With so many organizations looking to find ways to embrace the public cloud without compromising the security of their data and applications, a hybrid cloud strategy is rapidly becoming the preferred method of efficiently delivering IT services.
This guide aims to provide you with an understanding of the driving factors behind why the cloud is being adopted en-masse, as well as advice on how to begin building your own cloud strategy.
Topics discussed include:• Why Cloud?• Getting There Safely• IT Resilience in the Hybrid Cloud• The Power of Microsoft Azure and Zerto
You’ll find out how, by embracing the cloud, organizations can achieve true IT Resilience – the ability to withstand any disruption, confidently embrace change and focus on business.
Download the guide today to begin your journey to the cloud!
Move Workloads to the Cloud and Reduce Costs!
Considering a move to Azure? Use this simple tool to find out how much you can save on storage costs by mobilizing your applications to the cloud with Zerto on Azure!
With the onset of more modular and cloud-centric architectures, many organizations with disparate monitoring tools are reassessing their monitoring landscape. According to Gartner, hybrid IT (especially with IaaS subscription) enterprises must adopt more holistic IT infrastructure monitoring tools (ITIM) to gain visibility into their IT landscapes.
The guide provides insight into the IT infrastructure monitoring tool market and providers as well as key findings and recommendations.
Get the 2018 Gartner Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools to see:
Key Findings Include:
Each version of Windows and Windows Server showcases new technologies. The advent of PowerShell marked a substantial step forward in managing those features. However, the built-in graphical Windows management tools have largely stagnated - the same basic Microsoft Management Console (MMC) interfaces had remained since Windows Server 2000. Microsoft tried out multiple overhauls over the years to the built-in Server Manager console but gained little traction. Until Windows Admin Center.
WHAT IS WINDOWS ADMIN CENTER?Windows Admin Center (WAC) represents a modern turn in Windows and Windows Server system management. From its home page, you establish a list of the networked Windows and Windows Server computers to manage. From there, you can connect to an individual system to control components such as hardware drivers. You can also use it to manage Windows roles, such as Hyper-V.
On the front-end, Windows Admin Center is presented through a sleek HTML 5 web interface. On the back-end, it leverages PowerShell extensively to control the systems within your network. The entire package runs on a single system, so you don’t need a complicated infrastructure to support it. In fact, you can run it locally on your Windows 10 workstation if you want. If you require more resiliency, you can run Windows Admin Center as a role on a Microsoft Failover Cluster.
WHY WOULD I USE WINDOWS ADMIN CENTER?In the modern era of Windows management, we have shifted to a greater reliance on industrial-strength tools like PowerShell and Desired State Configuration. However, we still have servers that require individualized attention and infrequently utilized resources. WAC gives you a one-stop hub for dropping in on any system at any time and work with almost any of its facets.
ABOUT THIS EBOOKThis eBook has been written by Microsoft Cloud & Datacenter Management MVP Eric Siron. Eric has worked in IT since 1998, designing, deploying, and maintaining server, desktop, network, and storage systems. He has provided all levels of support for businesses ranging from single-user through enterprises with thousands of seats. He has achieved numerous Microsoft certifications and was a Microsoft Certified Trainer for four years. Eric is also a seasoned technology blogger and has amassed a significant following through his top-class work on the Altaro Hyper-V Dojo.
In The Forrester Wave: Intelligent Application and Service Monitoring, Q2 2019, Forrester identified the 13 most significant IASM providers in the market today, with Zenoss ranked amongst them as a Leader.“As complexity grows, I&O teams struggle to obtain full visibility into their environments and do troubleshooting. To meet rising customer expectations, operations leaders need new monitoring technologies that can provide a unified view of all components of a service, from application code to infrastructure.”Who Should Read This
Enterprise organizations looking for a solution to provide:
Our Takeaways
Trends impacting the infrastructure and operations (I&O) team include:
Welcome to this free eBook on Office 365 and Microsoft 365 brought to you by Altaro Software. We’re going to show you how to get the most out of these powerful cloud packages and improve your business. This book follows an informal reference format providing an overview of the most powerful applications of each platform’s feature set in addition to links directing to supporting information and further reading if you want to dig further into a specific topic. The intended audience for this book is administrators and IT staff who are either preparing to migrate to Office/Microsoft 365 or who have already migrated and who need to get the lay of the land. If you’re a developer looking to create applications and services on top of the Microsoft 365 platform, this book is not for you. If you’re a business decision-maker, rather than a technical implementer, this book will give you a good introduction to what you can expect when your organization has been migrated to the cloud and ways you can adopt various services in Microsoft 365 to improve the efficiency of your business.
