the cio s guide to understanding microsoft cloud...

The CIO’s Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud

Services

October 2014

2 The CIO’s Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services

AbstractThis white paper is designed for executives who are examining Microsoft’s cloud service offerings (Azure, Office 365, Project Online, TFS Online, Dynamics CRM Online) as a way to contain and scale back exploding IT cost and, become more nimble. This paper also serves to compare Microsoft with other cloud service vendors such as Amazon and Google, but does not discuss those vendors’ offerings.

This paper will also be useful to technically inclined readers but these readers should be aware that this is not an exhaustive technical view on all matters related to Microsoft Azure and Office 365. Rather, it focuses on understanding the solutions Azure provides with respect to a specific set of business opportunities, challenges and objectives at an executive level.

The goal here to provide enough information to simplify the decision process and make it clearer.

Let’s Speak the Same Language …When you travel to a foreign country, your journey is typically more enjoyable if you know the local language. The same is true for learning about cloud service offerings such as Azure and Office 365. It is important for us to review some common terms and concepts so we have a good baseline for deeper cloud-related concepts.

Cloud / Cloud Computing / Cloud ServicesYou’ve obviously heard the word “cloud” a few times over the last couple of years. Or maybe “cloud computing.” Or better yet, “cloud services.” These terms are often used interchangeably. So, what is “The Cloud?” Think of the cloud as a collection of servers in datacenters somewhere, providing services and applications as you need them.

You can also imagine the cloud as a marketplace of cloud services. And, at a high level, think of a cloud service as a collection of infrastructure components that serve a particular purpose – like servers and hardware that provide on-demand storage or hosted email.

People talk about public and private cloud service offerings. The key differentiator between these two offerings is who offers the service: your organization (private cloud) or an external vendor such as Microsoft, Amazon or Google (public cloud). Regardless of public or private, the key concepts for an excellent cloud service offering are: standardization, openness, flexibility, scalability and reliability.

Sound Like a Pro: IaaS, PaaS & SaaS ConceptsIaaS stands for “Infrastructure as a Service,” PaaS is “Platform as a Service” and SaaS is an acronym for – you guessed it – “Software as a Service.” Now that we have that out of the way, how should we think about these concepts with respect to our current internal IT capabilities and what Microsoft as an IT vendor provides? On PremisesOn premises is the traditional way of deploying and managing IT assets in your own datacenter. With on-premises assets, you have full control over infrastructure, from networking to storage to servers all the way through the application stack – you manage everything.

As an example, let’s take a look at a common workload, such as your collaboration environment deployed as an on-premises SharePoint 2013 intranet portal.

For this on-premises solution, imagine that your IT team has created and assigned storage endpoints to your Windows Hyper-V farm (or other virtualization platform). They used the Hyper-V farm to create virtual machines (VMs) running the Windows Server 2012 OS and created these VMs from a VM template that is fully patched and managed by the desktop/server engineering team.After many months of planning, budgeting and testing, the virtualization sub-team in the IT group created multiple Hyper-V farms in different datacenters for disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) purposes, and configured storage replication appropriately to support this virtualization solution. This was

AuthorsAdetayo Adegoke is the national practice lead for Perficient’s enterprise applications infrastructure group. In this role, he serves as a managing consultant, sales support technologist, emerging services evangelist as well as senior solutions architect for Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure and IIS-based services and platforms including but not limited to SharePoint. Adetayo is particularly skilled in advising firms and providing assets that assist clients with evaluating and transitioning to cloud solutions based on the Microsoft platform.

The CIO’s Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services 3

might come preconfigured with development tools such as Visual Studio 2012 and SharePoint Designer 2013. It could also have SQL Server 2012 and SharePoint 2013 build scripts with other software already preloaded. Alternatively, you could just use the out-of-box OS template provided by Microsoft as part of your Azure subscription, and build out your development environment using scripts.

The key takeaway here is that you do not have to manage the underlying hypervisor solution, underlying physical servers, supporting storage endpoints or networking. Microsoft does all this for you.

The one minor limitation with Azure IaaS right now is that you do not have access to the hypervisor console (Hyper-V Manager) since the virtualization platform layer and the underlying layers that support it are managed entirely by Microsoft. You do, however, have access to everything else – from the OS layer to the applications layer.

