We are coming together as a global community, looking for opportunities to act or perform small steps that drive change for the better. Many parts of the world are still in the first stage of responding, actively working through the immediate crisis with urgency. While other areas have started on recovery, looking at how to restart the economy, provide stability, and most importantly bring together our society. Amidst these goals are also questions, how do we make it safe for people to connect in person? To have a meal with friends, travel to see loved ones, or function as a community?
Top of mind for many organizations, and a theme prevalent at Microsoft’s inaugural virtual Inspire conference this week: how do we make it safe for people to return to the workplace? And how can the Internet of Things (IoT) play a role in supporting these phases of responding, recovering, and rebuilding?
Digital capabilities enabling business resilience
The COVID-19 outbreak has been a reminder of how interconnected humanity is globally—and how resilient the human spirit can be. But it has also shown that businesses using technology to stay connected have been more resilient than others.
In the world of IoT, we have the ability to transform analog and digital feeds, to reason over data and respond immediately. **The response is important. **In today’s increasingly connected world, we have seen organizations and industries respond to market demands and needs by putting technology at the center of their business. But more importantly, we are also seeing customers use technology built on the Microsoft platform to develop their own unique digital capabilities.
As we see these organizations build out their own digital capabilities—most recently with a focus on coming out stronger from this global outbreak—it is those that are able to quickly adapt to the changes around them that emerge resilient. At Microsoft, we built an edge and cloud methodology grounded by the principles of trust, responsibility, and inclusiveness. And organizational resilience is built upon cloud-enabled technologies that offer on-demand tools tailored to your needs, enable productivity enhancement, drive cost savings, and so much more.
Innovations leading the way to safer workplaces
It has been energizing to see the innovative strides being made by our partners and customers. To see how they are investing in digital capabilities and addressing our global challenge. And this use of technology has helped many of our customers as they were forced to adapt to new ways in an accelerated fashion. What would have taken years has happened in mere weeks.
As we enter this phase of recovery, many of our partners are using IoT solutions to solve the question of how we enable safer workplaces. Microsoft’s role as a platform provider is to empower our partner ecosystem with platforms upon which to build solutions to meet the evolving needs of their customers.
Employee health testing
One of the first areas we have come to re-examine as part of this global outbreak is how sick you should be before you avoid the workplace. We have also shown ourselves time and time again in the past few months that you do not need to be in the office to be productive, efficient, and connected.
However, as some of us slowly return to work in office or factory environments, we are all sensitive to how others around us are feeling. IoT partners are building solutions on the Microsoft platform to monitor public health in public spaces, including business offices. These IoT solutions use connected devices—such as thermal imaging cameras for temperature monitoring, smart sensors for promoting social distancing, and hand sanitizer dispensers to encourage recommended hygiene—and turn the data gathered at the intelligent edge into valuable insights that can help manage how people are interacting with their environment.
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