It takes a lot to earn the trust of enterprise IT, and rightly so: software runs the operations of almost every business around the world. For Microsoft, earning your trust has been a multi-decade investment, not something we started after we got into the cloud business. Everything we’ve done to earn your trust over the years we have applied to Azure.

At Microsoft, security, privacy, and compliance considerations have been baked into the development process for a very long time – it’s core to our culture. The Secure Development Lifecycle, an open methodology which developers can use to help them build more secure software, was invented at Microsoft over a decade ago and has been adopted broadly, across industries: safer software helps everybody.

Of the nearly $12 billion Microsoft spent on research and development last year, $1 billion was focused on our cybersecurity efforts. Because so many individuals and businesses rely on Microsoft, we feel a great responsibility here; and we have a distinct vantage point. As Ann Johnson, VP of our enterprise cybersecurity team, writes, “Microsoft has a unique position in cybersecurity. Because of the massive scale of information that Microsoft processes, for example, billions of device updates and hundreds of billions of emails and authentications, we’re able to synthesize threat data far faster than your organization could ever do it alone.”

Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (pictured) works with attorneys and law enforcement around the globe to catch digital criminals. They use sophisticated analytics and visualization tools, running in Azure, of course.

Thinking about regulatory compliance like HIPAA, PCI, FedRamp, and hundreds of other standards in other countries, Microsoft has more certifications than any other cloud provider, and is continually adding more. Check out my colleague Alice Rison’s frequent updates on the Azure blog.

We’re continually researching new technologies to further advance the state of the art in digital security and privacy. For example, with homomorphic encryption, it’s possible to perform operations on data while never decrypting it, and you can download open-source code from Microsoft Research to try it today. And Microsoft’s work in post-quantum cryptography helps ensure that security can be maintained even when, in the future, quantum computers are able to break the RSA cryptosystem, the standard today.

The point? Microsoft has your back.

Is it any wonder then that enterprises increasingly are turning to Azure? Two important studies, one from infrastructure security firm Hytrust and another from Cowen & Company, both show the majority of you are thinking about Azure. In particular, Cowen’s showed that seventy-three percent of you are expecting to adopt Azure in the next year to 18 months.

We appreciate your confidence! We’ll have a lot more to say about security, and a wide array of other topics, at Ignite on September 24-26 in Atlanta. If you can’t make it, be sure to save the date and watch online.