October 2014

The CIOs Guide

to Understanding
Microsoft Cloud
Services

Authors
Adetayo Adegoke is the national practice lead for Perficients enterprise applications
infrastructure group. In this role, he serves as a managing consultant, sales support
technologist, emerging services evangelist as well as senior solutions architect for Microsoft
Office 365, Microsoft Azure and IIS-based services and platforms including but not limited to
SharePoint. Adetayo is particularly skilled in advising firms and providing assets that assist
clients with evaluating and transitioning to cloud solutions based on the Microsoft platform.

Abstract
This white paper is designed for executives who are examining

People talk about public and private cloud service offerings. The key

Microsofts cloud service offerings (Azure, Office 365, Project Online,

differentiator between these two offerings is who offers the service:

TFS Online, Dynamics CRM Online) as a way to contain and scale

your organization (private cloud) or an external vendor such as

back exploding IT cost and, become more nimble. This paper also

Microsoft, Amazon or Google (public cloud). Regardless of public or

serves to compare Microsoft with other cloud service vendors such as

private, the key concepts for an excellent cloud service offering are:

Amazon and Google, but does not discuss those vendors offerings.
This paper will also be useful to technically inclined readers but
these readers should be aware that this is not an exhaustive
technical view on all matters related to Microsoft Azure and Office
365. Rather, it focuses on understanding the solutions Azure
provides with respect to a specific set of business opportunities,
challenges and objectives at an executive level.

standardization, openness, flexibility, scalability and reliability.

Sound Like a Pro: IaaS, PaaS & SaaS

Concepts

IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service, PaaS is Platform as a

Service and SaaS is an acronym for you guessed it Software
as a Service. Now that we have that out of the way, how should we
think about these concepts with respect to our current internal IT
capabilities and what Microsoft as an IT vendor provides?

The goal here to provide enough information to simplify the decision

process and make it clearer.

Lets Speak the Same Language

When you travel to a foreign country, your journey is typically more
enjoyable if you know the local language. The same is true for
learning about cloud service offerings such as Azure and Office 365.

On Premises

On premises is the traditional way of deploying and managing

IT assets in your own datacenter. With on-premises assets, you
have full control over infrastructure, from networking to storage to
servers all the way through the application stack you manage
everything.

It is important for us to review some common terms and concepts so

As an example, lets take a look at a common workload, such

we have a good baseline for deeper cloud-related concepts.

as your collaboration environment deployed as an on-premises

Cloud / Cloud Computing / Cloud Services

SharePoint 2013 intranet portal.

Youve obviously heard the word cloud a few times over the last
couple of years. Or maybe cloud computing. Or better yet, cloud
services. These terms are often used interchangeably. So, what
is The Cloud? Think of the cloud as a collection of servers in
datacenters somewhere, providing services and applications as you
need them.
You can also imagine the cloud as a marketplace of cloud services.
And, at a high level, think of a cloud service as a collection of
infrastructure components that serve a particular purpose like servers
and hardware that provide on-demand storage or hosted email.

2 The CIOs Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services

For this on-premises solution, imagine that your IT team has

created and assigned storage endpoints to your Windows Hyper-V
farm (or other virtualization platform). They used the Hyper-V farm
to create virtual machines (VMs) running the Windows Server
2012 OS and created these VMs from a VM template that is fully
patched and managed by the desktop/server engineering team.
After many months of planning, budgeting and testing, the
virtualization sub-team in the IT group created multiple Hyper-V
farms in different datacenters for disaster recovery (DR) and high
availability (HA) purposes, and configured storage replication
appropriately to support this virtualization solution. This was

necessary because of the service level agreement (SLA) terms

demanded by the business.
The database engineering team used multiple scripts to build your
AlwaysOn SQL Server database backend solution for SharePoint
with availability groups configured for HA and DR purposes.
In addition, the network engineering team configured network
subnets appropriately for the SharePoint architecture, so that SQL
and SharePoint servers can communicate with each other. The
server engineering team decided to script out the server build
tasks and also deployed a number of custom solutions to the
SharePoint farm. The SharePoint administrators also have direct
access to the SharePoint databases, which they optimized to
improve performance.
This sounds like a lot of work because it is a lot of work. More
work, in fact, than most organizations want to take on just to
enable SharePoint for internal collaboration.

