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Protect and extend your datacenter

As written on microsoft.com

Backup and disaster recovery solutions powered by Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery, built on Microsoft’s trusted cloud platform, protect and extend your datacenter. Site Recovery’s replication capabilities help protect critical applications and extend your datacenter securely to Azure, enabling recovery, dev/testing and migration of applications to Azure—all while you control data privacy and access. Azure Backup is a scalable solution that protects your application data and gives you visibility into where and how the data is managed. Azure Backup retains data for up to 99 years with zero capital investment and minimal operating costs, helping you meet your compliance obligations.

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BACKUP AND DISASTER RECOVERY

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Azure Backup:

Simple and reliable cloud integrated backup as a service

Source: azure.microsoft.com

What is Azure Backup?

Azure Backup is a simple and cost-effective backup-as-a-service solution that extends tried-and-trusted tools on-premises with rich and powerful tools in the cloud. It delivers protection for customers’ data no matter where it resides: in the enterprise data center, in remote and branch offices, or in the public cloud; while being sensitive to the unique requirements these scenarios pose. Azure Backup, now in a seamless portal experience with Azure Site Recovery, offers minimal maintenance and cost-efficiency, consistent tools for offsite backups and operational recovery, and unified application availability and data protection.

• • Unified solution to protect data on-premises and in the cloud

  • 99.9% availability guaranteed

  • Reliable offsite backup target

  • Efficient incremental backups

  • Secure—data is encrypted in transit and at rest

  • Geo-replicated backup store

Protect your critical assets wherever they are

Your data and applications are everywhere—on servers, clients, and in the cloud. Backup can protect your critical applications, including SharePoint, Exchange, and SQL Server; files and folders; Windows servers and clients; and Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) virtual machines.

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Compelling cloud-based backup alternative to tape

Due to business or compliance requirements, organizations are required to protect their data for years, and over time this data grows exponentially. Traditionally, tape has been used for long-term retention. Backup provides a compelling alternative to tape with significant cost savings, shorter recovery times, and up to 99 years of retention.

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Secure and reliable backup as a service

Your backup data is secure over the wire and at rest. The backup data is stored in geo-replicated storage which maintains 6 copies of your data across two Azure datacenters. With 99.9% service availability, Backup provides operational peace of mind.

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Efficient and flexible online backup services

Backup is efficient over the network and on your disk. Once the initial seeding is complete, only incremental changes are sent at a defined frequency. Built-in features, such as compression, encryption, longer retention, and bandwidth throttling, help boost IT efficiency.

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Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.

We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.

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United Airlines Uses Azure Site Recovery to Build a Disaster Recovery Solution

Source: customers.microsoft.com

To address the need for an enterprise-ready disaster recovery solution, in June 2013 United Airlines joined the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Windows Server 2012 R2. “Now that we are more virtualized, we are looking at a whole new approach to DR, where flexibility and cloud computing combine to provide a resilient solution that we can tailor to meet our needs,” says Wilson. “It made sense to continue on our cloud journey with a Microsoft DR solution.”

Hyper-V Replica offers a data replication solution that replicates virtual machines within a site or to a remote site. The latest version of Hyper-V Replica provides the flexibility that United is looking for, with variable replication frequency—from 30 seconds up to 15 minutes—and support for extended replication to a third site. And the new DR management service, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, answers the airline’s need for a highly available DR solution because it is delivered as a cloud service running in the Microsoft Azure environment. Azure Site Recovery offers orchestration at scale delivered via recovery plans, so United IT staff can bring up applications in a desired manner at a low recovery time objective. While Azure Site Recovery is a feature of Windows Server 2012 R2, it supports backwards compatibility with all versions of Hyper-V Replica.

With Azure Site Recovery:

• Safeguard complex workloads against outages

• Support heterogenous environments (including Hyper-V)

• Leverage computer resources

• Reduce infrastructure costs by migrating workloads to Azure

Using Azure as a destination for disaster recovery eliminates the cost and complexity maintaining a secondary site, and replicated data is stored in Azure Storage, with all the resilience that provides.  Site Recovery provides test failovers to support disaster recovery drills without affecting production environments. You can also run planned failovers with a zero-data loss for expected outages, or unplanned failovers with minimal data loss (depending on replication frequency) for unexpected disasters. After failover you can failback to your primary sites. Site Recovery provides recovery plans that can include scripts and Azure automation workbooks so that you can customize failover and recovery of multi-tier applications.

Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.

We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.

