. And they reflect your opportunity to grow, adapt and evolve to meet the changing needs of your customers and the new business opportunities of tomorrow by thinking and operating like a digital company. By developing new capabilities and transforming into a digital company, your business can better leverage every system, device, process and asset in order to draw better insight out of data and convert it to intelligent action. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help you evolve your business to meet the changing needs of customers and capture new business opportunities. We do this through agile platforms and solutions designed to change and adapt; an amazing breadth of technologies that prioritise flexibility, integration and trust; and one of the largest ecosystems of industry-leading partners. Don't be left behind. I encourage you to get started today. If you are a manufacturer in the industrial, high-tech, automotive or aerospace sectors, and would like to learn how to quickly respond to these trends and reinvent your business for tomorrow, then I encourage you to go here to download our whitepapers. If you would like to see this next revolution in digital transformation for yourself, please join us at Hannover Messe 2017 on April 2428 in Hannover, Germany. Our industrial innovation showcases will demonstrate how some of the top manufacturers in the world are already realising true business excellence and impactful ROI as a result of their transformations. We'll give you a hands-on roadmap that will show you how your business can achieve similar results. Twitter: @sanrav

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5 years later and the picture was starting to change. IT departments were starting to get seriously interested and business units were starting to see value in Software as a Service applications such as CRM, and even in some cases deploying them. The regulatory landscape had not really changed, but you know, not every application in a life sciences company falls under regulatory compliance…

And now, we are in 2017, and public cloud computing is finally arriving for many pharmaceutical companies. The question now is not "how can I use public cloud to give me more financial flexibility?" but rather, "what can cloud do to transform my business? What does access to what is effectively the world's largest supercomputer bring me? What is now possible, that was never possible before?"

Along every part of the value chain, we are seeing customers and partners use the cloud in innovative ways to transform their business. Diagnostic medical devices are being built entirely in the cloud. Health bots are being created with increasingly advanced diagnostic capabilities. And cloud capabilities are beginning to be used in research, not just for large scale simulation, but even to guide experimental approaches.

I’m particularly excited by how our cloud is enabling a new generation of partners in the life sciences industry. One of our partners Synthase is using an Azure-based biological computing language and operating system to control robotic hardware that performs highly reproducible experiments with detailed accurate reporting. Elsewhere, Microsoft is working exclusively with Vivli on an entirely cloud based platform for widespread sharing and analysis of clinical trials data across pharmaceuticals companies and institutes of higher learning. And on the commercialisation side, Indegene is partnering with Microsoft on a dedicated multichannel CRM solution that will allow life sciences companies to communicate more effectively with healthcare practitioners.

What I love about each of these examples is that every one of them is building on the billions of dollars of investment that Microsoft puts in its cloud services, ensuring that their services will continue to innovate over time. That is the real beauty of developing on top of the cloud. As it improves, your products and services can improve too. And if you are using higher level Azure services, you can develop prototypes faster than ever before, speeding time to market, in an industry that has always struggled with exceptionally long development cycles. If you would like great examples on how easy it is to build on top of some of those higher level services, take a look at our Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services a set of algorithms capable of interpreting images, video, speech, languages knowledge and search, all through a simple set of APIs.

These capabilities are causing life sciences companies to look at the next set of digital services that they can offer, ones that will supplement traditional therapies, and offer value add services not just to the patient, but to the healthcare provider and the payer.

While all of this is very exciting, and provides real opportunities for the industry to transform itself, change will not be easy. The industry itself is rooted in traditional approaches and there remains uncertainty in how regulatory requirements are interpreted. We are working with Life Sciences companies to address this problem and many have now gone through the critical step of qualifying Microsoft as a vendor, and are now in the process of developing new applications and qualifying existing ones. In the coming months, we will be blogging on some of the specific steps we are taking to help life sciences companies with their regulatory challenges. Over time, we fully expect it to become easier for a life sciences company to use public cloud services than to build their own, compliant environment.

But regardless of these considerations, one thing is now very clear. The ever-expanding array of services available in public cloud computing environments such as Azure, are providing the foundation for pharmaceutical companies to become digital health companies. The next few years will be one of major, technology driven transformation and it has never been a more exciting time to be in the life sciences industry.

