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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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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AWS silly season – here we go
The AWS re:Invent annual conference in Las Vegas kicks-off next week, which means we are about to be snowed under by hundreds of new service announcments, product updates and the like. This year, AWS have started this process slightly early, so as not to overwhelm people during the week of the conferenece. There have been […]
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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 […]
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AWS Savings Plans
AWS have announced a new pricing feature called Savings Plans, offering a way of saving up to 72% on your compute (EC2 and Fargate) spend. Even though I suspect that in most cases the realised savings will be lower than this headline figure, there is no doubt that they will be substantial in many cases. […]