Contact Us

Author: snp

5 Tips to Discover App Innovation on Azure

Posted on by snp

“How can we use Azure Cloud to modernize our applications” is among top asks we hear at SNP from our customers. There are various motivations for the question, from an interest in re-hosting legacy applications running on on-premise servers to greenfield application development initiatives. The person posing the question knows that cloud technology has something to offer, but the territory is unexplored and mysterious.

In this blog, my aim is not to extol the virtues of Azure Web Apps, Functions, Azure managed Kubernetes or other service of the moment. Neither will I convey best practices to solve an application architecture problem with Azure technology. Rather, my intent for these tips is to help lower the veil, so to speak. Follow some or all, and you will find Azure approachable and ready to implement for your application innovation projects.

1. Play in an Azure Sandbox

If you are new to Azure, Microsoft makes it super easy to set up a FREE Azure subscription. And, if you are a Visual Studio subscriber, don’t overlook your Azure benefits.

Once you have an Azure subscription, you’ll have access to the Azure Portal, the management portal for Microsoft Azure. Log in and you are prompted to take a guided tour. It’s short and worth the trip.

 

Next, I recommend a visit to the Quickstart Center. In the portal search box, start typing “quickstart” to expose the Quickstart Center link.

Azure Portal Search for Quickstart Center

Follow the link and review the “Get started” screen. You’ll want to review the Setup guides, but if you are eager to play, dive right into the “Start a project” options. The options do not require an existing application project or database. For instance, select “Create a web app” and then “Create a CI/CD pipeline with Azure DevOps Projects.” With DevOps Project, in a few steps through its wizard UI you can:

  • Create a Web App service (for Windows or Linux)
  • Application scaffolding for a .NET, Node.js, PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, Go or C
  • Create an Azure DevOps Organization
  • Git repository with Azure Repos
  • CI/CD pipeline with Azure Pipelines

Azure Portal Quickstart Center

Note the “Take an online course” tab in the Quickstart Center. This is one of several venues for deeper Azure study. I mention other learning resources in the tips that follow.

While in Azure Portal, my next suggestion to get a sense of the scope of Azure is to follow the All services link on the left menu. From here you can see over 100 Azure service types categorized by domains, such as Compute, Networking, Storage, Web, and so forth.

The groups that are the core of solutions in Azure for app innovation are Compute, Web, Containers, Integration, Internet of Things, Databases, and DevOps. Peer into these service types to get a high-level sense of what Azure has to offer.

Azure Portal All Services view

2. Explore the Azure Architecture Center

I started our tips with the Azure subscription sandbox, but paramount to Azure app innovation is an understanding of the service tooling and how to apply it. Azure Architecture Center holds the key to learning how to get the most out of Azure.

From the navigation menu on the left and featured links on the home page, we know that this is our go-to reference for:

  • Understanding Cloud fundamentals
  • Review of example scenarios and reference architectures
  • Guidance on cloud native, application design patterns
  • And much more

Azure Architecture Center home page screen capture

After the home page, an excellent place to start is the Azure Application Architecture Guide.

After gaining a foundational understanding of cloud computing and architectures, a primary concern of development teams is to review its digital estate and determine how to go about cloud adoption. There is an excellent set of articles for this, which begins with a favorite of mine The 5 Rs of rationalization.

3. Schedule an Azure Customer Immersion Experience

I’ve saved the sales pitch for this, our third tip ☺

Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) is a program for Microsoft Partners, such as SNP, to deliver hands-on training to software delivery teams. SNP’s expert facilitators can conduct the workshop on-site or remotely. The format is a blend of PowerPoint driven lecture, instructor led demonstrations, whiteboard sessions and proctored hands-on-labs.

For an App Innovation CIE, SNP can deliver a 1/2 day to multi-day workshop tailored to the technologies you work with and the Azure resources that best correlate to your application workloads.

For example, consider the topics below that we cover in our “App Innovation with Azure” 2-day workshop. This workshop targets product owners, developers and system administrators that contribute to the application value stream.

