“These cloud-based data analytics and visualization services will empower government employees to visualize data, glean valuable insights and intelligence from their vast data resources to take informed action to improve citizen services, reduce taxpayer costs and increase efficiency, all while adhering to the most stringent security requirements,” said Curt Kolcun, U.S. Public Sector vice president for Microsoft.
HDInsight Capabilities in Azure Government
Kolcun also provided further detail on how each can be utilized in Azure Government. HDInsight is currently available for the following tasks:
“Deploy a Big Data analysis cluster in minutes. No upfront costs, get started immediately. Enable streaming and processing of large data sets in real time using Kafka, Storm, and Spark for HDInsight. Build Machine Learning capabilities with Spark and R Server Build intelligent applications that leverage big data to deliver personalized experiences”
PowerBI Capabilities in Azure Government
PowerBIs functionality is slightly different, bringing real-time data visualization to a number of devices. The Azure Government offering includes:
“Power BI service is a cloud-based business analytics service that gives you a single view of your most critical data. Power BI Desktop puts visual analytics at your fingertips with intuitive report authoring; drag-and-drop to place content exactly where you want it on the flexible and fluid canvas, and quickly discover patterns as you explore a single unified view of linked, interactive visualizations. Power BI Mobile helps you stay connected to your data from anywhere, anytime; and get a 360° view of your organization data on the go – at the touch of your fingertips.”
Cognitive Services in Azure Government
As well as the features above, this build introduces a preview of Cognitive Services to Azure Government. This allows for features like audio and text translation, as well as facial and emotion recognition. All of this combines to create a powerful, unified system. Microsoft is partnering with various companies to provide real-time dashboards, including OSIsoft Technologies. Director of IoT Analytics Prabal Acharyya believes it will provide considerable benefits for government organizations: “Data scientists in U.S. Government spend inordinate amounts of time each day manually scrubbing terabytes of operational data for advanced analytics and business intelligence”, he said. “OSIsoft is pleased to partner with Microsoft to deliver PI Integrator for Microsoft Azure on Microsoft U.S. Government Cloud with free and fluid access to streaming Power BI-ready data, context & insights to build Innovative Gov solutions.” You can find more information about OSIsoft and the new functionality on the Azure blog.
