As we announced recently, Microsoft thinks there is a natural balance between the cloud and the edge in IoT. Why? Cloud is a natural place to manage IoT devices, to collect data from them, gain insights using analytics and then operationalize those insights. Edge is a natural place to collect, optimize and react to data with low latency based on the insights generated in the cloud. In this way, cloud and edge work together to help IoT reach its full potential.
Today Microsoft is participating in Cisco’s IoT World Forum in London where conversations like this are taking place and how to help customers gain intelligence from their data faster and more easily.
Microsoft Azure recently announced support for edge intelligence with Azure IoT Edge, and we strongly believe in giving customers options in picking the right the edge technology to meet their needs. Today at Cisco’s IoT World Forum we announced we’re partnering with Cisco to make it possible for the Azure IoT Suite to connect to and interoperate with Cisco Fog deployments.
This will have the following benefits for our joint customers:
- Enabling them to build and host their IoT applications in Azure, while extending the power of those applications to the edge via Cisco’s Fog computing solutions
- Bring intelligence and processing capabilities closer to where the data is originated so that critical decisions can be processed in real time
- Help them optimize their IoT deployment costs by only sending the necessary information to the cloud, while processing the rest at the edge
We believe IoT, Cloud and IoT Edge will continue to play a critical role in digital transformation. We’re excited to extend our work with Cisco and bring the Value of Microsoft’s IoT technologies and solutions to even more customers.
- Sam