Exciting news from Microsoft Ignite 2023

First held in 2015, Microsoft Ignite is the company’s premier annual event for developers and business decision makers from around the world. It attracted around 4,500 participants to Seattle in the north-west of the US this year and during 15th-17th November they heard Microsoft announce over 100 new updates including about eagerly anticipated tools and services, many of which are for the cyber security space, not least Security Copilot.

It’s an understatement that this year has been momentous for advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI. In fact, the Microsoft Ignite conference has already been dubbed ‘The Age of Copilots’.

As Quorum Cyber’s team participated in the Security Copilot Partner Private Preview in the run-up to the event, our trio of Paul Vasquez, Vice President of Alliances and Partnerships, Ricky Simpson, Solutions Director for Identity, and Graham Hosking, Solutions Director for Data Security & AI, attended the flagship event to watch the keynote, absorb all the groundbreaking insights, network with other companies and talk about Quorum Cyber’s own areas of expertise. To wrap up day one, we co-sponsored the Microsoft Ignite Security After Party.

Overall, the event programme was centred around the latest technological advancements with a specific focus on AI, sustainability, and cloud computing.

Key highlights include:

• Announcements of over 100 new updates, starting with Azure and AI enhancements
• New CPU technology from Microsoft and the acceleration of Azure
• The strengthening of its partnership with microchip maker Nvidia, a world leader in AI technology
• Updates on various AI-related products and services, such as GPT4 Turbo from OpenAI, Azure Maia, Language Model-as-a-Service (LMaaS), and sustainable computing initiatives.

Furthermore, significant emphasis was placed on the integration of AI in various Microsoft products, including Teams, Copilot, and SharePoint Premium. As expected, there were plenty of discussions around data management, privacy, security, and compliance in relation to AI.

Microsoft also reminded the audience about its goal to be 100% zero-carbon by 2025, which it intends to achieve with new fibre technology. They even had a stand dedicated to communicating their ambitious sustainability goals.

There were so many updates, in fact, that Microsoft has published its Ignite Book of News in an effort to keep everyone informed about messages from the event.

Our work on Security Copilot

Our team gave a well-attended 90-minute presentation in the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA) booth at the Microsoft Security area of Ignite. Ricky and Graham demonstrated how our services will use Microsoft Copilot to better protect our customers from today’s most advanced threats and those looming over the horizon.

“The issues that we see today with businesses is that they don’t have the resources or the skills to better protect themselves when it comes to utilising technology such as AI,” says Graham. “We want to be at the forefront of using AI for good, so we’ve been working with Microsoft on a new technology that provides automation of tasks and events to increase productivity, cyber, and data security posture. It will help with machine and human training to improve the time to respond to incidents by assisting with enhanced investigations.”

“What Microsoft Ignite clearly demonstrated is that customers are very keen to start taking advantage of the AI solutions being shown throughout the conference,” says Ricky. “What I found even more compelling was the sheer number of attendees who asked Graham and I for advice around how to prepare their organisations for these AI solutions. They appreciated that these tools will allow for huge leaps in productivity and threat hunting, but proactively acknowledged that they want to implement these tools responsibly, which is a massive step in the right direction, and something we were happy to help with.”

We’ll bring you more detailed insights from Graham and Ricky about Microsoft Ignite in the next week or so. In the meantime, you can watch Ricky and Graham’s video on the ‘Evolution of AI in Cyber Security’ or learn more about the ‘future of security with AI’ in Microsoft’s latest blog post.