21Nov2019
19Nov2019
Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) vs. traditional RDS or VDI
I want to talk about Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) as the successor to on-prem deployments of Remote Desktop Services (RDS), and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Many small and mid-sized businesses are already familiar with using Remote Desktop or...
16Nov2018
Three Azure solutions to SMB problems: The first rule of Azure is you don’t sell Azure
Different MSP's out there embrace the cloud to more or less extent. Most providers are doing Office 365 nowadays, but Azure (or IaaS solutions like it) is still nebulous or even a little scary: Some providers feel threatened by services like Azure, because deploying and managing on-premises servers still makes...
08Oct2018
Three ways to protect your customer’s on-premises data with Azure
I am going to spend a lot of time on this topic in the few next posts, because I think it is very important for service providers and consultants (which is a lot of my reader base)--we should all keep abreast of our options. In this series, I want to...
29Nov2017
Three ways to protect your customer’s on-premises data with Azure: Part 3 – Azure Site Recovery
In the previous two posts we looked at: Azure Backup (using the MARS agent) Azure Backup Server (free DPM server) Those two solutions are markedly different from one another, but they both basically provide some kind of backup. The former does only file, folder & system state information--no application data is...
28Nov2017
Three ways to protect your customer’s on-premises data with Azure: Part 2 – Azure Backup Server
In the previous post, we looked at Azure Backup using the MARS agent, which can only do file, folder & system state data, and must be configured on the local machine. As you may already be aware, there are no local backup copies in that solution--you would need to provide...
27Nov2017
Three ways to protect your customer’s on-premises data with Azure: Part 1 – Azure Backup with MARS
In this series we will explore three different Azure solutions, all of which are aimed at one objective: Protecting your organization's (or your customer's organization's) critical data. You might use just one of these, or any combination of them, in your own DR plan--but you will want to choose the right...
02Nov2017
Is Azure Backup as good as offline backup?
I am posing this question, not just for Azure Backup, but any cloud-based backup. Here's the question: Is Azure Backup (or any cloud-based backup for that matter) as good as having an offline backup?The Benefits of Azure / Cloud Backup
Certainly one of the biggest benefits of a cloud-based backup is that...
26Oct2017
Tutorial: How to Setup Azure Virtual Network with Windows Server Essentials and a Hardware VPN Appliance
Most tutorials on Azure Virtual Network and site-to-site VPN rely on Windows Server's RRAS role to create a quick and dirty VPN connection for demonstration purposes. But in a real world production environment, this is hardly ever the case; the better option by far for reliability and simplified routing is...
19Oct2017