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We’re fast approaching the start of Eurosatory 2022, a global event that brings together the allied defense community. Here at Microsoft, our Defense and Intelligence team is thrilled to be back at Eurosatory after a COVID-19 induced hiatus. We’re eager to meet with you, and we welcome the opportunity to discuss digital transformation and commercial technology for defense modernization. To learn more about what we are showcasing at Eurosatory, please watch the webinar, Microsoft at Eurosatory 2022, sneak peek at this year’s event. We look forward to discussing these capabilities with you.

A data-driven security landscape

We’re especially interested in speaking with Eurosatory participants about key technology trends shaping the global security landscape. Technology is evolving at a pace—unlike anything we have ever seen before, as are the tactics that adversaries are employing in the theater of battle. The global defense ecosystem is at an inflection point, and the theater and character of conflict is changing by the day. Digital transformation and the rapid acquisition and adoption of commercial technologies are critical to a modern, future-ready defense force.

We work closely with defense forces and the Defense Industrial Base to support their digital transformation journeys and to help them leverage commercially available technology for improved mission outcomes. A great example of this is the use of commercial technology to harness data as an asset. The Internet of Military Things (IoMT) is growing by leaps and bounds, and by 2025, we expect to see 80 billion connected sensors and devices across the defense enterprise. This results in an enormous amount of data that is available to a modern defense force, on the scale of zettabytes—an almost unimaginable volume. This has significant implications for battlefield intelligence, logistics, readiness, operations, communications, and more. And commercial capabilities such as the cloud, high-performance computing, AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics can help.

Technology informs all military operations

Technology is pervasive across the defense environment. The cloud provides defense forces and industrial base partners with a digital backbone on which they can collaborate and develop, deploy, and leverage a wide array of capabilities. Today, many defense customers and partners are leaning into hybrid cloud architectures. This allows them to take advantage of the power and benefits of hyper-scale commercial cloud for unclassified and restricted workloads, along with locally managed and operated on-premises capabilities (such as the Microsoft Azure Stack portfolio) for more sensitive data and classified workloads—including those with air-gapped requirements.

One of Microsoft’s principal and global responsibilities is to help defend governments and countries from cyber-attacks. Trust and security are foundational to the defense industry, and this informs our more than USD1 billion annual investment in cybersecurity, technical services, and training to help secure the world’s critical assets. We help our customers defend against the active and ever-evolving cyber threat landscape. We also provide critical notifications of threats, offer timely risk insights, telemetry, and recommendations, and help our defense customers prepare for, defend against, and respond to digital attacks.

The incredible growth of defense data has made AI a critical piece of the mission capability puzzle. We help defense customers harness that data to gain actionable insights that accelerate the observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop. AI helps augment the human element by providing computationally supported decision assistance that is both data-driven and transparent. Ultimately, this helps defense forces achieve information superiority—a critical differentiator on the modern battlefield.

We’re also seeing the growth of emulation capabilities and mixed reality as a tech trend across a host of defense use cases, including training, mission planning, remote maintenance, digital collaboration, and many more. On the topic of training, we know that defense training has historically been accomplished with unwieldy paper training manuals, physical time on expensive and in-demand platforms, and via time-intensive and sometimes dangerous methods. Now, with augmented and virtual reality, training can take place anywhere, anytime, and in a much more personalized and data-driven fashion.

Mobility, edge, and spectrum represent another important trend as defense operations become more distributed in nature. This includes forward deployed and even disconnected scenarios where communications are not guaranteed or may be subject to attack by adversaries. We would love to discuss the many ways we are enabling extended cloud networks to defense customers through 5G and space-based assets, as well as providing edge compute capabilities as far away as the International Space Station (as ‘edge’ as edge gets).

Lastly, and of important note, we are working to modernize the mission capability lifecycle for defense forces and the Defense Industrial Base through modern software development methodologies, digital engineering, digital twins, and more. This is critical for accelerating innovation and transforming the way we design, develop, and deploy new mission capabilities—at the speed of relevance.

See you at Eurosatory

There is still time to register for Eurosatory 2022, and we encourage you to do so. This is a rare opportunity to meet and visit with your global peers and partners in defense and identify capabilities to incorporate into your defense tech stack, develop commercial opportunities, and hear the latest views on the defense landscape—and contribute to the discussion.

We hope you will stop by our Microsoft booth, Hall 5A K350, and visit us at Eurosatory. We’ll be showcasing demos from Microsoft partners, including SES, C3.ai, Voyager Labs, Myriad Technologies, Taqtile, and IFS. We’ll also be highlighting our own capabilities in areas such as intelligence enrichment and discovery, and mixed reality for command and control. Unreal and Agenium for their partnership on mixed reality use cases for defense. In addition, we will host two panel discussions during the week: one on the digital transformation of the defense ecosystem, and another on sustainability initiatives in defense. Learn more by watching the webinar, Microsoft at Eurosatory 2022, sneak peek at this year’s event.

Visit our Defense and Intelligence site to learn more about our defense initiatives, as well as the many contributions our partners are making to modernize and enhance the allied defense technology stack.