Platform as a Service – PaaSLet’s examine the PaaS concept a little bit more closely. Microsoft Azure provides PaaS offerings in the form of Media Services, Cloud Services, Web Sites and SQL databases. Within this band of the Microsoft cloud offerings spectrum, you do not deploy SharePoint servers as you would with on-premises and IaaS layers. Instead, you deploy custom applications written by your software development team to PaaS, using programming languages such as C#, Perl, ASP.Net and so on. You do not have to worry about the underlying infrastructure that is the foundation of your PaaS solution implementation. Azure manages that for you, doing things like OS patching and automatically spinning up more server instances or storage to support your application’s configuration settings.

necessary because of the service level agreement (SLA) terms demanded by the business.

The database engineering team used multiple scripts to build your AlwaysOn SQL Server database backend solution for SharePoint with availability groups configured for HA and DR purposes. In addition, the network engineering team configured network subnets appropriately for the SharePoint architecture, so that SQL and SharePoint servers can communicate with each other. The server engineering team decided to script out the server build tasks and also deployed a number of custom solutions to the SharePoint farm. The SharePoint administrators also have direct access to the SharePoint databases, which they optimized to improve performance.

This sounds like a lot of work because it is a lot of work. More work, in fact, than most organizations want to take on just to enable SharePoint for internal collaboration.

Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS Let’s switch gears and talk about IaaS. Using the on-premises example we just described, let’s take a look at how the same end goal can be achieved by an IaaS offering. With IaaS, you have full control to the OS layer, but without having to worry about the physical aspect of building a virtualization platform solution, as you would with on-premises. This is wildly important.

We all know how long it takes to order servers and appliances, to rack and cable them in multiple datacenters and install the operating system on each box. With IaaS, we skip these tasks and get right to creating SharePoint VMs in Microsoft Azure, using your corporate OS template that was uploaded to Azure. This template


Common use-case scenarios with PaaS involve migrating custom ASP.NET web solutions to the Microsoft Azure Web Sites feature. Another scenario many customers ask about is migrating existing backend databases to the Azure SQL Database PaaS offering. PaaS accelerates custom development efforts by putting a blanket over your infrastructure requirements so that you can focus more on the application itself. Even though you do not see it directly in the background, Azure is automatically managing the entire infrastructure workload for your solution.

Software as a Service – SaaSLast but not least, let’s quickly review the SaaS concept. With SaaS, we can get back to our example of the SharePoint deployment described above. Microsoft offers cloud-based SharePoint solutions as a standalone offering, or as part of an Office 365 subscription. With SaaS, you are consuming pre-installed software solutions and typically have limited access to making global configuration changes that affect your SaaS instance, especially relating to backend infrastructure assets. SharePoint is running on servers in Microsoft’s datacenters and you, as the owner of your own SharePoint “tenant,” can configure your environment through the SharePoint admin portal. But you do not have access to the underlying servers, applications or operating systems that run SharePoint.

Other SaaS offerings from Microsoft include Yammer, Exchange Online & Lync Online (all part of Office 365), Dynamics CRM Online as well as Team Foundation Services. Note that the offerings that are a part of the Office 365 suite of products and are distinct from Microsoft Azure: Azure delivers IaaS and PaaS while Office 365 delivers SaaS.

How is the Datacenter Changing?Now that you can impress your IT pros with some cool cloud vocabulary, let’s bring it back to what these concepts all mean in the context of how you run your business – past, present and future.Your enterprise environment probably consists of more than one datacenter today, running a number of critical business applications on-premises on physical servers. This is the traditional legacy

approach to IT, and it has proven to be very effective over the past few decades. There are a number of advantages to the on-premises physical datacenter approach that experts bring up: full control, physical access and compliance to mention a few. We will examine each one of these important concerns in the context of cloud services later on in this paper.

There are also many challenges that come hand-in-hand with this approach. As the enterprise grows over time, so does the on-premises, datacenter. This might be for several legitimate reasons: new versions of critical business platforms require more computing power, global and intrastate/province mergers and acquisitions, new compliance and regulatory guidance mandate that data is kept for longer periods of time, and so on. We will talk through some of these everyday struggles the business wrestles with, and talk about some quick wins that can set the foundation to an effective cloud strategy for your organization.

Virtualization was one of the big disruptions in the technology space. The concept has been implemented by various vendors since the 1960s, primarily in the UNIX variant area, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that it really took off in the Intel x86 space. It was at this time VMware (acquired by EMC) and Connectix (acquired by Microsoft shortly thereafter) released competing products to take advantage of idle compute capacity on powerful workstations and servers to consolidate physical workstation and server footprint. A wide variety of resources could be virtualized including CPUs, memory, storage and network. Many businesses adopted virtualization as a very effective way to condense compute, network and storage resources and increase ROI on physical IT infrastructure assets already deployed within the enterprise.

