The Business Case for Microsoft Office 365

10th of November, 2014 / Andrew Janssen / No Comments

Businesses of all sizes and industries are considering adopting Microsoft Office 365. Some customers have a clear vision of the desired capabilities. Others have weighed up the options and identified that there are savings to be leveraged. Others still have heard the hype, but don’t know where to start.

Office 365, like any technology, offers a variety of solutions and risks to any business. Kloud has extensive skills and experience in Microsoft Office 365 and have assisted many commercial and public sector enterprise customers successfully navigate the journey onto Office 365.… [Keep reading] “The Business Case for Microsoft Office 365”

Start-up like a pro or fast track cloud in your enterprise. . .

30th of October, 2014 / Matt Davies / No Comments

As part of my job I regularly interact with IT and business leaders from companies, across a diverse range of industries. A similarity I see across most businesses is that they contain a bunch of knowledge workers that all need to interact both internally and externally with common parties (internal departments / branches, customers, suppliers, vendors and government / regulatory bodies).

So how do knowledge workers in today’s highly connected world collaborate and communicate? Aside from telephone and face to face communication, email is still the primary tool of communication, why?… [Keep reading] “Start-up like a pro or fast track cloud in your enterprise. . .”

Cloud Strategy – do you need one?

20th of June, 2014 / Geoff Rohrsheim / No Comments

Today’s organisations demand that their services perform better, cost less, are more reliable and offer greater flexibility than ever before. With high quality and quickly evolving consumer technologies, the expectation of IT services in the workplace is that they now reflect the same calibre of tools available to people outside of the office.

With common perceptions that business IT capabilities are too far behind, many departments look to acquire and provision cloud services themselves, without involving the IT organisation.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Strategy – do you need one?”

The FIM User Experience

27th of March, 2014 / Dan Thom / No Comments

A recent post by my colleague Jamie Skella “What UX Isn’t” started me thinking about how UX applies to FIM. Throughout my career as an Identity Management Consultant, I’ve seen projects reach a point in maturity where stakeholders are walked through the tasks an admin or user will perform in the portal, and the average eyebrow height in the room rises exponentially.

Those of us working with Microsoft’s identity products for a while, are used to seeing the glitz and glamour of the Sync Engine console, previously the only interface available with the product, so when the FIM Portal was introduced with FIM 2010, it gave a “user friendly” interface to work with.… [Keep reading] “The FIM User Experience”

Good Practices for Managing Microsoft Azure Subscriptions

30th of July, 2013 / David Harbert / 30 Comments

We’ve published some updated guidance for Service Admin account management based on the new RBAC access control techniques now available in Azure. While the classic non-RBAC portal is required, the content in the post here is still very relevant though!

Overview

Over the years it has been drilled into me to use “Least Privilege” access whenever and however possible. Least Privilege is all about limiting users, systems, and services to only those privileges which are absolutely essential to get the job done.… [Keep reading] “Good Practices for Managing Microsoft Azure Subscriptions”

The changing role of the CIO

4th of July, 2013 / Peter Hancock / No Comments

With the growth and commoditization of computing resource, and the inevitable introduction of cloud computing, both as a software, platform and infrastructure services, the Chief Information Officer’s role will change significantly over the next two years. Cloud computing provides incredible agility for those organizations equipped to utilize it, Business Process Outsourcing is providing increasing levels of workforce flexibility, and with the commoditization of design and development resources, how does this rapid ability to affect change effect the CIO?… [Keep reading] “The changing role of the CIO”

Office 365: To Federate or Not to Federate… that is the Question

5th of June, 2013 / Michael Pearn / 8 Comments

Yesterday, Microsoft released a new version of their ‘DirSync’ utility (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn246918.aspx) which up until yesterday provided a basic ‘copy’ of your local Active Directory accounts (Active Directory Domain Service or ‘AD DS’) from your premises to the MS Cloud directory (referred to as ‘Azure Active Directory’) for Office 365 (and other Cloud apps such as Team Foundation Service (TFS Online).

This blog is written for those considering moving to Office 365 (or have moved to Office 365) but haven’t identified any other application in the organisation apart from Office 365 that requires Active Directory Federation Services and SAML/WS.Federation… [Keep reading] “Office 365: To Federate or Not to Federate… that is the Question”

Azure AD and the Progression of Microsoft Identity and Access Management

16th of April, 2013 / Michael Pearn / 1 Comment

Defining Microsoft IDAM

The words ‘Identity and Access Management’ (IDAM) mean different things to different people – and a lot of confusion still reigns about what this area represents to an IT department. However, it’s generally agreed that a good corporate IDAM policy can drive down cost, increase security and provide significant user experience benefits to approved applications as they are introduced to an IT environment.

These improvements can broadly be categorised into the following areas:

• Single Sign On (usually abbreviated to ‘SSO’) – a user provides a single factor (99% of the time a password) and gets access to not just one application but a suite of applications after authenticating once without being prompted again for credentials.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD and the Progression of Microsoft Identity and Access Management”

Overview

Looking Back