App Innovation on Azure Cloud
Learn the benefits of cloud computing and how Azure services facilitate modernization of application workloads.

Deploy a website to Azure with Azure App Service
Learn how to create a website through the hosted web app platform in Azure App Service. Use the publishing features of Visual Studio 2017 to deploy and manage an ASP.NET Core web application hosted on Azure.

DevOps for Azure Applications
An overview of DevOps practices and their benefits, followed by a guided tour of Azure DevOps, Microsoft’s suite of tools to plan smarter, collaborate better, and ship faster.

Containers on Azure
A synopsis of the benefits of containers for application packaging, and a survey of the options in Azure for container management and deployment.

Azure Dev Spaces
A demonstration of Microsoft’s utility to test and iteratively develop your entire microservices application running in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) without the need to replicate or mock dependencies.

4. Do a Hands on Lab

While the structured delivery of training via the CIE model is quite beneficial, Microsoft provides hands-on-labs that can be done at your own pace. The primary resources for app innovation labs are:

Put an “Azure Immersion Monday” on your calendar, where you block out an hour or two for a lab a couple times a month.

Azure hands on lab graphic

5. Azure Podcasts, Videos and Blogs

As technologies, we know how hard it is to keep apace with the latest developments. With some discipline, it is not difficult to keep up with changes in the fast evolving Azure ecosystem. The matrix of resources below helps me and I hope you find it useful, too!

Title Format Consume in… When
Azure Podcast Podcast 30 mins Tuesday commute
Azure DevOps Podcast Podcast 45 mins Wednesday commute
Azure Friday Video 15 mins Monday morning
Azure Source blog Blog 30 mins Wednesday morning

 

 

 

 

Azure Source is a compilation of content from the prior week. I’ll often bookmark several pieces to review later over the course of the current week. This usually adds another 30 to 60 minutes to my weekly Azure content consumption.

In Closing

As you have read the tips above and started to explore Azure on your own, you have seen the breadth of Azure and understand how to navigate and explore its myriad services. If you have any tips of your own or follow up questions, please feel free to contact us.

Managing Hybrid Identities with Microsoft Azure

Posted on by snp

Today, businesses are becoming a combination of on-premises and cloud applications. Users require access to those applications which are hosted both on-premises and in the cloud. Managing users both on-premises and in the cloud poses challenging scenarios.

Microsoft’s hybrid identity solutions span on-premises and cloud-based capabilities, creating a single user identity for authentication and authorization to all resources, regardless of location or device.

Azure AD Connect integrates any user who is present or being created in an on-premise Active Directory to Azure AD. This means you have a single user identity for accessing resources present on-premise, in Azure, O365 & your SaaS applications.

 

Business Benefits of Hybrid Identities:

  • An increase in productivity by providing access anywhere, anytime
  • Create and manage a single identity for each user across all your data center-based directories, keeping attributes in sync and providing self-service and SSO for users.
  • Keep resources productive with self-service password reset and group management for both data center and cloud-based directories.
  • Organizations have complete visibility and control over security and monitoring to help reduce inappropriate user activity and spot irregularities in user behaviors
  • Enforce strong authentication to sensitive applications and information with conditional access policies and multi-factor authentication.
  • Federate identities to maintain authentication against the data center-based directory.
  • Provide SSO access to hundreds of cloud-based applications.

 

The Three Hybrid Authentication Solutions:

While hybrid identity may seem like a complex issue when it is up and running, it makes accessing data and services both internal and external while collaborating with partners and customers much simpler. To achieve hybrid identity with Azure AD, three authentication methods can be used:

 

1. Password Hash Synchronization (PHS):

Password hash sync is the simplest way to enable authentication for on-premise AD objects in Azure AD. Users can use their existing on-prem credentials for accessing cloud-based applications on Azure. Active Directory DS stores the password in a hash form which is synced to Azure AD. When a user tries to login to Azure AD, the password is run through a hashing process and the hashed value is matched with the hash value present on Azure AD. If the hash values match, the user is allowed access to the resources.