Infrastructure as a Service IaaS

Lets switch gears and talk about IaaS. Using the on-premises
example we just described, lets take a look at how the same end
goal can be achieved by an IaaS offering. With IaaS, you have
full control to the OS layer, but without having to worry about the
physical aspect of building a virtualization platform solution, as you
would with on-premises.
This is wildly important.
We all know how long it takes to order servers and appliances,
to rack and cable them in multiple datacenters and install the
operating system on each box. With IaaS, we skip these tasks and
get right to creating SharePoint VMs in Microsoft Azure, using your
corporate OS template that was uploaded to Azure. This template

might come preconfigured with development tools such as Visual

Studio 2012 and SharePoint Designer 2013. It could also have
SQL Server 2012 and SharePoint 2013 build scripts with other
software already preloaded. Alternatively, you could just use the
out-of-box OS template provided by Microsoft as part of your
Azure subscription, and build out your development environment
using scripts.
The key takeaway here is that you do not have to manage the
underlying hypervisor solution, underlying physical servers,
supporting storage endpoints or networking. Microsoft does all this
for you.
The one minor limitation with Azure IaaS right now is that you do
not have access to the hypervisor console (Hyper-V Manager)
since the virtualization platform layer and the underlying layers
that support it are managed entirely by Microsoft. You do,
however, have access to everything else from the OS layer to
the applications layer.

Platform as a Service PaaS

Lets examine the PaaS concept a little bit more closely. Microsoft
Azure provides PaaS offerings in the form of Media Services,
Cloud Services, Web Sites and SQL databases. Within this
band of the Microsoft cloud offerings spectrum, you do not
deploy SharePoint servers as you would with on-premises and
IaaS layers. Instead, you deploy custom applications written by
your software development team to PaaS, using programming
languages such as C#, Perl, ASP.Net and so on. You do not have
to worry about the underlying infrastructure that is the foundation
of your PaaS solution implementation. Azure manages that for
you, doing things like OS patching and automatically spinning up
more server instances or storage to support your applications
configuration settings.

The CIOs Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services 3

Common use-case scenarios with PaaS involve migrating custom

ASP.NET web solutions to the Microsoft Azure Web Sites feature.
Another scenario many customers ask about is migrating existing
backend databases to the Azure SQL Database PaaS offering.
PaaS accelerates custom development efforts by putting a blanket
over your infrastructure requirements so that you can focus more
on the application itself. Even though you do not see it directly
in the background, Azure is automatically managing the entire
infrastructure workload for your solution.

Software as a Service SaaS

Last but not least, lets quickly review the SaaS concept. With
SaaS, we can get back to our example of the SharePoint
deployment described above.
Microsoft offers cloud-based
SharePoint solutions as
a standalone offering, or
as part of an Office 365
subscription. With SaaS,

Microsoft SaaS Offerings

you are consuming

pre-installed software
solutions and typically have limited access to making global
configuration changes that affect your SaaS instance, especially
relating to backend infrastructure assets. SharePoint is running on
servers in Microsofts datacenters and you, as the owner of your
own SharePoint tenant, can configure your environment through
the SharePoint admin portal. But you do not have access to the
underlying servers, applications or operating systems that run
SharePoint.
Other SaaS offerings from Microsoft include Yammer, Exchange
Online & Lync Online (all part of Office 365), Dynamics CRM
Online as well as Team Foundation Services. Note that the
offerings that are a part of the Office 365 suite of products and are
distinct from Microsoft Azure: Azure delivers IaaS and PaaS while
Office 365 delivers SaaS.

How is the Datacenter Changing?