To help our customers see the potential of cloud computing in the industry, we have developed a whitepaper. You can download the paper here.

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Looking at the next level of omnichannel patient journey, we understood that healthcare providers are concerned with providing more value measured by outcomes and patient satisfaction, while reducing costs. We believe cloud-based, omnichannel healthcare can help providers achieve these goals, and that is where the value of Q-nomy's omnichannel healthcare platform powered by Microsoft Azure is demonstrated.

Using Azure SQL Database, Azure App Service, Azure Storage, Azure Queue storage and Azure Content Delivery Network, Q-Flow for Healthcare lets healthcare providers manage, communicate and optimise all aspects of patient treatment, except the medical procedure itself. Azure enables Q-nomy to deploy and maintain complex solution easily, securely and feasibly.

A good example of an efficiency-driven, interactive workflow is an optimised patient administration process in which visit registration, billing and insurance eligibility confirmation is done by the patient via self-service kiosks or by pre-check-in via online portals. This self-service-orientated workflow replaces or reduces the need for assistance by the clinic receptionist, thereby minimising waiting times and improving patient satisfaction.

This is on display at the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center (CRDAMC) in Fort Hood, Texas. The modern medical centre includes a 615,000-square-foot, 122-bed hospital; 322,000 square feet of outpatient clinics; a logistics building and a 23,000-square-foot central utility plant.

From the get-go, CRDAMC management wanted to guarantee reduced waiting times and improved patient satisfaction and overall care giving performance. The chosen solution had to optimise cross-department patient visits to ensure SLA for the entire patient journey, while providing a unified communication and information distribution system that ensures all patient orders, data, test and lab results are available to the right professional at the right time when the patient reaches their station. CRDAMC also required that the chosen solution will manage kiosks for self-service check in and routing to let visitors skip waiting for a receptionist when they already know what they need.

Q-Flow reduces patient journeys through different departments by at least 45 minutes. Q-Flow increases staff efficiency by streamlining medical case management in multi-department patient journeys.

This omnichannel healthcare approach means the physical and digital channels are entwined to help healthcare providers restructure workflow frameworks around the patient as an active user. The result is less paperwork, fewer manual tasks and less manual allocation of resources, thus increasing utilisation efficiency. Doctors, nurses and other caregivers are not bogged down with administrative tasks and EHR documentation.

Operations and costs go hand-in-hand with revenue efficiency. Shortening the length of stay may yield revenues sooner, but at the cost of higher readmission numbers.

Communicating with patients via various channels such as IoT and wearables, online medical devices, online forms, video sessions, texting and patient portals, while having actionable workflows based on this inbound data, helps avoid such readmissions, is of great value to patient wellbeing and is conducive to a healthy bottom line.

Contact Q-nomy or your Microsoft account manager to learn more on how to employ a cloud-based omnichannel patient journey to improve overall patient outcomes and provider performance.

To learn more about what Microsoft and their partners are doing in health, download the free eBook here.

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The problem is particularly acute in Finland. Market research firm Euromonitor Internationalⁱ reported in November 2016 that urban areas across Finland are home to some of the fastest-aging population groups in Europe a trend that is driving up health care costs and creating a host of other economic challenges for Finnish cities. And in densely populated cities like Helsinki, the problem is getting worse, because there simply aren't enough caregivers for the number of people who need help.

Using virtual care technology to make life better for seniors

To address these challenges, the City of Helsinki started experimenting about five years ago with an innovative, customer-centric approach to senior services. Led by Riitta Laanala, Director of Telephone and Wellbeing Services at the Helsinki City Service Centre, the City of Helsinki is using cloud-based solution technology to expand and enable senior services. The city equips seniors with a variety of assistive devices that support independent living and connect them to city services, such as GPS watches that show where seniors are located at all times, Menumat devices that enable seniors to heat prepared meals on their own, and tablets that allow nurses and other caregivers to use video conferencing to deliver virtual services that can replace some home visits.

By using virtual care to supplement physical services, nurses can devote their home visits to patients with the greatest needs those with dementia or who need physical assistance with showering and other personal tasks. Nurses can also use the network to link several seniors and their tablets together for group activities such as physiotherapy, music recitals and discussion groups.