 

2. Pass-Through Authentication (PTA):

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Pass-through Authentication allows your users to sign in to both on-premises and cloud-based applications using the same password. While deploying the Pass-through Authentication solution, lightweight agents are installed on your existing servers. These agents should have access to the on-premise AD domain controllers and outbound access to the internet. Network traffic is encrypted which is limited to authentication requests only.

 

3. Federation Authentication (AD FS):

With the Federation authentication method, you can federate your on-premises environment with Azure AD and use this federation for authentication and authorization. This sign-in method ensures that all user authentication occurs on-premises. Azure AD redirects the users to Active Directory Federations Services (ADFS) as the authenticated domain configured as a federated domain. The ADFS server authenticates the user with on-premise AD and returns a security token to authenticate with Azure AD. The configuration of this solution is much complex as it would require one or more ADFS Proxy servers, one or more ADFS Servers and SSL certificates for implementations.

 

Why SNP?

At SNP, we help you choose and implement a hybrid identity solution which aligns with your information technology roadmap. For more information, contact us here.

Power BI is Now Available on Microsoft’s 3 Sovereign National Clouds

Posted on by snp

Microsoft Power BI and its availability on national clouds highlights important considerations for organizations. Here’s a refined summary that emphasizes the implications of using Microsoft’s national cloud services:

Benefits of Microsoft Power BI in National Clouds

Overview: Microsoft Power BI is available on three national cloud platforms, providing organizations with tailored cloud solutions that comply with local regulations and enhance data security. These national clouds are designed to meet the specific needs of governments and regulated industries by offering isolated instances of Microsoft services within the geographic boundaries of specific countries.

Key Benefits for Organizations

  1. Data Sovereignty:
    • By utilizing national cloud services, organizations can ensure that their data remains within the borders of their country, addressing concerns about data residency and compliance with local laws.
  2. Enhanced Compliance:
    • Each national cloud environment maintains separate compliance offerings and audit procedures, aligning with government regulations. This allows organizations to meet stringent compliance requirements while leveraging Microsoft’s robust cloud capabilities.
  3. Consistent Security and Privacy:
    • While the compliance frameworks may differ, Microsoft maintains high standards of security, privacy, and transparency across all its cloud environments. Organizations can trust that their data is protected at all times.

Key Services Available in Microsoft’s National Clouds

  • Microsoft Azure Services:
    • Provides hyper-scale computing, storage, networking, and identity management tailored to meet government-required levels of security and compliance. Azure safeguards data with stringent control measures and transparency.
  • Microsoft Office 365:
    • Employs a defense-in-depth security strategy that layers multiple security controls (physical, logical, and data) to protect information. This ensures that if one security area fails, others remain in place to mitigate risk.
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365:
    • A cloud-based CRM solution that enables government employees to manage data reporting and workflows securely. It includes features to restrict access to sensitive data, ensuring that only authorized personnel can view critical information.

Conclusion

Leveraging Microsoft Power BI and other Microsoft services in national clouds allows organizations to take advantage of advanced analytics and productivity tools while adhering to local regulations and maintaining high security and compliance standards. This setup not only enhances operational efficiency but also instills confidence in data management practices, making it an ideal choice for organizations in regulated environments. By prioritizing data sovereignty and robust security, businesses can fully harness the power of the cloud without compromising on compliance or safety.

If you’re interested in transforming your company’s data into rich visuals to collect and organize so you can focus on what matters to you, Contact SNP Technologies here for more details and information on Power BI.

Achieve Cloud Native Network Security with Azure Firewall

Posted on by snp

Cloud developers and IT teams struggle to stay ahead of challenges protecting users, data, and applications from today’s cybersecurity attacks. With Azure Firewall, network security policies can be enforced while allowing companies to take advantage of the scale and simplicity of Azure.

 

Azure Firewall:

The Azure Firewall is fully integrated with the Azure platform, portal UI, and services. It offers fully native firewall capabilities for all your virtual network resources, and it includes built-in high availability that lets you scale your resources automatically. Azure’s Network Security Groups (NSG) are able to allow/deny and filter TCP/UDP traffic.

