Hybrid Cloud - Move at Your Own Pace

This is the first in a series of Hybrid Cloud articles where I review what "Cloud" means, discuss it's value, and move on to showing how to actually leverage cloud in your business.  The second blog, Hybrid Cloud - IaaS Foundation Part 1 is available now.

Are you thinking about going to the cloud and worried about having to go all-in and re-engineer your whole IT strategy?  Don't get hung up on the word "cloud" - the cloud is really just another data center - just one run by a company that does it professionally and focuses on doing it at scale and with resources you couldn't hope to match.  Besides... you don't have to go all-in at all.  You can adopt a hybrid approach.

Remember Mr. Miagi from the Karate Kid?  "Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later [makes squish gesture] get squish just like grape." Yeah... the hybrid cloud isn't like that at all.

With the hybrid cloud you get the best of both worlds - on-premises and the cloud.  You leave the workloads and data on-site that can't or don't make sense to move to the cloud and you move the rest.  Oh, and you can do it at your own pace and back out any time you like without penalty.  Did I mention you pay for only what you use and get billed by the minute?

Here's how "cloud" looks in a traditional data center:

You manage everything from the hardware and networking up through the O/S, data and applications.

At the other end of the spectrum you have full cloud computing or Software as a Service (SaaS) where everything is managed by the provider and you just get a web application:

Hybrid cloud isn't just mixing which services are provided by you and the vendor- as you see in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS):

Hybrid actually takes portions of a workload - some data, an application, some infrastructure - and moves just that to the cloud, leaving the rest on-premises.  Here's an example:

In this case, the data is stored in the existing data center but is connected to services in the cloud:

1. Data is stored in your on-premises data center
2. A Windows virtual machine in IaaS in the cloud runs a custom application that connects back to the data center.  (You choose a VM on IaaS instead of PaaS because the custom code requires O/S customization.)  The virtual machine could even integrate data from multiple on-premises and cloud sources.
3. A web application that takes the output from the custom app on the VM is hosted on PaaS (to enable easier scaling and reduce patching and O/S management overhead).
4. The application on PaaS then presents a web interface that is integrated in to your SharePoint Online intranet portal.

I'm not an application architect (though I can hook you up with some good ones!) but there are lots of options to choose from.  The beautiful thing about the cloud is that you can choose the best option for each part of your solution and you don't have to move the whole application to the cloud.

In another example, your Exchange e-mail is on-premises and you want to move just some of your users to the cloud:

In the diagram above, there are some Exchange users in the cloud and some on-premises.  They interact with each other as if they were on the same e-mail system.  You can choose to move just some mailboxes to the cloud or all of them and even move them back if you like.  Perhaps you have some users with e-mail data that contains trade secrets or bank card information... leave them on-premises if you like and just move the general user population to gain efficiency and scale where it makes sense.

The two main things you gain from the cloud are:

1. Scalability
2. Flexibility

And with hybrid cloud you don't have to sacrifice your current IT infrastructure and practices to leverage the cloud's benefits.

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This article is cross posted from my original on LinkedIn Pulse: Hybrid Cloud - Move at Your Own Pace.

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4 Shocking Microsoft Products You Need to Know About

Whoah! Microsoft did What?

You've been using Microsoft's products for a while now - Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype.  You know how to use them, what they do.  Here are a few you probably haven't used.  Some are really interesting and different than what you normally expect from Microsoft.  Some are actually free!
Here are 4 Strange Microsoft Products You Need to Know About:

Sway

Are you bored with PowerPoint?  Need to create a quick and easy visual presentation on the web?  Log in with your Microsoft Account at Sway.com and you can create a visually stunning presentation quickly and easily.

Choose a template then develop your story line with text, pictures and rich media easily - video, audio, Tweets and more.  Invite someone to co-create your Sway or review it if you like, then when you're done if you don't like it, hit the Remix button to give it a new look.

When you're done hit the Share button to share it on Facebook or Twitter or upload it to your public gallery on Docs.com.

Sway is free with a Microsoft account. You can also get free Outlook.com mail and free OneDrive storage with that same account. Go to live.com to get an account, but most people have one already.

Flow

Have you ever missed an e-mail from your boss?  Are you tired of posting updates twice - once to Twitter and once to Facebook?  Maybe you'd like to automatically save your e-mail attachments to SharePoint.  You can do all this and more with Microsoft Flow.

Flow has dozens of pre-created automations already built that you can use, or create your own from a selection of "triggers", conditions, and actions.

For instance, you can create a Flow like this:
Receive e-mail from Bob > Create a Wunderlist task > Add the subject from Bob's e-mail as the Title for a new Wunderlist task.

If you're a geek like I am and have played with home automation, Flow is a lot like IFTTT (If This then That) but for business.  It's a cool concept and it will be interesting to see what people come up with.

