Microsoft aims to make Azure the platform and ecosystem of choice for the mission needs of the space community with its new Azure Space offering.
According to Tom Keane, corporate vice-president: Azure Global at Microsoft, the space community is growing rapidly and innovation is lowering the barriers of access for public- and private-sector organisations.
“With Azure Space we have ambition to make space connectivity and compute increasingly attainable across industries including agriculture, energy, telecommunications, and government,” he says.
“We have brought together a team of renowned space industry veterans to work alongside our world-class product engineers and scientists to build cloud capabilities that meet the unique needs of space. Our innovation areas include simulating space missions, discovering insights from satellite data, and fueling innovation both on the ground and in orbit.”
By partnering, Microsoft aims to extend the utility of its Azure capabilities with worldwide satellite connectivity, unblock cloud computing in more scenarios.
Microsoft has a global network of over 160 000 miles of subsea, terrestrial, and metro optical fibre that connect billions of people around the world.
“However, many of our customers also operate in remote, rugged environments and find it hard to keep pace with their increased need for access to data and bandwidth,” says Keane.
“We are announcing partnerships which will provide exciting new networking capabilities as part of our Azure Space ecosystem. A thriving ecosystem of satellite providers is needed to meet the world’s growing network needs, and we are excited to partner with industry leaders to bring these capabilities to our customers faster.”
A new partnership with SpaceX Starlink will provide high-speed, low-latency satellite broadband for the new Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC).
Microsoft will also build on its existing Azure Orbital partnership with SES to support its O3B Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) constellation O3b MEO, extending connectivity between its cloud datacentre regions and cloud edge devices.
“Our approach is to supply a multi-orbit, multi-band, multi-vendor, cloud-enabled capability to bring comprehensive satellite connectivity solutions to meet the needs of our customers,” Keane explains. “Resilient satellite communications, coupled with Azure’s ability to provide high performance computing, machine learning, and data analytics opens many new opportunities for both public- and private-sector organisations.
“Our partnership approach to satellite communication solutions helps us bring these capabilities to customers faster to help solve their mission-critical space needs.”
The new connectivity partnerships are in addition to the recently-announced Azure Orbital ground station service and ExpressRoute satellite provider partnerships with SES, Intelsat and ViaSat.