Yesterday, we shared the top five SharePoint related blog posts of 2014. 
As several of those SharePoint posts alluded to, when it comes to the cloud, 2014 could be called the year Microsoft went “all in” and truly made cloud king. And Azure is a significant piece of that. 80% of Fortune 500 companies are on the Microsoft Cloud, with 50% using Azure. Our team shared their knowledge around Azure throughout the year, and here are the top five posts, in no particular order:
Multi-Forest Identity Solution – Azure AD Sync
In this post, Vaibhav Mathur discusses the much awaited multi-forest identity solution, Azure Active Directory Sync Tool. He gives background on why customers with complex multi-forest environments needed this. AADSync has its underpinnings from components of Microsoft’s Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) metadirectory service, so its architecture is similar to both DirSync and FIM.
Watch Out Amazon-Microsoft Azure is Here to Rule
After an impromptu airport encounter with Amazon and Google advocates, Vaibhav recognizes just how little some folks know about Azure and its capabilities. Most know Azure as only IaaS, but it has a wide variety of features in its PaaS offering and SaaS. In fact, Microsoft was one of two vendors described as leaders in Gartner’s application PaaS (which it calls aPaaS) Magic Quadrant. He goes on to talk about storage, business continuity, predictive analysis and security.
What’s New in Microsoft Azure Active Directory
Another winner from Vaibhav. Here, he talks about recent significant changes to the Azure Active Directory (AAD) features and capabilities. These include Subscription Management, Azure Rights Management (ARM) and Directory Management, as well as the features of Azure AD Premium and Directory Synchronization.
Microsoft Introduces Azure Estimation Tool
Did you know there are 25 different services offered as part of the Microsoft Azure platform? These services span a variety of areas – Compute & Networking, Web & Mobile, Data & Analytics, Storage & Backup, Media & CDN, Hybrid Integration, and Identity & Access Management. In this post, Joe Crabtree shares a newly released Microsoft tool, the Azure (IaaS) Cost Estimator tool V1.0, which helps identify the utilization and resource allocation on physical machines as well as guest VMs running on VMware and Hyper-V, and determine the cost of running an on-premises physical or virtual machine workload on Azure for 30 days.
The CIO’s Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services
In this post, I talk about a new white paper for executives who are examining Microsoft’s cloud service offerings (Azure, Office 365, Project Online, TFS Online, Dynamics CRM Online) as a way to contain and scale back exploding IT costs and become more nimble. If you’re interested, you can download the guide below.
[pardot-form id=”34122″ title=”MSFT: White Paper BLOG form: The CIO’s Guide to Understanding Microsoft Cloud Services”]
Perficient’s Top 5 Microsoft Azure Blog Posts of 2014
by Taylor Rhyne on December 30th, 2014 | ~ minute read
