Microsoft announced new functionalities to simplify the customer journey and deliver highly secured IoT products over its Azure platforms.
The company said it added new features to its IoT Central fully managed IoT app platform. These simplify challenges of building and deploying scalable and affordable enterprise applications and include 11 new industry-focused application templates to accelerate platform builders across retail, healthcare, government and energy; API support for extending IoT Central or integrating it with other products; IoT Edge support; IoT Plug and Play support for rapid device development and connectivity; the ability to Save & Load applications to enable application reusability; more Data Export options for continually exporting data to other Azure PaaS services, such as storage for rich analytics; multitenancy support for building and managing a single application with multiple tenants, each with their own isolated data, devices, users and roles; custom user roles for fine-grained access control to data, actions and configurations in the system, as well as a new pricing model for early 2020, designed to help customers and partners have predictable pricing as usage scales.
New functionalities with Azure IoT Hub message enrichment add the ability to stamp messages coming from devices with rich information before they are sent to downstream cloud services, making integration easy, the company said. IoT Hub integrates with Azure Event Grid, making it easy to consume IoT Hub device messages from an even broader variety of downstream services.
Azure Maps customers can add geospatial weather intelligence into their applications to enable scenarios like weather-based routing, weather-based targeted marketing and weather-based operations optimisation, in partnership with AccuWeather. Azure Maps will now be available on Gov Cloud, simplifying the onboarding process for customers.
Azure Time Series Insights is announcing new preview functionalities including multilayered storage; flexible cold storage; rich analytics; enterprise-grade scale, as well as extensibility and integration.
Through the company's Express Logic acquisition, Azure RTOS continues to enable new intelligent capabilities.
The company also added new features to Azure Security Center for IoT with the announcement of a Security Partner programme and support for national clouds. In addition, Microsoft announced the upcoming general availability of Azure Sphere in February 2020.