Now that you can impress your IT pros with some cool cloud
vocabulary, lets bring it back to what these concepts all mean in the
context of how you run your business past, present and future.
Your enterprise environment probably consists of more than one
datacenter today, running a number of critical business applications
on-premises on physical servers. This is the traditional legacy

4 The CIOs Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services

approach to IT, and it has proven to be very effective over the past
few decades. There are a number of advantages to the on-premises
physical datacenter approach that experts bring up: full control,
physical access and compliance to mention a few. We will examine
each one of these important concerns in the context of cloud
services later on in this paper.
There are also many challenges that come hand-in-hand with this
approach. As the enterprise grows over time, so does the
on-premises, datacenter. This might be for several legitimate
reasons: new versions of critical business platforms require more
computing power, global and intrastate/province mergers and
acquisitions, new compliance and regulatory guidance mandate
that data is kept for longer periods of time, and so on. We will talk
through some of these everyday struggles the business wrestles
with, and talk about some quick wins that can set the foundation to
an effective cloud strategy for your organization.
Virtualization was one of the big disruptions in the technology space.
The concept has been implemented by various vendors since the
1960s, primarily in the UNIX variant area, but it wasnt until the early
2000s that it really took off in the Intel x86 space. It was at this time
VMware (acquired by EMC) and Connectix (acquired by Microsoft
shortly thereafter) released competing products to take advantage
of idle compute capacity on powerful workstations and servers to
consolidate physical workstation and server footprint. A wide variety
of resources could be virtualized including CPUs, memory, storage
and network. Many businesses adopted virtualization as a very
effective way to condense compute, network and storage resources
and increase ROI on physical IT infrastructure assets already
deployed within the enterprise.
As virtualization evolved, it became clearer that it needed to be
more elastic and scalable, so that virtual resource instances
can be configured to scale up and scale down as required, and
more virtual resources can be provisioned (during peak demand
periods for an e-commerce web site for example) and destroyed
dynamically. To achieve this, virtualization solutions had to become
highly automated and standardized, and datacenter resources were
divided into normalized logical groups of virtualized resources. This
encapsulates the concept of IaaS. Businesses are evolving their
datacenters right now, either through private offerings managed
entirely by internal IT, or more commonly, through public vendor
like Microsoft and Cisco. An interesting figure: 20% of organizations
have private cloud offerings today, and most of the growth in the
cloud computing space has been through the adoption of IaaS.
The multibillion dollar idea was that with public IaaS offerings,
compute storage and networking becomes more utilitarian for the
enterprise and solutions can be built faster than ever since you
can effectively skip buying, installing, configuring and maintaining
physical hardware, which was a significant contributing factor to
slimming down project timelines. PaaS is the natural next step.
If you are not interested in purchasing, installing, configuring,

patching and upgrading standard software packages such as SQL

(including the underlying Infrastructure), PaaS is for you. As your
business thinks about deploying new applications to the cloud, PaaS
is typically the most efficient deployment model because it allows
sufficient control over underlying IT assets while allowing your IT
group to maintain a razor sharp focus on the business value your
software solution provides.
While PaaS is the immediate future, some businesses have started
to adopt SaaS solutions to provision common business workloads
such as collaboration and email services (SharePoint Online and
Exchange Online, offered through Office 365 by Microsoft). SaaS
extracts the technology aspects of an application even further, and
centralizes application solution access for your business users. 16%
of businesses today have at least one or two public vendor SaaS
implementations. While some of these SaaS services might sound
like newfangled options, Microsoft has actually been running SaaS
solutions for well over a dozen years. Hotmail (now Outlook) is a SaaS
service offered to millions of customers by Microsoft since 1997.

50%

of Fortune 500
companies use
Azure

Other consumer SaaS offerings from Microsoft include Skype,

Bing and Xbox Live suite of services, which includes providing
gaming and music subscriptions to millions of customers worldwide.
Microsoft has condensed all these years of experience from a global
customer base into Azure and Office 365. The results have been
impressive:

More than 1 billion Office documents and 11 billion photos
have been stored on OneDrive. More than 250 million
people use OneDrive (Microsofts consumer offering
alternative to OneDrive for Business).1

There are more than 8 million registered users on
Microsofts enterprise social network Yammer. 85% of
Fortune 500 firms use Yammer.2

50% of Fortune 500 companies use Azure.3 There are
about 10 trillion objects stored in Azure.

