Tag - Azure

When would I recommend Windows Virtual Desktop to a customer?

Call me crazy: I don't see the value in a Remote Desktop or Virtual Desktop experience for its own sake. The purpose of this kind of solution is to provide centralized management and remote access to specifically Windows-based applications. In short: Remove your dependency on Windows, and you've removed the...
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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 similar (e.g. Citrix, VMware View, etc.). Usually this type of service was...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Azure Virtual Network: What is the difference between Policy-based and Route-based VPN?

You want to configure a Site-to-Site (S2S) VPN tunnel from an on-premises hardware VPN device, such as your firewall, and an Azure Virtual Network. For this, you require several objects in Azure. One of those is a "virtual network gateway"--which is basically just a software VPN appliance with a public...
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