In today's article in our Modernizing Your Infrastructure with Hybrid Cloud series, Dan Stolts provides us with step-by-step instructions for leveraging Microsoft Azure Backup to protect servers against data loss and corruption in our Hybrid Cloud by enabling cloud-based offsite backup.

From Dan's article: "Azure Backup encrypts and protects your backups in offsite cloud storage with Microsoft Azure, adding a layer of protection in case data loss or disaster impacts your servers. It can integrate with the backup tools in Windows Server or System Center Data Protection Manager, and you can manage cloud backups from these familiar tools to configure, monitor, and recover backups across local disk and cloud storage with ease. Data stored in Azure Backup is geo-replicated among Microsoft Azure data centers, for additional protection. Your data is encrypted before it leaves your on-premises data center, and it remains encrypted in Microsoft Azure – only you have the key. Incremental backups provide multiple versions of data for point-in-time recovery, and you can recover just what you need with file-level recovery."
 

 

READ DAN'S FULL ARTICLE HERE!

What is Microsoft IT? We support the IT infrastructure and applications that run the business of Microsoft. We are a consumer of the Microsoft products and services while being a separate entity from the divisions that create and manage those...

With End-of-Support for Windows Server 2003 rapidly approaching, lots of organizations are leveraging this time to modernize infrastructure to reduce costs and improve flexibility.  Today, we're kicking off a new series across our US IT Pro team to help organizations step through the planning process to just migrate servers, but also improve overall architecture along the way by smartly leveraging Hybrid Cloud components as part of the migration strategy.
 

Tune in for Part 1 of this multi-part series where Matt Hester and Keith Mayer discuss the importance of planning for your organization’s move to Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft Azure. Along the way, they'll also explore and demo some of the tools that can help accelerate your migration plans.
 

When running application workloads on Microsoft Azure, virtual networks deliver the ability for multiple virtual machines and/or cloud services to communicate with one another across a secure, isolated IP network infrastructure. Like physical networks, the IP address space associated with these virtual networks can be subnetted to organize workload components and simplify guest operating system firewall rules. In addition, IP reservations can be defined when an equivalent to static IP addresses are required in the cloud.

Step-by-Step: Building Microsoft Azure Virtual Networks

In today's article in our Modernizing Your Infrastructure with Hybrid Cloud series, Matt Hester walks through building Microsoft Azure virtual networks.  In his accompanying video tutorial, he shows how to build a virtual network and define subnets via the Microsoft Azure management portal.  In addition, he also steps through the process of testing, assigning and displaying reserved IP addresses on a virtual network.

READ MATT'S FULL ARTICLE HERE!

In today's article in our continuing blog series on Modernizing Your Infrastructure with Hybrid Cloud being published by our US IT Pro team, we’ll discuss enabling “cross-premises data mobility” within a Hybrid Cloud by leveraging a new cloud-enabled storage solution: Microsoft StorSimple 8000.
 

 
When migrating application workloads to a cloud platform, such as Microsoft Azure, moving the OS and application bits to the cloud is usually pretty manageable. The virtual disks for VM’s containing OS and application binaries are usually somewhat small in size and can be moved rather quickly over common business-grade Internet connections.  Moving application data, however, can be a different story – some applications have vast amounts of data, hundreds of gigabytes or several terabytes in size, and it could take days or weeks to move all that data to the cloud over the Internet.  By leveraging Microsoft Azure and Microsoft StorSimple 8000, bi-directional mobility of enterprise data between on-premises and cloud locations can be realized to allow organizations to quickly leverage Hybrid Cloud architectures when considering business scenarios that involve large data sets.
 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE!