Microsoft Azure Services
Summary: Products like Microsoft’s Azure services help to make a business leader’s life easier, and the lives of their employees. Dave Hodgdon and Steve Ripper of Portsmouth Computer Group discuss the ins and outs of Azure and related products.
Mike: Alright, it is Tech Tuesday here on Newstalk 98.1 WTSN. We’re joined by the folks from Portsmouth Computer Group. Dave Hodgdon and Steve Ripper. Dave, good morning. Welcome, Steve. How are ya?
Steve Ripper: Hey, Mike, how are you today?
Dave Hodgdon: Good morning, Mike.
Mike: You guys good? You guys good? Everything’s good?
Dave: We’re still recovering from the Patriots game. We went to the game Sunday night. Long night. We had fun, lots of fun.
Mike: So, what time did you get home from the Patriots game?
Dave: It was 1:30, quarter to 2:00.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, but it was well worth it, right?
Dave: Yeah. It’s a long. It’s a twelve-hour day.
Mike: Yeah, well, you know . . .
Dave: Lot of crazies there.
Mike: What time did you say . . . well, you’re one of the crazies down [crosstalk]
Steve: We were. We were.
Dave: Well, yeah, we gotta have . . .
Mike: What time did you start tailgating, come on?
Dave: About 4:00.
Mike: About 4:00 . . . yeah? So, you were nice and toasty by game time.
Steve: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Dave: Had a nice tipped sausages, we had it all, burgers . . .
Steve: And a win. And a win.
Mike: Yeah, and a win. A pretty easy win, actually.
Dave: Yeah. It was good.
Mike: Aaron Rodgers is great, but Green Bay I guess is not that good a team this year, they’re what, three and four now?
Steve: Yeah.
Dave: Three and four.
Mike: The Patriots won, what, six or seven in a row?
Dave: But it was good to see that World Series trophy again, eh? How about those Yankees? Alright.
Mike: Oh, stop it. Stop it, you Red Sox fans, you’re just . . . Ah, I don’t even know what the word is. I get it.
Dave: Ride the wave. Ride the wave.
Mike: I’ve given you credit. The Yankees had a good year, they won a hundred games.
Dave: They did.
Mike: And the Red Sox had one of the best seasons of major league baseball ever. They’re gonna go down as one of the greatest teams in the history of baseball.
Steve: They will. They will.
Mike: And then of course we’ll see if the teams stays intact next year.
Dave: Always a problem.
Microsoft Azure Services
Mike: So, it’s Tech Tuesday, the folks from Portsmouth Computer Group join us, you can check them out at their website, PCGIT.com. These guys are the experts, Dave and Steve, and we talk a lot about moving things down, moving things into the cloud. And talk about . . . I’ve heard about this term where we’re gonna talk about this a little bit today. Steve, what is this about Microsoft Azure Services. What is all that about?
Steve: So, the idea is, if you’ve been listening . . . you probably haven’t been listening these weeks, but if you’ve been listening, we’ve been talking about how you get all of the different things that your company uses IT-wise into the cloud.
Mike: Right.
Steve: So, the Azure part is how you get your servers into the cloud. So, if you have three or four servers, one of them is your file server, one of them is your active directory. When we say active directory, that’s literally how people are logging into their computers, what their usernames are, what their passwords are — that directory. What do you do with it? So, customers come to us, they go, “With a very basic thing, Mike, how do we turn them all off? If I turn them off, what do I lose?” So, the answer is you’re not losing anything, it’s just what replaces that in the cloud? So, Azure replaces literally the servers. We’re gonna build a server just like the one you have in your closet or your data center. We’re gonna build it in the cloud and then we’re gonna put the software, the apps, your files on it and give you access to it, but it’s literally not in your building with you anymore.
Azure Advantages
Mike: Dave, what’s the real advantage of that type of platform?
Dave: Several things. First of all, it’s known that it’s usually always be on your building. You don’t have to worry about power. You do need to worry about internet that you need to get to it, but you don’t have that large capital expense of buying the equipment in house.
Mike: Okay.
