Migrate to innovate: How to be AI-ready and secure

In an era defined by rapid change and unprecedented challenges, agility has emerged as a business imperative. In this dynamic environment, the true catalyst for business agility is the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI). Gartner says CIOs Must Prioritize Their AI Ambition and AI-Ready Scenarios for Next 12-24 Months¹, and 90% of companies will use AI in their workforce by 2025².

However, amidst the pursuit of AI-driven innovation, enterprises often find themselves tethered to pressing priorities of today. From navigating economic downturns, managing cloud sprawl and tool proliferation, and fortifying defenses against cyber threats and the demands of the present seem to eclipse the pursuit of future innovation.

Enter Azure: Microsoft Azure meets customers where they are in their cloud journey.

Migration to Azure balances the need to innovate with AI and accelerate business growth, while taking care of pressing present-day priorities. Let’s explore!

Migrate to be AI-ready

While customers today are attempting to run AI workloads in various locations, our research and customer conversations indicate that customers are best able to realize their AI ambitions at scale by migrating to the cloud. Here are some common principles that apply:

1. Colocate to eliminate siloes: Over the years, organizations have shared how they have inevitably accumulated vast amounts of data and applications sitting in disparate locations, which often leads to sub-optimal performance and reduced agility to scale with business needs.

AI is only as good as the data it can use to model and train, the apps it can infuse into, and the infrastructure that powers AI processes.

By colocating databases, applications, infrastructure, and AI services in the cloud, organizations can get optimized performance that can’t be achieved in distributed environments or on-premises. This performance is exponentially higher with our purpose-built supercomputing infrastructure, which powers leading AI models, such as ChatGPT. Azure offers up to 2x faster throughput compared to competitors for our AI infrastructure³.

With the foundation laid in the cloud, organizations can then seamlessly integrate, infuse, and build AI and Copilots into their operations, enhancing productivity for both employees and customers! A recent IDC study highlighted that a company realizes 3.5x return on average for every $1 invested in AI⁴.

2. Embrace Responsible AI (RAI): As AI innovation accelerates, the question of responsible implementation looms large for every customer we talk to. Microsoft has been at the forefront of AI innovation and responsible AI practices for many years. From early research to present initiatives, responsible AI principles such as fairness, inclusivity, privacy, transparency, and accountability have continued to be a core focus. Compliance is integral to responsible AI, and Microsoft leads the industry with over 100 compliance certifications.

Securing workloads across your migration journey

The increasing speed, scale, and sophistication of today’s cyberattacks call for a new response to security. Today, infrastructure is code and organizations wish to unleash developer creativity to build compelling and compliant applications. In fact, more than 95% of cloud breaches can be traced back to preventable mistakes, misconfigurations, mismanagement, open-source code vulnerabilities, and exposed sensitive data in storage buckets⁵.

Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative keeps security at the heart of it all. Microsoft Azure is a comprehensive code to multicloud security platform: from foundational security to cloud-native workload protection. Microsoft has more than 10,000 dedicated security professionals and ​analyzes 65 trillion global signals daily. Let’s delve into 2 ways to secure your migration journey:

• Unified platform for code to multicloud protection: A key solution that is part of this platform is Microsoft Defender for Cloud. It comprehensively secures across your migration journey for on premises, hybrid and multicloud environments. It proactively discovers risk and drift, remediates security vulnerabilities, and prioritizes critical threats to help reduce threat mitigation time by up to 50%⁶.

Organizations also need to shift left. By integrating with developer tools such as GitHub, you can spot security issues before they hit your production environment

• Protect at the speed and scale of AI: The combination of generative AI with our end-to-end security solutions is proving to be a force multiplier for empowering security teams everywhere and delivering security for all.

Microsoft Copilot for Security is the first of its kind generative AI security product to help defend organizations at machine speed and scale. It combines the most advanced GPT4 model from OpenAI with a Microsoft-developed, security-specific model.

And the impact of Copilot is real! In a recent study to measure the productivity impact for “new in career” analysts, participants using Security Copilot demonstrated 44 percent more accurate responses and were 26 percent faster across all tasks⁷.

Get started with Azure

Want to learn more about how you can migrate to Azure? Here are some quick resources to explore:

1. Gartner Says AI Ambition and AI-Ready Scenarios Must Be a Top Priority for CIOs for Next 12-24 Months, November 2023
2. Gartner We Shape AI, AI Shapes Us: 2023 IT Symposium/Xpo Keynote Insights
3. Performance benchmark for 1-Trillion parameter model with DeepSpeed
4. IDC, The Business Opportunity of AI November 2023
5. Is The Cloud Secure (gartner.com)
6. The Total Economic Impact ™ Of Microsoft Defender for Cloud” February 2021, commissioned by Microsoft
7. Microsoft Security Copilot randomized controlled trial conducted by Microsoft Office of the Chief Economist, November 2023.