 

Learn more about professional services provided by Managed Solution

Network Assessment & Technology Roadmap

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To Learn More about Professional Services, contact us at 800-208-3617

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Disaster Recovery Service with Azure

Source: azure.microsoft.com

Any technology user knows the worst feeling is watching your screen go blank and knowing your data is lost.  Microsoft Azure has a Disaster Recovery Service to ensure your data and devices are protected, no matter what comes your way.  Orchestrate your perfect disaster recover plan with:

• Automated protection and replication of virtual machines

• Remote health monitoring

• Customizable recovery plans

• No-impact recovery plan testing

• Orchestrated recovery when needed

• Replication to—and recovery in—Azure

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Replication and disaster recovery to Azure

Replicating your workloads to Azure enables new capabilities. Applications can be Migrated to Azure with just a few clicks, or burst to Azure temporarily when you encounter a surge in demand. Run reports and analytics on copies of production workloads in Azure without impacting users. DevTest new versions of applications with copies of live data, and then seamlessly put the new version into production in your datacenter.

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Simple, automated protection and disaster recovery in the cloud

Your environment can be protected by automating the replication of the virtual machines based on policies that you set and control. Site Recovery can protect Hyper-V, VMware and physical servers and you can use Azure or your secondary datacenter as your recovery site. Site Recovery coordinates and manages the ongoing replication of data by integrating with existing technologies including System Center and SQL Server AlwaysOn.

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Orchestrated disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)

Automate the orderly recovery of services in the event of a site outage at the primary datacenter with Site Recovery. Bring over applications in an orchestrated way to help restore service quickly, even for complex multi-tier workloads. Easily create disaster recovery plans in the Microsoft Azure classic portal, where they are stored. The disaster recovery plans can be as simple or as advanced as your business requirements demand, including the execution of custom Windows PowerShell scripts and Azure Automation Runbooks, and pauses for manual interventions. Customize networks by mapping virtual networks between the primary and recovery sites, and test disaster recovery plans whenever you want without disrupting the services at your primary location.

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Microsoft's BizSpark helping start-ups, like Pose-a-Pet, reach their goals

Jennifer Whaley, founder and CEO of Pose A Pet™, stumbled onto her startup idea several years after she began volunteering to take pictures of homeless pets at animal rescue operations in an effort find them forever homes more quickly. Great pictures get animals adopted, she says. Even better? A PaaS like Microsoft Azure gives a startup the boost it needs to go worldwide.

Whaley’s idea to help homeless pets become more adoptable through charming, uniquely personable photos for rescue ads was helping to get more animals adopted more quickly, but the number of animals that she could help was limited by the number of hours in the day. She took pictures using a necklace of squeaky, distinctive sounds that captured a pet’s attention.

The noises captured the shots she wanted but, in her heart, she knew there had to be a faster and more efficient way to bring her photo-taking tools to the masses and distribute them out so that more animals would be adopted quickly. As she worked out the details of Pose A Pet™, she networked with other startups.

When another small pet business told her about the benefits of the Microsoft BizSpark program, Whaley was interested in learning more.

As she tells it, “It truly hit us that we were a real startup when we became a part of the BizSpark program. When we found out that everything we needed was available to us (Ed. Note: Visual Studio, Exchange, Azure, SQL, SharePoint, etc.) to develop the kind of apps we envisioned, we knew we had a chance.”

Jeff Everett, co-founder and CTO, manages the technology side of the business. Through BizSpark, Pose a Pet™ now uses Microsoft Azure to house all its images, create animal rescue flyers, add sponsors and helps create marketing campaigns for animal rescues worldwide, among other things.

Even more important, Microsoft Azure is available and scalable to Pose A Pet’s™ needs as it continues to expand worldwide. Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) allow developers to focus on building differentiating scenarios and features rather than rebuilding infrastructure.

PaaS was perfect for Pose A Pet™, says Everett. The Microsoft Azure platform provides a cloud services operating system and a set of services to support easy development and operation of applications for the platform. One OSS platform the company is currently evaluating for use within Azure is Concrete 5. Everett says that will help wrangle in the many contacts the startup has for rescues, TV stations, radio stations, etc.

“We love the flexible nature it provides that our developers need and have been asking us for so they can use it for their contacts.”

Because Pose A Pet™ is dealing with multiple software versions as well as a collaborative workspace, the company uses Git Repository to make sure all the versions are properly cataloged through the Feature Based Workflow.

“That gives us frictionless context switching,” says Everett, “so we can go forward with a revision, commit a few times, head back to where we branched from and apply patching where necessary in order to make our final project stable while developing other ideas in parallel.”