Dave: You won’t have the operating expense. It’s gonna be going. It’s not usually cheaper, but it’s very easy to scale, so a business . . . it’s very easy known as they go up or down. You’re subscribing to what you need. You pay for what you consume. So, I think it makes good business sense and not everything will go in the cloud. Steve and I have been speaking — there might be a hybrid model. You might have a line of business application, like your manufacturing software. It’s not gonna go in the cloud, but we can put, as Steve said, other things in the cloud and you have the best of both worlds.
Mike: So that is the method of operation. Most everything is going into the cloud. We’re living in the cloud now, right?
Dave: Correct.
Steve: So, a lot of times I talk to . . . the thing is when I talk to a company owner or an IT manager, an office manager, it’s like, “How do you sleep at night?” How do you get to a point where you’re not worrying, “will the server be on tomorrow morning?” Because even if you’re not thinking about that all the time, you’re thinking about . . . it’s a little bit in the back of your brain all the time.
Mike: Sure. Sure, yeah.
Steve: That’s a thing you’re managing, and it’s like, “Alright, if I come in, and the server’s not on, I’ve got a boss who is mad at me, and I’ve got ten employees who aren’t working.” Right, so a really huge part of the cloud is, listen, if we put it up there where there’s huge amounts of services . . . Amazon is running servers, Microsoft is running servers. These are huge companies with the ability to scale the money that you’re spending up so that the server’s never down. You’re literally not thinking about that anymore, because it literally almost can’t be. I get that there’s a chance that maybe some meteor hits the data center or something incredibly terrible happens, but pretty much not. So, you just stop worrying about it.
Mike: So, we’re not worried about Armageddon just yet.
Steve: No, not yet.
Mike: No, not just yet.
Dave: We have bigger problems if that happens.
Steve: Yes.
Mike: And then Bruce Willis will save us anyway.
Steve: Exactly.
Mike: Yeah, okay. So, what else is important about this, Dave?
Azure Products for IT
Dave: Well, the Azure, you can think of this like your house. It’s a platform. So as every business . . . there’s certain needs you have, so the Azure has many products. As Steve said, do you want your files in the cloud, do you want to control your management of your users, do you wanna run a particular application like the email? We spoke about that before, moving that up for your email.
Mike: Right.
Dave: The other big product we’ll talk about is OneDrive. How you can share files and permissions in the cloud, so I just try to keep it simple. Think as a platform, or your house, and I’m gonna dress up one room, I’m gonna add another room, and you don’t have to do everything at once. Azure is the platform, and then we add the services we need.
Mike: So, what is OneDrive? I’ve seen OneDrive on some of our servers here at WTSN as well. OneDrive. Talk about that.
Steve: So, OneDrive is mostly files. So, what are you doing with your files every . . . not only does a company have files on their services, but every individual user has stuff in their My Documents . . . they have Excel spreadsheets, they have documents. They have some recipes. They have pictures, huge amounts of pictures. So, we call those flat files. They’re not really associated with a database or program. They’re just the loose file that companies have. So, I’ll go into some companies and they’ll have just nothing but that. They have just thousands of Excel spreadsheets. So, what do we do with that? Other companies might have a database they run a program on, but of course their employees and they still have Word docs and PowerPoint presentations. Things like that. So where do you put them all? If you’re gonna get rid of the server that’s in the room, where does those files go? That’s where OneDrive comes in. So, there’s other products that do this. Drop Box is another product. There’s a lot of Google storage. Everybody gets the free storage somehow.
Mike: Is Drop Box similar to OneDrive?
Steve: Yeah. It’s very similar. OneDrive is Microsoft’s product for that. That’s what they push. So, the idea is that you get a OneDrive account, Dave has a OneDrive account, I have a OneDrive account. We can put all our data there. It’s not on the PC. If the PC blows up, right, I just get another PC, another laptop, another tablet, and then I go log back into my OneDrive account and there’s all my files.
Mike: It’s all there.
Steve: So, I didn’t lose it all.
Dave: That’s a key point, because so many people are mobile now, they have their notebooks. They always in the old days, take their files and try to save it to the server, but now their notebook’s gone or it’s lost. Their files are syncing to the cloud so it’s very good in today’s [crosstalk]
Mike: Automatically you mean?
Dave: Happening automatically. Those files are being synced, because a lot of times you are on a plane. You’re not gonna have the internet access, but you can have those files locally, work on them, and when you land back on the ground, they can sync back up to the cloud for the backup, because the amount of pain you see in someone’s face when they bring a system in and the notebook’s dead and there’s no files and they’ve lost everything . . .
