Introduction With the unprecedented events of 2020 and the requirements for home working/studying, everyone must have been aware of the huge growth of video conferencing. Zoom has seen a 355% increase in its revenues alone, but it is hard to argue that it ended up as Microsoft Teams’ year. The rush towards communications, with the […]
Category: Cloud advice
Advice on good practice when using cloud.
Introduction Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a key element to successful cloud adoption. Using IaC, organisations create infrastructure that is both re-usable and reproducible. This consistency helps ensure that applications built in development environments will function the same way in near-identical production environments. Changes can (should!) be planned and controlled through coding best practices such as version […]
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Being a good cloud citizen
When speaking to members and customers about their cloud adoption, I often use a phase to describe the development required for members of the team that will ultimately be deploying and managing resources in the cloud. I describe the need for these individuals to become “good cloud citizens”. This, of course, is followed by the […]
In my opinion, one of the most significant enablers for consumption of Platform as a Service (PaaS) in Azure has been the launch of Azure Private Link capability. For years, the concept, and successful implementation, of a private network has been a cornerstone of IT security. This is still true, even with an ‘assume breach’ […]
Jisc members and customers are under increasing pressure to deliver great user experiences to those who are working or studying remotely. Productivity suites have become an established means of delivering several applications and services remotely, across a range of platforms and devices. Email, calendars and collaboration tools, for example. But with the disruption caused by […]
This is a guest post by Peter Kent who is Head of IT governance and communications at Jisc. Working from home can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, you save time by not commuting which you can use for a few extra minutes in bed, more time spent with loved ones, or for a […]
Unsurprisingly, the world and its dog appear to be shifting large amounts of their collaboration activity (team chat, shared documents, meetings and telephony) into Microsoft Teams right now. Here are our top 10 tips for rolling-out Teams securely. This is particularly important given the large number of people now working from home. Whilst some of […]
With the move of large numbers of university and college staff and students to working from home there has been a significant shift in traffic flows across Janet. Microsoft have released guidance, How to quickly optimize Office 365 traffic for remote staff & reduce the load on your infrastructure, about how to optimise these new […]
One of the more recent inventions has been ‘streaming applications’. While the term sounds fancy, it is a relatively old technology – repackaged. Before I go into the specifics of AppStream 2.0, I would like to delve into the history of remote delivered content. Back in the mid ‘80s, a range of technologies started emerging. […]
If you run a website serving static data and need a caching solution, AWS CloudFront is the go-to service for this. It works by providing multiple ‘edge’ locations, which are simply data centres located in geographical hot-spots around the world. Data is accessed from the nearest data centre. For example, when accessing your London-region hosted […]