A Guide to GDPR Compliance with Microsoft Data Platform

As most people know, the GDPR is approaching quickly. May 25th to be exact. Most companies will need to review or modify their database management and data handling procedures, especially focusing on the security of data processing. In a recent webinar hosted by 3 experts in the Azure, SQL Data Platform and software arenas: Abraham Samuel, Technical Support Personnel, Microsoft; Brian Knight, Founder and CEO, Pragmatic Works; and Myself, Sr. Principal Architect, Pragmatic Works, offered an informational session on steps you need to take now to help in your journey with compliance.

This 2-hour webinar covered the key changes needed to be addressed for GDPR: Controls, Modifications, Transparent Policies and IT and Training. It also discusses how modernizing your data platform, on-premises and in Azure, will immediately reduce areas out of compliance, as well as what Azure tools and services are offered to help ensure you remain in compliance.

It also taps into experience from the Pragmatic Works team on some of the danger areas customers face and how the suite of software tools can help you expose areas of concern in your environment. Still using SQL Server 2008 or 2008 R2? Here you’ll learn what it means for 2008/2008 R2 end of support and paths to upgrade your SQL Server.

Take some time and watch this information packed webinar that will help eliminate confusion around GDPR and discuss the steps you need to take to be in compliance, as well as how to make your plans actionable. GDPR goes into effect this month. This webinar will educate you and give you options to move along your journey into GDPR and a Microsoft modern data platform.

 

The 5 Stages of Cloud Adoption

So, still not in the cloud and the thought of doing so feels like you’re taking a huge jump into unknown waters? We’re seeing more enterprises starting to dip their toe in the water with Microsoft Azure. Microsoft has shown their commitment to where they’re going with their cloud infrastructure and the growth has been tremendous.

Let’s look at the 5 stages or steps of cloud adoption to ease the fear of taking the leap:

Step 1 – Chaos – In most cases, there’s some chaotic event that makes businesses start looking at alternative ways to service their customers or their business. Maybe a server dies, or software comes to the end of life or support. The cloud then becomes a viable option and people start to consider it.

Step 2 – Awareness – Once the cloud is on the plate, people start by ramping up their cloud knowledge. They may start with training, hackathons, POCs or try to some hands-on opportunities, like setting up an Azure Active Directory to sync with their on-premises AD. Building knowledge leads to Step 3.

Step 3 – Security – Most companies get hung up with security concerns around the cloud. I can tell you that Microsoft has spent more money than any other company worldwide on security—over one billion spent in 2017. They are committed to making their customers security a top priority. Through their commitment they have 72 government and standardization certificates; their closest competitor, AWS, only has 44.

To overcome your fear, you need to realize that with Azure, you have an entire team of security experts watching your data and servers, as well as implementing best practices and creating new ways and policies to help companies avoid any kind of breach.

Step 4 – Governance – So, you’ve gotten over security concerns and have put your trust in the Azure public cloud, now you must develop best practices, policies and procedures around governance. The good news is when you start looking at service offerings, whether it’s PaaS, SaaS or IaaS, Microsoft has the best in class offerings and they’re managing a good portion of that security for you.

Step 5 – Optimization – Once you’ve got your environment in the cloud, how do you optimize it for performance and cost effectiveness? Take the time to choose the best services for your business and optimize your servers to minimize cost and run those servers in the best way; this can become a differentiator against your competitors.

Top 6 Business Drivers for Moving to Azure

If you haven’t made the move to Azure cloud, what’s stopping you? Many businesses either have moved or are starting to and I can tell you the top 6 reasons that are driving businesses to the cloud.

1. Business Growth – Are you experiencing new growth in your current sectors or looking into new sectors for your business? For those who are in the cloud, they saw the reasons for adopting the new cloud technologies and are already taking advantage of the business drivers discussed here. Think about how the cloud can help you, but don’t jump in with two feet. Plan or outline how the cloud can help your business; planning helps avoid cost overruns.

2. Efficiency – You can streamline processes, increase productivity, as well as deliver, both internally and externally, much faster.

3. Experience – The cloud gives you the opportunity to improve your customer and employee experience. You can deploy new technologies quickly and it gives you more of a landscape to offer new areas of engagement with existing clientele, or for new clients.

4. Agility – The flexibility of Azure public cloud will give you improved responsiveness from your internal departments, IT folks and internal consultants you may work with. You’ll also get Software as a Service (SaaS) technologies and you can spin up quicker solutions to help enable your workforce to get things done faster. And if you make a mistake, you’re not stuck with a software license purchase for years; simply swap out for a technology that’s a better fit.

5. Cost – Many have concerns about overspending. One misconception is that you’ll automatically cut costs. This is often not the case. Oftentimes, you’ll need to restructure you’re spending budgets. The good news is you’ll be spreading those costs out over time. You’re moving into a subscription model, so you’re only paying for what you’re using. You can buy what you need for service, turn off the service when you’re not using it but only use it as it works most effectively for your business.