 

How it works:

IT administrators can create connectivity policies using application and network filtering rules and enforce the policies across multiple subscriptions and virtual networks. The new service is built to work with Azure’s existing security services to strengthen and enhance the entire security experience.

 

Azure Firewall offers advantages like:

  • Built-in high availability: No additional load balancers are required, and there is nothing you need to configure.
  • Unrestricted cloud scalability: Azure Firewall scales automatically to accommodate changing network traffic flows, so IT administrators never need to budget for peak traffic periods.
  • Application FQDN filtering rules: Users can limit outbound HTTP/S traffic to a specified list of fully qualified domain names (FQDN), including wild cards. This feature does not require SSL termination.
  • Network traffic filtering rules: Centrally create “allow” or “deny” network filtering rules by source and destination IP address, port, and protocol. Azure Firewall is fully stateful, which enables it to distinguish legitimate packets for different types of connections. Plus, rules are enforced and logged across multiple subscriptions and virtual networks.
  • FQDN tags: FQDN tags make it easy to allow well known Azure service network traffic through the firewall.
  • Outbound SNAT support: All outbound virtual network traffic IP addresses are translated to the Azure Firewall public IP address (Source Network Address Translation). The firewall can identify and allow traffic originating from a virtual network to remote Internet destinations.
  • Inbound DNAT support: Inbound network traffic to firewall public IP address is translated (Destination Network Address Translation) and filtered to the private IP addresses on virtual networks.
  • Azure Monitor logging: All events are integrated with Azure Monitor, allowing IT administrators to archive logs to a storage account, stream events to Event Hub, or send them to Log Analytics.

 

For more information on Azure Firewall, contact SNP Technologies here.

SQL Server 2008 + 2008 R2 End of Life Support- 4 Ways to Migrate to Microsoft Azure

Posted on by snp

On July 9, 2019, Microsoft will end support and security updates for SQL Server 2008 + 2008 R2. By that date, businesses using those systems will need to have migrated their operations to new software. That presents issues not only of cost and security but availability. It’s not like you can migrate during downtime anymore. The 24/7 nature of the modern IT organization demands that you transfer on the fly to minimize service interruptions.

SNP has put together a unique process to ensure your organization has a low-risk, high-availability move to your optimal successor system for SQL Server 2008 + 2008 R2. Beyond that, this process will give you a reliable and repeatable methodology for future upgrades that includes planning, technology implementation, and validation and training.

Two Migration Paths to the Modern Cloud:

1. Migrate SQL on-premises to Azure SQL Database Managed Instances (SQL DB MI): This option gives you an intelligent, fully-managed PaaS solution that provides near 100% compatibility with SQL Server on-premises. SQL MI provides built-in high-availability and disaster recovery capabilities plus intelligent performance features and the ability to scale on the fly. SQL MI also provides a version less experience that takes away the need for manual security patching and upgrades.

2. Migrate SQL on-premises to Azure SQL VM: This is an IaaS option that provides Extended Security Updates at no additional charge above the standard pricing for Azure Virtual Machines. For customers that migrate workloads to Azure Virtual Machines, we will offer Security Updates and Bulletins rated “Critical” for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2.  This route to modern migration also offers you:

  • Three years of Extended Security Updates at no additional charge and the ability to upgrade to a newer version when ready
  • Built-in monitoring of security and performance for hundreds to thousands of databases at scale
  • The option to migrate SQL Server workloads to Azure with on-premises licenses
  • Significant time and resource savings with hybrid capabilities

Whichever route you choose to the cloud, or if you have no digital transformation plan, we recommend you upgrade to the most current version of SQL Server. That way, even if you cannot meet the end of support deadline, you can buy Extended Security Updates to keep the remaining servers protected until you upgrade them. Otherwise, you can choose to move to Azure by opting to rehost, refactor, rearchitect, or rebuild your workload or app. Or, you can upgrade on-premises to the latest version of Windows Server.