As virtualization evolved, it became clearer that it needed to be more elastic and scalable, so that virtual resource instances can be configured to scale up and scale down as required, and more virtual resources can be provisioned (during peak demand periods for an e-commerce web site for example) and destroyed dynamically. To achieve this, virtualization solutions had to become highly automated and standardized, and datacenter resources were divided into normalized logical groups of virtualized resources. This encapsulates the concept of IaaS. Businesses are evolving their datacenters right now, either through private offerings managed entirely by internal IT, or more commonly, through public vendor like Microsoft and Cisco. An interesting figure: 20% of organizations have private cloud offerings today, and most of the growth in the cloud computing space has been through the adoption of IaaS.The multibillion dollar idea was that with public IaaS offerings, compute storage and networking becomes more utilitarian for the enterprise and solutions can be built faster than ever since you can effectively skip buying, installing, configuring and maintaining physical hardware, which was a significant contributing factor to slimming down project timelines. PaaS is the natural next step. If you are not interested in purchasing, installing, configuring,

Microsoft SaaS Offerings


patching and upgrading standard software packages such as SQL (including the underlying Infrastructure), PaaS is for you. As your business thinks about deploying new applications to the cloud, PaaS is typically the most efficient deployment model because it allows sufficient control over underlying IT assets while allowing your IT group to maintain a razor sharp focus on the business value your software solution provides.

While PaaS is the immediate future, some businesses have started to adopt SaaS solutions to provision common business workloads such as collaboration and email services (SharePoint Online and Exchange Online, offered through Office 365 by Microsoft). SaaS extracts the technology aspects of an application even further, and centralizes application solution access for your business users. 16% of businesses today have at least one or two public vendor SaaS implementations. While some of these SaaS services might sound like newfangled options, Microsoft has actually been running SaaS solutions for well over a dozen years. Hotmail (now Outlook) is a SaaS service offered to millions of customers by Microsoft since 1997.

50%of fortune 500 companies use azure

Other consumer SaaS offerings from Microsoft include Skype, Bing and Xbox Live suite of services, which includes providing gaming and music subscriptions to millions of customers worldwide. Microsoft has condensed all these years of experience from a global customer base into Azure and Office 365. The results have been impressive:

• More than 1 billion Office documents and 11 billion photos have been stored on OneDrive. More than 250 million people use OneDrive (Microsoft’s consumer offering alternative to OneDrive for Business).1

• There are more than 8 million registered users on Microsoft’s enterprise social network Yammer. 85% of Fortune 500 firms use Yammer.2

• 50% of Fortune 500 companies use Azure.3 There are about 10 trillion objects stored in Azure.

• 25% of Microsoft’s enterprise customers have deployed Office 365. More than 2 million subscribers use Office 365

• More than 1 million state, federal and local government employees use Office 365.4

• Perficient has deployed more than 1.2 million seats of Office 365.

You get the idea. Microsoft SaaS platforms have been vigorously tested and vetted at a global scale in the real world, and have

operated effectively for a very diverse group of discerning consumers and firms for more than seventeen years.

Why Use Microsoft Cloud?This paper focuses almost entirely on Microsoft cloud services for two practical reasons: cloud service capabilities across all vendors are constantly evolving within a relatively short period of time, not to mention that there is a very broad array of capabilities across each vendor. Performing a rich analysis of each vendor’s services can be a fairly complicated affair, and as such, attempting to reasonably cover each vendor is outside of the scope of a white paper.

Evaluating AzureAzure provides many services. Its lineup of available services is constantly expanding, and each pre-existing service also evolves to provide richer feature sets. From core datacenter extension capabilities such as compute, storage and networking to identity management capabilities like Azure AD and its single-sign-on integration with popular enterprise application platforms such as Yammer, Salesforce and Exchange Online, there is an ever-broadening set of capabilities for to evaluate as you look for competitive advantages and solutions to difficult business challenges. Some of these services are discussed below.

Infrastructure/Compute Services: To run production, staging, integration-test and development workloads with varying degrees of complexity while maintaining a lower total cost of ownership.

Big Data: Hadoop clusters can be deployed in minutes instead of weeks to rapidly analyze massive amounts of data for insights that has the potential to guide the firm to make better, targeted business decisions in the future, while allowing for the flexibility of a wide range of programming languages including .NET and Java.

