Information Technology Navigator

It’s a crazy time out there. Businesses have been mandated by state governments to enable employees to work from home. Literally overnight, there have been massive shifts to connect people remotely. Suddenly even your grandparents know what Zoom is!

Microsoft Teams is playing an integral part in facilitating remote communication and collaboration. Most companies with Office 365 subscriptions already have licenses for this product, but just now are really rushed to enable Teams for the massive increase of remote workers.  

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The CDC recently requested all businesses to dust off their pandemic preparedness plans amid the spread of the Coronavirus also known as (COVID-19). The global threat has already had a major economic impact in a very short time, as is evidenced in the recent stock market plunges, worldwide flight cancellations and travel bans, and the clothing manufacturing sector to name a few.

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Microsoft Teams is the cloud-based collaboration solution in the Office 365 suite that integrates business messaging, calling, video meetings and file sharing. It is Microsoft’s replacement for Skype for Business.

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Impossible travel. Is it sending a human to Saturn or Venus? Well maybe, but in the context of Microsoft Office 365, Impossible Travel is a security feature that is a great indicator of potential hacking attempts. The concept is straightforward. If you login to Office 365 from your office in Boston and then 20 minutes later you try to login from Dallas, or you login from home in Chicago and five hours later from Beijing, Office 365 basically says “wait a minute, that’s impossible” and it denies login from Dallas and immediately sends an IT security alert.

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As usual, VMworld was a whirlwind of announcements, presentations, demos, meetups and networking opportunities. It’s a week of non-stop activities and it’s hard (actually impossible) to soak up everything. But I did manage to glean quite a bit and wanted to share my thoughts on some of the highlights and key takeaways.

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Retailers are under intense competition to deliver personal, seamless and differentiated on-line shopping experiences to ensure customer loyalty and drive growth. And while a retailer’s website must be extremely responsive and meet high user expectations, it must also be highly secure.

A cloud-based web application firewall (WAF) provides e-commerce sites with a level of data protection that eliminates website vulnerabilities, blocking bad actors and harmful traffic without degradation of the site’s performance.

Here are 4 crucial tips for retailers who have implemented a WAF

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Why Office 365?

The speed of business is requiring IT to create, secure, and scale resilient services, prompting enterprises to move away from on-premises data centers to the cloud. Microsoft Office 365 (O365) is an attractive option for organizations that need to innovate at what feels like “escape velocity” speeds. 

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Time is running out. Microsoft deadlines for SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 end of support are quickly approaching with Extended Support for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 ending on July 9, 2019 and Extended Support for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 ending on January 14, 2020. Don’t risk possible security or compliance gaps of unsupported software.

Security Options

End of support for these releases means the end of regular security updates. With cyberattacks becoming more sophisticated and frequent, running applications and data on unsupported versions can create significant security and compliance risks. With these risks and end of support dates coming soon, Microsoft has provided a cost-effective alternative to allow you to keep your 2008 release servers by migrating to the Azure cloud.

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A large number of businesses are increasingly embracing all that Microsoft Office 365 cloud technology has to offer and are getting there using a hybrid model. This model is based on - maintaining their on-premises Exchange infrastructure while slowly migrating mailboxes into the O365 cloud tenant. It’s a strategy that makes sense when organizations have large numbers of mailboxes or don’t have sufficient staff to support a “big bang” cutover approach.

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Last week, 5 members of the Daymark Cloud Consulting team traveled down to Orlando, Florida to attend the annual Microsoft Ignite technical conference. As always, the first day of the conference was filled with several major announcements. This blog will focus on the Azure related enhancements that were announced and Daymark’s thoughts on how they could help our clients in the future.

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