It’s no secret that more people, more than ever, are more digitally connected. The underlying network needed to support this connectivity must be faster, closer, and smarter, according to Forbes contributor Steve Alexander.

“On-demand content, bandwidth-hungry mobile apps, IoT devices, and new cloud-based applications are driving the need for more bandwidth and network capacity,” Alexander writes. He reminds us that “fast ethernet” used to be the descriptive phrase for the network edge, and that over time we have quickly increased connectivity times—because users’ needs demand it. This is no exception. “Since its inception, the internet has a been a catalyst for service providers to facilitate faster connectivity, an imperative that will increase over time,” states Alexander.

Read the entire article, “The Network in 2020: Faster, Closer, Smarter” for valuable insight on why network requirements will continue to align with the need for cloud services.

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Travel Counsellors Ltd. is an independent travel company headquartered in Manchester, England with more than 1,800 travel counselors operating in seven countries around the world. One of the company’s most important strategies for growth is to recruit more travel counselors globally–but to maximize this strategy, the company needed to move from on-premises Microsoft Dynamics to cloud-based Dynamics 365, an implementation spearheaded by Microsoft partner Alithya. But rather than sit on the sidelines while Alithya did all the work, Travel Counsellors tapped into Alithya’s unique methodology to empower a team internally to run the project, and relied on Alithya’s oversight, expertise, and experience to ensure that its internal team was doing things according to best practices to make the implementation as smooth as possible. Watch the video to see how this innovative approach to deploying Dynamics 365 helped Travel Counsellors achieve its strategic goals while learning CRM implementation from an inside, hands-on perspective.

Unlike any other competition, NASCAR is a sport where just one second of time can mean the difference between first place and a distant tenth. As such, racing teams like Hendrick Motorsports are always searching for ways to squeeze out another fraction of a second in performance. When NASCAR changed its rules to open up access to different data streams from each car–such as speed, brake level, and throttle position, coupled with GPS location–Hendrick needed a solution for generating actionable insights from this real-time telemetry information, and for sharing this information in real time with various stakeholders. To achieve this high-speed collaboration, Hendrick turned to Microsoft Teams for its efficient communication capabilities accessible in a single, convenient location, and for the solution’s enterprise-grade, end-to-end security. Watch the video to see how Hendrick Motorsports is using Microsoft Teams to translate real-time racing telemetry into lightning-fast decisions and faster race car performance.

Modern technology has enabled farmers to obtain impressive yields that sustain entire populations while allowing them to become as efficient as possible with their available resources. However, most of this technology is dependent upon stable electrical grids, large-scale aqueducts, and a steady fuel supply, all of which are not readily available to millions of farmers around the world.

One of these farmers is Monica, who depended on a water well located on her property as her only water source to sustain both her farm and her family. To make matters worse, climate change made rain increasingly scarce in her region of Kenya, Africa, which further decreased her available water supply and forced her to work harder just to maintain her current yields. Thankfully, just as things seemed impossible, digital transformation provided her with the solution she needed to secure a better future.

In this video, you’ll learn about Monica’s story and how, thanks to solar-powered Microsoft technology, she was able to automate her entire irrigation system, gain access to accurate weather forecasts, and obtain more income year round.

Curious about the ROI of Microsoft Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)? Have a look at this infographic that shows Forrester’s conclusions after six customer interviews and data aggregation for a five-year financial impact.

Businesses experienced reduced data center and outsourcing costs, website scale and performance improvements, ease of experimentation through virtualized environments, and developer and testers enhancements.

Want to learn more about the potential ROI that could be realized by shifting some or all of your management and operations to Azure? Contact us today.

View: MS Azure IaaS TEI Infographic