Web Applications: To create highly scalable web service architectures with flexible deployment models – TFS, GitHub, FTP etc. using a variety of frameworks and programming languages.

Mobile Apps: To enable businesses to build flexible cloud backend repositories very quickly, while maintaining support for a wide range of programming languages as well as enabling access to iOS, Android and Windows mobile devices. With this Microsoft Azure solution, businesses now have access to push notification capability that can scale to millions of devices.

Media: To provide on-demand transcoding, DRM protection, encryption and secure storage of premium media assets, workflows to mash up media content from various content providers, ads injection, broad device


Office 365 Core PlatformsExchange Online: Microsoft’s enterprise-class email solution in the cloud that can be accessed through Microsoft Office Outlook, a web browser or through mobile devices. With this service, you are provided with not just reliable email services deployed across globally redundant servers, but also anti-spam and anti-malware filtering to make employees more productive with their time by getting rid of junk mail. Another value add is instant access to email from mobile devices and other computers over the Internet, supporting the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon workplaces have had to deal with over the past few years.

SharePoint Online: With this service, users share information with each other and potentially with partners, vendors and the customers as well. Another strength of the platform is its ability to structure information about projects, teams, people and your firm by organizing data in a way that is natural to your company. You can leverage the enterprise-grade search capability to empower users to find information quickly and easily. You can also deploy tools that deliver critical insights and data visualizations for your business, to help you make timely decisions. SharePoint Online is highly extensible and allows easy customization that match the needs of your business. It is also a great tool for managing risk through eDiscovery.

Lync Online: Provides instant messaging, video conferencing and virtual meeting capabilities so that users can work together with each other as well as with customers, suppliers. Similar to other Office 365 platforms, Lync Online can be accessed through internet browsers or through a Lync client over a broad choice of devices. It provides HD quality video as well as voice call functionality and can connect to Skype as well.

Yammer: An online enterprise social network that empowers people to work together to create and share knowledge through natural, real time communication. With Yammer, you get deep, sticky discussions that are searchable, instead of information that gets buried in individual mail boxes. It is a great tool to collaborate on projects, help build company culture around non-business initiatives and develop your firm’s knowledge management capability. This social platform can be used to securely collaborate with your vendors, clients and partners as well, over a wide array of devices connected to the Internet.

compatibility as well as efficient, rapid global distribution of content.

Storage, Backup and Recovery: To create a durable, scalable and cost effective alternative to traditional infrastructure options such as hosted storage, backup and recovery vendors or on-premises investments.

Identity and Access Management: Provisioned for every Microsoft Azure subscription in order to store and manage cloud identities that enables employee, partner and customer access to resources and data stored within a Microsoft Azure subscription. Using this feature, businesses can integrate ADFS with to enable single sign-on, as well as provide an extra layer of protection for critical assets by providing multi-factor authentication.

Integration: To connect on-premises and cloud solutions together through BizTalk services using the Microsoft Azure Service Bus as the communications highway.

Evaluating Azure Security, Privacy and Compliance Microsoft has designed and executed a security strategy for Azure that is based on centers of excellence, which are comprised of highly experienced personnel that provide intelligence on global information security threats. Additionally, Microsoft has a security development lifecycle framework for all products and services so that they are designed and built with a strong focus on security and privacy. Customers can specify geographical boundaries for where they want their data to reside, so that data does not cross into other regions due to privacy and legal industry regulations for example. In addition, Azure is compliant with several frameworks, such as HIPAA BAA, PCI DSS Level 1 and ISO/IEC 27001:2005, amongst others. This is just a light introduction into Microsoft Azure’s commitment to security, privacy and compliance. For a deeper, updated look into the current state of this important topic relative to Azure, be sure to review the Microsoft Azure Trust Center5 with your team. Evaluating Office 365 Core Platforms, Office 365 Extended Platform & Other Microsoft SaaS PlatformsThink of Office 365 resulting from a cloud transformation of the collection of traditional shrink-wrapped software platforms that Microsoft offers to the world. Office 365 services are SaaS offerings that provide you with almost immediate access to Microsoft’s stable of managed software applications.

For Office 365, another value add to take note of the feature set provided by these services is constantly being updated and upgraded by Microsoft. Once you move to Office 365, you avoid migration pains going forward. Keep in mind that for these software offerings, Microsoft has adopted a cloud-first approach where new features and functionality are deployed to Office 365 before they are rolled out to on-premises installations.


