Chronodrive is a drive-through grocery service in France: customers shop online and drive to neighborhood pickup points where their purchases are loaded into their cars. With more than 60 grocery stores in France, two in Italy, and more on the way, Chronodrive needs up-to-the-minute knowledge of what’s selling in each store so that it can order the right inventory for the next day. To stay agile, competitive, and operationally lean in a highly competitive and fast-growing market, Chronodrive migrated its entire on-premises datacenter to the cloud in late 2014, with most workloads moving to Microsoft Azure. Azure is a public cloud environment that provides compute, storage, networking, and other services for creating and hosting applications in Microsoft datacenters.

To help more people live longer, cardiologists need data such as electrocardiogram (ECG) readings or blood pressure measurements collected over weeks, months, or even longer. To make such data collection possible, a consortium of 37 organizations built an Internet of Things (IoT) prototype called Digital and Analog Companions for an Aging Population (digilog). Using a fitness band and tiny wearable sensors, digilog captures and sends a patient’s ECG readings and other health measurements to Microsoft Azure. There, IoT and other services transform disparate medical data into easy-to-read summative dashboards and key performance indicators (KPIs), which users and their physicians can view from a mobile app or a web portal. As digilog undergoes extensive tests, its creators are excited by its potential to save lives, lower healthcare costs, and provide needed care in remote and underdeveloped regions.