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Cloud advice

Improving PaaS consumption with Azure Private Link

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’ […]

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Cloud advice

Powering productivity at home with desktops in the cloud

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 […]

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Cloud advice

Protecting your time: tools to help you find more and manage it better

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 […]

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Cloud advice

Top 10 security tips for deploying and using Teams

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 […]

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Cloud advice

Cloud connectivity – optimising traffic to Office 365 and remote access to on-prem applications

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 […]

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Cloud advice

Delivering your applications with AWS AppStream 2.0

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. […]

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Cloud advice

Protecting your workloads behind AWS CloudFront

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 […]

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Cloud advice

Are you well-architected?

If you currently work in a UK university or college, then the chances are that somebody, somewhere in your institution is already a customer of AWS or Microsoft Azure. Maybe both? In most cases, that usage of AWS or Azure will be known about and managed by the central IT deparatment, in some cases, possibly […]

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Cloud advice

The Capex to Opex Shift

Despite all the benefits of cloud, we often hear concerns about cloud. These generally fall into the following 6 categories which can be addressed with skills/knowledge or processes, be that creating or updating. One concern within Business is the capex to opex shift. Whilst on premise kit is treated as capex because they are owned […]