Information Technology Navigator

Microsoft has introduced Microsoft 365 Business Premium for GCC High, a tailored solution for small and mid-sized organizations in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB). This offering provides a cost-effective path to compliance with CMMC 2.0 and NIST 800-171, while maintaining the strict security and sovereignty standards of the GCC High environment.

✅ What Does GCC High Business Premium Include?

The new Business Premium for GCC High license mirrors much of the functionality of the commercial Business Premium suite but operates within Microsoft’s U.S. Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High) environment. Key features include:

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Earlier this month, Pure Storage and Nutanix announced a partnership to deliver a deeply integrated solution that delivers operational efficiency for storage-intensive workloads, including AI applications. This combined solution brings together Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) integrated with Pure’s high-performance FlashArray.

Daymark has longstanding, strategic channel partnerships with both Pure and Nutanix. We’re excited about how this integrated solution can help our customers maximize their investments by providing a modern and simplified IT infrastructure. Here are highlights of the newly announced features and benefits:

Simplified Infrastructure with Maximum Performance

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In today’s cloud-driven world, controlling cloud costs without sacrificing performance is a key challenge. Microsoft Azure FinOps (Financial Operations) is a framework that brings a strategic approach to managing cloud expenditures, transforming it from a guessing game into a structured process. For businesses utilizing Azure, learning FinOps fundamentals can unlock new cost-saving opportunities and enhance collaboration across finance, IT, and business teams.

Daymark Solutions’ comprehensive Azure FinOps workshop offers hands-on labs, expert-led discussions, and interactive exercises designed to teach critical cost management skills. Participants dive into rightsizing Azure resources, managing orphaned resources, and leveraging Azure’s unique cost-saving options like Azure Hybrid Benefit, Reserved Instances, and Azure Savings Plans. Each session balances theory with practical exercises to build a solid foundation for financial governance within Azure environments.

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Pure Storage Portworx has established itself as the gold standard for cloud-native Kubernetes data storage, offering scalable persistent storage, multi-cloud data mobility and zero RPO data protection and disaster recovery. At Daymark, we have been impressed with Portworx and view it as being in a class of its own when compared to other suppliers of storage for Kubernetes-orchestrated container apps. Once you transition from development to production with Kubernetes, persistent storage and enterprise data services become critical components of your Kubernetes environment.

A recent report by research house GigaOm concurs, recognizing Portworx as an “Outperformer” — the only product with that designation in the report. The GigaOm Radar for Kubernetes Data Storage Report reviewed nine vendors in the Kubernetes data storage space, down from twenty-two vendors in 2021.

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Companies performing work in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) often contemplate whether they should use a cloud service provider for their business, then wonder which version of the cloud service they should consider. The rules and regulations passed down to the DIB from the Federal Government are quite confusing when it comes to trying to figure out what their requirements are. In this article, we will try to clear some of that up!

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Microsoft has recently issued some retirement notices that impact VM default internet access on Azure and Basic Public SKUs. While there is runway on both of these notices, Microsoft recommends planning all new deployments with these changes in mind. We at Daymark agree. Here’s a quick summary of the announcements:

Default Internet Access Retirement

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HashiCorp recently held their annual conference, HashiConf 2023, in San Francisco (and virtually) to unveil some exciting enhancements to their suite of multi-cloud infrastructure automation software. Key themes revolved around infrastructure and security with an emphasis on how to use the cloud operating model to achieve operational cloud maturity and improve the developer experience while enabling platform teams to put controls in place to manage risk and cost.

 

Here are some of the important enhancements to their products that we think will benefit Daymark customers (with links to additional information at the end of this blog):

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Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Machine (Classic) is approaching its full retirement date of September 1, 2023. "Classic" in IaaS VMs refers to VMs managed by Azure Service Manager (ASM). While ASM has full IaaS capabilities and many enhancements over the years, the management of IaaS VMs through Azure Service Manager was deprecated by Microsoft in February 2020. ASM is the old control plane of Azure, responsible for creating, managing, and deleting VMs as well as performing other control plane operations. It’s estimated that 10% of IaaS VMs are still using Azure ASM. Those organizations need to start planning their migration today, given that full retirement is less than three months away.

Impact of this Retirement Notice

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The popularity and wide adoption of Microsoft Azure public cloud has transformed the way millions of businesses operate. It provides a wide range of services where customers can choose to develop and scale applications in a “pay for what you use” model. Getting the most out of Azure in a cost-effective way requires technical acumen, attention to detail and strong organizational skills.

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