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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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: The End of Exchange?

My scared cat / gatto (Photo credit: Paolo Margari)

"Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid!"

That's what I tell messaging engineers and consultants that aren't building their cloud skills.  The days of vanilla on-premises e-mail systems are numbered, and if you're not building your skills you're falling behind.

Just in case you've been asleep for the last twenty years here's what has happened in e-mail:

1. Starting in the early 90's - only a few people had e-mail, mostly through universities.
2. By the mid-late 90's - dial-up internet providers started providing IMAP / POP3 e-mail services that you would access through client applications like Eudora or Outlook.  At this point, e-mail was mostly used by businesses.
3. In the late 90's - ISPs, Yahoo and AOL began providing access to e-mail for customers through rudimentary e-mail web portals.  E-mail became popular with more tech savvy home users.
4. By 2007, Web 2.0 was a reality and Google had released Gmail.  They began wrapping more powerful web functionality around the service.  The accessibility provided by a friendly and easy web interface further popularized e-mail... most people had e-mail accounts by 2007.
5. In 2009, after seeing Google successfully launch a hosted e-mail product, Microsoft released Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS).  It was essentially Exchange 2007 hosted on some servers Microsoft owned.  The value proposition of BPOS being designed for business was pitched to customers.
6. In late 2011, after upgrading Exchange to 2010 and re-writing the software to better tailor it for mass hosting, Microsoft upgraded BPOS to Office 365 and began including rudimentary Office apps hosted in the cloud as well.
7. In January of 2013 Microsoft upgrades Office 365 again and the Microsoft Office suite took a full leap in to the cloud, providing much enhanced functionality:
1. After aggressively pursuing certifications and jumping the toughest regulatory and compliance hurdles, Office 365 began accelerating adoption both in business and in people's personal lives.
2. Offering the full Microsoft Office software suite further distinguished Office 365 from competitors.
3. The only hosted e-mail service with a true hybrid deployment model, Office 365 now defines the hosted e-mail experience for large enterprises.

So, its plain to see that cloud-based e-mail services are only going to expand.  The demand for hybrid deployments that include both on-premises and cloud-based systems is increasing as customers realize that they can move the workloads they are comfortable with putting in to the cloud while leaving others on-premises in traditional hosted systems.  If you're an Exchange e-mail administrator and you're not preparing for hybrid and cloud-based systems you're in trouble.

The cost / benefit equation is an easy sell to IT executives and vendors like Microsoft are making that value proposition to your leadership daily.  You can only use excuses for not moving for so long before the cost savings drive some of your e-mail in to the cloud.  You'd best be ready for it soon or you'll be looking at a new career when you cannot adapt.

Commodore 64 (Photo credit: shaniber)

Speaking of excuses, lets talk about companies that aren't investigating how cloud can enhance their business.  Want to be like Polaroid or Kodak?  They failed to see the digital camera revolution.  How about Palm Pilot and Commodore?  When was the last time you saw one of either of those?

In my research for this article I came across a great list of excuses to NOT innovate.  I'm going to quote just a few excuses from Mitch Ditkoff's article "The Top 100 Lamest Excuses for Not Innovating".  I suggest you give the full article a read... its hits very close to the mark I believe.  Here are a few of the excuses he found:

5. We won't be able to get it past legal.
6. I've got too much on my plate.
13. There's too much bureaucracy here to get anything done.
14. Our customers aren't asking for it.
15. We're a risk averse culture. Always will be.
34. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
89. We need to focus on the short term for a while.
91. What we really need are some cost cutting initiatives.
95. Maybe next year.

Do any of those sound familiar?  If your organization is using any of those excuses to not go to the cloud or at least evaluate how portions of cloud could be implemented, you should be looking for a new job.  If your employer doesn't use cloud you aren't developing cloud skills.  If you're not developing those cloud skills how will you find your next job?  Employers are asking for cloud skills on top of everything else.  Just go look at the LinkedIn (14,590 postings with "cloud") or SimplyHired (5,484 "cloud" jobs just near Kansas City) job boards and search for "cloud."  You'll see.

