With Gartner Inc. expecting the number of internet-connected objects to pass 20 billion by 2020, Microsoft Corp. sees a big opportunity.

The technology giant today announced plans to invest $5 billion into initiatives focused on the “internet of things” over the next four years. The push represents a major expansion of Microsoft’s activities in this area. Jason Zander, the head of its Azure cloud business, told VentureBeat that the company has spent a total of $1.5 billion on IoT programs so far.

Microsoft plans to focus its newly bolstered efforts on several areas in particular. The first priority that the company listed in the blog post announcing the initiative is improving the security of connected devices, which have been shown to be highly vulnerable to attack in recent years.

Given that Microsoft’s IoT strategy centers in large part on Azure, it may be planing to develop new cloud-based tools for protecting internet-enabled hardware. The company already provides security capabilities with some of the connected device services on the platform. The Azure IoT Hub management service, for example, lets administrators closely regulate the flow of data to and from endpoints.

Another focus of Microsoft’s $5 billion push will be creating new development tools that can help companies build applications for harnessing connected devices. Additionally, the technology giant said it plans to make “investments to grow our partner ecosystem.”

This latter initiative may focus in part on widening the adoption of Cortana. The virtual assistant lags behind Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa and Google LLC’s Assistant, an issue that Microsoft could try to address by encouraging more hardware partners to embed it into their products. Amazon is pursuing a similar strategy, recently releasing a development kit designed to make it easier for manufacturers to add Alexa to wearables.

Microsoft’s pledge to step up its IoT investments follows a major internal reorganization that put hardware on center stage. As part of the shakeup, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella formed a new Experiences & Devices division and appointed company veteran Panos Panay as chief product officer to lead hardware development efforts.

Image: Microsoft