Microsoft to integrate cloud and IoT services with Cisco
- Date: 20 April, 2020
Microsoft has announced a partnership with Cisco to integrate its Azure cloud with Cisco’s IoT platform and create the Cisco Edge to Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, a solution that will enable seamless connectivity and streamlined edge data flow into Azure IoT.
According to Microsoft the integration provides the necessary software, hardware and cloud services that businesses need to rapidly launch IoT initiatives and quickly realise business value. The aim is to give customers a fully integrated solution that provides access to powerful design tools, global connectivity, advance analytics and cognitive services for analysing IoT data.
The attraction of such a solution is clear to see. According to Cisco’s recent Internet Report, nearly half of the 29.3 billion networked devices in use by 2023 will support IoT applications. Meanwhile, Gartner is predicting that by 2025 around 75% of enterprise data will be generated at the edge.
As computing resources and IoT networking devices become more powerful, the ability to manage vast amounts of data near the edge will mean infrastructure and operations teams are required to handle more advanced data workloads, while keeping pace with business needs.
So, how will it work in practice? According to Tony Shakib, an IoT business acceleration leader for Microsoft Azure, using software-based intelligence pre-loaded onto Cisco IoT network devices, telemetry data pipelines from industry-standard protocols like OPC-Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) and Modbus can be easily established using a friendly UI directly into Azure IoT Hub.
Services like Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and Microsoft Azure Notification Hub services can be used to quickly build IoT applications for the enterprise.
Cisco Edge Intelligence will also play an important role. Released in January, this is an IoT software solution that securely delivers data from connected assets at the network edge to multi-cloud application destinations, in this case Microsoft Azure IoT Hub.
According to Vikas Butaney, vice president of product development, IoT Business Group at Cisco, “One of the outcomes of this partnership will be to offer customers a pre-integrated IoT edge-to-cloud application solution. Customers will be able to integrate their IoT devices through Cisco Edge Intelligence to Azure IoT Hub with a click of a button.
“Both Cisco and Microsoft have made it simpler, faster and more secure to send intelligent IoT edge data to enterprise-class applications. Customers will be able to drive their artificial intelligence, analytics, machine learning and business intelligence applications to support a better digital transformation.”