“Azure’s Platform as a Service provides significant cost reduction in the development, deployment and hosting of business applications due to the fact that you pay only for what you use,” adds Everett. “The ever-increasing and limitless computing resources of PaaS also give us a major competitive edge over our competitors because if we need more resources or servers, we can have them up in minutes rather than the time required at traditional in-house data centers.”

Because of all the services Azure has to offer, Pose A Pet™ easily built a back-end engine to create shareable flyers in bulk for automated sends; each animal rescue flyer has a link to a business that sponsors an individual animal, which are then shared all over social media.

“We got excited about Microsoft Azure when we realized that the process was much more automated that we expected,” he says. “The most exciting thing for us is the ability to scale. We know we will be housing thousands of images and moving a large amount of data around in the future. Keeping all that in one place on a single platform like Azure makes things straightforward. And that leaves time for us to plan for growth through development.”

“With Azure, we just save so much time for ourselves and the work we enjoy doing,” he says. “And the ability to scale through cost is beautiful. It’s easy to get all kinds of apps to communicate with the server. For example, we use a lot of Java and will be employing more open source software packages like Ruby on Rails as we grow and customize. That’s a huge benefit of Azure – that we can deploy OSS on it.”

Pose A Pet™ has iPad and Android apps now (Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps coming soon) that use proven attention grabbing sounds from Whaley’s necklace as a picture is being taken. The sounds in the app help the pet focus directly on the camera, which improves each picture taken. For those involved in animal rescue you can create a virtual flyer that can be instantly shared on their social media networks. The app will be available through the Windows Store soon stay tuned.

For anyone considering adopting a pet, Whaley has some valuable advice.

“Be sure you have the space, time and energy for a pet. Then find a local breed rescue or animal shelter and take things from there. Many people don’t realize that you don’t even have to open your home or even your pocketbook to help animal rescue. Visit your local animal shelter’s site today to find out how you can help homeless animals in your community!”

Microsoft is helping these startups succeed through its BizSpark program.

About BizSpark: Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps startups succeed by giving free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, software and support. BizSpark members receive up to $750 per month of free Microsoft Azure cloud services for 3 years: that’s $150 per month each for up to 5 developers. Azure works with Linux and open-source technologies such as Linux, Ruby, Python, Java and PHP. BizSpark is available to startups that are privately held, less than 5-years-old and earn less than $1M in annual revenue.

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Today’s Tech: How A Startup Attorney Uses Cloud Computing

By Nicole Black as written on abovethelaw.com

Cloud computing used to be a foreign concept to many lawyers, but these days most lawyers are working in the cloud whether they know it or not. Cloud computing offers so many advantages over traditional on-premises software — including convenience, mobility, flexibility, affordability, and 24/7 access — that it’s hard to avoid using cloud computing for work-related purposes. That’s why so many lawyers start using cloud computing services like Dropbox to share documents — oftentimes after being prompted to by other lawyers involved in a case — without even realizing they’re collaborating on documents in the cloud.

But not all lawyers stumble into the cloud unknowingly. Some choose cloud computing with their eyes wide open, after carefully researching their options. Steven Ayr is one such lawyer.

Last year Steven joined Fort Point Legal, a Boston law firm that focuses on representing small businesses and startups, after practicing law as a solo practitioner for a number of years. As a solo, his law practice was 100% paperless and all of the firm’s data was stored in the cloud. So when he started at Fort Point Legal, he was first in line to help move the firm into the cloud: “When I got here, the firm was on its way to a cloud-based practice but I nudged it along. For a firm like ours that’s growing quickly, it’s scalable and it takes out a lot of the management costs since we don’t have to worry about having an in-house IT department. And, from a productivity and security standpoint and the built-in ability to have 24/7 access from anywhere, it just makes sense for us.”

But according to Steven, it’s not just cost savings and convenience that make the cloud so appealing; the cloud also allows them to compete with larger law firms.

“We use the cloud-based software since it’s a relatively inexpensive way for a smaller law firm to get the capabilities that used to be reserved for larger firms. Whether it’s data management or security, the cloud really is the great equalizer,” he explains. “There aren’t many law firms our size in Boston that do what we do. Instead you typically find small departments within very large firms. So web-based software levels the playing field for us.”

The firm uses a number of different cloud-based tools. First, there’s Google Apps. “We use Google Apps for our email contacts and calendars. It’s the hub of our practice. We share calendars amongst team members so we can see what’s going on with everyone’s schedule and we can create specific calendars to keep track of different issues. So, for example, we have a calendar to keep track of corporate filings throughout the year that is accessible to everyone.”

