Apr 25, 2017 08:47 AM EDT By Emily Schultz, UniversityHerald Reporter

Microsoft Azure continue its relentless barrage in the cloud computing space, adding new cloud capability and boosting its presence in the UK. The software giant last week unleashed a number of new offerings to build up its extensive suite of IoT technology, extending the reach of its IoT services to include Azure customers and technology partners. Additionally, Microsoft is also beefing up its presence in the UK.

The Redmond-based software company is announcing a major expansion of its Azure cloud services in the UK market. Microsoft this week announced three new features that will be made available to Azure cloud customers in the UK, the Neowin reported.

The first cloud service that will be made available to the UK customers is the Azure HDInsight. This cloud feature has been created primarily for doing big data processing inside the Azure cloud service. The Azure HDInsight will allow you to create and manage Hadoop clusters on Microsoft's cloud platform.

Additionally, this feature can also integrate with other open and popular big data technologies like Apache Spark, Hive, HBase, and other big data tools. Aside from open source integrations, Microsoft is also claiming an enterprise-level security that will comes as part of its Microsoft Azure cloud service.

The second new cloud feature has some connection with HDInsight. Called the Azure Import/Export, this newly added cloud feature will allow IT admins to physically ship hard drives to Microsoft-operated data centers, where they can be uploaded to their cloud accounts.

Finally the third one, Microsoft Azure also announced that it will be bringing Azure Container Registry to UK cloud. For a starter, Azure Container Registry is a private registry for Docker-based images that can be deployed. It can integrate with the Azure Container Service and also provides supports for open source tools like Docker Registry v2.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Azure is taking a commanding lead in bringing cloud-based IoT capabilities to the enterprise world. The recent introduction of newly added cloud services to IoT-enabled Azure customers strengthens the company's market position.

The software company is currently one of the few companies in the tech circle that have able to deliver an end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, which said to cover the entire spectrum of IoT solutions. From the company's Windows 10 IoT Core to its premier business application offerings Power BI (Business Intelligence), Microsoft offers a comprehensive set of IoT services to the enterprise market, the Fortune reported.

To make IoT implementation much easier and fast, Microsoft has decided to come out with something new, an end-to-end IoT SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform built on top of Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Dubbed as Microsoft IoT Central, this cloud-based IoT service will simplify and streamline the process of building and managing IoT deployments for Azure customers and Microsoft's technology partners.

Microsoft has described the newly introduced Azure Time Series Insights as a cloud service that has been designed to uncover trends, find anomalies and root-cause analysis in real-time. This new cloud feature is actually a fully managed analytics, storage, and visualization cloud service that makes it incredibly easy for a company to ingest, store, explore and analyze billions of events from devices simultaneously.

Another new addition to Microsoft Azure cloud service is the Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning, a new capability that enables zero-touch provisioning of devices to the right IoT hub. Then, finally, the last one is the Azure Stream Analytics, a cloud feature that will help companies and organizations get better data from connected devices (IoT-enabled devices) out of the edge of a network where cloud connectivity is limited or unpredictable.

In addition, Azure Stream Analytics service also supports the SQL-based query language for analyzing the data streams in real-time. Microsoft recently made a huge announcement that it will be bringing the power of Complex Event Processing (CEP) solution available in the Microsoft Azure cloud to enable devices to run real-time analytics on multiple streams of data.

The Azure Stream Analytics service has been built on top of Azure IoT Gateway SDK (software development kits) and can run on both Windows and Linux platform. The new cloud service can also be integrated with the device management in the Microsoft Azure cloud, which the company called the Azure IoT Hub.

In other Azure-related news, Microsoft Azure and archrival AWS (Amazon Web Services) Executives have met and made some fine conversation at last week's Check Point Experience 2017 event in Las Vegas, Nevada. The two cloud behemoths have made some long and good discussions about cloud computing and both have reportedly agreed that security in the cloud is getting more important than ever.

For more about the recent cloud security discussion and the CheckPoint Experience 2017 event in Las Vegas, check out the CheckPoint website.

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