4 Ways to Migrate to Microsoft Azure:

  • Rehost: Migrate 2008 and 2006 R2 workloads to Azure VM or Azure SQL Database MI (No code change required). This allows organizations to maintain existing versions and editions without paying for extended support. Microsoft is extending SQL Server 2008/2008R2 support through 2022 for servers migrated to Azure.
  • Refactor, Rearchitect, or Rebuild: Innovate with Windows server containers and Azure SQL Database MI (From minimal change to new code required)
  • Upgrade: Upgrade to Windows Server 2019 or SQL Server 2019 and get cloud and DevOps ready (potential code change required)
  • Pay for Extended Support: Here the costs are exponentially higher than the other options listed above and can be short term focused.

 

For more details of information on how you can prepare for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 end of support, contact an SNP representative.

Read more blogs on SQL Server 2008 + 2008 R2 End of Life:

 

Jenkins At Your Service On Azure

Posted on by snp

If you’ve been following developments at Microsoft during the tenure of CEO Satya Nadella, it is likely you have heard him say “Microsoft Loves Open Source!”

Here at SNP, we did not need to be convinced of the value open source tools bring to our customers. A case in point is Jenkins, an open source automation server that has been a leader in the DevOps tooling marketplace. For several years, Jenkins has been SNP’s go-to software for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

For its part, Microsoft is also a Jenkins fan, having an entire section of its Azure documentation devoted to Jenkins on Azure. As well, there are tutorials to cover specific use cases in the Azure context, such as to deploy from GitHub to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with Jenkins.

To get started with Jenkins in Azure, Microsoft provides a guide to creating a Jenkins server on an Azure Linux VM from the Azure portal. This is all well and good, but this requires love and attention to a virtual machine, and that may not be your cup of tea. Jenkins as a service may be more to your liking. For this one can deploy Jenkins on Azure Web App for Containers. (At this time, put on your finest British accent, and repeat after me, “Jenkins at your service on Azure, Madam”.)

In the open source spirit, SNP has contributed a Docker image solution on GitHub titled Jenkins on Azure Web App for Containers. You can fork the Git repo to use as the basis for your own container image.

 

What follows is a step by step guide to deploy Jenkins on Azure Web App for Containers.

Get the Git Repository

Visit Jenkins on Azure Web App for Containers to clone or fork the repo. Read the README.md file, of course, and review the files in the repository.

Build an Image, Push to a Container Registry

The following steps assume you have Docker installed in your development environment.

In your favorite terminal, e.g. Git Bash, switch to the directory in which you cloned the repository.

 

At the command link, enter the Docker build command, for example:

docker build -t mikesacr.azurecr.io/jenkinsonazure:v1 .

 

List images to verify the build:

docker images

 

Run the image locally, for example:

docker run -p 8080:8080 mikesacr.azurecr.io/jenkinsonazure:v1

 

Push the image to a container repository. For example, using Azure Container Registry:

docker login mikesacr.azurecr.io -u myusername docker push mikesacr.azurecr.io/jenkinsonazure:v1

 

Once complete, a sha256 value with a unique identifier for your image is displayed, for example:

 

This sha256 is also visible in the Azure Portal, for example:

Deploy your Container Image on Web App for Containers

The following steps assume you have an Azure Subscription and an App Service Plan.

Create a Web App for Containers Resource

In Azure Portal, click “Create a resource”, then search for “Web App for Containers”:

This will open a Web App for Containers resource information blade. Click on the “Create” button at the bottom of the blade:

Next, fill in values for the parameters required to create your resource.

  1. Enter a unique App name
  2. Select your Azure Subscription
  3. Select a Resource Group. I recommend a new resource group because the life cycle of your Jenkins app will probably be independent of that of other applications.
  4. Select “Linux” as your OS
  5. Select an App Service plan/Location. If you have not already created a Service Plan, that’s OK. A new one can be created from here. The Service Plan should be in the same region as the Resource Group. Check this list of locations that support the Web App for Containers.
  6. Configure container. Here we identify the container registry and container image to be deployed to the Web App. Click the “Apply” when done filling in this blade.
  7. Click the “Create” button

Note: Alternatively, the preceding steps can be accomplished using the Azure CLI.

