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.
In this day and age, IT organizations are still learning about and adapting their cloud infrastructure. Many enterprises are either accelerating their move to the cloud or adopting cloud-native services and next-generation applications. Despite the benefits, there are still concerns around complexity, security, and management.
To help understand these concerns, Zerto sponsored new ESG research, which delves into these areas. Download the latest eBook, The Evolution of Data Protection Cloud Strategies to get an understanding of the following:
Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration, and it’s being used by born-in-the-cloud startups and cloud-native enterprises alike. In 2021, Kubernetes was in production on-premises, in the cloud, and even at the edge for many different types of applications, including those that Kubernetes wasn’t initially built for.
Kubernetes was never really built for stateful applications and, by default, lacks features for data protection. However, we see many organizations building and running their stateful applications on top of Kubernetes, indicating there’s a gap in functionality between what Kubernetes offers and what the (enterprise) market wants.
Unfortunately, existing data protection tools, mostly built for legacy technologies such as virtual machines, do not fit well into the container paradigm. Vendors are adapting existing solutions or creating new products from scratch that are often better aligned with the cloud-native and container paradigms.
The market for cloud-native data protection is growing rapidly, with both incumbent vendors and challengers competing for completeness of features, and differences can be observed between those targeting more traditional infrastructure alignment and those aimed at fully cloud-native environments.
In any case, we see a growing need for flexible, adaptive solutions that can meet the changing requirements of their customers. Multi-platform, multi-cloud, multi-environment (including edge), multi-team, and self-service capabilities are quickly becoming differentiating features that ensure successful adoption, not for just one use case but for continuously changing use cases across the entire enterprise.
CloudCasa is the perfect example of this type of modern solution that can adapt quickly to changing business and technical needs. Designed to be Kubernetes native, it is a SaaS offering with a friendly licensing model that significantly eases the initial testing and adoption of the solution.