messagingcollab

At Ignite, customers were definitely looking at hybrid strategies for their Microsoft Apps.

EMC can definitely help with all the stages of the journey - from figuring out how to evolve your organization and operations to how to build a solid hybrid cloud infrastructure, to mapping your application migration plans.

@philburtaj Microsoft is "all about Hybrid". Every step of their strategy places services in a "connected fashion" between Azure and Co-Lo or On-Prem. EMC foresaw this years ago. That's why we partnered with Equinix -- and why Azure did too.

@philburtaj Placing your EMC hardware at Equinix datacenters gets you, literally, inside the walls of the Azure datacenter and facilitates true Hybrid cloud architecture. Imagine, your data on your storage, being serviced by Azure's services.

Absolutely! That Express Route solution approach is a great way to maintain control of your data and still get some fantastic performance.

You can get info on Express Route here: https://community.em....

Jim Cordes has been with EMC for 10 years after spending almost 7 years at Microsoft and is currently a Technical Marketer in the Messaging and Collaboration team.

Some of the products and solutions Jim has experience with are: Microsoft technologies (Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Windows Server, SQL) with EMC Solutions.

Phil Burt has been with EMC for 16 years and is Product Management in the Cloud Solutions team. Some of the products and solutions Phil has experience with are: EMC’s storage management solutions and Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud.

I know the title says "Marketing", but I assure you, I'm as geeky as they come. Even this comment is proof of that :-)

This seems like a great event. Very experienced SMEs.

Cloud methods are challenging to some admins because they encourage us to "expect" -- to build blueprints that can be deployed in the future. We can no longer go respond effectively by simply racking servers faster.

By stepping back and building policies and blueprints, we can respond to the business faster. This "stepping back" can take discipline that some admins are not used to.

@jFcordes - Getting out of the weeds so you can build those policies and blueprints is definitely tough, but it is the only way you can build out a catalog of services - without that, your cloud is just a virtual infrastructure.

@jFcordes What are some key business drivers to move Exchange and SharePoint to a private, public or hybrid cloud model?

I just returned from EMC World. I spoke at four different sessions -- all pertaining to running Exchange and SharePoint in clouds

Customers want to control costs, increase deployment speed and accuracy, and respond to changing business needs.

It is only through cloud constructs that all of these business goals can be achieved. Standardized deployments of Exchange and SharePoint become mouse clicks rather than projects.

I saw the same thing at the Microsoft Ignite conference. Lots of Exchange and SharePoint folks looking different financial options, increased agility, and at the same time, more control.

I talked to a lot of customers that want to turn to a public cloud option, but ended up keeping things on-prem so that they can do compliance auditing and more easily deal with data sovereignty issues.

Specifically, they will answer your questions about the business drivers, different cloud computing models for Exchange and SharePoint and share insights from both EMC World and Microsoft Ignite.

Greetings Martha. Hello Phil!

Hey Martha and Jim! Thanks for hosting this Martha!

Thank you both @jFcordes and @philburtaj for hosting!

welcome to using crowdchat - you can add images, videos as well

Thanks for the tips @furrier!

Customers can get quite a bit of mileage from the solutions EMC delivers (whitepapers, reference architectures, "engineered solutions", etc.), but EMC Consulting and PS is also a key resource to help plot the journey.

EMC Consulting has a great track record in moving customers to the cloud

Any of them looking at cloud options?

Run into them -- that's an understatement! Exchange and SharePoint Admins were all over the place. Many of them wanting to avoid the "mess" of DAS and become productive responding to requests of the business units rather than reseeding databases

It's all about the service!

Service is the key -- and it can be difficult to wrap one's head around transforming email into a service, with policies, and service levels that are varied based on business units

For the most part, I saw the same thing - combination of personal concern and real regulations that prevent them from leveraging O365.

Though I also saw some cool things like #spanning: http://spanning.com/ (a recent EMC acquisition). Lets you provide backup for O365 in a way that end-users actually like!

Moving SharePoint to a public cloud is not the same as moving to a Hybrid Cloud. No... moving to a cloud is only part of the process in delivering a better mobile experience for SharePoint. Connectors like Syncplicity complete that story

We are finding that users need their content on their mobile devices, Syncplicity delivers against this goal by allowing admins to make SharePoint content visible and useful on Mobile devices

Public cloud gives you financial flexibility and simplicity.

Private cloud gives you more control, trust, and reliability. You can use the backup, disaster recovery, and high availability techniques that you are used to.

Hybrid gives you the best of both - align the model to the services your business is asking you to deliver.

@Martha1024 Cloud Architectures is a big topic, but let's rush to the end and say, Hybrid is the only option. Public is too difficult to control, while Private is too limited. Only Hybrid gives you control, flexibility, cost savings, & definable SLAs.