When the deployment completes, you should see your new Resource Group and new Web App resource in Azure Portal. Click on the Web App Resource. There are a few steps you need to complete before running your Jenkins application, as noted in the README.md file.

Web App Configuration Steps

  1. Ensure that the WEBSITES_ENABLE_APP_SERVICE_STORAGE app setting to “true” in the Application settings blade of the Web App.Application setting for WEBSITES_ENABLE_APP_SERVICE_STORAGE
  2. Manually create the jenkins_home directory in the Web App /home directory
    before you run the container and install Jenkins. This can be done from the Kudu Bash screen or from an FTPS session.Screen capture of web app home directory from FileZilla FTP client.

Run your Jenkins Container

From the Web App Overview blade, click on the URL to run your Jenkins instance. After a brief initialization period, you should be presented with the Unlock Jenkins screen.

You are on your own from here, but keep in mind the “Gotchas” we have documented in the repo’s README.md file.

Jenkins Unlock Jenkins screen

In Closing

If you have questions and suggestions to improve the solution, we are happy to receive issues and pull requests. Contact SNP here.

8 Ways Data Analytics Can Improve Your Business

Posted on by snp

Data analytics has become a crucial element for businesses looking to gain insights, optimize operations, and drive growth. Here are eight ways data analytics can improve your business:

1. Enhanced Decision-Making

  • Informed Choices: Data analytics provides actionable insights, enabling managers to make better decisions based on factual information rather than intuition. This leads to more strategic planning and risk management.

2. Improved Customer Insights

  • Personalization: By analyzing customer data, businesses can understand preferences, behaviors, and trends, allowing for tailored marketing strategies and personalized customer experiences that increase engagement and loyalty.

3. Operational Efficiency

  • Process Optimization: Analytics can identify inefficiencies in operations, helping businesses streamline processes, reduce costs, and enhance productivity. This can lead to faster turnaround times and improved resource allocation.

4. Predictive Analytics

  • Forecasting Trends: Predictive analytics leverages historical data to forecast future trends, helping businesses anticipate market changes, customer demands, and potential challenges. This enables proactive planning and agility.

5. Enhanced Marketing Strategies

  • Targeted Campaigns: By analyzing data on past marketing campaigns, businesses can identify what works and what doesn’t, allowing for more effective and targeted marketing efforts that maximize ROI.

6. Risk Management

  • Identifying Risks: Data analytics can help identify potential risks and vulnerabilities in operations, finances, and compliance, allowing businesses to take proactive measures to mitigate them.

7. Increased Revenue Opportunities

  • Market Analysis: By analyzing market trends and customer behavior, businesses can uncover new revenue streams and growth opportunities, enabling them to stay ahead of competitors.

8. Performance Measurement

  • KPI Tracking: Data analytics enables organizations to define, track, and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) effectively, providing a clear view of performance across various departments and facilitating continuous improvement.

Conclusion

Incorporating data analytics into your business strategy can lead to significant improvements across various facets of the organization. By leveraging data-driven insights, businesses can enhance decision-making, optimize operations, and create personalized experiences that foster customer loyalty and drive growth. As data continues to grow in importance, organizations that prioritize data analytics will be better positioned to thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Top 7 Reasons Why your Business Needs Open-Source

Posted on by snp

Adopting open-source solutions can provide numerous advantages for businesses of all sizes. Here are the top seven reasons why your business should consider leveraging open-source technologies:

1. Cost Savings

  • No Licensing Fees: Open-source software is typically free to use, which can significantly reduce software licensing costs. This allows businesses to allocate resources to other critical areas.

2. Flexibility and Customization

  • Tailored Solutions: Open-source software can be modified to meet specific business needs. This flexibility enables organizations to customize applications to suit their unique workflows and processes.

