Learn how the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program helps partners add value while their customers gain flexibility

Editor’s note (June 2019): We updated this post to reflect the latest CSP news and Softchoice webinar which can be viewed below. 

Technology acquisition continues to evolve – away from physically owned infrastructure and towards cloud subscription services – and vendors are offering great programs to go along with it.

Microsoft has recognized how customer buying habits have changed to meet the rapid pace of innovation and have developed the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. It’s all part of a larger trend moving away from traditional software licensing. By 2020, Gartner predicts that 80% of software vendors will abandon “traditional” licensing and maintenance for subscription models.

According to Luke Black, Director of Business Development Programs and Operations at Softchoice, while understanding how CSP solutions impact you as a customer is important, customer’s knowledge of CSP varies.

In our recent Modern Microsoft Licensing webinar, Steve Thompson, Sr. Systems Engineer Microsoft EMS MVP, and Patrick O’Leary, Softchoice’s Microsoft Practice Lead, peeled back the CSP curtain. They discussed how CSP with Office 365 and Azure works and the benefits customers can see from solutions using to build solutions.

What is CSP?

Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) is a non-contractual, monthly, cloud subscription platform on top of which partners can build, manage, and support solutions.

Today, almost all Microsoft online cloud solutions are offered as CSP solutions, including Azure and Office 365.

CSP customers gain the flexibility of scaling Microsoft technology up and down on demand in a cloud environment, but with the added support and expertise of a partner. Customers aren’t locked into the long-term commitment of an Enterprise Agreement (EA) or other traditional volume licensing programs.

CSP also changes the service and support model. The partner, and not Microsoft, is responsible for technical issues, support, and managed services. This allows partners like Softchoice to add extra value to the solution.

Why is the CSP program needed?

There will continue to be organizations for whom a three-year commitment to Microsoft around on-premise solutions makes perfect sense. However, more and more businesses need the ability to scale up and down, simply, quickly, and efficiently.

If you’re familiar with existing Microsoft license agreements, you are likely used to managing disparate agreements across many commercial systems. CSP solutions remove that complexity. They provide a single platform from which to buy and manage Microsoft cloud solutions, available from multiple entry points.

Who are CSP solutions ideal for?

CSP solutions are excellent options for customers who:

• Purchase directly from the Microsoft Office Portal – if you already buy through Microsoft’s online portal, CSP adds value and you still retain the same access and functionality of the Admin Portal
• Don’t want contractual agreements – CSP is perfect for those adamantly opposed to long-term commitments, or who want to be billed only for what they use month-to-month
• Need shorter-term cloud subscriptions for testing – customers on EAs today can add cloud subscriptions but there’s often still a long-term commitment involved. CSP solutions let you test out the cloud environment without being locked in
• Want to increase ROI by having a Microsoft expert like Softchoice at their service for getting the most out of their Cloud investments

What are the benefits of CSP solutions?

It allows seasoned Microsoft Partners like Softchoice to provide additional value and support for O365 and Azure.

CSP customers can pay for as much or as little service and support as they need. For example, at a minimum, a partner might offer a digital support model or a knowledge base for problem resolution. The real benefits come, however, when further value and managed services are layered onto a solution.

For example, navigating and managing the many updates and changes that come when using Software as a Service can be an overwhelming, full-time job. At the same time, traditional support often requires going through a script describing your environment.

Partners, on the other hand, have knowledge of both your environment and Microsoft solutions to provide strategic advice. A trusted solution provider using the CSP model can help customers achieve faster time to value and happier users, and can do so this while reducing risk and complexity and offering efficient, predictable costs.

Through a CSP solution like Softchoice’s Keystone for Office 365, your partner can provide you with the administration, actionable insights and ongoing mentorship to get the most out of the solution in your specific environment.

To learn even more about CSP, or for a refresher of what you heard in the webinar, you can watch it here.

The post Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and the ABCs of modern Microsoft cloud licensing appeared first on Microsoft Navigator.

You’re about to begin your journey to cloud adoption.

Or, you’ve already started but aren’t sure if there’s something you missed.

Most organizations moving to the cloud face the same problems. They don’t have a real plan. They have a skill gap in their organization. Or, they haven’t taken the time to define governance.

When it comes to cloud security, the same challenges apply. Planning for security is different in the cloud. 65% of enterprise businesses report a skills gap when it comes to cloud security. Governance questions arise about who will procure cloud technologies and who will have access rights to cloud resources.

But, cloud security is more critical than ever.

• 44% of enterprise firms suffered 2 or more data breaches in 2016
• 62% of enterprise firms claim to have insufficient security staff
• 25% of people reuse credentials

It may seem overwhelming, but there is an effective way to achieve security in the cloud. In fact, done right your migration to Azure will leave you more secure than in your present environment.

