Microsoft Boosts Big Data Analytics Power In Azure For US Government

Microsoft has announced the general availability of HDInsight and Power BI Pro in Microsoft Cloud for Government, bringing big data, analytics and visualisation capabilities to US government customers.

The new features in Azure Government enable organisations to manage, analyse and visualise large quantities of data, providing insight within minutes.

Accompanying these is a preview of Cognitive Services, which provides solutions for a range of scenarios including audio and text translation, as well as gender, age and emotion recognition.

New features

“HDInsight unlocks the ability to build data and machine learning applications that run-on Apache Spark and Hadoop,” writes Tom Keane, general manager for Microsoft Azure.

The fully-managed cloud offering provides open source analytic clusters that can be easily deployed as managed clusters with “enterprise-level security and monitoring”.

Bringing big data to Azure Government, it provides the streaming and processing of large data sets in real time using Kafka, Storm, and Spark, while also enabling organisation to build machine learning capabilities and applications that “leverage big data to deliver personalised experiences”.

Power BI, on the other hand, focuses on the aggregation and visualisation of data. Live dashboards and interactive reports connect to a broad range of data and increase the speed and efficiency of data analysis.

In Microsoft Cloud for Government, Power BI provides a single view of your most critical data, enables customisable visuals with drag-and-drop placement and “helps you stay connected to your data from anywhere, anytime” through Power BI Mobile.

For customers in the UK, Microsoft has introduced several new Azure features since the turn of the year. In February UK customers were given access to Azure Backup and Site Recovery services, which was shortly followed by the release of Azure Search.

And just last week the company announced an Azure Blueprint for the UK Government, which implements the 14 cloud security principles published by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre.

Quiz: The history, products and people of Microsoft