25% of Microsofts enterprise customers have deployed
Office 365. More than 2 million subscribers use Office 365

More than 1 million state, federal and local government
employees use Office 365.4

Perficient has deployed more than 1.2 million seats of
Office 365.
You get the idea. Microsoft SaaS platforms have been vigorously
tested and vetted at a global scale in the real world, and have

operated effectively for a very diverse group of discerning

consumers and firms for more than seventeen years.

Why Use Microsoft Cloud?

This paper focuses almost entirely on Microsoft cloud services for

two practical reasons: cloud service capabilities across all vendors
are constantly evolving within a relatively short period of time, not to
mention that there is a very broad array of capabilities across each
vendor. Performing a rich analysis of each vendors services can
be a fairly complicated affair, and as such, attempting to reasonably
cover each vendor is outside of the scope of a white paper.

Evaluating Azure

Azure provides many

services. Its lineup of available services is constantly expanding,
and each pre-existing service also evolves to provide richer feature
sets. From core datacenter extension capabilities such as compute,
storage and networking to identity management capabilities like
Azure AD and its single-sign-on integration with popular enterprise
application platforms such as Yammer, Salesforce and Exchange
Online, there is an ever-broadening set of capabilities for to evaluate
as you look for competitive advantages and solutions to difficult
business challenges. Some of these services are discussed below.
Infrastructure/Compute Services: To run production,
staging, integration-test and development workloads with
varying degrees of complexity while maintaining a lower
total cost of ownership.
Big Data: Hadoop clusters can be deployed in minutes
instead of weeks to rapidly analyze massive amounts of
data for insights that has the potential to guide the firm to
make better, targeted business decisions in the future,
while allowing for the flexibility of a wide range of
programming languages including .NET and Java.
Web Applications: To create highly scalable web service
architectures with flexible deployment models TFS,
GitHub, FTP etc. using a variety of frameworks and
programming languages.
Mobile Apps: To enable businesses to build flexible cloud
backend repositories very quickly, while maintaining
support for a wide range of programming languages as
well as enabling access to iOS, Android and Windows
mobile devices. With this Microsoft Azure solution,
businesses now have access to push notification
capability that can scale to millions of devices.
Media: To provide on-demand transcoding, DRM
protection, encryption and secure storage of premium
media assets, workflows to mash up media content from
various content providers, ads injection, broad device

The CIOs Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services 5

compatibility as well as efficient, rapid global distribution

of content.
Storage, Backup and Recovery: To create a durable,
scalable and cost effective alternative to traditional
infrastructure options such as hosted storage, backup and
recovery vendors or on-premises investments.
Identity and Access Management: Provisioned for every
Microsoft Azure subscription in order to store and manage
cloud identities that enables employee, partner and
customer access to resources and data stored within a
Microsoft Azure subscription. Using this feature,
businesses can integrate ADFS with to enable single
sign-on, as well as provide an extra layer of protection for
critical assets by providing multi-factor authentication.
Integration: To connect on-premises and cloud solutions
together through BizTalk services using the Microsoft
Azure Service Bus as the communications highway.

Evaluating Azure Security, Privacy and Compliance

Microsoft has designed and executed a security strategy for Azure

that is based on centers of excellence, which are comprised of
highly experienced personnel that provide intelligence on global
information security threats. Additionally, Microsoft has a security
development lifecycle framework for all products and services so
that they are designed and built with a strong focus on security and
privacy. Customers can specify geographical boundaries for where
they want their data to reside, so that data does not cross into other
regions due to privacy and legal industry regulations for example. In
addition, Azure is compliant with several frameworks, such as HIPAA
BAA, PCI DSS Level 1 and ISO/IEC 27001:2005, amongst others.
This is just a light introduction into Microsoft Azures commitment to
security, privacy and compliance. For a deeper, updated look into
the current state of this important topic relative to Azure, be sure to
review the Microsoft Azure Trust Center5 with your team.