Flow is another free service from Microsoft and just requires an account. Sign up at live.com.
BONUS: Check out Wunderlist - its a great (and free!) to-do and personal planning app for the web and most mobile devices. Wunderlist is a part of Microsoft as well! Thank you Satya!

Delve

For those business users already on Office 365 with files in OneDrive and SharePoint, Delve provides a way to share and discover documents, subject matter experts, groups, and more... all based on your own preferences, content and existing contacts and groups.

Delve lets you "favorite" boards and documents to enable easy recall of content you discover. The feature is quite similar to what you see in Pinterest.

For instance, if you share a lot of documents with your marketing team and they publish a new design style guide or PowerPoint template to the public, you can go to Delve and quickly see the new doc without having to go search for it on SharePoint.

Delve also allows you to:

• Post and share an internal blog
• View your organization's structure - see the reporting structure for your internal contacts
• Offer public praise to your coworkers
• Discover various documents you have security to view for contacts, groups, and contacts of contacts
• Dive in to MyAnalytics (with an additional license) - get details about how you use your time, who you should stay in touch with, set goals for how to manage your day and more.

Access Delve from within your Office 365 portal at portal.office.com. You can open it from the "Waffle" menu in the upper-left-corner if you have access. Requires an appropriate Office 365 subscription.

Planner

Need to get organized but think Microsoft Project is overkill? If you have Office 365, Planner goes hand-in-hand with Office 365 groups to allow for easy team collaboration on tasks with light project management tracking and metrics.

If you're familiar with kanban boards and cards, Planner is very similar. You Create a task or card on one of several boards. The boards organize the cards either in to categories or as a reflection of process or backlog for items to do.

You can use Planner to assign tasks to team members and then easily track status of all tasks in the Chart view. Planner is closely tied to Office 365 Groups and you can manage a Notebook, store files, share a Calendar and even use the Conversations view to discuss progress of your project. Office 365 Groups could (and probably will!) be an entire blog of its own. There's lots to like there.

Like Delve, Planner requires an Office 365 subscription and appropriate access to be granted.

Keep an Eye on Office 365 and Microsoft for More

Microsoft has moved to a cloud-first model. You see innovative applications like these popping up regularly now. There will likely never be a full on-premises Office client for any of these applications but they are all built to work well on mobile devices, may be integrated in to other Microsoft apps and may show up in the mobile app stores as well.

The cloud allows Microsoft to quickly develop and market test applications and those that catch on will stick around while others may fall off. You can be sure of one thing, though... you'll see more of these and some may look strange if your only experience with Microsoft is Office.

(This article is cross posted from my LinkedIn Pulse blog)

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Office 365 Security Updates - Encryption, DKIM, DLP, and More!

Microsoft recently announced upgrades to OneDrive including greatly expanded storage.  They also released details around how OneDrive (and SharePoint Online) encrypts customer data both in transit and at rest.

The video below explains Microsoft's encryption very clearly.  See the original article for more.


I've been very happy with Microsoft's continued focus on security.  Here's a short list of some of the more recent announcements:

• Enhanced email protection with DKIM and DMARC in Office 365 - reduced spoofing and phishing through inbound sender verification.
• Garage Series: Bringing Data Loss Prevention to SharePoint and first look at new Office 365 Message Encryption Viewers - enabling DLP and mobile message encryption
• Serving 26 million Texans with secure cloud-based computing - the State of Texas finds Office 365 is secure enough for government, meeting requirements for HIPAA and CJIS standards
• Data Encryption in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online - TechNet article on data encryption in Office 365 on the SharePoint side.

There is also the Office 365 Trust Center - an entire internet portal Microsoft has devoted to answering questions about Office 365's security features.

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Cloud Compliance and Regulatory Challenges with Office 365!

Are you in highly a regulated industry?  Do you have issues with "the cloud" and compliance and regulatory challenges?  Let's talk about how Office 365 IS and IS NOT just "cloud."  Once we've cleared the air a bit, you should take another look at Office 365 with a fresh set of eyes and reconsider Office 365 for at least some of your workloads.

I recently blogged extensively on this topic on the Oakwood Insights site.  In the future, I'll be posting complimentary articles there and here and will link them together.

