I had a very good time last night at our regular Amy and Susan webinar. I realized that little is exciting me like the changes that are happening in IT like Azure does. It’s a brave new world full of some very cool new technology and with new technology comes new opportunity. Azure is full of opportunity.
Robert Crane was our special guest. He’s an Office 365 MVP and heavily involved with Azure. He’s written a lot of blog posts and private community materials on Azure, how to get started and how to make money doing it. Robert suggests everyone look for Blue Ocean opportunities. These are new opportunities that this technology presents and get there before the crowd does.
We do these webinar every month so please join us for the next one. You can find out when and what topic on our events page. http://www.thirdtier.net/events
Webinar Recording
Slide Deck Download
Edited Q&A
You@All: I still remember my surprise the first time I logged into Azure and found my AD there. Duh, I had never stopped to think about how they were authenticating Harbor’s O365 accounts
You@All: Notice that there’s no server in Azure SQL. No server in Websites. No server in Remote Apps. Azure is putting servers in the background and services in the foreground. Not everything needs a server anymore
KenS@All: Robert – What are typical Internet Connection Speeds in Australia?
You@All: We’ll find a point to ask Ken. I know in the past their speeds were slow and expensive. I think things are getting better. I seem to recall that the government made a commitment to it
Viewer 7@All: http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/product-training/microsoft-azure
You@All: I would say that you need to be better at DNS, routing and general networking that you do on-premises.
Viewer 7@All: Now he tells me ;-) http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/06/19/azure-automation-runbook-management/
KenS@All: Robert – What does “blue oceans” mean?
KenS@All: Bandwidth in Oregon is usually very good in the metropolitan areas, but there are still a number of rural areas that have a very limited number of options.
Chris M@All: I have a client that runs AutoCAD. I am concerned about putting their files on Azure that the performance over a point to point VPN won’t be great or that the cost will be high downloading and saving AutoCAD files. Are my concerns founded?
Chris M@All: I have another client that uses a lot of QB files and I have the same concerns with those.
Viewer 7@All: why not RDS instead of VPN?
Viewer 7@All: -or- Intuit would ask – why not QB online?
Chris M@All: QB Online reporting is not great so most QB users want to use the desktop version.
KenS@All: Quality of the online version of the solution is not always up to par with the current on-premise version, yet.
Viewer 7@All: RDS/TS it
Viewer 7@All: The key is -yet-
KenS@All: The key is now, not yet. :)
Viewer 7@All: Which is what your role is to determine what is good and not good to go there
Viewer 7@All: watch their vendors
Chris M@All: With RDS they have to reinvest in all their software licenses (particularly Office) and they also have a fairly large investment in the local PCs.
Chris M@All: Almost all my clients are now using cloud based email so that is the easy first step.
Chris M@All: Curious if Azure Backup is competitive with Carbonite, Mozy Pro, etc…
Chris M@All: Is there a good way to estimate bandwidth usage and costs. The Azure calc is great for storage and CPU but not so much for real world estimates of bandwidth costs.
Robert Crane@All: http://aka.ms/azurevar has a spreadsheet
Chris M@All: If I move a file server to the cloud I don’t really know how much is going on in the background when you download and save an average Word Doc or Excel Workbook
David Moen@All: Thanks again for an informative session! Time to do some mental stretches and get ready to do some more learning.
Chris M@All: OK. I probably just need to put up a test server and try it out for a month on my own.
KenS@All: Please give us some realistic ideas for things we can do with the $100 Azure credit without exceeding it. (It just seems so little.)
Chris M@All: Thanks to you all. Very helpful!
Viewer 7@All: build a wordpress web site
Robert Crane@All: Azre backup
Robert Crane@All: Popwershell machine
Viewer 7@All: you will realize that the mysql is a different site
Robert Crane@All: Dirsync server
Robert Crane@All: actually Azure AD Connect !!1
Robert Crane@All: Create a Azure AD/O365 demo environment
KenS@All: Robert – What would a PowerShell machine cost for a month?
You@All: $17
KenS@All: Seriously Amy? Only $17/month?
You@All: yep
KenS@All: WOW
KenS@All: What about Azure Backup?
Viewer 36@All: Where do you find information on setting up a portal?
Robert Crane@All: I get $100 per month and have never got below $ 40
Robert Crane@All: for everything I do
Robert Crane@All: but I switch stuff off
You@All: $5 for under 50gb data backup plus $.025 per gb
Viewer 7@All: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeI3PySRE9E
Robert Crane@All: http://blog.ciaops.com/2015/02/configuring-azure-sso-portal.html
Chris M@All: Thanks for all that each of you do on the mail lists as well. I always look for your messages so I can learn!
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