What Is Microsoft Azure – A Complete Guide

In a 2017 survey, Microsoft Azure was identified as the most-used public cloud, and the one most likely to be purchased or renewed, according to 28% of survey respondents—the highest percentage for any public cloud provider. With results like this, it’s no wonder the number of businesses interested in Azure continues to climb. Continue reading

Microsoft Ignite 2017 Summary and Announcements

Ignite 2017 Key takeaways

This was the first year I have not attended Microsoft Ignite, due to unforeseen circumstances. But this didn’t stop me from covering Ignite 2017. So here we go…

Ignite 2017 this year has about 25k attendees. During the same time as Ignite, they are also running Microsoft Envision. This is more focused to business leaders across industries.  Its main focus is to have Business Leaders understand and manage their organizations in the Digital Age.

Ignite 2017 Attendee Breakout

  • 47 % ITI/IT Pros
  • 34% Developers
  • 19% ITDM.

Top Industries Attended

  • 34% IT and Software (flat YoY)
  • 20% Education
  • 9% Healthcare
  • 9% Manufacturing
  • 9% Professional & Business Services

Ignite Keynotes Summary and Links

ignite2017

Modern Workplace

Key Takeaways – Modern Workplace

Expanding Microsoft 365

  • Microsoft 365 Firstline offering and Microsoft 365 Education
  • New Windows 10 S devices from HP, Lenovo, Acer and Fujitsu starting at $275 USD

Intelligent personalized search power by Microsoft Graph

  • Bing for business
  • LinkedIn data integrated with Office 365 profile card
  • Office 365 search & discovery improvements
  • Windows 10 taskbar search

Intelligent Communications vision

  • Bring voice and video + new cognitive and data services into Micro Teams

Advances in Intelligent Security

  • Integrated Adminced threat Protection using Intelligent Security Graph
  • Better data protection and access control across Microsoft 365
  • New Compliance Manager, a single GDPR dashboard

Modernizing Business Process with Cloud and AI

Key Takeaways – Business Applications

New Microsoft Dynamics 365 AI Solutions

  • First solutions for customer care includes a virtual agent for customers, an intelligent assistant for support staff and conversational AI management tools, power by Microsoft AI
  • HP, Macy’s, and Microsoft already using this technology to improve customer satisfaction and handle more requests, more quickly

Modular apps for Dynamics 365

  • New modular apps are lightweight SaS services designed to transform one business process at a time
  • Work with Dynamics 3 business apps or can be used independently
  • Extend existing systems of record, integrate with Office 365 and augment with LinkedIn insights.
  • First to allow talent leaders and hiring managers to address a company’s most important asset, people
  • Attract: focused on recruiting | Onboard: helps you make new employees successful – Available later this year.

Deeper integration for PowerApps and Microsoft Flow + Office 365 and Dynamics 365

  • Rapidly build apps, automate tasks, simplify workflows and solve unique business problems.
  • Allow any business user familiar with InfoPath forms, Access databases or SharePoint list. This allows customers to build apps that help them achieve more, on a single no-code/low code platform.

Apps and Infra/Data and AI

  • Every customer is an AI customer

The Enterprise Cloud

Key Takeaways – Hybrid

Delivering true hybrid consistency

  • Azure Stack shipping through OEM partners including Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo
  • Database Migration Service (DMS)

Empowering customer to optimize costs

  • Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL server
  • Azure Cost Management by CFloudyn – free to all Azure subscriptions

Key Takeaways – Intelligence

Any data, any place

  • SQL Server on Linux Windows and Docker availability with SQL Server 2017 GA’

One convenient workbench for data scientists and AI developers

  • Azure Machine Learning Updates

Build intelligent apps at global scale

  • Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions integration

Performance and Scale for mission-critical analytic apps

  • Azure SQL Data Warehouse preview release of new “optimized for compute” performance tier

Cloud for Good – Key takeaways

To empower nonprofits, Microsoft Philanthropies will:

  • Microsoft has announced they met their 2016 commitment to donate $1 billion in cloud computing resources to nonprofits
  • Continue the cloud donations program, and triple the number of nonprofits Microsoft serves over the next three years
  • Launch a new Tech for Social Impact group, and the first offers, announced this week include:
    • Microsoft 365 for Nonprofits
    • Nonprofit Surface discounts for the first time ever

To get more detailed information about these announcements, please see links below or check out the Ignite2017 Site.

Official Microsoft Blog
Office Blogs
EMS Blog
Dynamics Blog
Azure Blog
Hybrid Cloud Blog
Data Platform Blogs


Until next time, Rob.

Microsoft Azure Cloud Series – Azure Resource Manager – Part 3

Hello everybody, time to get in-depth with Azure Resource Manager.  But, before I dive into the Azure Resource Manager, I would like to quickly review some of the basics in Azure.  I will start with a rundown of the Azure Global Footprint.  Then, I will go into how Azure charges are incurred.  And finally, I will dive into the Azure Resource Manager V2 and comparing it to the older Azure Service Manager V1.  Sit tight and let’s go for an Azure Ride 😉

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Microsoft Azure Cloud Series – Understanding the Stack, Who Manages What? – Part 2

In today’s IT, there are a lot of discussions about different terms like PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS.  So what do all of these cloud acronyms mean?

I’m going to give you the simplest explanation I can, to help you understand the difference between SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS.

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Understanding Windows Azure Pack – Reconfigure portal names, ports and deploy certificates – Part 6

happynewyear1 Windows Azure Pack
Happy New Year Everyone!!!  I know Azure Stack is just around the corner, but I still get lots of questions around configuring WAP and portals. So to follow-up my Windows Azure Pack (WAP) series, I am going to talk about reconfiguring server names and ports as well as assigning trusted certificates to my WAP Portals.

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Microsoft SQL Server High Availability Options on Nutanix

To give credit, this content was taken from my buddy Mike McGhem’s blog and I added some more color to it, but his content is right on.

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Deploying a Test Lab SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group with Hyper-V on Nutanix – Failover Cluster Configuration – Part 1

In my various blog series, you need a SQL 2012 server setup for hosting databases with different Microsoft Solutions. Testing out on a SQL AlwaysOn AG will give you a feel of a real world scenario.

If you want to understand SQL 2012 Always-On Availability Group, check my blog post on SQL 2012 AlwaysON Feature – What is it? How does it work?.

To learn more about SQL Server on Nutanix Check out the Microsoft SQL Server on Nutanix Best Practices!

To give credit, most of the content was taken from Steve Poitras’s blog.  He did a series on Configuring SQL Server on VMware ESXi that is awesome and I altered it for Hyper-V and added more details for installing.

In the following blog post,  I’ll go over how to install and configure a test lab Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn AG with Hyper-V on Nutanix.

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Understanding Identity with ADFS – Part 1

Identity is always something of a taboo subject and is still not clearly understood out there and the IT security landscape keeps evolving.

One of the recent changes past few years is a move away from (Access Control Lists) ACLs on files in the NTFS file system to an access control system that is based on claims.

Claims based authentication is an industry standard security protocol to authenticate users. This is the underlying WS-* standards that describe the usage of Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML) tokens. Claims based auth requires these tokens, and by extension an entity that can issue the token.

This is the Secure Token Service (STS). The STS server can be based on Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) or other platforms that provide this service. This is where ADFS comes in and the highlight of this series.

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