 uh... office studios in winter haven florida uh... today is thursday two thirty join us next week at tuesday two thirty where we will cover a another topic but today's theme building your modern workplace ingram today's topic is don't buy another server uh... but before we get into that can you show everyone where we are in the six pillars so uh... you know the series of the following a roadmap uh... and just to give you an overview we've covered wireless we talked about that the other day we talked about upgrading your computer uh... this was for like a combination but we did do two series on this we talked about replacing your file server and upgrading communications with a lot of emphasis on skype for business uh... but today what i like to talk about is uh... as your and uh... to me uh... azure is about not buying another server and uh... our story was basically that uh... part of our migration to this platform was to eliminate all of our equipment and not have any spinning media or any kind of electronics or things that consume power you know except for laptops and computers so when you say don't buy another server you really mean it i really mean it uh... you know from an it perspective i mean it was really cool to have a computer and a server is like i want to rack it put on a rack and build metal data center and as you have as you've been to our data center data centers quite big is four thousand square feet we have another floor that's on the fifth floor and then another one across the street uh... and it was fun for a while is building this equipment and learning it but it really became a headache is learning that you know ac equipment breaks all the time everything has to be built with redundancy because there's always going to be a failure the hard drives fail uh... the power supplies fail the controller boards in these equipment sophisticated things they fail they have to be on a warranty so uh... very very like uh... that's just a lot of maintenance so it was great when it was brand new yeah and it was shiny but as soon as things started uh... breaking or slowing down and need maintenance yes that's when it became a headache and that's when i guess that's when you start thinking about uh... a different way of doing yeah i mean you hear everybody talking about putting their servers in the cloud and so i i kind of think of the cloud in two pieces of the cloud uh... one is there is your business line applications and that's kind of like where most companies are going to focus on is uh... when you do this migration to the office 365 or microsoft 365 and all that these pillars that we're talking about uh... what's left is these business line applications that you can't move like to like the cloud uh... for example an accounting system uh... quick books for example we you know we've used quick books over the years it's a great accounting system and it was always installed on a server somewhere that everybody accessed and uh... you know it's not an easy thing to move to the cloud it can be and i can explain why but the first thing was any application business line application that we had was try to figure out if you can buy it through the cloud not through microsoft or in quick books case you can buy quick books online and it works i think better than what the standalone version that you used to buy on your desktop does it's a subscription it costs like it's really pennies compared to what the uh... you know buying that because we bought the software every year and this is like a monthly service now and what's really cool about it is now when i want to access the uh... financial records uh... i log into my account and it's audited and i can see all the records and someone else could be working on the system at the same time so a lot of those applications that are like that and a lot of the vendors that are making business line applications are moving towards the cloud and putting their applications in the cloud there's always going to be some application somewhere that you just can't move yet because it's not you can't buy it in the cloud yet so then you can figure out what's my options do i leave my server in the back office and you know how this infrastructure to run it or can i do something else with it so that's that's what we did uh... we have a couple business line applications that can't be purchased in the cloud and there are uh... and recently too is a lot of the clients that we've been working with they have business line applications uh... that can't that are in the cloud yet either like they're not services cloud and i give an example is on we have a couple construction companies that are clients and they have estimating software in the estimating software sort of legacy and they don't have that cloud version yet and so uh... it's that's a server in the back office and everybody's got that there's something in everyone's office that's in the back office so uh... what we did is uh... basically built that server you bought that server in in microsoft is your and it's just like buying it's like buying a server from deluxe and instead of racking it you're pressing a button and so you press a button in the server like comes alive and you log into it install software you need and uh... what's unique about with those particular applications is we set up this thing called rds or remote desktop services and uh... those applications now run as an application on their desktop but it's the infrastructure and server is sitting somewhere else and across the country and so when you i mean you could run notepad in the cloud if you want uh... so instead of notepad actually running on your cpu on your computer on your desktop it's running in the cloud but your screens and all the gooey's and everything you see look like they're sitting on your computer it's like it's like fascinating what it's doing so you mentioned that there uh... you know a lot of you know even though uh... applications are you know more and more going into the cloud business yes or making available in the cloud uh... does azure have a restriction on certain applications that can't go into azure uh... azure is uh... is infrastructure as a service so all the blinking lights all the equipment the hardcore like a traditional server you can purchase it in azure and just by pressing a button so uh... what used to take i think this is like this is like real world okay so we decide we have a new application this is what used to happen you have an application we need to get it on a server somewhere well we don't have a server for it's like everything we have is already used for something else right so we got to go buy a server okay so you know contact del and we like shop for a server you know it's like it's a couple weeks of haggling with the vendor on you know what the price is