Microsoft is doubling down on its IoT push. The company today unveiled a bevy of updates to its burgeoning IoT portfolio aimed at addressing ongoing security challenges and easing adoption of the technology.

The new features are part of Microsoft's $5 billion commitment — announced in April 2018 — to IoT and edge computing.

"At Microsoft, we are committed to building a trusted, easy-to-use platform that allows our customers and partners to build seamless, smart, secure solutions, regardless of where they are in the IoT journey," said Sam George, corporate VP of Azure IoT at Microsoft, in a statement.

Microsoft sees IoT devices as enabling companies to shift cloud intelligence from the data center to the edge allowing them to develop new products and use cases.

Furthering this mission, Microsoft is rolling out 11 application templates to its IoT Central Platform. These templates promise to simplify IoT deployments in industries such as retail, health care, government, and energy.

Other improvements to Microsoft's IoT Central include custom user roles; the ability to save and load application states; and improved data export options. The platform has also gained support for API integrations, plug-and-play deployments, edge compute, and multi-tenancy.

Alongside the new features, Microsoft announced the platform will be getting a new pricing model beginning in early 2020 that it says should make it easier for customers to predict usage and cost.

Microsoft announced five new preview capabilities that will be rolling out to its Azure Time Series Insights platform. Notable additions to the platform include multi-layered storage for fast access to frequently accessed data, cold storage for historical data, and rich analytics.

With the update, Azure Time Series Insights will also be getting scale and performance improvements across the platform and new integrations with the company's Power BI dashboard.

Microsoft is also tapping into its acquisition earlier this year of Express Logic with a new hardware partnership. It's in the form of Azure RTOS, which is the company's real-time operating system for IoT and edge microcontrollers. That platform, which was formerly ThreadX RTOS under Express Logic, is now being offered on the Renesas product line and includes offerings from Synergy and RA MCU.

Microsoft also announced its Azure Sphere IoT security platform that will be generally available beginning in February. According to Microsoft, tackling IoT security will require a holistic approach that starts at the chip level. This means working with chipmakers to develop hardware tailored to IoT applications.

Qualcomm, which recently announced a collaboration with Microsoft to develop mobile hardware for Azure Sphere, is among the first of these partners.

IoT security is becoming a major risk factor as companies seek to deploy the technology on their networks. A Nokia Threat report from late 2018 found that IoT botnets were on the rise and 5G-based IoT deployments were only going to make the situation worse.

As part of today's update, Microsoft also announced the availability of its Azure Maps location services on Gov Cloud alongside a new message enrichment capability for the Azure IoT Hub. The message update is designed to embed useful information in messages coming from IoT devices before they reach the cloud.

Update: This story has been updated to clarify that Azure Sphere is not a partner security program and is in fact a comprehensive IoT security platform.