Steve: Or even if they’re not in a company. They lose all their kid’s photos because the PC’s really become — they’ve taken over so many other things in the house, whether it’s your music collection, whether it’s your picture collection, right? So, you’ve got all your pictures, and you should see the faces on . . . they come in and they bring the PC in and it’s .. . hundreds and hundreds, thousands of pictures of their kids gone.
Mike: You can’t retrieve them.
Steve: Yeah. So, they’re really expensive. There are ways to send a hard drive in and they can do an analysis, a low level, and then maybe a repair, but it’s hugely expensive and sometimes it doesn’t work.
Mike: Now on a simpler notion; I’ve noticed you talk about the uploading to the cloud. I noticed that when I take on my iPhone, and I get home, they’re already in the cloud.
Steve: Sure.
Mike: And I don’t know if I’ve automatically set something up, or the new system has set it up automatically.
Steve: Yeah. So, this is the same idea. OneDrive does this, but Google . . . I mean the iPhone Apple cloud is built into the phones, so that’s already happening for you. They set it up automatically.
Mike: Great. Great, great, great.
Dave: And you might get the message that you’re running out of space, do you wanna buy more space?
Mike: Oh, sure, that always comes out.
Dave: Give me a little extra money . . .
Mike: Yeah, oh, give more money to Apple. I just wanna give more money to Apple, Dave . . . [crosstalk]
Steve: Well that’s what I was saying earlier. You get rid of the worry, is the server gonna crash, but now you have the worry of I have a subscription that I have to hit every month, right? What’s my —
Mike: Oh yeah.
Steve: — How much am I paying for all of this, again?
Mike: So eventually you have to pay for some of the space.
Dave: It’s not less money. A lot of people, you will pay more money, but it’s a consistent number. It’s not that big cap X, but Microsoft’s not losing money right here. There’s no way. Think about people used . . . in the old days, they would have used a Microsoft Office version 2003 for 15 years. They’re not making any money on you. Now they’re making money on every product every month, just a little bit.
Mike: Yeah, somehow I’m not worried about Microsoft’s profit and . . .
Dave: No, no.
Steve: No.
Intune Device Management
Mike: We’re all using their products. They’re all pretty good, I guess. We got about a minute or so left. What else can we tell our listeners today about the servers?
Dave: Let’s talk a little bit about Intune. I’ll let Steve, but the key to the Intune is the ability to manage your devices. People BYOD, they’re bringing their devices, they have their phones. These are all independent islands, and if you can’t manage those devices, it’s very difficult to push what you need out there, who has access to what, so I’ll let Steve talk a little bit about what Intune —
Mike: Intune is a program? A platform? What is Intune?
Steve: So, platform would be the right way to put it. It’s Microsoft’s way of taking all of the different ways that you would secure the devices. So, if you think about what we’re talking about, “That’s great Steve, we put all the files in the cloud. I put everything that my company does up there.” Now I’ve got 10, 15, 40, 100 employees walking around with a device in their pocket that connects to everything that our company does. Like, “Oh my word, right? Oh my word.” It’s a little black hole in everybody’s pocket that anyone, if they get a hold of it, could read the database, read the contact list, read the data that they’re doing for business. So, Intune is the platform that allows you to put the policies out. How do we get the policies out to the tablets, the phones, the laptops that are going around the country because I’m sending my sales force out, right? So, Intune allows you to do policies, so if you’re doing multi-factor authentication, different ways of logging into the different apps that you use of the programs, that’s how it does that.
Mike: Alright, sounds good. Alright, the guys from Portsmouth Computer Group. Check them out. PCGIT.com. They’ve got convenient locations in Portsmouth, in Dover. You can check them out at the 603-431-4121 in Portsmouth and in Dover 603-750-0101, all part of Tech Tuesday. Dave and Steve joining us this morning on Newstalk 98.1 WTSN. All power by the folks at Portsmouth Computer Group. Good to see you guys.
Dave: Always a pleasure, and again —
Steve: Thank you, Mike.
Dave: — If you need any help getting to the cloud, give PCG a ring and we’ll talk to you about Azure and all these wonderful products.
