Security News > 2020 > March > What is Microsoft Azure Sphere? Everything you need to know
How can we secure devices and make sure they stay secure? That's where Azure Sphere - Microsoft's defence-in-depth IoT platform that mixes hardware, software, and the cloud to protect your devices and your network - comes in.
At the heart of Azure Sphere is a hardened Arm-based microcontroller, designed to deliver what Microsoft calls "The seven properties of highly secured devices".
You can only interact with your device through the Azure components of the Azure Sphere service or through debugging services on a device that's connected to a developer's PC.Applications are built in C, using the Azure Sphere SDK in either Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code.
While Azure Sphere devices are intended for more complex IoT applications and services than many of the smaller microcontrollers on the market, there's still the potential for deployments to be in the hundreds of thousands, or even the millions, of devices.
Removing much of the risk form IoT should make Azure Sphere an attractive alternative to other IoT platforms, allowing you to both use secure hardware and to ensure that it's up to date, for your software and the device OS. Building on familiar tools and services should help too, making it easier to deliver the applications these devices need.