Transforming virtual health care data into actionable insights

Although the city continually monitored the devices the seniors were using, it had no way to analyse all the data it was gathering from those devices. Riitta Laanala brought in Innofactor, a Microsoft Certified and CityNext partner and a leading provider of cloud solutions and digital transformation in the Nordic countries. Laanala asked Innofactor to develop a solution that would bring together all the different virtual health care data streams, enable both analytics and predictive capabilities, and provide insights to help the city improve services and manage resources more effectively.

Working with Laanala and other city employees, Innofactor created a cloud-based Internet of Things solution that transfers data from network-connected devices to Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer-relations management (CRM) system. The solution uses Azure machine learning to analyse the data and then visualises the findings with Power BI and returns them to the CRM system. Help Desk employees can then access the findings through the dashboard and provide information to the caregivers.

Exploring new ways to enhance city services

Laanala and her colleagues continue to explore new ways to use technology to enhance city services and put their customers at the centre of care including a new robotics project. One scenario would be to place actual hardware robots in people's homes and program them to provide additional services. The city could also program the robots to detect abnormal behaviour patterns or events, understand that something is wrong and send an alert that the person needs help.

Many serious health problems begin with small changes that can serve as early warnings. If an elderly person begins to stumble or fall, doesn't drink or eat as they once did, or no longer walks around their apartment in the usual way, those behavioural changes may indicate health problems ranging from mild stroke to the early stages of dementia. If caught in time and treated immediately, many conditions can be cured or prevented from getting worse. By using machine learning and data from a variety of virtual care sensors, the city can detect and respond to changes in patterns that warn of more serious problems saving lives, reducing health care costs and bringing priceless peace of mind to many families.

Laanala and her team are also looking at software robotics, which would enable the city to automate and co-ordinate many services. When someone enters the hospital, all services are put on hold. Right now, when that person is released from the hospital at some later date, all services have to be switched back on manually. By linking the databases for the hospital, home care, security and catering and transportation services, we can automate that process to make sure all services are restored on time and nothing is overlooked.

The main goal of this customer-centric concept and all our technology work with the City of Helsinki is to support people by helping them to stay healthy and remain in their homes for as long as possible. We all want to give people a happy life in the place where they really want to be. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

ⁱhttps://www.cgi.com/sites/default/files/white-papers/cgi-health-challenges-white-paper.pdf

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New technological breakthroughs, such as AI, predictive analytics and blockchain are opening up many new possibilities for the concepts of identity and identity management. Field-tested solutions to an age-old problem have now reached an enterprise-ready state and will be on the frontlines in the continual battle over cybersecurity.

The current systems and identification techniques have been insecure for many decades. Physical cards can be counterfeited and passwords can be cracked. Even biometric identifiers, like fingerprints, are not perfectly secure. But technological advances have not only helped empower institutions, but have also enabled those who seek to circumvent defences or conceal their identities for elicit purposes. So how do banks control access to a trusted network when dealing with an outside party?

Identity and access control reconsidered

Traditionally, financial institutions have relied on two-factor authentication. Though not perfect, combining authentication factors is many orders of magnitude more secure than either alone. But why stop at two or three? Each additional layer of authentication makes the system orders of magnitude more secure.

The main limitation is physical: identification and bank cards contain a finite amount of information, a constraint that is no longer applicable in our digital era. Consider how the following innovations made possible with the scale and power of the cloud potentially change the game:

• A system with memory. Imagine an authentication system that not only uses the three primary identity components knowledge factors (such as a password), possession factors (like a bank card) and inherence factors (biometrics) but also maintains a historical record of each, generating additional context around every interaction.
• Combinatorial improvements. Leveraging technology, like biometrics and AI, in combination with blockchain can provide an immutable and truly unique identifier. Adding a secure, cloud-based, component would also provide additional computing power for behaviour analysis, resulting in a much more agile platform reducing security risks while offering greater agility.
• A fourth identity component. The combination of cognitive computing, predictive analytics and the context derived from an immutable record introduces a fourth identity component: what a person does. The fourth component, the attributes of an individual's digital activity recorded in an immutable blockchain, can add even more unique possibilities and identifiers.