Evaluating Office 365 Core Platforms, Office 365

Extended Platform & Other Microsoft SaaS Platforms

Think of Office 365 resulting from a cloud transformation of the

collection of traditional shrink-wrapped software platforms that
Microsoft offers to the world. Office 365 services are SaaS offerings
that provide you with almost immediate access to Microsofts stable
of managed software applications.

Office 365 Core Platforms

Exchange Online: Microsofts enterprise-class email
solution in the cloud that can be accessed through
Microsoft Office Outlook, a web browser or through
mobile devices. With this service, you are provided with
not just reliable email services deployed across globally
redundant servers, but also anti-spam and anti-malware
filtering to make employees more productive with their
time by getting rid of junk mail. Another value add is
instant access to email from mobile devices and other
computers over the Internet, supporting the BYOD (bring
your own device) phenomenon workplaces have had to
deal with over the past few years.
SharePoint Online: With this service, users share
information with each other and potentially with partners,
vendors and the customers as well. Another strength of
the platform is its ability to structure information about
projects, teams, people and your firm by organizing data
in a way that is natural to your company. You can leverage
the enterprise-grade search capability to empower users
to find information quickly and easily. You can also deploy
tools that deliver critical insights and data visualizations
for your business, to help you make timely decisions.
SharePoint Online is highly extensible and allows easy
customization that match the needs of your business. It is
also a great tool for managing risk through eDiscovery.
Lync Online: Provides instant messaging, video
conferencing and virtual meeting capabilities so that
users can work together with each other as well as
with customers, suppliers. Similar to other Office 365
platforms, Lync Online can be accessed through internet
browsers or through a Lync client over a broad choice of
devices. It provides HD quality video as well as voice call
functionality and can connect to Skype as well.
Yammer: An online enterprise social network that
empowers people to work together to create and share
knowledge through natural, real time communication.
With Yammer, you get deep, sticky discussions that
are searchable, instead of information that gets buried
in individual mail boxes. It is a great tool to collaborate
on projects, help build company culture around non-

For Office 365, another value add to take note of the feature
set provided by these services is constantly being updated and
upgraded by Microsoft. Once you move to Office 365, you avoid
migration pains going forward. Keep in mind that for these software
offerings, Microsoft has adopted a cloud-first approach where new
features and functionality are deployed to Office 365 before they are
rolled out to on-premises installations.

6 The CIOs Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services

business initiatives and develop your firms knowledge

management capability. This social platform can be used
to securely collaborate with your vendors, clients and
partners as well, over a wide array of devices connected
to the Internet.

Office 365 Extended Platforms

Project Online: An online solution for managing your

portfolio of projects with potentially no Infrastructure
costs. It supports a wide array of devices, and includes
Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online
integration as well to enable your organization to manage
scarce resources in a secure manner. With Project Online,
your PMO is able to take advantage of the platform
immediately to create projects, assign tasks, and create
dashboards and workflows.
Dynamics CRM Online: Microsofts customer relationship
management cloud platform that empowers your sales
team to learn more about and customers to enable them
to sell more efficiently. It provides a range of cloud-based
services to business to manage customer relationships in
the context of sales, marketing, customer care and social
listening. In addition to supporting these capabilities, the
platform provides mobile access, reports and personal
dashboards, knowledge management as well as a unified
service desk to your sales team.

Chances are you already have a good idea where to start. It could be
that you are looking to stabilize your email platform not just to
minimize outage incidents, but to
continue to meet your end user
expectations of very high storage
capacity limits while minimizing
costs in a predictable fashion. Or
you might want to get start migrating
file servers to a collaboration
environment that turbo charges
productivity natively through
versioning, search, people search
and other out-of-the-box features.
Maybe you want to introduce video conferencing and IM capabilities
to your organization. How do you make your vision a reality?
1.

