Microsoft Cloud Services
As anyone who has the indescribable pleasure of working or living with me will unerringly attest, I am a fully paid up member of the new computing paradigm club. Every industry development is greeted with glee at the Quirkshop and I will gladly flit from vendor to vendor pursuing computing excellence in whatever form it takes.
Admittedly I have been a VDI sceptic in my time, I’ve been pretty much universally Microsoft focused for my entire IT career, have never dabbled with vegetarianism, never spent a year in a Kibbutz, don’t understand dance music, can’t watch anything with the word “celebrity” in its title and think that most green vegetables are an affront to humanity.
The above brings me jarringly to the reason for my breathless excitement. Here at Orinoko we’ve been using version one of Microsoft’s first cloud offering, BPOS, since we started the company and we have just migrated into the next version of this solution, Office 365 (a beta currently). Now, as mentioned above, I’m big into all this “cloud” stuff. I may have suggested on occasions that clouds consist of vapour, but that was just rum fuelled banter.
Office 365 gives us access to Lync, including Lync-to-Lync voice, which is very cool. It gives us very highly available Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 too. As a small business, to run these systems on-premise would be costly in every regard, so to my luddite eyes the cloud solution is like voodoo.
Bolstered by my positive experience with Office 365 I have dipped my toe into Azure infrastructure services. Frankly I find the whole thing baffling, it just works.
Why didn’t we do this a hundred years ago? I spent a brief and misguided few weeks working for a Microsoft Small Business Server partner many years ago. The sort of system we would spend a fortnight implementing for a few thousand pounds can be had for literally cents on the hour for compute and single digit pounds per-user-per-month. Admittedly I can see how the costs might rack up (no pun intended), but this stuff just seems like magic.
Finally, Intune. Now, as a Systems Management Guy ™ I realise that Intune is lacking in certain features we currently demand from our management solutions. In particular Software Distribution. BUT. If you currently have nothing in place for systems management, or if you have machines that live outside of your corporate LAN for most of their lives and you want to keep them patched, and secured and be assured that they’re not suffering from basic performance issues. And if you want to manage the licenses for the software already deployed on them, Intune is nothing short of fantastic.
And the monthly per-device charge includes an upgrade to Windows 7 Enterprise!
I have seen the future and it’s vaporised! Some of this stuff has a little way to go, but if the cloud model didn’t fit your organisation the last you looked at it, it’s time to look again.