What Office 365 IS NOT:

Everyone talks about what Office 365 IS.  I'd like to contrast that with what Office 365 is NOT:

Office 365 IS	Office 365 is NOT
A suite of hybrid on-premises and cloud-hosted services and software: Exchange SharePoint Lync Microsoft Office	JUST e-mail in the cloud
A highly-available service developed for business	A consumer-grade e-mail solution for end-users
Private and transparent	A vehicle for generating more advertising revenue
Compliant to regulatory requirements	An all-in cloud solution unable to handle on-premises data requirements
Secure - both for physical and logical access	Always a valid answer for every security requirement
A licensing vehicle for flexible access to the Microsoft Office suite of applications	A replacement for your EA licensing agreement with Microsoft
A great solution for businesses that need the flexibility to go to the cloud on their own terms at their own speed.	Just for business - education and government organizations at all levels are using Office 365

Addressing Compliance and Regulatory Requirements

Office 365 addresses a comprehensive list of requirements including:

• HIPAA
• Data Processing Agreements (DPA)
• Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)
• ISO 27001
• EU model clauses
• U.S. - E.U. Safe Harbor

And here are some of the security and privacy tools used to address compliance and regulations:

1. Restricted physical data center access
2. Encryption at rest and during transmission
3. No use of customer data for advertising
4. Regular back ups of data
5. Enforcing "hard" passwords
6. Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
7. eDiscovery
8. Granular, role-based permissions
9. Transparent operations - know where your data is and who has access
10. Visibility in to availability and a 99.9%, financially-backed up time guarantee.

Some of the industries with the heaviest requirements (finance, healthcare, power and utility, government and education to name a few) have just written off the cloud entirely and I think that's a big mistake.  On a quarterly or even monthly basis, Microsoft is improving the service, continually adding capabilities and looking at additional security and management features.  Frankly, investing in the types of features and controls that Office 365 provide in an on-premises environment can be very expensive and labor-intensive and most small and medium sized organizations struggle to comply with complex and intrusive regulations.

So, I hear a lot of: "we can't move anything because we can't move everything."  Organizations assume that if they have one workload or one class of user that requires high-security or is highly regulated that they cannot move any of their workloads or users.  This simply isn't true in most cases.  Microsoft has invested much effort in developing products that offer "Hybrid" on-premises / cloud functionality.  Let's talk about that next...

What Hybrid Does for You

Typical Components of Cloud Computing Systems

First, what does "Hybrid" mean?  Hybrid configurations take the best of on-premises and cloud-hosted systems and tie them together.  While hybrid configurations can be more complex they also afford much greater flexibility and functionality.

Here's what that means: you can selectively choose workloads that are more appropriate for the cloud and move just those while leaving the remainder of your IT infrastructure on-premises where you have full control of it.  Take advantage of the scale and pricing efficiency you get in the cloud but do so only for those users and data for which it is appropriate.

The real trick is categorizing your data, users and business processes to understand which platforms are best suited for them.  The same way you now evaluate storage... tier 1/2/3... you need to evaluate platforms.  Consider on-premises traditional, public cloud and private cloud options and make a chart for each use case and where that workload belongs.

Learn More About My Cloudy Challenge!

Visit my article at Oakwood Insights for more:

• How Hybrid Works: what are DirSync, ADFS and Hybrid?  And how do they change the Office 365 conversation?
• Risk Management: how Microsoft categorizes data and how you can use their model to evaluate what does and doesn't belong in the cloud.
• Power and Utilities example: how a power and utility company might selectively choose a workload for Office 365 and mitigate some of the security and data ownership challenges they face.
• Microsoft is crossing platforms... Windows, iOS, Android... they just want to sell you services now and don't care where you access from or how.
• My Cloud Challenge!  Reevaluate Office 365 and start a pilot... for something, no matter how small.  Your peers are looking at the cloud... you need to be as well.

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The New Cloud Productivity Competency for Office 365 Partners

Well, it's WPC (Worldwide Partner Conference) time again and that means changes to the Microsoft Partner Network.  Most years we see several new and changing competencies and this year is no different.  With Microsoft's recent focus on cloud and the phenomenal success of Office 365, however, it should be no surprise that the Cloud Partner programs (Cloud Deployment and Cloud Accelerate / Essentials) are being revised retired.

None of this should be a shock... we've heard rumblings since late 2013 that changes were coming.  In November, Julie Bennani (General Manager, Microsoft Partner Network) released the timeline for some of the changes announced at WPC in 2013 (see Partner Program Updates. What you need to know).  Included was the retirement of the Cloud Essentials, Accelerate and Deployment programs.  In January, a Technet article (see Cloud Program Update: Your Questions, Answered) clarified some of the reasons for the changes and how the retirement of the programs would work and how Partners would be affected.

In a post titled "Making Cloud core to the MPN Program", this week at WPC 2014, Gavriella Schuster (General Manager, Worldwide Partner Group) confirmed the program update and announced some significant changes that will simplify partnering with Microsoft for public and private cloud while providing additional resources at the same time.  Unfortunately, some of the differentiation for top Office 365 partners is falling by the wayside as a result... as her article title suggests, cloud is now core to the MPN program and Microsoft will be expecting more and more partners to get on the cloud bandwagon.