Define your vision and map it to specific success

metrics: Do you want to reduce your exploding storage
costs by at least 20% within the next year? Or maybe you
want to increase sales revenue of pre-existing products and
services in a new vertical market and want to be able to
track sales leads to successful closure so that you can better
forecast sales next year within +/- 5% accuracy? In order
to gain support and adoption through the organization, it is
crucial to have tangible goals that firm employees, partners
and customers can wrap their hands around and get behind.

2.

Put together a sponsorship/leadership team: The next

phase is to assemble your team. For a project or program
focused on the cloud, you will have to bring in a wide range
of people to be successful. For example, if your goal is to
reduce your storage costs significantly and predictably,
and your were looking at implementing Azure Storage and
related services as well as StorSimple appliances, you will
find yourself calling on your senior infrastructure managers,
network engineers and architects, your PMO as well as IT
managers for business applications affected by this change.
This is typically the phase where you identify gaps in skills
and experience necessary for the success of the endeavor,
which could range from deep IT skills and implementation
experience to change management and end user training.

3.

Begin your planning framework: Because of the

transformational nature of deploying cloud services, it is
critical that the planning framework you put together has the
breadth and depth necessary to the engagements success.
You might not have all the answers at hand for this phase of
your journey, but this activity should point out what you do
not know, and need some assistance with. For example, to
whom should you deploy SharePoint Online to for piloting
purposes? How long will it take to move the entire firm to
Exchange Online? We have more than 300 apps to migrate
to Office 365; which one goes, and what gets retired?

Other Microsoft SaaS Platforms

Intune is Microsofts solution to managing the reality of BYOD (bring
your own device) that has exploded across the IT landscape in
recent years. It allows a firm to support Windows and non-windows
PC and mobile devices using a pure cloud approach or integrated
with your Systems Center Configuration Manager deployment. By
deploying this service, you gain more control over remote devices
accessing firm resources on premises or in the cloud by enforcing
security protocol requirements as well as gaining a better view of the
range of devices accessing your network.

Evaluating Office 365 Security, Privacy and

Compliance

The Office 365 suite of services is designed and built using

Microsofts Security Development Lifecycle. In addition, Microsoft
uses a defense-in-depth layered approach to physical security,
logical security, data security and admin/user controls. With Office
365, Microsoft guarantees privacy of data so that a firm maintains
complete ownership. Office 365 is compliant with ISO 27001, EU
model clauses, HIPAA BAA, and FISMA. For a more comprehensive
review of security, privacy and compliance for Office 365, please be
sure to take a look at the Office 365 Trust Center6 with your team.

Sounds Convincing, How Do

We Get There?

Now that you have a better idea of the what, who, why, where and
when, lets think about the final piece of the puzzle: how do you use
Microsoft Cloud Services as an enabler for your firms success?

The CIOs Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services 7

4.

Engage with an implementation team: At this stage, you

have a good idea what needs to be done, and the missing
gaps that needs some answers. You are ready to put
together an implementation team that will take the work you
have done so far and run it to the end line. If youve decided
to employ an outside vendor to assist with your cloud
implementation, now is a good time to determine who from
within your internal team will be the key contact(s) working
closely with the vendor.
A typical line up with a cloud engagement is IT personnel
cloud specialists, solution architects, enterprise architects,
network, storage, database, security, desktop, and
collaboration, communications, the PMO as well as identified
alpha (innovators that love technology) and beta (early
adopters that are/want to be recognized as visionaries that
apply new technology to solve business problems) testers.
The implementation team will take the planning framework
that was put together earlier on and provide richer details,
including but not limited to tasks, resources, budget, time
lines and key milestones.

