Welcome back to the penultimate post in our Industry 4.0 series. In this post, we are going to look at how Industry 4.0 and Microsoft helps businesses with their modern factory adoption by providing services, tools and technologies to support the key components we reviewed. 

Azure IoT Hub & Event Grid/Service Bus Topics  

Ingest IoT sensor data from connected devices and then use event grid to push out the data to be consumed by other services in your enterprise architecture. 

Azure IoT Edge  

Run cloud workloads on the edge, faster and offline capable, containerized, including the ability to run AI and machine learning processes, custom services, etc.  

Hololens2  

Augmented reality to improve employee experience in areas like training, task visualization, and remote collaboration. The Hololens2 can use off-the-shelf products from a variety of vendors, e.g. Microsoft 365 remote assist, as well as custom solutions. 

Dynamics 365 (e.g. Remote Assist, Field Service) 

Dynamics 365 provides app integrations for the HoloLens2, or other employee experience improvements to facilitate remote collaboration and training for employees. 

Microsoft Fabric 

Microsoft Fabric is a unified, all-in-one AI-powered solution that combines your data and services, including data science, data warehouse, data engineering, and business intelligence. 

Azure Digital Twin 

Model any live factory environment with Azure Digital Twin, connect assets, query real time and historical data and extract insights on past operation and generate predictions for the future. 

Azure Arc/Azure Stack HCI  

Extend the cloud to the edge with Azure Arc, or to on-premises with Azure Stack HCI, to take advantage of Azure offerings, to meet the requirement of providing cloud computing solutions without being fully cloud dependent. 

We’ve only lightly touched on each of these, and Microsoft Learn provides a lot of information about all of them for you to dig in deep into them. As always, there are a lot more options out there both from Microsoft, and from other providers if you have a different cloud partner. Stay tuned, there’s one more post to go.  

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