6. Assurance – You’ll now know you have a ‘best in class’ infrastructure and much of the maintenance for your servers that IT had to take care of will be drastically reduced. Security takes a different approach. Everything is secure and on by default, like data or storage encryption, so you’ll have to go in manually to turn them off.

You can also rest assured knowing that Microsoft has already met most regulatory and policy requirements, allowing you to continue to move forward and offer more to your customers, regardless of what space they’re in.

Hybrid Identity Management with Azure Active Directory

With all the things organizations need to manage identity for – on-premises environments, mobile devices, laptops and other managed devices, plus our internal active directory systems – it’s becoming increasingly harder to manage. We are in a new world of mobile first, cloud first reality.

Here are a few stats to think about:

  • 63% of confirmed data breaches involve weak, default or stolen passwords
  • More than 80% of employees admit to using non-approved SaaS applications in their jobs
  • As we are trying to manage all this, IT budgets are barely growing – we’re seeing less than 1% growth year over year

In reality, those Software as a Service (SaaS) apps integrate nicely and enable users to be more efficient, but we must be able to manage all those identities. When a user comes into your environment, using all kinds of web applications with user accounts for each, and possibly access to a corporate credit card, then that person leaves the company or gets let go, it’s difficult to track all those if they are individually managed.

With Azure Active Directory, you can manage 1000s of apps with one identity, enable business without borders, as well as manage access to scale, plus you’re offering cloud-powered protection. With Azure AD at the core of your business, you are enabling identity as a control plane.

So, how does this look?

    • With Azure AD on your current on premises environment, you’ll want to link up with all those cloud applications (Azure, SaaS, Office 365, any public cloud).
    • In between, you’ve got Azure Active Directory, where you can easily sync that back with your on premises and then tie that into all those SaaS applications.
    • This allows you to offer self-service, single sign on to your users for all of those apps, plus any internal on premises areas you use with user names and passwords.
    • Everything will be synchronized across the landscapes and you can extend that out to your customers and partners as well.
    • This is a powerful way to enable your workforce, as well as sync with your customers and partners when you want them to have access to certain areas.

Simply put: 1000s of apps with one identity, using single sign on to any app using Microsoft Azure Active Directory. And to take it one step further, if you want to move any of your VMs up into Azure or any of your services up into a PaaS solution, you already have that integration and using your Azure AD domain services, you can set up your lift and shift that much easier.

 

An Overview of Azure File Sync

I have a question… Who is still using a file server? No need to answer, I know that most of us still are and need to use them for various reasons. We love them—well, we also hate them, as they are a pain to manage.

The pains with Windows File Server:

  • They never seem to have enough storage.
  • They never seem to be properly cleaned up; users don’t delete the files they’re supposed to.
  • The data never seems accessible when and where you need it.

In this blog, I’d like to walk you through Azure File Sync, so you can see for yourself how much better it is.

    • Let’s say I’m setting up a file server in my Seattle headquarters and that file server begins having problems, maybe I’m running out of space for example.
    • I decide to hook this up in a file share in Azure space.
    • I can set up cloud tiering and set up a threshold (say 50%), so that everything beyond that threshold, those files will start moving up into Azure.
    • When I set this threshold, it will start taking the oldest files and graying them out as far as users are concerned. The files are still there and visible as there, but they’ve been pushed off to the cloud, so that space has now been freed up on the file server.
    • If users ever need those files, they can click on them and redownload.
    • Now, let’s say I want to bring on another server at a branch office. I can simply bring up that server, synchronize it with the branch office based on those files in Azure.
    • From here, I can hook up my SMBs and NFS shares for my users and applications, as well as my work folders using multi-site technology. I have all my files synchronized and it’s going to give me direct cloud access to these files.
    • I can hook up my IaaS and PaaS solutions with my REST API or my SMB shares to be able to access these files.
    • With everything synchronized, I’m able to have a rapid file server disaster/data recovery. If my server in Seattle goes down, I simply remove it; my files are already up in Azure.
    • I bring on a new server, sync it back to Azure. My folders start to populate, and as they get used, people will download the files back and the rules that were set up will maintain.
    • The great thing is it can be used with SQL Server 2012 R2, as well as SQL Server 2016.
    • Now I have an all-encompassing solution (with integrated cloud back up within Azure) with better availability, better DR capability and essentially bottomless storage. Azure Backup Vault gets backed up automatically and storage is super cheap.

With Azure File Sync I get:

1. A centralize file service in Azure storage.

2. Cache in multiple locations for fast, local performance.

3.  I can utilize cloud based backup and fast data/disaster recovery.

3 Power BI Offerings to Consider…

I’m often asked by clients about which Power BI offering is best for their business and where they should store their data. The 3 main offerings around Power BI all have their strong points where they excel. It comes down to understanding what each offers to decide the best fit for your organization’s data and needs.