The firm also uses Asana, which provides web-based task management software. “We can forward emails into Asana and it will create a task using the body text of the email and will also add any email attachments to the newly created task. Team members can then comment the task as well. And over time you can follow each matter as it progresses and tasks are checked off.”

Dropbox is another web-based tool that the firm relies on. “We use Dropbox as our central file repository. We use it to collaborate, but it’s not ideal for collaboration since it doesn’t update in real-time like Google Drive’s collaboration. We use Dropbox Pro because of the higher level of encryption it provides, since in Massachusetts we have very strict data privacy laws. Another reason we prefer Pro is because you have access to more security features when it comes to team members, including the ability to remotely wipe devices.”

Another cloud-based tool the firm uses is Phone.com. “We recently switched from Ring Central to Phone.com because we were seeking a more user-friendly interface and better customer support. Another reason we really like this service is because there’s no limit to customization you can set up in terms of how you want phones to ring and at what time of day and in what order.”

Cloud-based tools benefit their firm in many ways. Not only do they provide convenience and save their firm money, they also make the firm more appealing to their target market. “Our startup clients would be put off if we didn’t use these tools with them. We use them regularly with clients and many of my client interactions take place online now.”

Of course there can be drawbacks when collaborating with clients online, as Steven acknowledges: “There is arguably lack of human touch when a lot of client communication occurs online. So it’s important when using cloud computing tools for client communication to be cognizant of that fact and to take steps to maintain those connections.”

His advice to lawyers seeking to use cloud computing software in their practice? Plan carefully. “Think through your needs before you start implementing different types of software. Take the time to research your options and sit through demos with sales reps. Figure out what you truly need ahead of time so you can avoid wasting time by constantly switching between systems and software.”

About Managed Solution

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Aiming to Deliver New Drugs Faster at Less Cost in the Cloud

Researchers from Molplex, a small drug discovery company; Newcastle University; and Microsoft Research Connections are working together to help scientists around the world deliver new medicines more quickly and at lower cost. This partnership has helped Molplex develop Clouds Against Disease, an offering of high-quality drug discovery services based on a new molecular discovery platform that draws its power from cloud computing with Windows Azure.

Rethinking Drug Discovery
David Leahy, co-founder and chief executive officer of Molplex, envisions a way to help pharmaceutical researchers anywhere in the world form effective drug discovery teams without large investments in technology or fixed running costs. "It takes massive computing resources to search through chemical and biological databases looking for new drug candidates. Our Clouds Against Disease solution dramatically reduces the time and cost of doing that by providing computation and chemical analysis services on demand," Leahy says.

Molplex regards drug discovery as a big data and search optimization problem. Clouds Against Disease uses its computational molecular discovery platform to automate decision making that is traditionally the scientists’ task.

"Instead of having teams of scientists scanning chemical information, our software searches for structures that have multiple properties matching the search criteria," explains Leahy. "When we integrate that with highly automated chemical synthesis and screening, it becomes a much more efficient and productive way of doing drug discovery."

Data Manipulation on a Larger Scale
In a recent pre-clinical study, the company applied its computational platform to more than 10,000 chemical structure and biological activity data sets. This action generated 750,000 predictive relationships between chemical structure and biological effect. After generating numerous possible outcomes, Molplex then used the same validation criteria that scientists would use to narrow down the 750,000 relationships to just 23,000 models covering 1,000 biological and physico-chemical properties, a relatively small data set that humans could then manage. "It would have taken hundreds of scientists several years to do this the conventional way," Leahy

Windows Azure was critical to the success of Clouds Against Disease. Molplex can access 100 or more Windows Azure nodes—in effect, virtual servers—to process data rapidly. The physical-world alternative would be to source, purchase, provision, and then manage 100 physical servers, which represents a significant investment in up-front costs. Before they could begin drug research, scientists taking this traditional approach would have to raise millions of dollars, but Windows Azure helps eliminate start-up costs by allowing new companies to pay for only what they use in computing resources.

Vladimir J. Sykora, co-founder and chief operating officer for Molplex, explains that the Molplex computational platform runs algorithms his company developed to calculate the numerical properties of molecules rapidly. Consequently, Molplex has been able to produce drug discovery results on a much larger scale than what was previously feasible. "We would not have been able to predict so many compounds without the cloud computing resources enabled by Windows Azure," asserts Sykora. "The speed and high level of detail provided by Windows Azure allow us to explore far beyond what would have been possible with traditional hardware resources."