going to be or what the specifications what's available because a lot of stuff you buy is not available or they have to get it make it on the fly you know so it could take uh... once we decide what we're buying and we we have overprice were uh... we have to order it and then so then there's a financing piece okay we're going to buy it out right or we release it all this stuff you know that we have cash flow right now to buy it out right all these things are going through our heads then eventually we make the financial purchase we order the equipment from the vendor and then we wait for three weeks for it to show up and then it shows up it usually sits in a box for several days because no one sort of doesn't know when it was going to come and they don't really schedule time sits in the box they take it out of the box they have to find a place for it to live usually the IT guys and the data center people don't talk to each other so it's got to go on a rack it's got to have the right power you know is there power available are we exceeding UPS so it's like is there an ethernet cable for the network has the network been provisioned correct I mean there's all this whole this line your list of things that have to happen to get that server on the rack but eventually it makes it on its way to the rack and then you're at a place where you can actually log into it and then you got to install your software so all that time it took to do that it could be like a month and then obviously something fails on it right so maybe it doesn't work right out of the box or like three weeks later hard drive fails then you're repairing that too and calling your vendor to repair the drive all this stuff so what happens now is we click a go basically go right onto Azure's portal I click a button says add new services what size server do you want you pick your CPU and memory and within about a 30 seconds the server is like up and running you log into it and install your applications so what used to take a month takes a second takes a second wow and if I am you know what's cool about this stuff too is if I'm not using it I mean that you're buying it you're consuming it really you know you think of everything you're consuming is by the month but you can consume it by the hour if you want if you're for some reason need to have a server that's only available during the week days or you know a lot of the reason they think like that is a lot of people have websites that are that you would build in Azure and as these servers get really busy you scale them out you just add more servers so they can handle the load an example would be like a flower shop right so like during Valentine's Day that servers would be more busy than if it were like every day Monday right so they you have a way to scale these servers out on the fly to you to take up the demand and then when they're done they scale back and so you're only paying for that time it scales out that's a little more sophisticated but that's that's the power of the cloud and what about the end user does the end user see any difference between uh... no they actually it works better they're not it's not consuming resources on their local computer this is if you set the business line application with this thing already has remote desktop services uh... it's a hosted application in the cloud it looks and behaves just like it were on your desktop uh... which it is you hit print that you can print uh... just like you would normally uh... you can access files on your local machine you can access files one drive sure point uh... even a local file repository that's up in the cloud too so all the different ways so the users don't have to be retaught how to do something no they could just say okay just just start using it out of the clients that we've migrated these business line application to Azure uh... they don't notice a difference they in fact that in their eyes it's just you maybe move my icon from the right screen to the left side of the screen i've heard some of those complaints yeah my icon's been moved yeah so like well yeah it used to be over here you know that that to me when i said there's two sides of Azure or the cloud is there is this business line applications and those are kind of like one-off small applications uh... the other side of the coin is the like uh... an application that you built like a piece of software that runs with all this dedicated equipment you know in our world uh... we used to run or uh... have been running Microsoft exchange on site for clients for the last fifteen years and all that infrastructure we're currently moving all of that and we have a whole data center full with servers that we're literally picking up and moving them to Azure to 365 and our clients don't can't tell it's happened uh... it just it just we move it uh... without you know an impact to the client uh... the other thing is we have an encryption software that we built up about eight years ago uh... that requires a whole variety of servers and everything and we're currently in the process of migrating that business our business line application to that Azure platform too and so the benefit of that is is you know this equipment we have in these data centers is aging uh... you know it comes up for warranty we have to keep it on warranty it comes up for warranty the equipment then becomes end of line it you know they no longer make a warranty for this equipment anymore so you have to it's you know it's difficult for us because we basically have all these clients on this physical machines the warranty comes into life then we have to go buy all new equipment millions of dollars with equipment you can put that equipment stand it next to the other equipment then move the clients from one equipment to the other equipment and they usually will see an impact on that we have to notify and tell them that whole process is just cumbersome and now what happens is you click a button in the cloud and that server is always up to date that's the latest firmwares it's it just works all the time the hard drives aren't failing i don't worry about any of those things anymore i don't worry about power i'm not paying for power bills it's it's it's zero maintenance for us or space or space to that matter networking is another thing i mean like if you want to set up a vpn typically you got to go to the vendor find the right vpn software you know it's a complicated configuration now with azure you hit a button and i hook a vpn service up to my my resources in azure and boom i got a vpn network i can connect my vpn to my office it's it's all seamless and uh... you know office 365 works together with everything and so there's pieces of a shirt sure azure wait you'll say two different things azure azure and azure and azure it's a southern thing i think i thought