3. Community Support and Collaboration

  • Vibrant Communities: Open-source projects often have active communities that provide support, documentation, and shared knowledge. This collaborative environment fosters innovation and allows users to benefit from collective expertise.

4. Enhanced Security

  • Transparency: With open-source software, the source code is publicly available, allowing for peer review and scrutiny. This transparency can lead to quicker identification and resolution of security vulnerabilities compared to proprietary software.

5. Avoiding Vendor Lock-In

  • Interoperability: Open-source solutions often promote interoperability, reducing dependency on a single vendor. This allows businesses to switch providers or integrate various technologies without significant barriers.

6. Rapid Innovation

  • Continuous Development: Open-source projects benefit from contributions from developers around the world, leading to faster updates, new features, and enhancements. This can help businesses stay competitive with the latest technologies.

7. Skill Development and Talent Acquisition

  • Fostering Expertise: Using open-source technologies can help organizations build a skilled workforce familiar with widely-used platforms and tools. This expertise can enhance internal capabilities and attract talent interested in working with innovative technologies.

Conclusion

Integrating open-source solutions into your business strategy can lead to significant cost savings, increased flexibility, and enhanced security. By leveraging the power of community-driven development and avoiding vendor lock-in, businesses can remain agile and innovative in a rapidly changing technological landscape. As open-source software continues to gain traction, embracing it can position your organization for long-term success.

For more on Open-Source Solutions, Contact SNP here.

Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud: Which One is Right for You?

Posted on by snp

Shortly after an organization makes the decision to migrate to the cloud, another big decision must be made: Which cloud model should the business adopt? The public cloud model and private model each have benefits and drawbacks, and several factors must first be weighed before the right decision can be determined.

At SNP Technologies, we take a highly-structured approach to cloud design and development, and our implementation services take into consideration our clients’ current and future business needs before recommending a specific cloud model.

Following is a brief explanation highlighting the differences between public and private cloud offerings as well as some of the key factors we take into consideration before making a recommendation:

Public clouds are hosted services made available over the internet. Organizations that use web servers or application systems where security and compliance requirements are not very rigid normally prefer to use public clouds. For instance, web-based email, data storage, or file transfers over the internet (e.g. FTP), online office applications, and web hosting often use a public cloud.

Key resources (e.g., servers, storage) are shared between multiple users, and the infrastructure, services, and usage policies are often times managed by a cloud service provider.

 

Some of the key advantages of a public cloud offering include:

  • Simple and easy to deploy: Public clouds are easily available as a service over the internet.
  • Low initial investment costs: Shared key resources (e.g. servers, storage) enable lower start-up costs, which makes public clouds most appealing to start-ups and small businesses.
  • Efficient: IT resources and services are made available immediately, saving time for the company.
  • Zero maintenance: Hardware and network infrastructure is maintained by the cloud service provider.
  • No contracts: Public clouds typically use a pay-as-you-go pricing model, also known as a utility model.

 

Some of the disadvantages of a public cloud offering include:

  • Lack of control: Clients have zero control over the data infrastructure, which can raise concerns about data privacy and integrity.
  • Performance: The network performance depends on the public cloud provider’s internet connectivity, which is largely outside the customer’s control.
  • Security concerns:  With hardware resource being shared among multiple users, IT security issues and data theft concerns arise.

Private Clouds, which are also known as enterprise clouds, are for organizations that have high security, compliance, and data privacy requirements. Many mission-critical business applications have specific performance, security, and compliance needs, that can only be met by a customized private cloud, which gives you a managed, dedicated, secure and scalable environment. A private cloud needs to be looked at as a long-term investment, which involves a careful selection of the right technology and architecture to ensure optimal performance over a specific period.

