As a software developer, Quest
Software has a great deal of experience building on-premises software
to solve such customer challenges as migrating email from one platform
to another. While these products have done very well, the inherent
drawbacks to on-premises software, include the need to provision
hardware, as well as download, configure, patch, and maintain the
software. Companies generally live with this for software that solves
ongoing management problems like identity management, data protection
and auditing. These requirements of on-premises software can add
significant time, cost and resources to short-term projects, however.
For the last few years, I’ve been working with development teams at
Quest to build Software as a Service (SaaS) products, most of these on
Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. One of those products – Quest OnDemand Migration for Email
– was released last September and, as the name suggests, it migrates
email from on-premises or cloud-based email platforms to Office 365,
Live@Edu and hosted Exchange. The following are the main factors we
considered when deciding on a cloud platform for this product.
Technology stack – One of the key deciding factors in
choosing a platform was the compatibility of the technology stack. For
many of our SaaS projects, we port or repurpose existing code from
on-premises products that were written on .NET. Moving this to Windows
Azure was more frictionless than completely re-writing our code for a
platform that does not support .NET. Our Windows management development
teams can continue to develop on a technology stack they already are
familiar with. For our non-Windows teams, Windows Azure exposes its
APIs via standards-based protocols (HTTP/REST), and, therefore, supports
applications written in a variety of programming languages.
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