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News

Immersive Reader – baby steps towards using the cloud and AI to support reading

Microsoft have recently announced the general availability of Immersive Reader, one of the Azure Cognitive Services. Immersive Reader is probably more applicable to schools and, maybe, FE than to universities but is interesting nonetheless: Empowering remote learning with Azure Cognitive Services https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/empowering-remote-lea…. Immersive Reader is an Azure Cognitive Service within the Azure AI platform that […]

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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 […]

Categories
Service announcements

AWS Partner Guided Onboard (GO) Program

We are excited to announce that we are part of the AWS Partner Guided Onboard (GO) Program! As part of our partnership with AWS we are now able to offer financial and practical support for a range of guided onboarding activities to support members and customers in their early use of AWS cloud technologies. The […]

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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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News

Microsoft Azure and Office 365 resourcing issues

As must be clear to everyone by now, there has been a massive spike in demand for public cloud services since the coronavirus outbreak first hit us. Microsoft report that whole countries have gone from zero use of cloud to deliver teaching to 100% coverage of cloud-based remote learning in a matter of weeks. MIcrosoft […]

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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 […]

Categories
Service announcements

Improved reporting for our Managed Azure customers using automation

One of the many things we offer as part of our Managed Azure service is a monthly report with advice on cost savings, security and cloud best practice. Fortunately, the native tool, Azure Advisor, provides personalized information on exactly these categories. However, we had a problem. Although Azure Advisor allows manual export of its reports […]