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

5th of June, 2013 / / 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”

Ideal Workloads for Cloud

17th of May, 2013 / / No Comments

Working in the fast changing world of IT, sometimes is good to stop, take a breather and reflect on where we are and how we got here. Cloud computing is certainly no exception and has had an enormous amount of hype over the past 5 years, but has it lived up to the promise?

Looking Back

I and many others at PDC 2008 listened to the announcement of Azure and the follow up communications as Microsoft went “all in” on the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Ideal Workloads for Cloud”

AWS Cloud Architecture Essentials – The Commodity

16th of May, 2013 / / No Comments

AWS Architectures start at the heart of many businesses, customers.

The foundation and principles of AWS have been built on Amazon, a company that was envisaged to be the most customer centric company in the world. “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.” – Jeff Bezos

These types of requirements are inputs into an ethos that pervades, that underpins the Architecture of AWS.… [Keep reading] “AWS Cloud Architecture Essentials – The Commodity”

An Overview of Server Name Indication (SNI) and Creating an IIS SNI Web SSL Binding Using PowerShell in Windows Server 2012

18th of April, 2013 / / 7 Comments

One of the frustrating limitations in supporting secure websites has been the inability to share IP addresses among SSL websites. In the day, there were a few ways to solve this limitation. One, you could use multiple IP addresses, binding a SSL certificate to each combination of an IP address and standard SSL port. This has been the best method to date but it is administratively heavy and not necessarily a good use of valuable IP addresses.… [Keep reading] “An Overview of Server Name Indication (SNI) and Creating an IIS SNI Web SSL Binding Using PowerShell in Windows Server 2012”

Azure AD and the Progression of Microsoft Identity and Access Management

16th of April, 2013 / / 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”

Cloud Storage AWS and Azure

22nd of February, 2013 / / 3 Comments

Kloud Cloud

Working with new technologies, rapid rates of change, the excitement of the unknown are good reasons to work in IT. The constant change keeps things fresh and interesting.

The thing that gets me excited though, is the business innovation that occurs with the application of the right mix of technology to otherwise everyday business problems. At Kloud we get to do this all the time!!

I’d like to share with you some simple use cases for cloud services that we have recently been a part of that makes IT Managers and Systems Administrators look like stars.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Storage AWS and Azure”

Publish Content to the Azure CDN with URLRewrite

23rd of May, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that will cache and serve content from edge nodes closer to the user’s browser. By utilising this functionality websites can offload much of their static content delivery to those servers saving valuable web processing and bandwidth for core business related activities and giving the user a better online experience.

A CDN should be considered for delivering content for Internet workloads that exhibit:

  • Static or slow changing content
  • Content shared by many users
  • Geographically dispersed users
  • Ad-hoc or irregular usage (and therefore don’t get the benefit of the browser cache)
  • Expensive or saturated bandwidth connections

One or more of these characteristics is an indicator that a CDN may be a worthwhile investment, but the investment need not be a large one.… [Keep reading] “Publish Content to the Azure CDN with URLRewrite”

Cloud Revolution – The Blind Entrepreneur

6th of December, 2011 / / 1 Comment

[Following from Cloud Revolution]

Profitable since the first quarter, 375 million page views per month, $4 million in annual revenue, 75 employees and $30 million in venture funding. Certainly sounds like a successful business, and it is.

I Can Has Cheezburger has leveraged the initial success of that hit web site by launching hundreds of other similar but slightly different sites based on the original. Many of these sites fail to attract traffic and are shut down within weeks, but every now and then one works, like “Fail Blog” or “Totally looks like“.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Revolution – The Blind Entrepreneur”

Cloud Revolution – The Late Night Scientist

6th of December, 2011 / / 1 Comment

[Following from Cloud Revolution]

It’s late at night in January and an email just arrived that has someone very excited. A medical student has won an auction, but this is no eBay auction, it’s an Amazon EC2 instance auction. She has been preparing for this moment for over a year and will make or break her post-doctoral research paper.

She is continuing the valuable work done by her predecessors in the field of on Parkinson’s research and its relationship to dopamine levels in the brain.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Revolution – The Late Night Scientist”

Cloud Revolution

28th of November, 2011 / / 3 Comments

There has been much focus recently on cloud computing and its adoption (or not) by the enterprise. Although most cloud vendors are understandably keeping their cards close to the chest, by all reports the enterprise uptake has been slow.
The problem as I see it thus far has been:

  1. Enterprises are notoriously bad at costing internal IT infrastructure. For 20 years the IT department has sat comfortably in the corner of the office occasionally ducking in and out of that off-limits humming room with no windows speaking a secret coded language of CAT-5 cables and firewalls.
… [Keep reading] “Cloud Revolution”