Alex Grimshaw, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Microsoft Azure, discusses how Microsoft Azure is enabling digital transformation across sectors, with a focus on mission-critical government workloads, co-innovation, and ethical data governance. He also outlines Azure’s commitment to cloud infrastructure, open-source technology, and responsible AI in the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.
Alex Grimshaw is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Microsoft Azure in the United Kingdom, where he supports customers and partners across sectors to drive digital transformation using Microsoft Azure Cloud. Prior to this, Alex served as Microsoft UK Public Sector CTO, working with the UK’s largest Public Administration organisations, HM Revenue & Customs, and the Department for Work & Pensions. During this time, he focused on tech intensity, human excellence, and industrial empathy as core pillars of cultural change to impact customers, partners, and colleagues.
During the interview, Alex Grimshaw highlights how Microsoft Azure supports digital transformation in the UK through co-creation and co-innovation strategies:
“We currently have an initiative where a customer or partner can bring their engineering teams and directly work with Microsoft AI experts to achieve the goal.
We do work quite closely with a number of customers and partners, where we have direct engineering engagements, and we invest in those engagements.
We try to instil creativity, reduce cost and improve efficiencies, and think about competitive advantage.
Co-creation fosters more openness, higher morale across all the teams, and ultimately higher productivity.”
Transforming HMRC’s Tax System with Microsoft Azure
Alex explains the rationale behind migrating a mission-critical government system to Azure:
“I think when any organisation takes its first kind of baby steps into public cloud and in this case Azure you’ve got two choices one is you can either pick a very discreet, isolated, non-interdependent workload or like in HMRC’s case, you can pick the most gnarly, horrifically interdependent, huge, massively complicated workload.
If we can migrate that thing into Azure, then of course, anything after that will be relatively easy. So, in this case, of course, they went for what was called the enterprise tax management platform to migrate.
This platform collects hundreds and hundreds of billions—billions of pounds worth of tax revenue every year. When I think about the definition of mission-critical workloads, this is one of those workloads.
This particular platform fuels the coffers of the UK government, it funds the distribution, and the funding for welfare services.
This has created a much more stable, scalable, certainly more secure, and far more resilient platform than the original hosting environment provided. It also benefits from cloud economics and an always-current underlying infrastructure.
The great thing about the Azure platform you’re getting the financial benefits of only paying for what you utilise.
Each time that Intel, Nvidia, or AMD produce their next set of silicon, we adopt that newest technology, implement it onto our platform.
That means customers have got the very latest tech all the time, which in most cases means they can scale down their VM sizes because the silicon is much more powerful.”
Ethical data management
“The storing, handling and use of data has always been critical to every organisation, and obviously with the era of AI, it’s now even more critical.
With Microsoft, transparency is key, so we expect customers will always have control of their own data, they’ll always know where it’s located and how it’s being used. We’ll uphold our privacy commitments through robust privacy governance policies.
Security is also a top priority for Microsoft, so whether it’s robust access policies, encryption, data minimisation or retention policies, we ensure that we’re also backed up by the most compliant cloud platform.
Data guardians—or custodians, whichever one you prefer to call them—should always ensure that they prioritise data quality.
When I think about data quality, I think about establishing standards, profiling, and identifying anomalies and inconsistencies.
They should implement robust data privacy and security standards, not only safeguarding the data but also aligning with regulatory or legislative compliance, in FSI, for example. They should also implement data governance standards to maintain data integrity, accessibility, consistency, and reliability of the data.
One of the biggest challenges that I’ve certainly seen in the public sector is the sharing of data and ownership.
We need to find a way of deriving the value from shared data initiatives very clear data governance between the organisations, so they can both benefit from that consolidated, aggregated insight from their collective data.”
Microsoft Azure: Solutions for business and digital transformation
“Azure platform is circa 600 different services, so a huge, huge footprint of different services covering infra, data and AI, and application development.
We have three distinct areas that we call solution areas that cover all of those capabilities. Where maybe other providers might be quite niche, we cover the entire gambit of what a customer will require to digitally transform their organisation.”
We continue to deploy vast amounts of regions and data centre regions in parts of the globe where our customers need to consume those services. At the moment, we have more regions than the other hyperscalers combined.
When you think about open source, and whether it’s open source OSS or databases or even LLMS and AI models, we completely whatever a customer wants to utilise in terms of their technology stack choices, our platforms will enable those technology choices
You may have assumed that Azure was a Windows-only platform. Of course it’s not. We have equally as many Linux distributions on there as we do Windows. We mainly focus on the where and the what: where do customers want to consume services, and what choices do they want to use?”
Alex highlights how Microsoft Azure supports digital transformation in the UK through co-creation and co-innovation strategies:
“We currently have an initiative where a customer or partner can bring their engineering teams and directly work with Microsoft AI experts to achieve the goal.
We do work quite closely with a number of customers and partners, where we have direct engineering engagements, and we invest in those engagements.
We try to instil creativity, reduce cost and improve efficiencies and think about competitive advantage.
Co-creation fosters more openness, higher morale across all the teams, and ultimately higher productivity.”
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