Author: Michael Otey

Microsoft 365 is an indispensable collection of tools for businesses. While Microsoft is responsible for the availability and ongoing functionality of all the Microsoft 365 apps, the responsibility for protecting Microsoft 365 data is the customer’s obligation. Let’s take a closer look at the different types of Microsoft 365 data and the kind of protection… Read More

As of this past November 9th 2021, AWS now offers the ability to switch between AWS provided licenses and bring your own licenses (BYOL) for Windows Server and SQL Server instances using the AWS License Manager. Changing the license type associated with your instances will retain the application, instance, data and configuration for that instance.… Read More

At this past virtual Ignite 2021 conference, Microsoft announced that their Microsoft Defender for Cloud service will provide native support for AWS. Multi-cloud protection has become a priority for most businesses. Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud report showed that 92% of organizations now have a multi-cloud strategy. Microsoft Defender for Cloud was previously called… Read More

Microsoft 365 is the most widely used cloud application for business and it has several different technologies that are designed to protect your data. Let’s take a closer look at Microsoft 365’s built-in data protection technologies and see what steps you might need to take for your own complete data protection needs. OneDrive Recycle Bin… Read More

With the rise in remote workers the risk of ransomware is higher than it has ever been before. By now most people know that ransomware is a type of malware extortion scheme that typically encrypts files and folders preventing access to critical data or sometimes it can also be used to steal sensitive data. After… Read More

This past October 20th, 2021 Amazon announced the general availability of their new AWS Panorama appliance. Adding to their ever increasing number of on-premises solutions, AWS Panorama shows exactly how seriously AWS takes the hybrid cloud market. What is AWS Panorama? The AWS Panorama appliance is a computer vision (CV) appliance that uses Machine Learning (ML) to… Read More

Experiencing a disaster is one of the worst possible events for both businesses and their IT departments. However, there is one worse event – failure to recover from the disaster.  While every IT department should have a disaster recovery (DR) plan, that doesn’t mean every DR plan will work. In the best case, a failure… Read More

This past Oct 5th 2021, Amazon announced the general availability of VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. In case you’re not familiar with AWS Outposts, they have been available since December 2019. AWS Outposts are essentially an Amazon provided hardware platform that runs on-premise and supplies hybrid cloud services.  Amazon provides the hardware and software and… Read More

Amazon EKS Anywhere is a deployment option for Amazon EKS that enables you to create and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises using VMware vSphere. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed container service that allows you to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the AWS cloud. In fact, according to the Cloud Native… Read More

One of the major announcements from this past AWS Storage Day 2021, September 2nd 2021, was Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is a fully managed storage service that enables businesses to run NetApp ONTAP file systems in the AWS cloud. ONTAP from NetApp  is an enterprise data management solution designed to provide… Read More

It’s time to get ready for the big online AWS event of the year – the AWS Summit Online for the Americas. The AWS Summit Online - Americas is a free three-day event. It features keynotes from industry leaders, dive deep educational sessions, interactive labs, and one on one chats with AWS experts. The AWS… Read More

It seems hard to believe but Amazon’s EC2 was first launched back in 2006. It was Amazon’s third major cloud service behind their Simple Storage Service (S3) and Simple Queue Service (SQS).  I think it’s fair to say that Amazon EC2 was the driving force behind many businesses’ initial move toward Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). This July… Read More

On July 19th 2021, Amazon announced the general availability of their new Amazon ECS io2 Block Express volumes service.  Amazon io2 volumes have been available since 2020 and they are essentially provisioned SSDs designed to deliver 99.999% durability. Amazon ECS io2 Block Express are io2 volumes running on the EBS Block Express architecture. ECS io2… Read More

While 2020 will surely be remembered as the year of the pandemic, it’s quite possible that 2021 will be remembered as the year of ransomware too. Ransomware attacks seem to be running amok through 2021 and almost daily occurrences have been reported. Ransomware is a type of malware that blocks access to a company’s files… Read More

One of the things that Amazon recommends for high availability is to be sure that your services span multiple AWS regions. The need for this advice was definitely underlined last week when the AWS Frankfurt data center experienced a failure. While this sort of thing is extremely, rare it does happen. When your services can… Read More