THE BASICS
We’ll cover the differences (and why one might be more appropriate for you than the other) in more detail later but to start off let’s just clarify what each software package encompasses in a nutshell. Office 365 (from now on referred to as O365) 7 is an email collaboration and a host of other services provided as a Software as a Service (SaaS) whereas Microsoft 365 (M365) is Office 365 plus Azure Active Directory Premium, Intune – cloud-based management of devices and security and Windows 10 Enterprise. Both are per user-based subscription services that require no (or very little) infrastructure deployments on-premises.
The cloud computing era is well and truly upon us, and knowing how to take advantage of the benefits of this computing paradigm while maintaining security, manageability, and cost control are vital skills for any IT professional in 2020 and beyond. And its importance is only getting greater.
In this eBook, we’re going to focus on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on Microsoft’s Azure platform - learning how to create VMs, size them correctly, manage storage, networking, and security, along with backup best practices. You’ll also learn how to operate groups of VMs, deploy resources based on templates, managing security and automate your infrastructure. If you currently have VMs in your own datacenter and are looking to migrate to Azure, we’ll also teach you that.
If you’re new to the cloud (or have experience with AWS/GCP but not Azure), this book will cover the basics as well as more advanced skills. Given how fast things change in the cloud, we’ll cover the why (as well as the how) so that as features and interfaces are updated, you’ll have the theoretical knowledge to effectively adapt and know how to proceed.
You’ll benefit most from this book if you actively follow along with the tutorials. We will be going through terms and definitions as we go – learning by doing has always been my preferred way of education. If you don’t have access to an Azure subscription, you can sign up for a free trial with Microsoft. This will give you 30 days 6 to use $200 USD worth of Azure resources, along with 12 months of free resources. Note that most of these “12 months” services aren’t related to IaaS VMs (apart from a few SSD based virtual disks and a small VM that you can run for 750 hours a month) so be sure to get everything covered on the IaaS side before your trial expires. There are also another 25 services that have free tiers “forever”.
Now you know what’s in store, let’s get started!
Make the Move: Linux Remote Desktops Made Easy
Securely run Linux applications and desktops from the cloud or your data center.
Download this guide and learn...
Assess what you already have
If you have a business continuity plan or a disaster recovery plan in place, that’s a good place to start. This scenario may not fit the definition of disaster that you originally intended, but it can serve to help you test your plan in a more controlled fashion that can benefit both your current situation by giving you a head start, and your overall plan by revealing gaps that would be more problematic in a more urgent or catastrophic environment with less time to prepare and implement.
Does your plan include access to remote desktops in a data center or the cloud? If so, and you already have a service in place ready to transition or expand, you’re well on your way.
Read the guide to learn what it takes for IT teams to set up staff to work effectively from home with virtual desktop deployments. Learn how to get started, if you’re new to VDI or if you already have an existing remote desktop scenario but are looking for alternatives.
Microsoft Azure Administrator Certification Exam measures your skill set in provisioning and managing an Azure environment with a focus on Azure subscription management, compute, storage, networking and identity. The AZ‑103 exam replaces the AZ‑100 and AZ‑101 exams, thereby simplifying your journey to become a certified Azure Administrator Associate.
Download this study guide to learn about the Azure Administrator skills measured in AZ‑103, as well as some of the important topics that will be covered under each of the exam's study areas, such as:
• Azure subscriptions and resources management• Storage management and implementation• Deployment and management of virtual machines• Configuration and management of virtual networks• Identities management