Information Technology Navigator

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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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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Celebrating the 10^th Successful Year!

For the 10th straight year, Daymark employees, their families and clients supported “Run to Home Base” an annual event committed to helping veterans suffering from mental trauma and brain injuries. It’s an inspiring event which has the full commitment of Daymark’s employees. For the 4^th consecutive year, Daymark was a corporate sponsor.

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As the IT mandate shifts to innovation, many CIOs are seeking ways to offload operational tasks. Some plan to get out of the data center business all together. Partnering with a Managed Services Provider (MSP) has proved to be an effective strategy that allows IT organizations to provide more value to the business and frees IT staff to focus on digital transformation initiatives.

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Pretty much everyone likes a good surprise. Whether it’s a birthday party or an unexpected visit from an old friend, surprises can be quite pleasant. When it comes to IT, surprises are not welcome. Suddenly finding out a maintenance contract is expiring next week is not considered good news.

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For many of us, a rock-solid business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan can mean the difference between a good night’s sleep and living in constant fear of impending doom. Hyperbole aside, many BC/DR plans are under-tested, under-architected, and misunderstood by businesses. Sure, you may have a copy of your data at a secondary site, but how do you know it’s accessible to applications in the event of a failover? How do you ensure your most business-critical applications (complex interdependencies and all) come online properly and quickly? How do you automate and orchestrate changes to networking or startup scripts when your VMs fail-over? Just as importantly, how do you effectively test that all of this will work when it matters most? 

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The benefits of migrating applications to Microsoft’s Azure cloud make a very compelling business case – agility, scalability, a pay for what you use cost model, etc. But as you move workloads to Azure, don’t assume they are automatically protected, because while Azure does ensure a secure infrastructure, you are responsible for ensuring protection of your data – not Microsoft.

It’s all detailed in Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Security Model. Understanding where the Shared Responsibility model starts and stops is critical to ensuring your data is secure and compliant. Here are some key considerations:

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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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