Posted on July 17th, 2010Microsoft Cloud Hosting Service, Azure offers web hosting providers cloud deployment alongwith number of IT outsourcing services. Microsoft Cloud Services are designed to provide users MSP mode and addressing rising frequent revenues.
Many businesses have deployed Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Sharepoint applications, so there is nothing extraordinary with these hosted versions. However, cloud-based services are exceptional to add value in the already installed apps.
Microsoft is focusing on providing rapid business solutions to its customers and for this reason they are arranging ‘Application Platforms’. For instance, ‘xRM’ development toolset is a fundamental tool for distributed cloud environments where service providers can replicate databases among data-centers.
Another great aspect of collaboration productivity is its focus on legal compliance capabilities. With the increasing demand of security, traditional IT methods are no longer stable to address security issues. The Cloud environment offers the solution in the form of plug-ins which can be implemented on Exchange and SharePoint to make them more practical and productive.
SharePoint is the main product from Microsoft which increases staff productivity and assist organizations to achieve its goals. The Relational Productivity Application white paper (19-page PDF), published by Microsoft explains about Application Framework approach and Innovation Process Management Solution.
Aberdeen report on ‘Securing Unstructured Data’ tells us another story. According to the report, while bringing these tools together, there are more security risks. Word, Excel, multimedia and other types of raw files all come under unstructured data and these files propagate very fast across the network. Though, organizations can save SharePoint if they put a firewall on the hosting server and restrict VPN access, but still all the above mentioned files are unsafe when they are downloaded over the internet.
Organizations can use HP-Trim software to save the records but this works fine only when data is saved on a single SharePoint server and when security restrictions are implemented fully. The more authentic approach is to save user profiles and unstructured data behind the corporate firewall. Another report from EMC predicts that there are still number of chances for this data being lost.
Cloud storage is the solution of all these issues as explained by author in Aberdeen report which provides us technology bundle to address such problems. The software in the Cloud platform encrypts and replicates data across many channels and offers the highest security through intelligent automation. Moreover, time-stamping cloud service can be used for authentication and legal compliance which works perfect in the event of disaster.