New models of identity management

As these concepts of identity management take hold in real-world applications, we will see significant improvements in the security of digital systems. In fact, we're already seeing the outlines of this future today, with new models of identity management based on cloud solutions:

• Identity as the new perimeter. Many traditional security measures focus on securing devices or adding more firewalls. Microsoft provides solutions that enable financial institutions to secure corporate identities and use machine learning to detect and defend against cyberattacks. Microsoft processes 450 billion authentications per month and from our cloud telemetry we have acquired unique threat intelligence that financial institutions can leverage for their protection.
• Greater security through distribution. The repositories for corporate identities are compelling targets for cyberattacks. Part of the solution is to distribute and secure those identities separately. Microsoft is working with several organisations (Accenture, RSA and others) to build an open source Distributed Identity Framework, in which the storage of identities is decentralised, but secured by blockchain. This framework is being developed as part of the ID2020 initiative to enable refugees to register their identity with biometrics and own and manage their identity.

At Microsoft, our approach applies technology in unique ways with a trusted cloud platform, tools and services that empower business agility and enable a new vision of cybersecurity for the industry. As your trusted technology partner, we offer both industry know-how and enterprise-grade solutions. We can help no matter where you are on your digital transformation roadmap. Download our whitepaper to read Microsoft’s perspectives on the digital bank.

Follow us @msftfinserv

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As retailers and consumer brands move forward to drive transformation within their organisations, technology innovation in the cloud holds the key to success.

Combined with the latest advancements in analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing's current capabilities are powerful and far-reaching. It has the potential to rewrite the business of retail and transform every aspect of a retail or consumer goods organisation from the customer experiences they provide, to how their employees work, to their business processes and operations, to the very products and services they offer.

It's truly an exciting time to be in the industry.

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more. Building the intelligent cloud platform is one way we are helping do that.

For my worldwide retail and consumer goods team that translates into making sure retailers and brands get the most value out of Microsoft technology to accelerate digital transformation and unlock new opportunities at the intersection of business performance improvement, differentiated experiences and technology integration. It's at the core of every interaction we have.

Today, more than 90% of the Fortune 500 use Microsoft's cloud services, and I am thrilled by the number of retailers and brands already using Azure to fuel business growth and reinvent themselves.

With more of our industry looking to what the cloud can offer, I wanted to highlight eight benefits of the Microsoft Cloud for retailers and brands.

1. Get IT flexibility with a truly consistent hybrid cloud

A consistent hybrid approach to the cloud is something retailers and consumer brands want, but haven't always been able to find with a cloud provider. We want to give our customers the choice and flexibility that works best for their business.

With Azure, retailers and brands can get the best of both worlds the ability to deploy in the cloud or on-premises and extend on-premises data and apps with hybrid consistency everywhere: in application development, management and security, identity management and across the data platform. Azure's flexibility in how you build your apps also helps accelerate innovation, rapidly building simple to complex projects using your choice of tools and open source technologies.

For retailers with large store or on-premises technology investments, a hybrid approach offers a compelling path to the cloud and a way to optimise their existing investments, keep costs down and enable a truly connected enterprise one that will open doors to delivering greater consistency and personalisation in the shopping experience, and the speed and agility to meet customer demands.

2. Protect your business with the most trusted cloud

While data security and privacy is vital to any business, retailers and brands face enormous pressures and challenges with targeted cybercrime, complex supply chains, increasing compliance obligations and constant staff turnover. That's why the cloud provider and technology they choose is so important.

Microsoft is committed to the highest levels of trust, transparency, standards conformance and regulatory compliance. Our broad suite of cloud products and services are all built from the ground up to address the most rigorous security and privacy demands of our customers. We offer 50 compliance offerings, more certifications than any other cloud service provider and the Microsoft Cloud helps retailers and brands accelerate compliance, for example, with Europe's upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law.

We also help manage and control identity and user access to your environments, data and applications. Azure Active Directory federates user identities and enables multi-factor authentication for more secure sign-in for all your retail employees. Retailers and brands can also use Azure Active Directory B2C to serve their applications to customers with fully customisable experiences, while protecting their identities at the same time. Plus, the Microsoft Azure IP Advantage programme offers Azure customers comprehensive protection for their cloud-based innovations and investments against intellectual property lawsuits and risks.