Continue reading 3 Power BI Offerings to Consider…

Overview and Benefits of Azure Cognitive Services

With Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the possibilities for your applications are endless. Would you like to be able to infuse your apps, websites and bots with intelligent algorithms to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret your user needs through natural methods of communication, all without having any data science expertise?

Continue reading Overview and Benefits of Azure Cognitive Services

What is Azure Cosmos DB?

Are you familiar with Azure Cosmos DB? Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s globally distributed, multi-model database. With the click of a button, it allows you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of Azure’s geographic regions, so you can put the data where your customers are.

Cosmos DB has custom built APIs that allow you a multitude of data sources, like SQL Server, Mongo DB and Azure tables, as well as offering 5 consistency models. It offers comprehensive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with money back guarantees for availability (99.99% to be exact), latency, consistency and throughput; a big deal when you need to serve your customers at optimum performance.

Cosmos DB is a great option for many different use cases:

  • Companies that are doing IOT and telematics. Cosmos DB can ingest huge bursts of data, and process and analyze that data in near real-time. Then it will automatically archive all the data it ingests.
  • Retail and Marketing. Take an auto parts product catalog, for example, with tons of parts within the catalog, each with its own properties (some unique and some shared across parts). The next year, new vehicles or new parts model come out, with some similar and different properties. All that data adds up very quickly. Cosmos DB offers a very flexible schema in a hierarchical structure that can easily change the data around as things change.
  • Gaming Industry. Games like Halo 5 by Microsoft are built on a Cosmos DB platform, because they need performance that is quickly and dynamically scalable. You’ve got things like millisecond read-times, which avoids any lags in game play. You can index player related data and it has a social graph database that’s easily implemented with flexible schema for all social aspects of gaming.

Azure Cosmos DB ensures that your data gets there and gets there fast, with a wealth of features and benefits to make your life easier. And it’s easy to set up and manage.

 

Overview of Azure Databricks

I’d like to tell you about Azure Databricks. If you don’t know what that is, Azure Databricks provides an end-to-end, managed Apache Spark platform optimized for the cloud. It’s a fast, easy and collaborative analytics platform designed to help bridge the gap between data scientists, data engineers and business decision-makers using the power of Databricks on Azure.

Azure Databricks uses Microsoft Azure Active Directory as its security infrastructure and it’s optimized for ease of use, as well as ease of deployment within Azure. It features optimized connectors to Azure storage platforms (e.g. Data Lake and Blob Storage) for the fastest possible data access, and one-click management directly from the Azure console.

Some key features are:

Auto-scaling – This feature makes scaling much quicker and allows you to scale up or down as you need.

Auto-terminator – Helps you control the costs of your compute time, as well as assist you in preventing cost overruns (a concern for many cloud users).

Notebook Platform – The Notebook Platform supports standard languages (SQL, Python and R for example) and it builds a whole discussion environment around those platforms, enhancing collaboration amongst teams.

Here are some simple steps to get you started:

  • First, you’re going to prepare your data by ingesting it from your Azure storage platform, which has native support with Azure Databricks.
  • Next, you’re going to do any kind of transformation you need on your ingested data and store it in a Data Warehouse.
  • From here, you’ll want to start to perform analytics on your data. These platforms are built for lots of data and you’ll have the capability to explore large data sets in real time, as well as the ability to explore very quickly.
  • Lastly, you’re going to display the data. Databricks has native support for tools like Power BI to build your dashboards and analytics models.

So, Azure Databricks provides an end-to-end data solution. You can quickly spin up a cluster or do advanced analytics with this powerful platform. And with it, you can create and monitor robust pipelines that will help you dig deep and better understand your data, allowing you to make better business decisions.

3 Reasons Why You Should Move Your Business to the Cloud

Cyber security is on everyone’s mind these days and it can be a challenge for many organizations. If this sounds like you and you haven’t moved to the cloud, it’s something you should think about. I’d like to tell you why you should move your business to the cloud and why it could be more secure there.

1.  When you’re in the cloud business, having a secure cloud drives more business. That’s why cloud companies are willing to invest more to hire the best and brightest. So, the top security people in the world are going to the top cloud companies in the world.

2.  When moving to the cloud, typically, the customer only has to focus on one aspect of security because the rest is already taken care of, so by default, secure. You’d have to intentionally unlock something to make yourself less secure.

3.  Regulatory and certification requirements are more easily satisfied. With a foundation in place that’s already secure and certified, it allows you to focus on your app or infrastructure or whatever requirements you need to satisfy those regulatory compliance issues.

So, make this your year to move to the cloud and take some of the cyber security challenges off your mind.