Our latest Discovery Series webinar explores which aspects of the Azure cloud Microsoft secures and which are your responsibility. Watch it here:

Shared Security Model

The conversation begins with a distinction between the security of the cloud versus security in the cloud. The first refers to the infrastructure Microsoft has built. The second refers to your responsibility to secure the operating system, network, and firewalls as a customer. Depending on your deployment, some or all aspects of security are shared.

On-premises infrastructure leaves all responsibility for operation and security in the customer’s hands. In an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model, elements like network hardware and the hypervisor fall under the platform vendor. At the same time, responsibility for applications, identity, clients, and data is shared.

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) models build on IaaS deployments and make the provider responsible for securing networking controls. In a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, the provider delivers apps to the customer and abstracts the underlying components. The customer manages their users, controls their end-point devices and classifies their data.

Microsoft Data Center Security

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has made security in the cloud a top priority for the company. From perimeter fencing to two-factor authentication, Microsoft has made heavy investments in protecting its data centers. They’ve even put funding behind features like seismic bracing to ensure data centers are physically resilient as well as secure. As a customer, you’ll often get to benefit from the certifications that result from this spending.

Microsoft has also launched the Cyber Defense Operations Center. This unit protects Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, services, products, and devices. Offering 24 x 7 protection it uses machine learning to detect potential attacks and take appropriate action.

Identity & Access Management

Addressing identity and access management is a recommended first step. When we interviewed CIOs about what’s important to their organizations, this issue ranked as a high priority. This is because identity and access management also impact end-user satisfaction. When your employees encounter various apps that need different credentials, the result is a poor experience.

Microsoft Azure Active Directory provides a single mechanism for authentication. And, Cloud App Security allows you to track external SaaS apps in your environment and roll them into this single point of management. The solution also helps to address “shadow IT,” or the use of unsanctioned apps by employees who aren’t aware of the risks.

Host Infrastructure

Most organizations we work with are using virtual machines (VMs). The first step in cloud adoption for many of these businesses is to move VMs to an IaaS deployment. Here, the customer remains accountable for managing VMs, including antivirus, backup, and malware. You need a strategy in place to protect yourself in these areas.

Many of the software solutions that have protected you for years, like Trend Micro Deep Security, now offer protection in Azure. Trend Micro was one of the first security partners on the Azure platform. And, customers who have used their technology before will be able to capitalize on much of that knowledge in Azure.

Ensuring you have consistent security for virtual machines and IaaS is key. Using a template-based approach is an effective way to ensure identical and secure deployments.

Network Controls

The high number of compute resources in an average IaaS deployment means network communication is critical. But, once you expose your Azure environment to the Internet you’re accountable to protect it. Some organizations attempt to secure this by routing through their on-premises environment and existing network protection infrastructure.

Another approach is to try protection within Azure. In this case, you still need to manage configuration along with networking elements like virtual networking, load balancing and DNS.

Barracuda offers a robust solution for networking and web application protection. Available via the Azure Marketplace, it integrates with key aspects of Azure, including Express Route and Azure Active Directory.

Data Classification & Accountability

Encrypting data and understanding who has access to it is more important than ever. The ready flow of information makes this a vital part of cloud security.

Microsoft has made it simpler with Azure Information Protection. AIP allows you to classify data based on sensitivity and enforce access rights. And, it goes beyond rights and policy enforcement to support an end-to-end data lifecycle. It also allows you to track data in motion and pinpoint where users are accessing information within a map view.

You’re Ready to Secure the Cloud

What are the next steps on your journey to cloud security?

1)Build a Plan

Take the time to define governance for your environment. Get a sense of what’s already running in your environment. Ensure you have a checklist for your cloud migration.

2)Secure Identity

Decide how to manage identity. Gain control of SaaS in your environment and adopt a single authentication mechanism.

3)Secure Host Infrastructure & Network Controls

Understand your current state and protect your vital infrastructure and networks.

4)Secure Data

Classify data and encrypt sensitive information with Azure Information Protection.

5)Detect & Respond

Improve your ability to detect and respond to security breaches and potential threats on an ongoing basis.
Now that you have a better understanding of the options and best practices for securing your environment in the cloud, you’re ready to move forward.

Interested in learning more about cloud security and staying up to date in the latest security innovation? Download our latest issue of the Ultimate Security Guide today.

The post Clearing Up Cloud Security appeared first on Microsoft Navigator.

Originally published in November 2015. Updated: May 18, 2016. New on-demand Webinar

We used to just worry about the unlikely natural disaster and the odd communications breakdown when planning for backup and recovery. But these days, an entirely new breed of threats have emerged that promise to knock out your business applications and data the first chance they get. From cyber crime, to cyberterrorism and mobile and cloud computing complexities, handling these new threats with the same old tools simply isn’t possible.

But there is hope. New platforms and best practices are emerging that allow businesses to better prepare for backup and recovery.

This was the topic that drove a recent Softchoice webinar, centered on how your business can more effectively, simply and securely provide a robust DR and BC strategy leveraging a suite of Azure based technologies from Microsoft.