3. Easily implement ready-to-use IoT

As we continue to see, retailers and consumer goods brands want practical uses for the Internet of Things (IoT.) The Microsoft Cloud offers plenty of effortless ways to drive better operational efficiencies and drive down costs. With our Azure IoT Suite, retailers and brands benefit from preconfigured solutions for the most common IoT scenarios such as remote monitoring and predictive maintenance and can help increase margins per store by understanding things like in-store traffic patterns, shelf stock levels and energy usage and tracking grocery refrigeration units to prevent food waste and spoilage.

Azure IoT Suite is also open and customisable by design, and 46% of Azure Certified for IoT devices run on Linux, Android or other open source technologies. Here's what MARS DRINKS has to say about their IoT deployment to improve operational efficiency for its partners in the field.

"The analytics platform based on Azure helps us to deliver a better service to our customers. We achieve this by using the information the platform provides to identify the optimum time to stock and service MARS DRINKS machines. We give this information to our operators as simple, actionable data that can be acted upon straightaway, helping them to add efficiency to their business and identify areas where improvements can be made." Jamie Head, Chief Information Officer at MARS DRINKS

4. Power decisions and apps with unmatched intelligence

Advanced analytics and AI are at the core of helping retailers and brands turn all their data into insights to drive real transformation across their business.

Azure is also the only public cloud that provides Cognitive APIs, Bots, Machine Learning and Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) capabilities for developers and data scientists. They can build intelligent solutions at scale by pairing these capabilities with powerful GPU-based compute to accelerate deep learning, enable HPC simulations and conduct real-time data analytics using Azure N-Series Virtual Machines.

With Cognitive Services and the Bot Framework, brands can create the kind of app interactions that feel natural and delight users. Using predictive analytics services such as Machine Learning, retailers can make smarter decisions, and uncover new possibilities from their structured and unstructured data including ERP and CRM systems, web, IoT devices and big data and integrate apps with the tools their employees use every day such as Power BI and Microsoft Excel. Blockchain can dramatically enhance transparency in a product's journey along the supply chain. And all the deep learning and real-time analytics have the potential to drive billions of dollars in savings in two of the industry's biggest profit losses: food fraud and theft.

In my next blog, I'll share more advantages of the Microsoft Cloud for retailers and brands and how to move to the cloud with confidence.

To learn more in the meantime, go here. You can also watch this video of our technologies in action delivering a seamless and connected customer journey. We look forward to helping retailers and consumer brands take advantage of all that the Microsoft Cloud can offer, and helping you rewrite the business of retail and reinvent the shopping experience.

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel

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The emergence of new competitors poses a critical challenge to deciding which road to take: new entrants have fundamentally different ways of thinking they challenge orthodoxies and rewrite the rules. We have seen this occur in other industries who could have predicted the hospitality or transportation industries disrupted by a couple of user-friendly apps and well-designed platforms, like Airbnb or Uber? Or that the venerable newspaper industry, that once relied on classifieds for over 70% of its revenue, would be crushed by the likes of Craigslist and eBay?

These unexpected events dramatically reshaped entire industries and established an entirely new order. And, when this happens, it isn't always the strongest who survive, but rather those who are the quickest to adapt and most willing to rethink their existing, profitable lines of business.

Banks especially are facing competitive pressures on four different fronts:

• An empowered generation. Millennials have a decidedly more entrepreneurial mind-set than any previous generation. They want to be in control of their own finances and are far more willing to embrace a self-service model. They are more likely to question prevailing wisdom, reject a one-size-fits-all mentality and embrace assembling their own solutions.
• Simple, intuitive experiences. In our fully mobile, app-driven world, customers demand simplicity and are far less complacent when confronted with structural inefficiency. They want services that are on-demand, integrated and friction-free. They expect consistent, intuitive and meaningful experiences.
• Non-banks and challengers. Technology companies such as Facebook, PayPal and Apple offer products that were once the exclusive domain of financial services. From ad hoc digital wallets to real-time payments, the blurring of industry lines and encroachment into traditional banking territory is the new reality.
• Rise of fintechs. Fintech start-ups, born in the cloud and less constrained by regulatory requirements and legacy costs, represent a special challenge to incumbents. They target the most profitable areas in financial services while also delivering better customer experiences. In extreme cases, fintech solutions offer services completely outside of the monetary system, such as bitcoin, that may call into question the very need for banks.

