New options for AI-powered innovation, resiliency, and control with Microsoft Azure

We’re expanding Azure’s public regions to offer solutions that align with our customers’ changing business needs, all without compromising on quality.

For organisations managing vital workloads, the stakes are high. System failures can have serious consequences, affecting lives and business operations on a large scale. As a result, they need control, resilience, and operational independence—balancing innovation with governance. Agility is essential, allowing them to leverage AI, scalable computing, and sophisticated analytics in ways that best suit their needs.

For instance, manufacturers need assembly lines to keep running during network interruptions, while healthcare providers must access patient data during disasters. Similarly, government bodies and critical infrastructure operators must comply with regulations that ensure systems operate autonomously and keep data within national borders. Regulations may also mandate local storage and processing of sensitive data under local jurisdiction and management.

These are the challenges Azure’s adaptive cloud approach aims to address. We are expanding Azure’s public regions with adaptable options, so customers don’t have to make trade-offs. Microsoft’s strategy spans our public cloud, private cloud, and edge technologies, giving customers a cohesive platform for operations, applications, and data while balancing flexibility and control. This lets them innovate with Azure services in environments they fully control, rather than relying on separate, outdated IT systems.

Addressing Distinct Operational and Data Sovereignty Needs

To meet specific operational and data sovereignty requirements, Microsoft has launched Azure Local. This brings Azure infrastructure directly into customers’ own datacentres or across distributed sites. Azure Local offers integrated compute, storage, and networking services and uses Azure Arc to extend cloud capabilities seamlessly into hybrid and disconnected environments.

Over the past six months, we’ve greatly enhanced Azure Local’s features to meet diverse industry needs. We’ve witnessed significant interest from clients such as GSK, a global leader in biopharmaceuticals, which is using Azure Local to drive cloud innovation and AI to the edge. They’re processing real-time data and running AI inference in vaccine and medicine manufacturing and R&D labs worldwide. GSK shared insights into their use of Azure Local during our What’s New in Azure Local session at Ignite last month.

We are also closely collaborating with public sector entities to ensure that essential services can operate independently of internet connectivity when necessary, from city councils to defence and emergency response teams.

To support these clients, we’re rolling out an expanding array of Azure Local features, many of which are now generally available (GA) or in preview.

• Microsoft 365 Local (GA) enables full productivity—including email, collaboration, and communication—within a private cloud, ensuring sovereignty and security for sensitive scenarios.
• Next-gen NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs (GA) facilitate high-performance AI workloads on-premises, driving advanced analytics and generative AI without compromising compliance.
• Azure Migrate support for Azure Local (GA) simplifies lift-and-shift migrations, cuts costs, and speeds time to value.
• AD-less deployments, Rack-Aware Clustering, and external SAN storage integration (Preview) add options for identity, fault tolerance, and flexible storage.

• Multi-rack deployments (Preview) greatly enhance the options for large-scale deployments, allowing larger IT estates within a single integrated Azure Local instance.
• Disconnected operations (Preview) provides a fully disjointed Azure Local experience for mission-critical environments where internet access is impractical or undesirable.

In summary, Azure Local has quickly developed into a robust platform for operational sovereignty. It maintains Azure consistency for all workloads, from core business applications to AI, at the customers’ locations—ranging from a few nodes on a factory floor to thousands of nodes. These advancements underscore our commitment to meeting customers where they are.

Smart and Connected Physical Operations

Azure’s adaptive cloud strategy helps integrate AI into physical operations. With our Azure IoT platform, asset-heavy organisations can securely and efficiently gather data from devices and sensors. When paired with Microsoft Fabric, customers can gain real-time insights from their operational data. This synergy lets sectors like manufacturing, energy, and industrial operations connect digital and physical systems and adopt AI and automation tailored to their needs.

Our strategy for enabling AI in physical operations follows two primary models. Azure IoT Operations aggregates and processes device and sensor data at larger sites near the source for near-real-time decision-making, sending only relevant data to Fabric for advanced analytics. In contrast, Azure IoT Hub securely routes device data to Fabric, supported by cloud-based identity and security measures. This integration bridges Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT), delivering cost-effective, secure, and repeatable outcomes.

In the last six months, we have rolled out several upgrades to Azure IoT focused on connected operations:

• In Azure IoT Hub, a new Microsoft-backed X.509 certificate management feature provides improved control over secure identity lifecycles. The integration with Azure Device Registry simplifies identity, security, and policy management across entire fleets.
• Enhanced Azure Device Registry capabilities improve asset registration, classification, and monitoring for operational clarity while enabling Azure-connected devices to work with any Azure service.

• The latest release of Azure IoT Operations introduces many features. WebAssembly-driven data graphs enable quick, modular analytics for nearly instant decision-making. Expanded connectors for OPC UA, ONVIF, REST/HTTP, SSE, and MQTT enhance interoperability. OpenTelemetry endpoint support helps establish seamless telemetry pipelines and monitoring. Advanced health monitoring provides profound visibility and control over operational assets.
• In Microsoft Fabric, Fabric IQ and Digital Twin Builder transform raw telemetry into actionable context through models and knowledge graphs, clarifying streaming data.

Clients like Chevron and Husqvarna are expanding Azure IoT Operations from single-site pilots to multi-site rollouts, unlocking new applications like predictive maintenance and worker safety. These implementations highlight the tangible benefits and the adaptive cloud architectures that drive business value. Our partner ecosystem is also evolving, with collaborations with Siemens, Litmus, Rockwell Automation, and Sight Machine building on the platform.

Businesses often struggle with the complexities of widely distributed IT estates, which can range from on-premises data centres to numerous edge sites, multiple public clouds, and a plethora of devices. Managing and securing this vast ecosystem can overwhelm traditional tools. A key promise of Azure’s adaptive cloud approach is to simplify centralised operations through a unified control interface via Azure Arc.

Over the past six months, we have launched numerous enhancements to help customers manage distributed resources at scale across diverse environments seamlessly. Significant improvements in our Azure Arc platform include:

• Azure Arc site manager (Preview) helps organise resources by physical site for effortless monitoring and management of distributed operations.
• A new GCP connector (Preview) lets you integrate Google Cloud resources into Azure, giving you a consolidated view across Azure, AWS, and GCP.

• Azure Machine Configuration (GA) ensures OS-level settings across Azure Arc-managed servers for compliance and security.
• New Azure policies audit and configure the Windows Recovery environment for readiness during critical patches to recover from unbootable states, such as those caused by faulty drivers.
• New subscription-level enrollment for essential machine management services comes with a simplified pricing model, creating a unified user experience from Azure for hybrid environments and reducing adoption obstacles for legacy systems.
• Workload Identity (GA) lets Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters use Entra ID for secure resource access, eliminating the need for local secret storage.
• AKS Fleet Manager (Preview) connects Azure Arc-enabled clusters to synchronise policies and deploy across hybrid settings.
• The Azure Key Vault Secret Store Extension (GA) permits Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters to cache secrets from Azure Key Vault, enhancing security and improving workload resilience against intermittent network issues for hybrid applications.

These improvements highlight our belief that cloud management and cloud-native app development shouldn’t be limited to the cloud itself. Whether managing five data centres or 5000 retail locations, Azure provides the tools needed to oversee that distributed environment and develop applications cohesively within an adaptive cloud framework.

Azure’s adaptive cloud strategy empowers organisations to innovate on their own terms while retaining control. In a time marked by uncertainty—whether from cyber threats or geopolitical changes—Azure enables customers to modernise confidently without sacrificing resilience or authority.