Here's a summary of what's new and changed:

Program	Benefits	Requirements	Description
Action Pack	5 seats of E3 5 seats Intune	Partner account Action Pack Purchase for $475	Replaces the Cloud Essentials program.  Phone support, trial invites, delegated admin.
Silver Cloud Productivity Competency	25 seats of E3 25 seats Intune	One Office 365 tech One messaging tech Customer reference Deployed Office 365 active use requirement	Roughly replaces Cloud Accelerate.  Office 365 demo tenant, Signature Cloud Support, trial invites, delegated admin, etc.  Switch from assigned seats sold to active use as metric.
Gold Cloud Productivity Competency	100 seats E3 100 seats Intune EMS Direct PAM	Two Office 365 techs Two messaging techs Customer reference Deployed Office 365 active use requirement Additional program fee	Roughly replaces Cloud Deployment.  Same as Silver but adds more internal rights, Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) and direct-to-partner support by a tele-partner account manager (tPAM).

One of the big challenges for partners working with Microsoft on funding offers (BIF) like the enterprise E3 $40/seat FY2013 offer and more recently the watered-down FastTrack Office 365 offer has been the deployed seat metric.  It looks like the competencies are going to use a similar metric for now until Microsoft can come up with a good way to accurately measure "active use" of the service.  Right now they judge deployment using the number of assigned seats... just due to lack of a better metric.

The Office 365 Marketplace and Pinpoint still have the existing filters (Cloud Deployment, Top Cloud Experts, Cloud Accelerate, etc.) but I would guess those will be replaced by a simpler "Cloud Productivity" filter or such at some point.  When that happens those companies that have fought hard for their premium cloud designations may be a bit unhappy.  Hopefully the additional resources like EMS and Signature Phone Support being provided offset the loss though.

More information and links to additional material can be had at Cloud is our core - Build a profitable cloud business on the Partner Network site.  See a good breakdown of the specific benefits and requirements between the Silver and Gold competencies at Cloud Productivity, also on the Partner Network site.

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Office 365 Learning and Education Roundup

Do you ever find there's a lack of sufficient Office 365 technical and learning resources?

Yeah, me neither.

There is so much available it can be a real challenge to identify what is worth your time and what is not.  This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list but I'm going to hit some highlights of more useful resources.  Feel free to add your favorites down in the comments.

I've organized resources by category, beginning with introductory materials and ending with expert resources.

Happy learning!

For Beginners

Resource	Description	Usefulness
What is Office 365 for business?	Microsoft's Office 365 main product website is comprehensive with links to use cases, features, versions, pricing, and learning materials. It's a great place to start.	*****
Getting to know Office 365 eBook	Has very high level use cases for end users. Gives an idea about capabilities without going in to any details about specific functionality.	**
Quick Start to Office 365 for Small to Medium Businesses	A guide to introducing new users to Office 365 through Microsoft learning videos, e-mail campaigns and hands-on demonstrations.  Zipped guide e-mail templates, presentation, videos, etc.	***
Office 365 Midsize Business Quick Deployment Guide	An initial training resource for Office 365 admins that will be configuring the service. The guide covers simple new account topics like setting up e-mail services, managing licenses and adding users.	***
Microsoft Virtual Academy	The MVA is a fantastic resource for IT pros. A number of Office 365 courses are available including introductory guides, video training, hands-on virtual demos and more.	*****

Intermediate and Advanced

Resource	Description	Usefulness
Office 365 MCSA Certification	Achieve certification in Office 365. Concentrates on provisioning, identity management (DirSync), federation and single sign on (ADFS), and configuring the services. Instructor-led training is available from Microsoft Learning Partners to prepare.	****
MS Online Demo Solutions	This site has virtual click-through labs for Office 365 including for migration of users, enabling federation and more.  Unfortunately, the content is for an older version of the service and the 2010-level applications.  Still, it may be useful for those who don't have a demo environment and need more hands-on than the videos and documentation provide.	**
Office Ignite	Important resource! Events, in-depth videos and technical content for training administrators.  Much of the content is presented directly by Microsoft product managers, engineers and support staff.	*****
Office 365 Technical Network on Yammer	This is a great place to network with your peers, ask questions, and interact directly with Microsoft.	***
LinkedIn Office 365	The Microsoft Office page on LinkedIn with content shared from members.  Join the LinkedIn group for "Microsoft Office 365" as well to network with your peers.	****
Channel 9	View videos from Microsoft events - including product demonstrations, training videos and more.	***
Office 365 Garage Series	These are good videos for deeper technical dives in to particular Office 365 features. They highlight topics like compliance, what's new with SP1 for Exchange 2013, Yammer, OneDrive and more.	*****
Office Blogs	News about Office and Office 365... a good place to subscribe a RSS feed to.	***

I know that's a lot to absorb, but hopefully my descriptions and rankings will help you make sense of them somewhat.  This is by no means an exhaustive list... what did I miss?  I'll add the best ones in and update the article periodically.

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