By: Anup Karade, Principal Director - Cloud Architecture, LTIMindtree

While empowering the hybrid workforce remains the top priority of all organizations post-pandemic, digital initiatives have further accelerated, and so has cloud adoption. The buying trends indicate some very interesting traits for Azure Trends in 2023.

• Organizations at high cloud maturity curves are looking to improve efficiencies by further outsourcing capabilities like DR, scalability, resiliency, and, most importantly, security in the Public cloud. Indicative of growing trust with hyperscalers.
• Since the last few quarters, the cloud-led Modernization definition has further evolved and leaned towards standardization.
• Sustainability has moved from board-room discussion to an imperative business outcome.
• 5G and innovations in wireless have fuelled new age Modern connected apps.

Azure is poised to lead trends in 2023, with its extreme business-centricity and focus on cloud Practitioners across industries. The Top 10 Azure Trends articulate the customer discussions we have been having at all levels and our continuous research at LTIMindtree.

1. Verticalized cloud to get eyeballs

Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives. Industry cloud or Vertical cloud combines and tailors cloud services required for specific Industry vertical cases. The pre-configured cloud services with industry-specific add-ons in terms of ML /AI models, and data schema will accelerate and amplify the needed business outcomes. Standardized configuration, optimal spending, and operational efficiency will lead to deep customer engagements.

This Microsoft Azure Trends in 2023 is leading with its Vertical cloud offering in Finance, Manufacturing, Retail, Government, etc. The underlying services mostly comprise Microsoft Dynamics, Power Platform, and Azure Services. The stellar combination of Low-Code / No-Code, CRM/ERP, Office Integration, Modern Workplace, and Azure cloud services give it an edge over other hyperscalers.

2. Modernization becoming inclusive

The term “Modernization” has been buzzing around for more than a year. Modernization will see an increased scope and broader definition as one of the Top 10 Azure Trends in 2023. Not just restricted to Legacy rebuilds, upgrades, or re-factoring the app to cloud-native services and containerization. The modernization will now become more inclusive with data transformation, data-led insights, and hitting other NFRs like composability, resiliency based on business objectives, and longevity of the application.

Azure, with its purpose, builds services around serverless computing, integration, Data – AI/ML, messaging, managed databases, storage, containerization options – AKS, and Azure Container Apps, providing Modernization choices for practitioners. Azure investments and onboarding partner ISVs like Red Hat Open Shift have accelerated the portability goals for the companies.

3. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud

As more and more workloads are being migrated to the cloud, organizations have realized two important fundamentals: not everything can be moved to the cloud and having a purposeful workload disposition to the most suited specific hyper-scale has benefits. While multi-cloud strategy is still evolving, organizations have started embracing Hybrid. Regulatory compliances, security, and regional availability still dominate the rationale for Hybrid. Another important reason is ROI vs. TCO debate itself – whether the cost of migration justifies the ROI of the application or the business process.

While services like Azure Stack can help organizations to embrace the hybrid and run the Azure cloud in the datacenter, the true support comes from services like Azure Arc, which can manage the cloud and on-prem infrastructure from a common pane, helping organizations to control and monitor cohesive hybrid applications like a single unit.

4. Sustainability becomes a mandatory ”business outcome”

As a part of overall enterprise sustainability goals, organizations are looking for ways to reduce the carbon footprint on IT assets and services. Cloud being a major part of every IT landscape, hyperscalers have created dashboards and APIs to measure the carbon footprint on the overall investment made by an organization in computing, storage, and other cloud services. Going a step ahead, some providers have also exposed SDKs and APIs to include on-prem assets, enabling an organization to track its carbon footprint across the value chain.

Microsoft has built and published reference architectures for IoT cases – Smart meter monitoring, Solar Panel Monitoring, Connected Waste Management, and Water Consumption Monitoring to name a few. Sustainability is now built into patterns and practices and is part of CAF and WAF. Microsoft has released two apps, one for Azure and the other for O365, helping customers gain visibility to track carbon emissions.

5. The 5G effect

Mobile networks have been evolving alongside advancements in the Internet. 5G promises to enable use cases that were impossible due to bandwidth limitations. 5G represents a fundamental architecture change from 4G/LTE. This has led to a new breed and era of network intelligent apps – The Modern Connected Apps. The use cases range from intelligent network apps at Edge to low-latency high bandwidth IoT cases, online video analytics, real-time AI, and much more. Running containers at Edge is now practically possible.