Watch the latest on-demand webinar:

The complexities are worse than ever

The issue of backing up your data and recovering it in case of an emergency has only grown in complexity in recent years. Today, businesses are faced with fragmented, hybrid environments with multiple apps and OSs, exponential data growth, longer more cumbersome retention processes and, worst of all, an enormous cost increase just to store it. It’s also not uncommon for enterprises to have less budget than needed to run an adequate DR strategy.

The costs of an outage are outrageous

It’s not only too expensive to maintain the right DR strategy, the costs of getting it wrong are more significant than ever before. According to one IDC study, the average hit to a business is $110,000 per hour of disruption.

The solution: Availability on Demand

Thankfully though, IT leaders have a number of best practices at their disposal to eliminate their risk, increase their cost efficiencies and be prepared for the worst. A majority, if not all, of these new approaches are made possible thanks to cloud technologies such as what is found in the Azure stack, making up what is dubbed “Availability on Demand.”

Availability on Demand centers on three fundamentals: speed, scale and economics. For speed, businesses will enjoy procurement and provisioning that takes minutes instead of days and weeks. On the scale side, organizations can leverage an infinite capacity to store protected data and apps. And with economics, you end up paying only for what you use (“on demand”), shifting your costs to OpEx from an old CapEx model, freeing up more capital as a result.

Exploring Azure’s offerings

From this point on in the webinar, we dedicated the discussion to highlighting three central technologies to help businesses achieve this on-demand vision. They are:

• Azure Site Recovery: giving you “DR as a Service” for Hyper-V, VMware and physical servers
• Azure BackUp: simple and reliable cloud-integrated backup-as-a-service
• StorSimple: a hybrid cloud storage device used for primary storage, archiving and disaster recovery

Azure Site Recovery:

SiteRecovery (ASR) lets you protect and maintain all your applications and data, without having to maintain a secondary data center. On the call we discussed two popular scenarios where ASR would come in handy, Datacenter to Datacenter recovery, and Datacenter to Azure. Pulling from Microsoft’s powerful Azure cloud solution, there are a number of benefits of leveraging ASR:

• Support for Hyper-V, VMware, Physical Servers
• Lift and shift migrations to Azure
• No-Impact recovery testing
• Orchestrated application recovery

Probably one of the most essential points to draw here is ASR’s ability to let you run planned fail-over testing, a capability missing from almost all traditional approaches to recovery (and something we’d suggest is better to know in advance if it’s working, before it’s too late.) Also key is to note the support for both Hyper-V and VMware environments, or a mix of both.

Azure BackUp:

The elephant in the room during the webinar when it comes to storage is data growth. What is certain is that almost all organizations are facing staggering rates of growth in data that needs to be stored. The problems only intensify when you consider the extra hardware needed to manage this growth, the never-ending problem of data recovery and an incessant dependency on tape as your go-to-storage medium. A key message here was that tape is no longer your only option to managing this growing scourge. And in fact, it shouldn’t be.

Azure BackUp changes the story for enterprises dealing with this issue. With it, you can access “backup as a SaaS application” granting you several benefits, such as lower OpEx, zero egress costs for retrieval, unlimited scale and a single-point of management for all your storage and cloud needs (simplifying management).

StorSimple:

Finally, we investigate StorSimple, a hybrid storage array that runs in your data center and combats a series of headaches associated with traditional storage data center architecture. The solution connects your Windows, Linux and VMware to Azure Storage, delivers inline de-dupe and compression, highly efficient disaster recovery and an integrated offsite data protection service, using cloud snapshots.

In recent months, Microsoft has rolled out a number of updates to StorSimple making it more effective for your admins. For example, StorSimple now allows for Locally Pinned Volumes, which makes it easier to use high-performance workloads, such as SQL. Microsoft also announced general availability of the StorSimple Virtual Array, allowing you to deploy the solution without installing any physical hardware in your datacenter. Finally, you can integrate with Azure Site Recovery to protect entire workloads protected on your StorSimple hybrid array. This means in the event of a disruption, a single click can bring your application back up online in a few minutes.

But the bottom line here is that StorSimple can save you thousands of dollars, and lots of time. In fact, we’ve seen customer storage costs get sliced by as much as 40%-60% thanks to reduced complexities, less demand on admins and internal resources and a reduction in capacity issues and hard costs on tape storage.

Watch the webinar or get started

Your backup and DR needs will be specific to your own goals and unique challenges. We recommend you take a look at the on-demand webinar to get an even deeper insight into the technologies discussed above.

After that, get in touch with a Softchoice representative to take advantage of a number of offerings and special promotions, including our Azure TechCheck, deployment funds and our Keystone managed service for Azure.

The post Say hello to Azure’s arsenal of backup and disaster recovery solutions appeared first on Microsoft Navigator.

What is Microsoft doing in light of the CPU vulnerabilities?