Chances are you already have a good idea where to start. It could be that you are looking to stabilize your email platform not just to minimize outage incidents, but to continue to meet your end user expectations of very high storage capacity limits while minimizing costs in a predictable fashion. Or you might want to get start migrating file servers to a collaboration environment that turbo charges productivity natively through versioning, search, people search and other out-of-the-box features.

Maybe you want to introduce video conferencing and IM capabilities to your organization. How do you make your vision a reality?

1. Define your vision and map it to specific success metrics: Do you want to reduce your exploding storage costs by at least 20% within the next year? Or maybe you want to increase sales revenue of pre-existing products and services in a new vertical market and want to be able to track sales leads to successful closure so that you can better forecast sales next year within +/- 5% accuracy? In order to gain support and adoption through the organization, it is crucial to have tangible goals that firm employees, partners and customers can wrap their hands around and get behind.

2. Put together a sponsorship/leadership team: The next phase is to assemble your team. For a project or program focused on the cloud, you will have to bring in a wide range of people to be successful. For example, if your goal is to reduce your storage costs significantly and predictably, and your were looking at implementing Azure Storage and related services as well as StorSimple appliances, you will find yourself calling on your senior infrastructure managers, network engineers and architects, your PMO as well as IT managers for business applications affected by this change. This is typically the phase where you identify gaps in skills and experience necessary for the success of the endeavor, which could range from deep IT skills and implementation experience to change management and end user training.

3. Begin your planning framework: Because of the transformational nature of deploying cloud services, it is critical that the planning framework you put together has the breadth and depth necessary to the engagements success. You might not have all the answers at hand for this phase of your journey, but this activity should point out what you do not know, and need some assistance with. For example, to whom should you deploy SharePoint Online to for piloting purposes? How long will it take to move the entire firm to Exchange Online? We have more than 300 apps to migrate to Office 365; which one goes, and what gets retired?

Office 365 Extended PlatformsProject Online: An online solution for managing your portfolio of projects with potentially no Infrastructure costs. It supports a wide array of devices, and includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online integration as well to enable your organization to manage scarce resources in a secure manner. With Project Online, your PMO is able to take advantage of the platform immediately to create projects, assign tasks, and create dashboards and workflows.

Dynamics CRM Online: Microsoft’s customer relationship management cloud platform that empowers your sales team to learn more about and customers to enable them to sell more efficiently. It provides a range of cloud-based services to business to manage customer relationships in the context of sales, marketing, customer care and social listening. In addition to supporting these capabilities, the platform provides mobile access, reports and personal dashboards, knowledge management as well as a unified service desk to your sales team.

Other Microsoft SaaS PlatformsIntune is Microsoft’s solution to managing the reality of BYOD (bring your own device) that has exploded across the IT landscape in recent years. It allows a firm to support Windows and non-windows PC and mobile devices using a pure cloud approach or integrated with your Systems Center Configuration Manager deployment. By deploying this service, you gain more control over remote devices accessing firm resources on premises or in the cloud by enforcing security protocol requirements as well as gaining a better view of the range of devices accessing your network.

Evaluating Office 365 Security, Privacy and Compliance The Office 365 suite of services is designed and built using Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle. In addition, Microsoft uses a defense-in-depth layered approach to physical security, logical security, data security and admin/user controls. With Office 365, Microsoft guarantees privacy of data so that a firm maintains complete ownership. Office 365 is compliant with ISO 27001, EU model clauses, HIPAA BAA, and FISMA. For a more comprehensive review of security, privacy and compliance for Office 365, please be sure to take a look at the Office 365 Trust Center6 with your team.

Sounds Convincing, How Do We Get There?Now that you have a better idea of the what, who, why, where and when, let’s think about the final piece of the puzzle: how do you use Microsoft Cloud Services as an enabler for your firm’s success?


Taking the Next StepThe IDC predicts that cloud computing will be a $107 billion industry by 2017. This rapid expansion is fueled by the need for businesses to rapidly develop competitive advantages through complex technology solutions to stay at the forefront of your industry. In addition, with the increasing mobility of the workforce, today’s new employees, who will drive the growth of the firm in the future, have come to expect employers to provide access to tools that would have been cost prohibitive just a few years ago. At the same time, IT budgets are not growing fast enough to meet these challenging demands using traditional technology frameworks.

