Notes from the Road Show

I recently attended Microsoft's New York City stop on their Cloud Roadshow. Here are my notes. Full disclosure: I work at Avepoint, a Microsoft ISV and Partner of the Year for 2015.

Microsoft is pushing hard for the cloud, competing well with incumbent players. Whereas a year or two ago they were prompting Office 365 as their cloud solution, now everything is about Azure. Don't just move your email and collaboration to the cloud, move your entire infrastructure.

Toward this end Microsoft has made several enhancements to Azure, their cloud infrastructure service. Previously, Azure supported Windows servers and services, and a handful of Linux systems. Now, Microsoft is certified to host Red Hat Linux implementations, meaning Red Hat won't hang up on you when you tell them your box is in Azure. Microsoft also supports Unix/Linux automation with Powershell DSC, though you can also continue with Puppet and Chef if that's your thing.

Microsoft is still pitching their 365 services; there was quite a bit on migrating to 365, in particular ensuring that Sharepoint customizations can make it to Sharepoint Online. Broadly, the story is hybrid support: customers who are ready to go to the cloud but have one or two things that don't fit well. Microsoft's story in 2015 seems to be: move what you can, and connect it with what you can't.

For example, say your company's sales team needs to send out mass emails to employees - thousands at a time. There are limitations on how many emails and how many recipients Exchange Online can send, in order to prevent Microsoft from being flagged as a spam factory. So, you might want to keep an on-premise Exchange server for just that purpose - but otherwise move your company email to the cloud.

Or, for another example, say you want to move to the cloud to lower infrastructure costs, but there are certain teams or categories of data that really shouldn't go to the cloud. Keep your Sharepoint on file server infrastructure on-premise for that data, while moving the non-sensitive materials to the cloud.

On a recent drive across Brooklyn, as we arced high on the BQE, I saw several old factory buildings in Red Hook that had been renovated and turned into spaces for small businesses, including startups. If instead of renovating an old building, new ones were being built, you'd have what Microsoft is doing: building big boxes (data centers) for businesses to move into. Never mind the electrical and the plumbing, or the security for who has access - just tell us how much space you need and we'll set it up for you. They're not telling you you can only use Microsoft furniture (err, operating systems and browsers) or phones. They just want you to use their infrastructure.

Admittedly, it is not quite as open-ended as Amazon's offerings. I'm reasonably sure that if you said you wanted to spin up a bunch of Silk VMs to act as scalable Kindle emulators, Amazon would pause and say, "yeah sure." But Microsoft is catching up, and arguably the more secure for it.