While Microsoft or Softchoice have not received any information to indicate that these vulnerabilities have been used to attack Azure customers, many of our clients are wondering if there is anything they need to do.

Short Answer: Microsoft has already updated and rebooted servers within their data centers to apply a fix and no further action on the part of Azure clients is required.

The security vulnerability affects the vast majority of CPUs being used today, including CPUs found in Microsoft data centers running Azure.

You can see the public Azure post from Microsoft HERE.

The good news is Microsoft has deployed updates to their hardware and rebooted the necessary VMs by Thursday, January 4th. If you are an Azure customer, you may have been notified directly by Microsoft that a reboot was going to take place. The Azure customers we have spoken with were not aware of the server/VM reboot, nor saw any degradation in service.

If you have questions, we encourage you to engage with your Softchoice account manager and Microsoft Solution Architect.

The post Securing Azure customers from CPU vulnerability appeared first on Microsoft Navigator.

Last month I attended the Microsoft Ignite 2017 conference in Orlando Florida.  Microsoft Ignite 2017 is one of the biggest tech conferences this year and there were more than 25,000 people in attendance at the Orlando Orange County convention center.

I my opinion it was a great conference with all kind of activities to learn about Microsoft and their partner’s offerings as well as interact with Microsoft staff, partners, customers and fellow geeks.

I put together a summary of the keynote sessions I attended, and I hope you enjoy it.

General Keynote at Microsoft Ignite 2017

The General Keynote started with Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO where he talked about Microsoft’s vision and how the Microsoft technology and services platform can help organizations with their digital transformation.  He spoke about how we should not focus on the technology per se and instead to focus on what we can do with the technology.

He also spoke about the advancements Microsoft is doing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mixed reality, which is the overlaying of your real-world view with holographic computer graphics or virtual reality visuals through the use of a headset integrated with a complex series of sensors and cameras.   At this point there was a cool demo of how Ford is using mixed reality technology with Microsoft’s mixed reality headset, the HoloLens.  In the demo Microsoft showed how a Ford Engineer and a Designer can work interactively in a 3D hologram projected onto a real vehicle and provide real time design reviews and recommendations. This kind of review used to take weeks of back and forth between team members and now it can be done in hours, the meeting can be recorded, and notes can be shared among team members. It is impressive how this technology has the potential to revolutionize how people will work in the near future.

More information about the Microsoft HoloLens and Ford collaboration can be found here.

Satya also spoke about how organizations can take advantage of the integration of the Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Linked-in platforms to create Artificial Intelligence first applications.  Such applications utilize AI technologies to support the user of that application in maximizing the value they get out of it.  Another interesting topic of discussion that Satya covered was how organizations are using Azure technologies like machine learning in areas like cancer research, mining, packaging and precision medicine.

To close the Keynote, Satya brought to the stage a group of scientists to talk about the research that Microsoft is doing in the Quantum computing field.  Microsoft’s approach in Quantum computing includes teams of people from different fields like physics, advanced mathematics and computer science working together to reach the goal of creating a Quantum computer.  During the talk we saw a quantum chip that Microsoft created that works at extremely low temperatures to enable its use.  Once Quantum computing becomes a commercial reality the application of this technology will be used to help in the resolution of many big problem type challenges like: global warming, fighting diseases, security and more.

Microsoft is developing a quantum software stack that includes quantum simulators.  Developers interested in knowing more can find more information here.

If you want to watch the full keynote it is now available below:

Azure Keynote

This keynote was hosted by Scott Guthrie who is Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group.  This keynote had a lot of information for different audiences like IT professionals that focus on infrastructure, development, data, AI and security.   The session was loaded with many customer case studies, demos and announcements.

The first slide of the deck showed that 90% of the Fortune 500 companies are using the Microsoft cloud platform today.  Microsoft wants to make sure that customers understand that the platform is Enterprise ready and showed the names of companies like GE, BMW, Toyota, Heineken, Rolls Royce and many others.  This is one way they look to reassure customers that if these large multinational organizations are using their cloud platform then they can use it too. Right after that slide we saw a video where some of these companies were talking about how they use Microsoft Azure to achieve their business objectives.

Corey Sanders, Microsoft’s Director of Compute in Azure, did a demo to show the end to end Azure management experience.  In this demo he showed the large M-series virtual machine type that has 128 v-CPUs with 3.8 TB of RAM.  This kind of machine can be used to run large SQL databases, SAP Hana, or even be used as a virtualization host and take advantage of the nested virtualization capabilities of the platform.   Corey also showed 3 levels of nested virtualization in this demo.  Azure is the only cloud provider that has this capability right now. He then showed the new PowerShell experience within the Azure web portal itself. This is a capability that many people have been requesting for some time.  In addition we saw new features in the Virtual Machine management interface blade, like Disaster Recovery, Update Management, Inventory and Change Tracking. These new capabilities improve the admin experience of the Azure VM and IaaS services. The update management capability set is also able to manage multiple machines in Azure as well as on-premises.  This presents a single place to manage the updates of all the machines either in the Azure or on-premises for infrastructure management professionals.

