Kurt Shintaku's Blog

The need for visibility across organizations and flexibility to analyze deeper in your data is greater than ever. A unified, scalable, cost-effective data and analytics platform is the foundation of organizations’ digital transformation strategy. Yet many on-premises big data users struggle with its system complexity, unscalable infrastructure, and DevOps burden.

In this three-part webinar series, we will uncover why now is the time to modernize your big data platform and how Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Machine Learning can help organizations achieve 417 percent ROI and 10x the speed to insight. Additionally, we will go deeper into the use cases for financial services and retail industry customers.

• Innovate faster by migrating from Hadoop to Azure Databricks
  March 11, 2021 at 2:00 PM Eastern Time (11:00 AM Pacific Time)
  Learn why now is the right time to migrate your on-premises Hadoop system to Azure. We’ll walk you through how to migrate Hadoop systems seamlessly while achieving your desired business outcomes more quickly.
  Register now

• Maximize environmental, social, and governance impact in financial services

  March 18, 2021 at 2:00 PM Eastern Time (11:00 AM Pacific Time)

  Data has become the key competitive advantage for financial services institutions. In this session, explore how the ability to make sense of a wide range of data—particularly environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and alternative sources—is helping financial institutions manage risk, create new products, and compete against fintechs.

  Register now

• Drive profitability in retail with data and AI

  March 25, 2021 at 2:00 PM Eastern Time (11:00 AM Pacific Time)

  Discover how Azure solutions are enabling retail organizations to have a real-time view of their supply chain and fulfill customer requests faster than their competitors. Learn how to use retail data to drive intelligent business decisions.

  Register now

New private preview available.

Today we are announcing that Windows Server 2022 is now in preview, the next release in our Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), which will be generally available later this calendar year. It builds on Windows Server 2019, our fastest adopted Windows Server ever. This release includes advanced multi-layer security, hybrid capabilities with Azure, and a flexible platform to modernize applications with containers.

…

Read more here:

• Announcing Windows Server 2022—now in preview
  https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2021/03/02/announcing-windows-server-2022-now-in-preview/

We’ve published a page & docs specifically to help our customers optimize their costs of Azure.

• Cost Optimization: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/cost-optimization/

• Documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/framework/cost/

Training
The question I hear is, “Is there any training on how to leverage these cost optimization capabilities?” 

There are 2 means of learning how to cost optimize your Azure billing:

• Microsoft Learn:
  "Azure Well-Architected Cost Optimization”
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/azure-well-architected-cost-optimization/
  Learn how to save money on Azure in this free, 51-minute Microsoft Learn module, Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework—Cost Optimization. You’ll learn how to:

• Gain visibility and draw cost insights using monitoring and analytics.
  
• Maximize the efficiency of your cloud environment.
  
• Provision resources that are optimized for cost.
  
• Microsoft Ignite:
  “7 ways to Optimize your Azure Costs”
  https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/6c48f069-210d-4d0f-8f07-1cfff17bc7b3
  Are you getting the most out of your Azure investment? One of our biggest Azure customers used these 7 actionable techniques to optimize their Azure costs . . . and you can too. Maersk will join us as we learn the right and wrong way to keep within your cost constraints, aim for scalable costs, pay for consumption, right-size resources, and monitor your spend.
  

Azure Resource Mover, a new free service enables customers to move multiple resources across public Azure regions to support their ever-evolving business needs.

Azure Resource Mover greatly reduces customer time and effort needed to move resources across regions by providing a built-in dependency analysis, planning, and testing that ensures the resources are prepared to move and then successfully moved to the desired region.

Azure Resource Mover also provides a seamless and consistent single pane of glass experience that allows move orchestration for a range of Azure resources.

Q. What can customers do now that they couldn’t do before?

• Azure Resource Mover now further simplifies the dependent resources analysis by validating and identifying all dependent resources in a single step. This reduces the multiple iterative steps previously required to discover all the resources in the environment, thus making planning for large scale even more seamless.
• Customers from various industries such as Banking, Financial services or Healthcare may have sensitive data, which they encrypt using keys or certificates in key vaults. Azure Resource Mover now supports VMs encrypted using Customer Managed Keys (CMK) or Azure Disk Encryption (ADE) mechanisms.
• We have heard from our customers that they needed a native experience within Azure Resource Mover that allows delete of source resources. We are now happy to announce that users can now delete multiple resources simultaneously using the delete source feature that provides full control and confidence with validations in place to ensure the delete is performed only after the move is completed.
• VM replication health monitoring is now enabled once the ‘Prepare’ phase is complete, exposing any warnings and take corrective actions if there are any issues with ongoing replication.

Q. What is the pricing and/or licensing implications, if any, for this announcement?

• None. Service is free, customers may incur ingress/egress charges.

For more information visit:

• Azure Resource Mover – Protect Resources for Migration
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/resource-mover/
• What is Azure Resource Mover? | Microsoft Docs
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/resource-mover/overview

We have added best practice guidance in Cloud Adoption Framework to support customers in their hybrid and multicloud journey.