Taking the Next Step

The IDC predicts that cloud computing will be a $107 billion industry
by 2017. This rapid expansion is fueled by the need for businesses
to rapidly develop competitive advantages through complex
technology solutions to stay at the forefront of your industry. In
addition, with the increasing mobility of the workforce, todays new
employees, who will drive the growth of the firm in the future, have
come to expect employers to provide access to tools that would
have been cost prohibitive just a few years ago. At the same time,
IT budgets are not growing fast enough to meet these challenging
demands using traditional technology frameworks.
You are likely reading this paper because you have a vision for
what Microsoft Cloud Services can do for your business, and you
might have even gathered support at the executive level. Because
cloud technologies are fundamentally different from on-premises
platforms, it makes sense to engage with partners trusted by
Microsoft to offer some support for this important initiative. With
this strategic partnership, you strengthen your IT team with deep
expertise through envisioning, planning, integration, pilot and
deployment phases of your cloud engagement.

Once a good project baseline has been established, its

time to put together a small pilot trial for your group of alpha

For example, you might want to move your email system to

testers to try out.

Exchange Online, and might be ready for a small pilot that achieves
this (in concert with using Azure IaaS). Or maybe you have

5.

Plan, design and deploy a proof of concept: A proof of

concept will help to test the baseline project plan as well as
underlying ideas as to how implementing a Microsoft cloud
service like Azure will execute the vision of the project. Think
of this phase as a litmus test. Did we really plan for enough
time to roll this out to everyone? Are there localization issues
we missed? Do we need to plan for more end user training?
How do we capture lessons learned effectively to then pass
on to help desk personnel when the solution is deployed
firm-wide?

For many firms, IT personnel are used to participating as end users

in the proof of concept environment, however this is not a hard
rule. Typically, data generated in this environment is treated as
ephemeral. Alpha testers at this point are evaluating the Microsoft
Cloud platform and providing feedback to the implementation team.
The implementation team can go through several releases of the
proof of concept solution before determining tthe project is ready to
advance to the beta testing phase.
Beyond this, the team continually refines the project plan,
proceeds to beta testing (rolling out the solution to an early adopter
department, like Finance for example), communicates progress to
the business and each other, and eventually deploys the solution
to the entire firm, while taking note of lessons learned and best
practices to be applied later on for other cloud services projects.

8 The CIOs Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services

already deployed Office 365 but wanted to take better control of

mobile devices consuming those services. This is where Intune
integrated with Systems Center Configuration Manager will come
into play. Another need that might come up is how to integrate cloud
deployments into your existing IT management frameworks and
protocols. Governance sessions for Azure and Office 365 will be the
first step towards achieving this goal.

Microsoft Cloud Services are very comprehensive. Offerings from

Microsoft not only help drive down infrastructure costs and provide
new services to turbo charge efficiencies within the business, they
also reach into other areas of disruption including mobility, social
and Big Data analytics.

2.

Partnering with Microsoft can further increase efficiencies gained by

employing cloud platforms that take advantage of synergies from
integrating cloud-based solutions from the same vendor to deliver
cost-effectiveness, critical intelligence using Big Data, securely drive
mobility adoption, and deploy social business platforms to drive
deeper collaboration within and outside your firm while providing
next-generation cloud-based tools.

3.

References
1.

Microsoft by the Numbers (2014). Retrieved from http://

news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/index.html

4.
5.
6.

Microsoft News Center (2013). ABB to Deploy Microsoft

Office 365 and Yammer as Part of Strategic Initiative
to Improve Collaboration Worldwide [Press release].
Retrieved from http://news.microsoft.com/2013/04/10abbto-deploy-microsoft-office-365-and-yammer-as-partofstrategic-initiative-to-improve-collaboration-worldwide/
Martin, S. (2013, June 14). 50 Percent of Fortune 500
Using Windows Azure. Retrieved from
http://ppe.blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/
archive/2013/06/14/50-percent-of-fortune-500s-usingwindows-azure.aspx
Microsoft by the Numbers: The Enterprise Cloud (2014).
Retrieved from http://news.microsoft.com/cloud/index.html
Microsoft Azure Trust Center (2014). Retrieved from
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/trust-center/
Office 365 Trust Center (2014). Retrieved from
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/office-365-trustcenter-cloud-computing-security-FX103030390.aspx

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The CIOs Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services 9