The next section of the keynote was dedicated to the development audience, specifically for mobile cloud developers when a demo of a Xamarin solution.  The impressive live demo showed being able to debug code for an iPhone App from a Windows PC with Visual Studio connected via Wi-Fi. This greatly improves and speeds up the developer experience in testing mobile applications.  Microsoft also demonstrated their commitment to containers by showing how the Docker integration into Visual Studio works.

After the Visual Studio demo, Microsoft presented a video that featured UPS.  The key message in this segment was that people might think about UPS as a packaging company however, UPS sees itself as a technology company first, that also does logistics.  The video showed how UPS uses Xamarin, Visual Studio, Azure and a Bot framework to create innovative applications and services for their customers.

Azure Stack was featured for the start of the Hybrid Cloud segment.  Scott Guthrie explained the scenarios and use cases in which Azure Stack can be used.  It was also announced that Azure Stack started to ship that same day worldwide and will be sold initially by Dell EMC, Cisco, Lenovo and HPE.

The next segment was dedicated to the Microsoft data platform.  It was announced that SQL 2017 was now considered generally available on  Windows, Linux and Docker containers.  Then followed another customer case study of a start-up company using SQL on Linux and a cool demo of SQL 2017 running in a container.  Microsoft also announced that traditional SQL enterprise capabilities like in-memory table, role level security, compression and many other features are now available in all SQL editions including SQL Express.

SQL is the only data platform that is available on-premises and also in the cloud with Azure SQL as a full managed database.  There is also new database migration service that can be used to migrate on-premises SQL or Oracle database to Azure SQL.

Scott also showed how an enterprise customer evaluated the cloud migration of its workloads and found that the migration was 70% more cost effective with Azure than AWS.  Considering the benefit of using the on-premises Windows and SQL licenses that can be used in the Azure and the few changes required to the applications to run in Azure, saving millions of dollars in migration costs was demonstrated to be a reality that is achievable by all.  To close the data platform segment, we saw Azure Cosmos DB capabilities discussed.

Nowadays there is no Microsoft presentation without AI being part of it and the Azure Keynote was no exception.  We saw the new capabilities of Azure Machine learning and the announcement of the new Machine Learning Workbench that will help data scientists to build models and run experiments easily in an agile environment.

To close the session Microsoft showed the new capabilities of the Azure Security Center.  They also announced the cost management portal provided by Cloudyn will be free for all Azure customers.  Also, the new Azure Reserved Instances that will allow customers to save even more on the cost of Azure Virtual Machines was also detailed.

If you want to watch the full keynote it is now available below:

The post Microsoft Ignite 2017 General and Azure Keynotes Summary appeared first on Microsoft Navigator.

Microsoft announced its vision of Intelligent Communications at its Ignite 2017 event in September. Intelligent Communications will see the migration of voice and chat moving from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. What does this mean for your organization?

First, this change will not occur overnight. The Voice features will become available in Microsoft Teams soon, but you won’t be forced to migrate your Skype for Business Online Voice service until you’re ready.

Microsoft will continue to support both the Skype for Business Online service and client until the functionality in Microsoft Teams is nearly equal to Skype for Business Online. Hence, Microsoft has re-focused development of new features to the Microsoft Teams infrastructure.

There are some features in Microsoft Teams that are a duplication of Skype for Business features. These include conversations, chats, and meetings.

Microsoft Teams Conversations

Conversations in Teams is very similar to the Persistent Chat role in Skype for Business Server and Yammer for cloud users. Each has its own use case and Microsoft has not announced any migration plans for this feature.

Microsoft Teams Chat

Chat is a form of instant messaging that users are familiar with in Skype, Skype for Business, and other platforms. It allows users to send a typed message instantly to another individual. Some platforms, including Teams, allow for enhanced messages that include emojis, pictures, files.

Microsoft Teams already supports chatting with Skype for Business. This allows for a seamless experience with all users on both platforms.

Microsoft Teams Meetings

Meetings in Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams are not compatible. Meetings in Teams can only be joined by Teams users.

To schedule a meeting, the familiar Outlook method may be used for Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams. If the Teams desktop client is installed, it presents a Teams meeting icon in the Outlook ribbon beside the Skype for Business meeting icon.

If the Teams desktop client is not installed, then Teams meetings must be scheduled in the Teams meetings web interface. It should be noted that the Teams meeting interface only allows scheduling of Teams meetings.

Skype for Business meetings also show in the Teams meeting interface with a Join button. Clicking on the Join button for a Skype for Business meeting will open your Skype for Business client to join the meeting.

To reduce user confusion, your organization can choose to disable meetings in Teams.