there was just really two ways to say uh... so what are some ways that azure works along with the other applications in office 365 uh... well one thing we've talked briefly a little bit about is uh... identity management is uh... it's such an important thing to talk about uh... is who you are and verifying who you are and knowing that it's you it's like again so with the credentialing in 365 azure you have one credential it's you and uh... everything is logged like as far as auditing you know who you are when you are uh... what you're doing it could detect if there's some sort of anomalies happening with your logins like if you're logging at two locations at the same time it knows that can't really happen so that it throws an alert it will probably challenge your uh... your credentials and maybe ask you two factor like where you know calls your cell phone or something like that uh... but the power of that is having one login right and that uh... all this stuff works across the board with the same single sign on basically yeah i remember uh... just a couple years ago that single sign on was one of our most problematic issues that we would have come through the support uh... center there are it's hard to set up it's hard to set up and now it's a breeze it is a breeze so one password one login it just works and analytics that we get about how are you using it and what you're doing and what auditing of everything it's so powerful now all these uh... you know i think at another talk in the trust care column we're gonna talk next time is about security side of everything but having uh... to attribute how you log in and where you're logging in from what you're doing have policies in place to determine what to do if it sees some anomaly uh... this is very powerful and our current systems that we had before i said current before we're in the middle of migrating a lot of things still but uh... you know there's the there's brute force attacking happening every day you plug a computer up to the internet it's being attacked within like fifteen seconds and that's how serious stuff is so uh... in a lot of the uh... services we've had in the past it's really hard to take those things that are happening special tools have to be put in special uh... networking here to detect all these things all this stuff is built from the platform up and as you're in three sixty five uh... and so that's why you're seeing like government going to the cloud uh... you're seeing uh... we have some security government contractors that are moving to the cloud and uh... you know like organizations like the fb i are moving to three sixty five uh... criminal justice all kinds of uh... federal organizations are moving as well because the security standards are so high and uh... so well-thought-out and so uh... third-party tested as well so it's not like just their word saying that these people have worked really hard with these agencies to make sure the stuff is really really secure you know with each pillar that we've gone through you know i've noticed the theme of three three key things one it's easy you know when you do it to its cheaper and three the security is yeah much better so when you work across all pillars i think that those three key things come into play with each one technology has evolved so much uh... to make you know technologies are working better for us you know used to be like oh you had to know how to do all these things is like a secret but now it's it's becoming way easier way easier it's a good thing it's a good thing again you asked me the other day you're like you know is should the IT guy be threatened right? yes should we be threatened right? I don't look at that at all because it just opens our world to other things now we have time to play with more productive things you know analytics is a really big area that we want to get more into you know it gives you time to really analyze your business to have that time rather than messing in the weeds with all the problems i think IT guys are just good problem solvers it's you know it'd be nice to really think about like what's next versus being just a break fix all the time right yeah so i think you're right like it maybe like in the late eighties it used to be the IT are we bringing up chris again? no no that's the nineties that's the late nineties um but i believe it used to be the IT person's job to modernize the office and then you know as more applications came in more and more became about troubleshooting all the different things so now we're going back to what the original role was which was to modernize the office and to come up with it that's a great point because IT is such served as like it's the IT guy you know it's and and it's almost demeanor demeanor in some way the IT professional but it is a profession and the the role of the IT or CIO is someone to propel the business forward versus working on the the nuts and bolts of it all right i've heard some of our clients talk about being like really the role is being an IT pimp is their their their goal is really is to run the business and find vendors that can help them propel their business forward because there's going to be expertise in all of those fields even when i started there was one computer show that everybody went to now there's like thousands of them because the industry has become so fragmented their specialties in all the different areas now and it's hard to keep up with all this stuff you know it's difficult to you know before you kind of knew everything there was a small world and now this world is gigantic so finding an expert and having the right kind of expert help you through this stuff is you know wise well i think that's a good place to stop unless you have anything else you want to say no uh there was something about Azure you know there is you know we we pitch Azure because it's the Microsoft platform but you know you have heard of things like Amazon web services and you've heard like companies like netflix and apple they all use these cloud things but the cloud isn't for necessarily just for big business it's for small business and things like hosting your business line application and Azure can be done and it's very cost effective it just it's very powerful it's it can be very simple and it's not it shouldn't be such a scary thing and it really will help people in their business so not just for the big players anymore now anyone can anybody can do it anyone can do it there's something else but i can't remember we'll probably come we'll do it in the next pillar all right well thank you all for joining us again and if you like our content please click the like button or hit the subscribe button if you want to be reminded each time we do a new video and once again thank you to our clients who make these videos possible thank you