Most businesses are now familiar with the concept and associated benefits of moving workloads such as email to the cloud using Office 365. But does current technology really make it a viable proposition for businesses to decommission all of their on-premise servers and rely solely on cloud services?

DOES YOUR BUSINESS STILL REQUIRE AN ON-PREMISE SERVER?

With no keynote speeches scheduled for today at the Microsoft Ignite conference, this question became the focus of our second day here in Atlanta as we visited the Expo area and spoke to some of the experts promoting new partner solutions and offerings.

Whilst many Utilize customers have migrated to Office 365, most still have the residual need to retain some servers to manage logins, file security and user access rights along with legacy or line of business applications.

But today we saw several demonstrations of Microsoft’s cloud-based Enterprise Mobility and Security Suite (EMS), which gave us a glimpse at how a traditional on-premise Active Directory can now be migrated to Azure. This setup can be complemented by Azure Rights Management to control, from the cloud, which users have access to specific documents and where they can be distributed.

For example, a file can be restricted from being emailed outside of an organisation based on some set criteria such as whether it contains a credit card number. Any document classified as being suitable for distribution outside of the corporate infrastructure can be tracked online, showing where in the world each copy of the file resides and, if necessary, the access rights can be digitally revoked (providing it has internet access).

GROUP POLICIES RUNNING FROM THE CLOUD

The security of computers has traditionally been managed by something called Group Policy, hosted on an on-premise server that restricts certain functionality to end users such as installing new software and accessing administrative functions. Within EMS, Microsoft Intune now enables administrators to control this from the cloud, opening up the possibility of removing any on-premise server.

In conclusion, we’ve seen today that modern device management and security from the cloud is now a reality and is accessible to every business for a low monthly cost. During the coming months, Utilize will continue to test these technologies and develop them with a view to launching a true server-less infrastructure to our clients as soon as it becomes a viable proposition. Of course there is a conversation to be had around legacy line of business applications, but from what we have seen today, standard technologies are a significant step closer and the reality of a true server-less network is not very far away…

Miles walked today: 5.69
Coffees and Diet Cokes consumed: 6