Microsoft Teams Voice

Voice in Microsoft Teams will require Microsoft Calling Plans during the initial enablement. Skype for Business Calling Plans are available for US customers. Microsoft has yet to announce details for Calling Plans in Canada. Microsoft plans to support hybrid voice later, with a simplified solution supporting 3rd party PBX and telecom connections.

We recommend that organizations deploy cloud Voice using Skype for Business Online now. The migration path that Microsoft has announced will ease your transition to Teams Voice.

Skype for Business Server 2019

Microsoft announced that a new wave of their productivity server products will be released. Skype for Business Server 2019 will be released in the latter half of 2018. These new releases will include features that have been rolled out in Office 365.

To position your organization for the eventual move to the cloud, we recommend that all Microsoft productivity server deployments be configured to support hybrid mode with Office 365. This will allow the use of cloud only features today, such as Skype Meeting Broadcast while being prepared to start moving users to the cloud when your organization is ready.

Get Started

We recommend that you start using Microsoft Teams today to experience the conversations, chat, document co-authoring, AI-powered Bots and other features, and see how Teams is the hub for teamwork in Office 365. Consider deploying Skype for Business to start your journey to Intelligent Communications.

The post Skype for Business is now Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft Navigator.

It seems like every month there’s a new story highlighting the cost of service outages and data loss. When it happens, business reputations tank and IT loses stature in the company. These effects can be even worse than direct costs from lost customers and sales.

To prevent downtime and outages, environments need to be resilient in the event of failures, and able to recover from them quickly.

There are three key issues making business continuity a challenge today:

1. Cost

The need for a second site, extra hardware, fast WAN and extra people is prohibitive for many companies.

2. Complexity

Maintaining multiple data centers and tape restoration is complex, while managing, patching and upgrading disaster recovery systems is daunting. And remember – your backup and disaster recovery system is only as good as your ability to restore it.

3. Compliance

For many organizations, data residency for personally identifiable information is also a concern.

The cloud helps businesses to overcome these barriers. It’s easier and cheaper in the cloud to keep the lights on and plan for inevitable failures to come. In Azure environments specifically, a wide array of options exist for business continuity. Microsoft has invested heavily to make Azure an open platform. Azure supports — and is supported by — a vast ecosystem of disaster recovery, backup and archiving tools. That way you can use your existing business continuity solutions or favorite vendors on the cloud.

Of course, those seeking a pure Microsoft environment can find it through Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup. Using Microsoft Azure solutions for business continuity makes it fast and simple to set up your recovery environment. It’s also easy to test that your fail over plan actually works. This is a critical-but-often-overlooked element of disaster recovery planning.

Watch our video to see how these two solutions work in the real world.

Cloud-based solutions like Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup help you modernize your business continuity system by offering some pretty significant benefits.

Azure Site Recovery

is Microsoft’s disaster recovery-as-a-service solution. It can create a failover environment from one on-premise data center to another, from on-premise to the cloud or even cloud-to-cloud. Cost of disaster recovery is reduced by eliminating the need for front-end hardware investments, or for a secondary site.

With 36 or more global Azure locations available (the number is constantly growing!), it’s now easier to meet the disaster recovery requirement of having more than 100 miles between sites. Microsoft has also worked with governments and regulators in those regions to meet local privacy regulations, solving the compliance challenge.

Site Recovery enables high-availability to applications while reducing the cost of disaster recovery. Businesses pay only to store the restore data of the physical or virtual machines being replicated — on low-cost cloud storage, of course. For compute power, you pay only in the case of an outage. Fail overs can be set to occur based on predefined situations, improving response times.

Of course, time must be spent scripting these situations, but that’s basically the setting up of your disaster recovery plan. Azure Site Recovery is not an out-of-the-box solution. It must be customized.

Azure Backup

is Microsoft’s backup-as-a-service solution. Originally a different architecture from Site Recovery, the two now use the same storage model and interface. Azure Backup backs up disc images but can be used to back up applications. The tool protects against failures not caused by disasters. Azure backup gives the ability to quickly restore data that’s been compromised by hackers, file corruptions, human error, ransomware or lost devices.

It’s simply another locked door to prevent the bad actors from getting you. For example, during a ransomware attack, you can pay to get your files back and hope for the best. Or you can use Azure Backup to wipe and restore the encrypted files.

There are three main considerations that go into building a modern business continuity plan:

• Are the business continuity services built to support native cloud services?
• Does the cloud platform support business continuity?
• Perhaps most importantly, how do you test the business continuity plan?

Business continuity and high availability don’t need to be beyond an organization’s reach. The cloud, and Azure specifically, can help overcome the common barriers by reducing cost, helping manage complexity and providing the flexibility to meet the specific needs of your business.

The post How Azure helps solve the big 3 challenges of business continuity appeared first on Microsoft Navigator.

