Microsoft Inspire has come to a close for another year. This year’s Inspire was, of course, a virtual event, and I’ve spent most of my week trying to attend as many sessions as I can, often finding myself admiring the impressive homes of the top Microsoft executives!

I’ve been juggling the week’s work in between sessions and reminiscing about the never-ending supply of snacks at last year’s event at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas! Disappointingly, there’s no closing party this year and they haven’t arranged for Adam Lambert & Queen to come and perform in my back garden this weekend (we can dream!), but it has no doubt, been a great virtual event that has been inspiring and insightful.

It’s no surprise that CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote this year focussed heavily on the surge of remote working demands and uptake of digital and remote working technology during the pandemic, with Microsoft Teams call minutes reaching 4 BILLION a day! Satya homed in on the new features they are building at pace, such as AI-powered ‘Together Mode’ due in August, which will place participants in a shared background to aid more natural and inclusive conversations.

However, Judson Althoff, Executive VP of Microsoft Worldwide Commercial Business, struck a chord with the partner community when he said “if it looked good to get out of your data centre, pre-Covid, it looks really good to get out of your data centre now!”

Speeding up cloud initiatives is at the forefront of every CIO’s agenda. Many of you have already enabled your businesses to survive by tactically migrating workloads to the cloud when your employees were sent home in March. But now, as we see another shift in our way of working as many prepare to return to office work in the coming months whilst others are adopting a more permanent work from home approach, now is the time to ensure that you are building for flexibility.

We’re engaging with our customers through the delivery of our Cloud Enablement Framework with a keen focus on planning cloud adoption strategies together that deliver that flexibility and agility, following security best practices and delivering never-more-important cost-efficiencies that many are needing right now. We can help you manage and govern your existing workloads on legacy infrastructure whilst providing improved performance and efficiencies, take you on the next step of your cloud journey at the pace you are comfortable with, or simply help you get you out of those data centres and into a hybrid cloud model so you can focus on successfully achieving your business goals.

To learn more about our Cloud Enablement Framework and better understand your options for digital transformation, contact our team today for a free consultation.