This guidance walks through additional considerations for hybrid and multicloud that customers need to review and decisions they need to make as they navigate the different phases of their cloud journey. These include:

• defining strategy and plan
• configuring their cloud environments
• enabling ‘unified operations’ to provide visibility and control of the resources distributed across on-prem, hybrid, multiple clouds or the edge platform through a single pane of glass

This content is available for free as part of the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure.

For more information, Read the blog on “Implementing Hybrid and multicloud approach using Cloud Adoption Framework.”

• BLOG: Implementing Hybrid and multicloud approach using Cloud Adoption Framework
  https://aka.ms/adopt/hybrid/blog

Need to brush up on your Security in Azure? Get started with our 25min Microsoft Learn security module here:

Security, responsibility, and trust in Azure

Learn how Azure can help you protect the workloads that you run both in the cloud and in your on-premises datacenter.

Learning objectives:

• Strengthen your security posture and protect against threats by using Azure Security Center.
• Collect and act on security data from many different sources by using Azure Sentinel.
• Store and access sensitive information such as passwords and encryption keys securely in Azure Key Vault.
• Manage dedicated physical servers to host your Azure VMs for Windows and Linux by using Azure Dedicated Host.

Check out the modules here:

• Protect against security threats on Azure
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/intro-to-security-in-azure/

Microsoft’s Store team hosts training sessions on-site at Microsoft customers or virtually. These come at no-charge for Microsoft managed customers.

These end-user centric training sessions are Level 100-200 and cover the following topics as of 3/12/21:

• Microsoft Bookings
• Microsoft OneDrive for Business
• Microsoft Planner
• Microsoft SharePoint Online
• Microsoft To Do
• Microsoft Lists
• Microsoft Yammer
• Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Accessibility
• Windows 10
• Power Apps
• Power BI
• Power Automate
• Microsoft Teams – Level 100, 200
• Microsoft Teams Meetings
• Microsoft Teams Calling
• Microsoft Teams as a Platform: Integrating Apps – Level 200
• Microsoft Teams Live Events (Attendee)
• Microsoft Teams Live Events (Organizer)
• Word Level 100 & 200
• Excel Level 100 & 200
• Microsoft OneNote – Level 100 & 200
• Outlook (Desktop & Mobile) – Level 100 & 200
• Forms
• Project for the Web
• Tasks

• Yammer

Training programs can be personalized for any industry & are customized around the customer’s unique needs and are hands on.  Students bring in their own devices and use the apps being trained on in the contexts of use that they require to get the most out of their Microsoft investment.

Contact your Microsoft Account Executive for more information on how to engage this program.

• BLOG: Microsoft Store’s training program gives customers a personalized fit
  https://www.microsoft.com/whatsinstore/2021/01/13/microsoft-stores-training-program-gives-customers-a-personalized-fit/
• DOWNLOAD: Customer Success Training Program – One Pagers
  https://www.microsoft.com/whatsinstore/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Microsoft-Store-Customer-Success-Training-One-pager.pdf

Sometimes you have to open a support incident/case & your organization never set up a Unified Enterprise support agreement.

For immediate technical support for your small business, Professional Support is available as a single pay-per-incident (PPI) or a 5-pack of incidents. Microsoft support can help you troubleshoot a specific problem, error message or functionality that isn’t working as expected.

Here’s where to go to open a ticket.  FYI: These are something like ~$300 each on a credit card.  There is no escalation or management of the support case, so YMMV:

• Support for business – Web:
  https://support.serviceshub.microsoft.com/supportforbusiness/create
• Support for business – Phone:
  (800) 642 7676

For more information on Professional Support incidents:

• Microsoft Professional Support (pay-per-incident): FAQ
  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/microsoft-professional-support-pay-per-incident-faq-575821bc-17bb-7484-4935-334c5437639f
• Microsoft Professional Support (pay-per-incident) FAQs
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/services-hub/sfbus/support-for-business/professional-support-faqs

When you need to remind program management that it doesn’t matter – it just doesn’t matter – if it’s not in the GCC enclave.

To be worn at conferences, conventions, & product launches.  For my friends.  You know who you are.

• T-SHIRT: “Is it available in GCC/GCC High/DoD?”
  https://www.zazzle.com/z/a0tvf3mo

We recently announced the “Zero Trust Deployment Center”. We’re making it easier for folks that are implementing zero trust principles to benchmark themselves on their progress. For those not yet underway toward zero trust, we provide prescriptive guidance and a roadmap on how to get started.

We are excited to announce the launch of the Zero Trust Deployment Center—a repository of information to improve their Zero Trust readiness as well as specific guidance on implementing Zero Trust principles across their identities, endpoints, data, applications, networks, and infrastructure. The Zero Trust Deployment Center breaks down deployment guidance into plain-language objectives across each of the technology pillars, providing an actionable list of steps needed to implement Zero Trust principles in your environment.

..

If you are already well underway in your journey, these objectives will provide a great framework to help measure your progress and ensure you are meeting critical milestones. If you’re interested in measuring your Zero Trust maturity, we’ve also created a Zero Trust assessment tool to help measure your current maturity and identify possible next milestones and priorities along with technologies.

…

• Read more of the announcement here:
  https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/10/15/announcing-the-zero-trust-deployment-center/
• Visit the Zero Trust Deployment Center here:
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security/zero-trust/