Microsoft announced a significant step towards helping enterprises in this journey: Azure Private 5G Core, available as a part of the Azure private multi-access edge compute (MEC) solution. Azure Private 5G Core enables operators and system integrators (SIs) to provide a simple, scalable, and secure deployment of private 4G and 5G networks on small-footprint infrastructure, at the enterprise Edge.

6. Privacy first – cybersecurity still dominates the trend for 2023 and beyond

Cybersecurity is the topmost concern for almost 95% of CIOs, as per one of the Gartner reports. While all the hyperscalers continue to invest huge amounts to continuously monitor, secure their infrastructure, and provide a wide range of services to the customer, there are a few trends worth noting in this area.

• The “Privacy first” approach is being taken as voluminous compliance-related data is moving to the cloud.
• Moving to “Passwordless” authentication and access management is another peaking trend
• With the growing number of connected devices, IoT, and Edge security practices are on the uptick as well. EU Cyber Resilience Act has added new regulations for mitigating IoT and edge threats.

Though Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel are top prime offerings, Microsoft continuously makes advancements in the security posture of all the services, be it Azure Firewall, storage, or native services. In 2021 alone, Microsoft awarded 13.7 million dollars in bug bounties.

7. Business value of modernization

Organizations prioritizing Digital transformation initiatives are focusing on – Business Agility, rich customer experiences, and staying relevant in the market by innovating on existing offerings and launching new products and services.

The ability to move faster, change, adapt, move quickly and make the best out of an ever-diminishing opportunity window, is one of the important KPIs businesses are tracking.

The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for Azure and The Azure Well-Architected Framework (WAF) has been there for a while and continues to improve; customers can take advantage of AAMP.

The Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP) offers a full-service experience, including technical guidance, training, and help in finding an expert partner. AMMP supports a wide range of common migration and modernization scenarios and workloads.

8. Prepare for web3 – lay the foundation

While Web3 promises a fundamental shift for the internet, de-centralization is one of the most important pillars. At its core, it uses blockchains, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies. While the technologies, use cases, and protocols are evolving, it is important to start investing now.

• Apps are becoming DApps (Distributed Apps) to be delivered on a decentralized network, interacting with DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), and trading in NFTs and Cryptos using wallets.
• This is a big shift in the skill sets required for the new Internet – Web3. Service providers must start laying and building the foundation for the incoming changes. By the end of 2023, Web3 maturity will be exponentially better than in 2022.
• Microsoft is investing, partnering, and acquiring heavily in this area. Azure retired its blockchain services in September 2021 and has partnered with ConsenSys to offer Quorum Blockchain Services. Space and Time, a decentralized data platform, has raised $20 million in strategic funding to help businesses grow through smart contract technology.

9. Sovereign cloud to rescue

While the idea of a Sovereign cloud is not new, it started the gain traction in 2021 and is now becoming part of the Multi-cloud strategy in most of the top discussions.

• Hyperscalers are aligning to meet a growing list of data privacy requirements demands. They offer Sovereign cloud services to Governments, Financial Institutions, and companies governed by regulatory and compliance laws.
• Multinational service providers will have to work along with hyperscalers to address this as part of a multi-cloud strategy else they will lose the majority market to local businesses.

Microsoft offers Azure confidential computing, an innovative technology, that offers sovereign protection with Confidential Virtual Machines and Confidential Containers.

Also, Microsoft cloud for Sovereignty will include a Sovereign Landing Zone, a solution to simplify the architecture, and deployment workflow, and provide intelligent tools to orchestrate operations of our various security services and policy controls in a streamlined manner.

10. Digital twins, metaverse to change the UX paradigm

Digital Twin is not new to the industry; the manufacturing and engineering sectors have been using them for decades. But with the advancements in technology, the use cases have hopped across different verticals (BFS, Energy, Retail, Govt, Health & Wellness), and its applications are ready to take the next leap. With innovation in 5G, cloud, and IIoT, Digital Twin is ready for its next avatar – Metaverse.

Microsoft has made huge investments with Meta Devices in both Digital Twins and Metaverse. Be it launching Mesh for Teams, Hololens, VR headsets, Mobile, tablets, or PCs.

Azure Digital Twins is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that enables the creation of twin graphs based on digital models of entire environments, including buildings, factories, farms, energy networks, railways, stadiums, and more—even entire cities. These digital models can be used to gain insights that drive better product and optimization.