In a new blog series, David Lef, principal network architect at Microsoft IT, holds a Q&A session on how to support a network that moves from a traditional infrastructure to a wireless cloud computing platform, like Azure. Microsoft IT is responsible for the network needs of 900 locations and 220,000 employees and vendors around the world. Lef looks to the future with Azure and discusses the how to meet constantly evolving customer demands in the cloud industry.
David Lef goes over the biggest network challenges when migrating IT-supported services and environments to cloud-based services, like Azure.
“Our network supports over 2,500 individual applications and business processes. We are responsible for providing wired, wireless, and remote network access for the organization, implementing network security across our network (including our network edges), and connectivity to Microsoft Azure in the cloud. We support a large Azure tenancy using a single Azure Active Directory tenancy that syncs with our internal Windows Server Active Directory forests. We have several connections from our on-premises datacenters to Azure using ExpressRoute. Our Azure tenancy supports a huge breadth of Azure resources, some of which are public-facing and some that are hosted as apps and services internal to Microsoft, but hosted on the Azure platform.”
Lef notes that Microsoft IT has the people and resources to ensure a smooth user experience whenever a migration to Azure takes place. Their resources help with the migration and training for companies. Microsoft IT makes sure that business processes are running the same or better than the network was before the migration.
If you are interested in reading all of David Lef’s thoughts on network migration to Azure, take a look at the full Q&A session here.
