Good morning,

At IoT in Action today, we announced that Azure Sphere is exiting its Public Preview phase and is now a GA (generally available) product. This milestone represents another important step affirming Microsoft’s commitment to provide manufacturers, businesses, and end-users with an end-to-end solution for creating or connecting secured, “seven properties” compliant, IoT devices.

There are 9 billion microcontrollers (MCUs) sold every year; they are the invisible fabric of computing in your home, in your office, and in your car that help us in our everyday lives. Connecting MCU-based devices to the internet is the next revolution in computing, transforming businesses, industries and homes to introduce new, dynamic experiences to our daily lives. Yet, the act of connecting a device to the internet introduces the risk that our devices are no longer our own, but are attacked, hacked, and taken over by hackers.

Azure Sphere’s mission is to raise the bar for IoT security by making it easier for anyone to produc.... Every Azure Sphere chip includes built-in Microsoft security technology to provide a dependable hardware root of trust and silicon security features that improve the defense in depth of the Azure Sphere operating system. However, Azure Sphere is much more than just hardware: it takes all of Microsoft’s experience in hardware, software, and services to blends them together for single, end-to-end solution that operates at scale.

The Azure Sphere Operating System (OS) is a custom-built, Linux-based OS that creates a highly secured software environment and a trustworthy platform for new IoT experiences. The operating system implements new security features across firmware, kernel, and user-mode processes that make it more difficult for hackers to compromise a device. Microsoft will keep the Azure Sphere OS up to date and will handle the security of the OS for more than a decade for each Azure Sphere-based chip.

The Azure Sphere Security Service is built on the best technologies in Azure to broker trust for device-to-cloud interactions through authentication and attestation. It monitors the Azure Sphere ecosystem via error reporting and provides a secured pipeline for delivering application and OS updates to each device.

Throughout Public Preview, we shipped major features quarterly to our OS and SDK, and we continually deployed updates to the Azure Sphere cloud services. Our GA milestone signifies that we are ready to engage not only with early adopters, but with any business ready to go through their own digital IoT transformation.