Empowering our customers in financial services to innovate is central to our mission: we understand that transformation can be challenging, but we also believe that it holds incredible promise. Our approach is to leverage technology in novel ways enabling business agility with the tools that will define the future of banking.

As your trusted technology partner, we offer both industry know-how and enterprise-grade solutions. We can help no matter where you are on your digital transformation roadmap.

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The post The Way Forward: Confronting Today’s Challenges in Financial Services appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Belgium.

For grant professionals, every new piece of legislation that affects the grant process brings challenges, opportunities and uncertainties. New regulations often impact organisations' core processes, from funding strategies to compliance programmes. Answers to questions like How will this impact my grant administration? and What do I have to do to be compliant? – can fundamentally change from year to year. Understanding the impact of new regulations is vital to ensuring that reporting remains accurate and compliant. Let's look at a few of the most recent changes to grant regulations and the implications for grant professionals.

International governments have increased their transparency requirements

Many governments around the globe are working to increase the transparency of their funding. The international market for grants is expansive: 5.3 billion (8.2 billion USD) in grants was distributed in 2015¹ in the UK alone. The EU implemented the Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council in 2016². The law requires reporting to include data related to an organisation's efficacy and ability to meet project deadlines. This dramatically impacts the type and amount of information that needs to be tracked to prove that grantees are being efficient and effective with their grants.

Recent US regulations radically altered the grant management landscape

In 2014, the United States implemented two significant regulations OMB Uniform Guidance and the DATA Act to better understand and track the impact of all grant funding. Both regulatory initiatives were designed to increase transparency, but they have also led to an increase in reporting complexity for grantees and intermediaries. OMB Uniform Guidance³ requires that grantees report not just their spending, but also the success and impact of their programmes. The increased tracking helps prevent the abuse of federal award money. Unfortunately, organisations must conduct a time-consuming data collection and tracking process to remain compliant with the new success metrics. The DATA Act⁴ requires every dollar of federal money that’s spent (including all funding awarded via grants or contracts) be reported and available to the public on USAspending.gov⁵. While the move away from manual reporting offers many long-term benefits, organisations are faced with an expensive and time-consuming switch to digital records. Additionally, any reporting that is submitted late or incomplete puts the organisation at risk of losing their funding.

Meet the increasingly difficult demands of today's regulations with Grants Management

Within this radically changing landscape, many organisations find it challenging to cope with the new regulations and stay 100% compliant. While these laws have created new reporting complexities at the grantee level, they also represent an opportunity to improve the way that grants are managed from top to bottom. The GrantVantage Grants Management solution, built on Microsoft Cloud technology, provides a comprehensive platform that enables you to easily handle new regulations, gain better insight into operations and reduce the burden of reporting. The solution was designed by grant professionals who understand the challenges their peers face. Grants Management helps to maximise transparency by enabling funders, recipients and citizens to access detailed grant insights in the cloud. With all reporting housed in one central location and always instantly available, the risk of data loss is greatly reduced. The solution significantly enhances the efficiency of budget management, with all grantee and sub-recipient drawdowns, disbursements and reimbursements tracked and reported in a consistent, centralised way. Finally, organisations are empowered to use custom metrics and objectives that best suit their needs, and share progress with others, using compelling visual dashboards.

Learn more

Curious about how the Microsoft Cloud and Grants Management will ensure your organisation's ability to meet these new regulatory requirements? Try the solution today on Microsoft AppSource, to see how Grants Management provides new insights, streamlines day-to-day operations and guarantees compliance, auditability and organisational accountability.

¹https://data.ncvo.org.uk/a/almanac16/fast-facts-5/²http://ec.europa.eu/budget/mff/simplification/index_en.cfm³https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/learn-grants/grant-policies/omb-uniform-guidance-2014.html⁴https://www.datacoalition.org/issues/data-act/⁵https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/Default.aspx

The post New regulations impact grants management appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - Belgium.