Cost Control of the Cloud: On-Demand or Reserved Instances

Cloud IaaS is increasingly a core component of IT operations strategy in the deployment of new technologies to support business goals. One of the most asked questions before starting any cloud deployment is cost control. Being able to extract the maximum value out of your cloud infrastructure, especially those resources/servers that will be online for long expected periods of time would be a great benefit to many companies. The most common way to purchase IaaS instances in public cloud is in an on-demand model. You pay for what you want when you use it at a predefined price for the increments of time that you use it. Additionally, there are two other means of purchasing an IaaS instance in either Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS/EC2 today which are spot pricing and reserved instances.

• Spot pricing is available in Amazon AWS only and is best used for workloads that are cost sensitive and not time dependent. When the load in a region falls, Amazon will allow for more inexpensive instances to operate due to the available capacity. For computational workloads related to scientific research or investment modeling, this is a great option.
• Reserved instances, which have been available in AWS for some time and just recently announced to be coming to Azure, allowing you to lock in a certain IaaS workload for a term, usually, 1 or 3 years resulting in savings up to 75% depending on a variety of factors. Great uses for these instances are machines that will be online for long periods of time, such as domain controllers, authentication servers (ADFS and Azure AD Connect), or web servers.

AWS and Azure do treat these Reserved Instance contracts differently. With AWS if you want to get out of a Reserved Instance contract prior to its completion you need to use a third-party service to transfer it to another company. Azure is reportedly going to allow for refunds of the Reserved Instance with a minor penalty (Rumour is 1 month of runtime). As the Azure offering details are pre-release, the final terms and conditions are not completed yet, this blog article will be updated once that becomes available.

To illustrate the cost savings below is a cost comparison for Reserved Instance vs. On-Demand. Here is a graph from Cloudyn showing an on-demand instance in comparison to reserved instances:

On Demand and Heavy Utilization Breaking Point

Highlighted is the important area. The blue line is the on-demand cost for a larger instance that grows in use over the course of getting that workload running to the desired performance state, reaching $28,000USD in cost over the course of a year, and continuing at that higher cost into the future. The green line, which represents a reserved instance for the same performance capabilities of the blue line, at full utilization and runtime (i.e. running 744 hours a month or all of the time) shows that in around 6 months the reserved instance pays for itself in this scenario. That is $14,000USD that your organization would not have to pay to receive the same level of service over the course of year 1. Additional savings will be realized in year 2 and beyond.

For the right workloads, those that are predictable and stable, utilizing reserved instances on either Azure or AWS is an excellent strategy to reduce and limit unexpected cloud costs. As discussed there are penalties for dropping out of such a pricing strategy early. In a way, these penalties are similar to long-term telecom agreements. It is a good exercise to make sure this is the right strategy for your company over the course of a year or more.

At Softchoice our group of experts on both Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS can help you analyze your current cloud environments to find cost savings using Reserved Instances and other methods. We offer a number of services that can help you determine a cost savings strategy for both immediate savings and long term optimization of your costs.

The post Azure and Reserved Instances – strategy to reduce and limit unexpected cloud costs appeared first on Microsoft Navigator.

How the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program helps partners add value while their customers gain flexibility

Technology acquisition continues to evolve – away from infrastructure and towards web services – and vendor licensing and partner programs with it.

In recent years, Microsoft has recognized how customer buying habits have changed to meet the rapid pace of innovation. To align with them, Microsoft developed the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program. It’s all part of a larger trend moving away from traditional software licensing. By 2020, Gartner predicts that 80% of software vendors will abandon licensing and maintenance for subscription models.

While understanding how CSP solutions will impact you as a customer is important, according to Luke Black, Manager of Microsoft Programs and Marketing Operations at Softchoice, customer knowledge of CSPs varies.

In our recent Modern Microsoft Licensing webinar, Black and co-presenter John Byrne, Softchoice’s Managed Services Advisor, peeled back the CSP curtain. They discussed how CSP works and the benefits customers can see from solutions using to build solutions.

What is CSP?

Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) is a non-contractual monthly, cloud subscription platform on top of which partners can build and support solutions. Today, three Microsoft cloud solutions are offered as CSP solutions: Office 365, Microsoft Enterprise Mobility +Security and Azure.

CSP customers gain the flexibility of scaling Microsoft technology up and down in a cloud environment, but with the support of a solution provider. Customers aren’t locked into the long-term commitment of an Enterprise Agreement (EA) or other volume licensing programs.

The program also changes the service and support model. The solution provider, and not Microsoft, is responsible for technical issues, service, and support. This allows partners like Softchoice to layer extra value onto the solution.

Why is the CSP program needed?

There will continue to be organizations for whom a three-year commitment to Microsoft around on-premise solutions makes perfect sense. But increasingly businesses need the ability to scale up and down and a simple way to do it, Black noted. “It’s all about simplification.”

“We all want to do more with less,” he said. “That’s why there’s a need for this modern licensing and a platform like Cloud Solution Provider.”