And if you are that company using compliance and regulations to not move to the cloud... you know who you are.  Are you using excuses like being in a highly regulated industry like healthcare, financial services, power & utilities?  Check out "Office 365: A snowball's chance in hell?" for a look at how some top utilities are taking a second look at the cloud.

If you are hiding behind these acronyms you need to take another look at cloud.  At least with Office 365 (see the Office 365 Trust Center) I know you have good, compliant, hybrid solutions:

• ISO
• HIPAA
• ISO
• FISMA
• FERC / NERC,
• EU privacy

In a future article maybe I'll talk about how hybrid solutions can meet the needs of highly regulated industries.  Yes, it IS possible to comply with regulations and just move certain workloads to the cloud.

Are you ready for the cloud?  Time's up.  It's here.

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And Now for Something Completely Different - Moving to Microsoft

Changes Coming...

Over the last 2 years over 1,300 of you have followed me on Twitter, I've had 74,000+ page views on this blog reading 83 published articles and I've interacted with many of you through comments here or on LinkedIn.

And now for something completely different: Microsoft.  It has been a career goal for me to work at Microsoft for almost 15 years and that goal has finally been realized... last week I started at Microsoft as an Account Technology Strategist working in the Kansas City Microsoft office.

In the months ahead I plan to continue to post informative, well written articles on cloud services, as that is still a large part of my job.  However, I will not be concentrating solely on Office 365 the way I have been.  Expect articles about other cloud services like Azure as well.  And in the not too far distant future I plan to update the look and feel and possibly the "brand" of the blog as well.

I hope you all stick around.  The best is yet to come... I plan to use my new perspective to bring even more interesting and relevant content to you in the days ahead.  It will probably take me a few weeks to get on my feet... there's a LOT to learn here, but I love it so far and know it will be as good as I've always hoped.

In the meanwhile, come connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter.  I will continue using Twitter as a funnel for industry cloud computing news and for announcing new articles here on my blog.

Thank you for your readership, see you soon!

Scott

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Office 365 - Finding Good Help

You've read the reviews, maybe you know someone who has already switched but it's just more than you're ready to do on your own - how do you find good help moving to Office 365?

At any size, migrations to Office 365 can be fairly complex and even for larger companies with an IT staff doing the migration work on your own may just be too much to plan, manage and implement.  Finding a qualified partner can make a potentially complex migration a breeze.  A good partner will have completed many migrations before yours and will incorporate best practices and tools in their work for you.

Partners will also be knowledgeable about the various offers Microsoft has.  You may be able to pay for some or all of their consulting work using Microsoft funds.  For instance, if you had a Microsoft EA (Enterprise license Agreement) and were looking to migrate to Office 365 you could have taken advantage of a $40 per seat deployment offer up until the end of March 2013.  In many cases that would pay for an entire migration project... and the only way to access those funds was through a Microsoft Deployment Partner.  Also if you have an EA, you may have deployment planning services (DPS) days available - free (paid for) consulting days that partners can use to help you plan desktop, Exchange, and SharePoint migration work.  Many EA customers leave these DPS days unused... a terrible waste in my opinion.  (Hint to Partners... be sure to know how to use DPS!)

The top Microsoft credential for Microsoft partners that focus on assisting companies in migrating to Office 365 is "Cloud Deployment Specialist."  The picture above shows the requirements to achieve this level (click on the image for more details).  Having a combination of certified consultants and experience migrating large numbers of mailboxes to Office 365 provides good value to most customers.

A step down from that is Cloud Accelerate.  Cloud Accelerate Partners have sold three cloud deals for 150 seats or more within 18 months and are registered Microsoft Partners.  Most of the more experienced cloud partners will have this credential.

At a minimum, look for Cloud Essentials Partners.  These have registered with Microsoft and passed a sales assessment to ensure they understand Microsoft's offerings.  For more about the Microsoft Cloud Partner program see the FAQ.


To find MS partners in your area go to the Office 365 Marketplace.

Good luck in your move to Office 365!

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