Microsoft Ignite 2019: Tech giant on security, compliance and a 1978 Superman movie

Technology giant Microsoft is rolling out new solutions to cater to enterprises’ security, compliance and privacy requirements.

The technology giant has also shown that movies can be archived on a piece of quartz glass.

It announced the solutions at the Microsoft Ignite, an annual event for information technology professionals and decision-makers.

Trust has become a top priority for organisations, given the expansion of cloud services and the increase in data,  Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365, wrote in a blog post.

Microsoft has been investing in built-in capabilities, cloud-powered intelligence and integration to cater to the growing need for security and compliance.

Koenigsbauer wrote about new innovations at Microsoft, including Azure Synapse Analytics  – a service that has added enhancements to Azure SQL Data Warehouse, which can now pull insights from data sources, data warehouses, and big data analytics firms

The company has also introduced connectors in Azure Sentinel to help security analysts collect data from sources such as Zscaler, Barracuda, and Citrix.

Microsoft has also brought Insider risk management in Microsoft 365, which can help identify and remediate threats. Additionally, the Microsoft authenticator can reduce the risk of phishing and other identity-based attacks by 99.9%, the blog post claimed.

Other innovations include a firewall manager, an application guard for office 365 files, a compliance scoring mechanism and information protection and governance suite.

In a separate blog post, Microsoft said it has worked with Warner Bros to store the entire 1978 Superman movie in a piece of glass. When the film studio approached Microsoft for ways to efficiently store movies, the engineers at Microsoft worked on a technology to encode an entire movie on a piece of glass using lasers.

"A laser encodes data in glass by creating layers of three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations at various depths and angles," Microsoft said in its blog post .

"Machine learning algorithms read the data back by decoding images and patterns that are created as polarized light shines through the glass,” the post added.

Microsoft’s project Silica has been ongoing since 2016 and is trying to find a solution for cold storage. The company is looking at ways to store data that is not accessed for long periods of time. An original version of a movie, for example, which is pulled out only when it needs to be remastered.

The Microsoft Ignite event is taking place between November 4 and November 8 at Orlando, USA.