 

Some of the key advantages of a private cloud include:

  • Control: Web-based controls allow users to monitor and track system usage and give them a complete view of their IT infrastructure.
  • Security & Compliance: Each cloud environment belongs to a single client, which allows for more granular security controls as well as alignment with organizational and industry data governance policies.
  • Reliability: Private cloud offerings enable end-to-end managed services capabilities and can meet stricter SLA requirements. Additionally, complementary services such as backup and disaster recovery and granular data retention requirements are oftentimes included.
  • Affordable: With the flexibility of private clouds, new workloads can be deployed without incurring extra capital expenses in physical infrastructure.
  • Superior Performance: Normally, private clouds are deployed inside the firewall of the organization’s intranet which ensures efficiency and strong network performance.
  • Easy Customization: Private cloud hardware and other resources can be easily customized.

 

Some potential drawbacks of private cloud offerings include:

  • Higher Costs: Building an on-premise private cloud data center isn’t cheap. In addition to the initial IT and hardware costs, companies must factor personnel costs and periodic upgrade costs. In the case of outsourced private cloud, operating costs will include per-resource usage and are subject to change at the discretion of the service provider.
  • Underutilization: Unlike public clouds where resources are turned on and paid for as needed, private cloud requires companies to purchase resources ahead of time and to predict future needs, which can lead to underutilization.
  • Capacity Ceiling: Due to a service provider’s limitations, users could run up against a capacity ceiling regarding how many servers or storage resources the provider can handle.
  • Vendor lock-in: This can be a major impediment to private cloud adoption, especially when the hardware and infrastructure is outsourced. This is a service delivery technique where the client company is forced to continue with the same service provider, thus preventing the client from migrating to another vendor.

However, by using a Hybrid approach, companies can maintain control of an internally managed private cloud, keeping the public cloud optional. For instance during peak periods individual applications, or portions of applications can be migrated to the Public Cloud.  This will also be beneficial during predictable outages: hurricane warnings, scheduled maintenance windows, rolling brown/blackouts etc

For more information about which cloud computing model suits your business best, Contact SNP Technologies here.

Top 5 Azure Cognitive Services for your Applications

Posted on by snp

Microsoft’s cloud-based platform Azure has helped many businesses expand while reducing costs associated with hosting and storing data and applications in the cloud. SNP Technologies leverages AI-based cognitive services to add intelligence, automation and search capabilities to your applications. And by adding easy to use APIs (application program interfaces), machine learning algorithms and real-time computing, SNP can help you build powerful intelligence within your applications to trigger natural and contextual interactions with features like facial recognition, speech recognition, emotion detection, and speech and language understanding.

Here are the top five most popular Azure cognitive services and how they help your business grow:

 

1. Vision

This is a Microsoft Cognitive Service to build custom image classifiers. Custom Vision makes it easier and faster to build, deploy and improve image classifiers with artificial intelligence and machine learning. This service features facial analysis, handwriting recognition, optical character recognition (OCR) from images and real-time video analyses.

2. Speech

Through Azure’s speech cognitive services API, you can integrate speech processing capabilities into any app or service. So, regardless of speech style, geography or technical term, the application allows users to recognize everything that’s spoken and transcribe the text accordingly.

3. Language

Language and context-based meaning are two of the most important features that define communication. Through the cognitive services language API, you can develop apps that understand a wide variety of text.

4. Knowledge

Azure’s cognitive services offer some of the most comprehensive and accurate database creation and search tools available. The knowledge API can leverage or create resources to be integrated into apps and services with several other capabilities. For instance, a Q&A service can be used to scan vast amounts of content and text and quickly extract the most relevant information. So, no matter the question, you’re bound to find the answers you’re seeking.

5. Search

Search helps users find what they need while searching through billions of web pages, videos, news search, and images. Leveraging Bing, cognitive services employ powerful AI-powered algorithms capable of searching, comparing results, and summoning only those that are relevant to your inquiry.

Microsoft Azure has a wide range of intelligent AI-powered services, each designed to accommodate various needs. Through this, you can create systems that can see, hear, speak and understand people in their own natural language and use the same communication method to relate to them.

Interested in incorporating Azure Cognitive Services into your next app? Let us assist you! Contact SNP here.

Microsoft Cognitive Services