Encryption In The Cloud

15th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Is it safe? 

Three simple yet chilling words immortalized by the 1976 movie Marathon Man staring Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, in which Olivier tries to discover by very unpleasant means whether the location of his stolen diamonds has been exposed.

Well had Sir Lawrence encrypted that information, there would have been no need for him to worry because he would have known that short of using a weak cypher or vulnerable algorithm or password, encrypted data has a very strong chance of remaining secret no matter what.… [Keep reading] “Encryption In The Cloud”

Create a Cloud Strategy For Your Business

15th of August, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Let’s be clear, today’s cloud as a vehicle for robust and flexible enterprise grade IT is here and it’s here to stay. Figures published by IDG Research’s 2015 Enterprise Cloud Computing Survey predict that in 2016 25% of total enterprise IT budgets will be allocated to cloud computing.

They also reported that the average cloud spend for all the enterprises surveyed would reach 2.87M in the following year and that 72% of enterprises have at least one application running in the cloud already, compared to 57% in 2012.… [Keep reading] “Create a Cloud Strategy For Your Business”

Performance Tuning Ubuntu Server For Use in Azure cloud

8th of August, 2016 / / 3 Comments

The following describes how to performance tune Ubuntu Server virtual machines for use in Azure. Although this article focuses on Ubuntu Server because it’s better established in Azure at this time. It’s worth mentioning that Debian offers better performance and stability overall, albeit at the cost of some of the more recent functionality support available in Ubuntu. Regardless many of the optimizations discussed below apply equally to both although commands and settings may vary occasionally.

Best practice recommendations from Microsoft.… [Keep reading] “Performance Tuning Ubuntu Server For Use in Azure cloud”

Modern Authentication and MAPI-HTTP

27th of July, 2016 / / No Comments

If you haven’t heard, Modern Authentication (aka ADAL), has now officially gone GA (https://blogs.office.com/2015/11/19/updated-office-365-modern-authentication-public-preview/) – which means that if you are utilising Office 365 services, particularly Exchange Online, and Office 2013/2016 as your client, you should really be looking at enabling this functionality for your end users.

For those unfamiliar with Modern Auth, there are numerous benefits, but one of the most obvious for end users is it removes the need for the use of ‘save my credentials’ when signing into Exchange Online and provides a true SSO experience when combined with ADFS Federation.… [Keep reading] “Modern Authentication and MAPI-HTTP”

The art of managing a service

22nd of July, 2016 / / 1 Comment

In the age of technology, it’s important to deliver value to customers in terms of outcomes. Service typifies what this means, providing value to the customer.

There is an art to managing a service, it’s here I want to focus the attention. “Art,” implies mastery of any sort of craft.  I love the picture this paints.  One could imply that managing a service is a mastering it, in turn mastering value.

Here’s a few pointers on how to do that.… [Keep reading] “The art of managing a service”

Break down your templates with Linked Templates (Part 2)

30th of April, 2016 / / 2 Comments

Continued from part 1

The 2nd part of the series will describe how we construct Azure Resource Manager linked templates.

Quick Recap

In the first part, we set up the first template which deploys the storage, virtual network, and subnets. This will be our “master” template where we will link all our related templates.

 

Linked templates.png

  • 1st template: master template – we will modify this template slightly to capture parameters and the linked templates
  • 2nd template: two web servers (IIS) – this is a new template
  • 3rd template: DB server (MySQL) – a new template

We will use the Azure quickstart templates on GitHub as the basis for the second and third templates.… [Keep reading] “Break down your templates with Linked Templates (Part 2)”

Break down your templates with Linked Templates (Part 1)

16th of April, 2016 / / 3 Comments

Templated deployment is one of the key value propositions of moving from the Azure classic to Resource Manager (ARM) deployment model.  This is probably one key feature that made a big stride towards Infrastructure as a Code (IAC).  Personally, I have been looking forward to this feature since it’s a prominent feature on the other competing platform.

Now that this feature is live for a while, one aspect which I found interesting is the ability to link templates in Azure Resource Manager. … [Keep reading] “Break down your templates with Linked Templates (Part 1)”

Implement a SharePoint Timer job using Azure WebJob

15th of March, 2016 / / 1 Comment

The SharePoint Timer service runs in background to do long running tasks. The Timer service does some important SharePoint clean up tasks in the background but can also be used to provide useful functional tasks. For instance, there may be  a situation when you want to send newsletters to your users on regular basis or want to keep your customer up to date with  some regular timed information.

I will be using SharePoint Timer Service to send an email to newly registered customers/users for this demo.… [Keep reading] “Implement a SharePoint Timer job using Azure WebJob”

Highly available WordPress deployment on Azure

15th of March, 2016 / / 8 Comments

WordPress is the leading content management system today owning more than 50% of the market share. WordPress on Microsoft Azure is becoming a very popular offering with the ability to host WordPress as an Azure WebApp. While Microsoft has made the process of spinning up a WordPress site very easy with built in gallery images, running business critical applications on a cloud platform also introduces challenges in terms on availability and scalability.

WordPress Architecture

A typical WordPress deployment consists of the following two tiers:

  • Web Frontend – PHP web site
  • Backend Data store
    • Relational data store – Hierarchical entity store
    • Object data store – Used to store uploaded images and other artefacts

In order to guarantee high availability and scalability, we need to ensure that each of these service tiers are decoupled and can be separately managed.… [Keep reading] “Highly available WordPress deployment on Azure”

Office 365 Import Service via PowerShell

3rd of February, 2016 / / 32 Comments

UPDATE 10/02/2017

Ok, so sorry everyone, I’ve been a bit slack with this one and Microsoft have made some significant changes in this space since I blogged on it. I thought it best to get this page updated so anyone who googled it would have current info!

Firstly, Microsoft have changed the BLOB they give you for the ingestion service to write once. This of course means if you don’t place things in the right location (folder for example) it’s not going anywhere!… [Keep reading] “Office 365 Import Service via PowerShell”