MICROSOFT CLOUD IS COMING TO ISRAEL - WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO ISRAELI CUSTOMERS? (Part 1)

As a new comer to Microsoft@Israel, one of my main decisions to join this great company was due to the fact Microsoft declared it's investing in israel and intend to open a formal public cloud region in early 2022!

Few months into the role, I realized how big this announcement was - Microsoft will not just launch a regular public cloud region in israel but will bring all cloud-based solutions to have a full modern public cloud in israel that will deliver and accelerate an end to end business outcomes to Israeli organizations.

In Part 1 of this article, i will be mainly focus on highlighting what are the top organizations priorities, both from Business and IT perspectives, and i will describe how a "Modern Cloud", a one that Microsoft announced will arrive to israel, is able to a answer and accelerate organizations to achieve their goals.

So, Let's begin.

I would like to start with the top organization’s priorities – As those priorities are driving Microsoft approach on how to build and deliver an end to end tailored solutions.

Top Organizations Priorities:

CEO Business Priorities:

Optimize Operations: Building a strategy to systemically address different aspects of operations that can help business operations and free up resources that could better use elsewhere. Leaning more on automation processes by moving to Intelligence driven operations.

Transform Products: Market and customer needs are in constant change; companies are looking to transform their products to offer new and fast to market offerings that will help them reach to new customers but also to increase cross sell and upsell within their current customers.

Engage Customers: Organizations are looking for innovative experience and expecting to conduct business on multiple digital channels with fully personalization experience.

Empower Employees: CEOs investing more in Employee’s experience to increase productivity and efficiency of employees.

CIO Business and Tech Priorities:

Transform Products: transform products through application modernization – building new applications and modernize current applications to extend capabilities to meet business needs.

Multi Cloud: Ability to react fast to business needs, leveraging public cloud agility and state of the art tech and business tools to modernize applications and engaging customers on every channel.

AI & Data Analytics: CIO’s choosing to invest heavily in data transformation and analytics to act based on smart insights and predictive analytics to optimize operations inside the organization and outside with customers, to infuse customers engagement with more personalization and proactive engagements.

Employee Experience: Investing in modern workplace for employees with ability to work from anywhere and from any device, using advanced technologies that can help automate manual processes with smart collaboration increasing employee’s productivity.

Cyber Security: Protecting the organization assets and IP to prevent sensitive data to leak outside, prevent ransomed attacks that can cost millions of dollars lost to companies.

By understanding CEO and CIO priorities, it’s very clear that organizations are looking today for holistic platform that will help them deliver their priorities and innovations they are looking for. Furthermore, the digital evolution success is leaning on the ability to connect between technologies and break the siloed operations we are working today.

Organization Main Focus are Around 5 Main Pillars:

1.  A platform that can bring a ready to go tailored Industry SaaS solutions that fits to personalized market (Finance, Transportation, Defense, Health).

2.  A Platform that can run any application and business with the highest SLA, Predictive performance and consumed as a service.

3. A platform that can enable to develop new applications fast to meet business changing needs.

4.  A Platform that enables employees to collaborate more effectively inside and outside.

5.  A platform that is highly secured across the different layers.  

 Public cloud can offer an amazing scale and agility which organization can leverage to overcome challenges,

but, what if we would be able to take the public cloud advantages and infuse it with additional dimensions that it will be able to accommodate most if not all organizations challenges?

If i were able to imagine such a cloud, I would imagine it like this:

A modern cloud platform with several cloud dimensions building blocks that are working seamlessly together with an out the box integrations between the layers and act as a unified platform where organizations can deliver their priorities

A Modern cloud with 5 dimensions that work seamlessly together:

What advantages, you as a customers can gain from such a modern cloud ?

1.Customer Engagements and Transforming products:

• Embrace new methods of conducting business through omni channels and customer insights platforms.
• Evaluate new technologies and tools to accelerate new way of products transformations (e.g., Low Code / No code, Hyper Automation, Cognitive Services /AI)
• Setting the foundation for becoming a digital and intelligent driven organization, building new capabilities, exploring new market opportunities and services. 

Business Outcomes:

reacting fast to new business demands and infusing smart insights to apps to meet customers’ needs in proactive way.

IT Outcomes:

Ability to work with advanced technologies that can help accelerate the business needs with low efforts and skilling’s due to the as a service nature of the public cloud.

2.Data Analytics & AI:

improving capability to transform data & insights into business value execution. verbose Data & AI tools that are offered as a service that help organizations to accelerate Data & AI adoption with exceptionally low effort, while improving the ability to utilize real time data insights due to the nature of public cloud infinity scale and performance.

Business Outcomes:

• Ability to act immediately to customers’ needs when conducting business.
• Ability to proactively suggest customers personalized product/ service he is looking for.
• Transform operations by having real time insights on inventory, supply chain, customers demand and purchases.

IT Outcomes:

• Real time data insight – infinite performance and ultra-high processing power to support real time insight and actions based on analyzing both transactional and operational data in real time.
• Advanced Data & AI tools that has been democratized to be used as a service with very low efforts and doesn’t require advanced development skilling’s.

3.Employees Experience and Productivity:

Access your data on the cloud from anywhere securely and from almost any device. Enables remote and hybrid working experience while at the same time enable the organization to operate with “zero trust” policy.

Business Outcomes:

• Employees can have the freedom to work from anywhere and to choose how and when they can be more productive to the organization.
• Collaborative advanced tools help the employees to easily automate recurring manual process and find what they are looking for much faster. Saves employees time tremendously.
• Measuring Employee productivity is a key success factor. It gives HR and CEO ability to understand what needs to be done to increase productivity and employee’s wellbeing. and of course, data anonymity and privacy of the employee and organization are being adhere to kept.

IT Outcomes:

• Reducing dramatically the number of different platforms to manage and secure via unified collaborative platform with build in security protections on devices, identity, and data.
• Ability of IT to infuse the collaboration platform with advanced technologies of AI that can help employee to automate processes, find fast what he is looking for and optimization suggestions how to manage task and activities to be more productive.

4.Your data is safer in the cloud:

Microsoft is obligated to protect and secure our customers data with the most advanced cybersecurity tools, tactics, and security analysts. Our environment is secured and protected by design, showing real defense results against the most advanced attacks and zero days attacks.

Business Outcomes:

• High protection to the organizational assets.
• Ability to keep business operative and recover much faster from denial-of-service events due to the nature of public cloud being very resilient to security attacks.

IT Outcomes:

• Security guardrails are embedded into the infrastructure and services, reducing the need to maintain and integrate different security solutions – Less time and Less complexity.
• Monitoring constantly the attack surface with huge numbers of security analysts with the biggest SOC in the world – gives higher protection with ability to stop zero day and advanced cyber-attacks. 

On Part 2 of my article, i will focus on highlighting and answering the "Why Microsoft" question. i will explain more in depth the services we are bringing and will also share with you our big announcements - "Microsoft Industries Cloud".

Stay tuned...

aviyoshi@microsoft.com