Microsoft

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) aren’t space tourists. They’re workers, scientists and engineers. They are doing critical science missions in an intense operating environment where safety is paramount. On spacewalks they repair equipment, install new instruments and upgrade the largest spacecraft ever flown. Just like workers here on Earth, their gloves can show wear and tear – even rips and cuts – presenting potential safety concerns. To prevent problems from arising, astronauts working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) must take photos of their spacesuit gloves during and after every spacewalk and transmit them down to Earth for inspection. From there, NASA analysts examine photos of...

Each April we celebrate Families month at Microsoft, and our theme this year is “Empowering everyone through every stage, phase and season of our personal and professional lives.” The Families Employee Resource Group (ERG) has a vision to support employees in whatever family role they play. Collectively, we discard the idea that one can leave one’s personal life at the door when coming to work, because the modern reality is that our work lives are no longer fully separate from our personal lives. Being our whole selves means balancing a wide variety of personal and work responsibilities that all come with a host of expected and unexpected challenges. With the right support, our home life and work life can become symbiotic, empowering us...

Photo courtesy of Minit. Today, Microsoft is announcing the acquisition of Minit, a leader in process mining technology that enables businesses to uncover opportunities for continuous process improvement and better operational efficiency. Organizations across the globe are seeking to be more operationally resilient and accelerate their digital transformation plans. Seamless operations and ensuring that every component of each business process runs smoothly is critical, but most leaders are not able to understand the actual performance of their processes and end up making decisions based on subjective information. Gartner® notes that “Recent trends in automation and knowledge of the underlying processes and interactions are key to...

On International Women’s Day, we celebrate the potential of women and girls everywhere, and their ideas and innovations that are shaping our future. March is also Women’s History Month in the United States. Introduced in the late 1980s, this month is a celebration of the numerous, but often overlooked, accomplishments by women across history, culture and society. This is a time to reflect — and keep working to close equity gaps. We know that companies with more diversity generate more innovation[1] and better financial results.[2] Yet less than 2% of enterprise software startups in the U.S. feature a women founder.[3] The COVID-19 pandemic has — and will continue to — disproportionately affect women across the globe, with the time it...

Beneath the buzz, the metaverse is arriving in both predictable and unexpected ways. Some new experiences using headsets and mixed reality will be in your face – quite literally – but other implications will be harder to spot. As with all new categories, we’ll see intended and unintended innovations and experiences, and the security stakes will be higher than we imagine at first. There is an inherent social engineering advantage with the novelty of any new technology. In the metaverse, fraud and phishing attacks targeting your identity could come from a familiar face – literally – like an avatar who impersonates your coworker, instead of a misleading domain name or email address. These types of threats could be deal breakers for...