You are likely reading this paper because you have a vision for what Microsoft Cloud Services can do for your business, and you might have even gathered support at the executive level. Because cloud technologies are fundamentally different from on-premises platforms, it makes sense to engage with partners trusted by Microsoft to offer some support for this important initiative. With this strategic partnership, you strengthen your IT team with deep expertise through envisioning, planning, integration, pilot and deployment phases of your cloud engagement.

For example, you might want to move your email system to Exchange Online, and might be ready for a small pilot that achieves this (in concert with using Azure IaaS). Or maybe you have already deployed Office 365 but wanted to take better control of mobile devices consuming those services. This is where Intune integrated with Systems Center Configuration Manager will come into play. Another need that might come up is how to integrate cloud deployments into your existing IT management frameworks and protocols. Governance sessions for Azure and Office 365 will be the first step towards achieving this goal.

4. Engage with an implementation team: At this stage, you have a good idea what needs to be done, and the missing gaps that needs some answers. You are ready to put together an implementation team that will take the work you have done so far and run it to the end line. If you’ve decided to employ an outside vendor to assist with your cloud implementation, now is a good time to determine who from within your internal team will be the key contact(s) working closely with the vendor. A typical line up with a cloud engagement is IT personnel – cloud specialists, solution architects, enterprise architects, network, storage, database, security, desktop, and collaboration, communications, the PMO as well as identified alpha (innovators that love technology) and beta (early adopters that are/want to be recognized as visionaries that apply new technology to solve business problems) testers. The implementation team will take the planning framework that was put together earlier on and provide richer details, including but not limited to tasks, resources, budget, time lines and key milestones. Once a good project baseline has been established, it’s time to put together a small pilot trial for your group of alpha testers to try out.

5. Plan, design and deploy a proof of concept: A proof of concept will help to test the baseline project plan as well as underlying ideas as to how implementing a Microsoft cloud service like Azure will execute the vision of the project. Think of this phase as a litmus test. Did we really plan for enough time to roll this out to everyone? Are there localization issues we missed? Do we need to plan for more end user training? How do we capture lessons learned effectively to then pass on to help desk personnel when the solution is deployed firm-wide?

For many firms, IT personnel are used to participating as end users in the proof of concept environment, however this is not a hard rule. Typically, data generated in this environment is treated as ephemeral. Alpha testers at this point are evaluating the Microsoft Cloud platform and providing feedback to the implementation team. The implementation team can go through several releases of the proof of concept solution before determining tthe project is ready to advance to the beta testing phase.

Beyond this, the team continually refines the project plan, proceeds to beta testing (rolling out the solution to an early adopter department, like Finance for example), communicates progress to the business and each other, and eventually deploys the solution to the entire firm, while taking note of lessons learned and best practices to be applied later on for other cloud services projects.


2. Microsoft News Center (2013). ABB to Deploy Microsoft Office 365 and Yammer as Part of Strategic Initiative to Improve Collaboration Worldwide [Press release]. Retrieved from http://news.microsoft.com/2013/04/10abb-to-deploy-microsoft-office-365-and-yammer-as-part-ofstrategic-initiative-to-improve-collaboration-worldwide/

3. Martin, S. (2013, June 14). 50 Percent of Fortune 500 Using Windows Azure. Retrieved from http://ppe.blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/06/14/50-percent-of-fortune-500s-using-windows-azure.aspx

4. Microsoft by the Numbers: The Enterprise Cloud (2014). Retrieved from http://news.microsoft.com/cloud/index.html

5. Microsoft Azure Trust Center (2014). Retrieved from http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/trust-center/

6. Office 365 Trust Center (2014). Retrieved from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/office-365-trust-center-cloud-computing-security-FX103030390.aspx

Microsoft Cloud Services are very comprehensive. Offerings from Microsoft not only help drive down infrastructure costs and provide new services to turbo charge efficiencies within the business, they also reach into other areas of disruption including mobility, social and Big Data analytics.

Partnering with Microsoft can further increase efficiencies gained by employing cloud platforms that take advantage of synergies from integrating cloud-based solutions from the same vendor to deliver cost-effectiveness, critical intelligence using Big Data, securely drive mobility adoption, and deploy social business platforms to drive deeper collaboration within and outside your firm while providing next-generation cloud-based tools.

References 1. Microsoft by the Numbers (2014). Retrieved from http://

news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/index.html

About PerficientPerficient, Inc. is a leading information technology consulting firm providing business-driven technology solutions to Global 2000 and other large enterprise clients throughout North America. If you would like more information about the topics discussed in this white paper please feel free to contact the author or send an email to [email protected].

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