If you’re familiar with existing Microsoft license agreements, you are likely used to managing disparate agreements across many commercial systems. CSP solutions remove that complexity. They provide a single platform from which to buy and manage Microsoft cloud solutions, available from multiple entry points.

Who are CSP solutions ideal for?

According to Black and Byrne, CSP solutions are excellent options for customers who:

• Purchase direct from the Microsoft Office Portal – If you already buy through Microsoft’s online portal, or who want to, CSP continues that, but with added value coming from the solution provider.
• Don’t want contractual agreements – CSP is perfect for those adamantly opposed to long-term commitments, or who want to be billed only for what they use month-to-month.
• Don’t mind buying separate on-premise licenses – While it’s on the roadmap, on-prem licenses are currently not part of CSP offerings. They are expected to be incorporated in the first half of 2018.
• Need shorter-term cloud subscriptions for testing – Customers on EAs today can add cloud subscriptions, but there’s often still a long-term commitment involved. CSP solutions let you test out the cloud environment without being locked in.

What are the benefits of CSP solutions?

While CSP is a partner program, the ultimate beneficiary is Microsoft’s customers. It allows solution providers to offer greater value above and beyond the software purchase.

CSP solution customers can pay for as much or as little service and support as they need. For example, at a minimum, a partner might offer 24 x 7 live support. The real benefits come, however, when further value and managed services are layered onto a solution, Byrne suggested.

For example, navigating and managing the many updates and changes that come when using Software as a Service can be an overwhelming, full-time job. At the same time, traditional support often requires going through a script describing your environment.

Partners, on the other hand, have knowledge of both your environment and Microsoft solutions to provide strategic advice. A trusted solution provider using the CSP model can help customers achieve faster time to value and happier users. And can do so this while reducing risk and complexity and offering efficient, predictable costs.

Through a CSP solution, like Softchoice’s Keystone for Office 365, your partner can provide you with the administration, actionable insights and ongoing mentorship to get the most out of the solution in your specific environment.

To learn even more about CSP, or for a refresher of what you heard in the webinar, you can watch it here.

The post Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and the ABCs of modern Microsoft cloud licensing appeared first on Microsoft Navigator.

2018 SPLA Price Changes from Microsoft explained

As we enter the final Quarter of 2017 we are all focused on finishing the year strong but it’s also an important time to plan for 2018. While Microsoft has some great things in store, this article is unfortunately about a SPLA price hike they have planned for January 1st, 2018, and another one on January 1st, 2019.

To help you plan for this change and minimize the impact, we have put together a list of actionable items.

1. Change your reporting from Processor to Core

If you’re currently reporting Windows Server by Processor (applicable only to 2012 and older versions, and only if your SPLA term started or renewed before October 1, 2016), now is a good time to change to the Core SKU. Microsoft is specifically raising the price of Processor SKUs for 2018.

2. Use CIS SKUs if reporting both WinServ and SysCen

If you currently report Windows Server and System Center separately, you can simply report the Core Infrastructure Suite and get them both for a savings of up to 20%.

3. Ensure compliance to avoid audits

Are you counting all the users that have access to your hosted Microsoft environment? Are you reporting your monthly usage to Softchoice by the 10th of each month? As we all know, audits can be a costly business and Microsoft has forecasted to increase their frequency in 2018.

Our recommendation is to schedule a call with your Softchoice Account Manager and the SPLA Team to go over any immediate questions or future plans.

Why is Microsoft Increasing Prices on SPLA?

With significant investments in Research & Development, Microsoft continues to deliver cloud-ready innovations across its infrastructure products. These product enhancements are being delivered at a faster pace so partners and customers can take advantage of the new capabilities and innovations. Additionally, Microsoft has kept SPLA pricing consistent for 24+ months for its infrastructure product offerings. Considering this, Microsoft is increasing the prices of certain infrastructure product offerings as detailed below.

2018 SPLA Price Increases

Effective January 1, 2018 these are the approximate increases expected:

10 to 15% on the following items:

• Windows Remote Desktop Services SAL 6WC-00002
• Windows Server Standard and Datacenter (Processor) P73-04837, P71-01031
• Windows Server Essentials (Processor) G3S-00566
• Core Infrastructure Server Suite Standard and Datacenter (Processor) YJD-00007, FUD-00009
• SQL Server Standard, Enterprise, and Web edition 7NQ-00302, 7JQ-00341, TFA-00523
• SQL Server Standard SAL 228-05018

Effective January 1, 2019 these are the approximate increases expected:

10 to 15% on the following items:

• Windows Remote Desktop Services SAL 6WC-00002
• Windows Server Standard and Datacenter Core 9EM-00562, 9EA-00039

5 to 10% on the following items:

• Core Infrastructure Server Suite Standard and Datacenter Core 9GA-00006, 9GS-00495

Please let us know if you have any questions, or would like more information and assistance about compliancy or moving to Cores.

The post The New Year and 2018 SPLA Price Changes from Microsoft appeared first on Microsoft Navigator.