Fighting Tropical Diseases
Molplex is embarking on a new collaboration with the Malaysian government to search for drugs that fight tropical diseases. This search has always been a lower priority for drug companies because the market is smaller, making it a less desirable commercial prospect. The traditional drug discovery program is geared to $1 billion a year blockbuster drugs; however, there are fewer opportunities today for drugs with that level of commercial potential.

Increasingly, scientists are researching tropical diseases that affect smaller populations; radically reducing the cost of drug discovery makes it feasible for scientists to tackle them. "Unlocking drug discovery technology from a physical location with the cloud has tremendous potential to help researchers work on curing these diseases faster and at less cost," asserts Leahy, "wherever they are in the world."

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The future of mobile app development

By Nat Friedman as written on blogs.microsoft.com

It is incredible how much has happened since Xamarin joined Microsoft just over a month ago, starting with Scott Guthrie’s Build 2016 announcements that Xamarin is now part of all editions of Visual Studio at no additional charge — from Community to Enterprise — and our plans to open source the Xamarin SDK. It is a dream come true for us to be able to put the power of Xamarin into the hands of all developers.

In just the first two weeks since Build alone, we helped nearly 3.5 times more developers get started building great apps with Xamarin than ever in our history as a company.

Now we are at Xamarin Evolve 2016, the world’s largest cross-platform mobile development conference, in Orlando. This morning we open sourced the Xamarin SDK and launched new ways to make Visual Studio the most complete mobile development environment. We also launched new ways to build native, cross-platform apps faster than ever using our popular cross-platform UI framework, Xamarin.Forms.

This is our third Evolve conference, but the first time we are showing the comprehensive developer experience that only Microsoft and Xamarin together can deliver.

Open source Xamarin: Ready for you!

We have officially open sourced and contributed to the .NET Foundation the Xamarin SDK for Android, iOS and Mac under the same MIT license used for the Mono project. This includes native API bindings for iOS, Android and Mac, the command-line tools necessary to build for these platforms, and Xamarin.Forms, our popular cross-platform UI framework.

Watching Xamarin co-founder and open source pioneer Miguel de Icaza announce this onstage was a proud moment for all of us. The future of native cross-platform mobile development is now in the hands of every developer. We look forward to seeing your contributions; go to open.xamarin.com to get involved.

Visual Studio: Your complete mobile development environment

Today we launched new ways to connect Visual Studio to your Mac to make it even easier for C# developers to create native iOS apps, and new ways to auto-generate mobile app test scripts in Visual Studio.

Our iOS Simulator remoting lets you simulate and interact with your iOS apps in Visual Studio — even supporting multi-touch interactions on Windows machines with capable touch screens. We also unveiled our iOS USB remoting, which makes it possible to deploy and debug apps from Visual Studio to an iPad or iPhone plugged into your Windows PC.

In addition, our Test Recorder Visual Studio Plugin now brings Test Recorder’s ability to generate test scripts to Visual Studio users. Simply interact with your app on device or in the simulator and Test Recorder automatically generates scripts that can be run on thousands of devices with Xamarin Test Cloud’s automated app testing.

 

Xamarin.Forms: Faster and easier mobile app development

We launched Xamarin.Forms a few years ago to help developers build mobile apps faster, maximizing UI code-sharing while still delivering fully native experiences.

Today, we showed three key new features that will be coming to Xamarin.Forms. Data Pages and Themes make it easy to connect apps to common entities and data sources, and create beautiful, native user interfaces with just a few lines of code. The Forms Previewer makes it easy to iterate on your Xamarin.Forms UI designs by providing real-time previewing of Xamarin.Forms user interfaces composed in XAML.

 

The new, mobile-optimized development lifecycle

We were able to show today the most streamlined mobile lifecycle available anywhere through our combined product lineup, including integrations between Visual Studio Team Services, HockeyApp and Xamarin Test Cloud. Through our combined mobile lifecycle solution, you now have a complete solution to build great mobile apps at scale, tackling the unique challenges of mobile DevOps.

We’ve heard great enthusiasm from our customers. Bryan Hooper, senior director enterprise architecture at Bloomin’ Brands, talked about how they have “paired Xamarin with Microsoft’s Azure technology, and we’re really excited about the new partnership between the two organizations.” Darrell Thompson, vice president of information system services at Coca-Cola Consolidated, says that “Xamarin and Microsoft have been excellent partners and brought our mobile development to a whole new level.”

If we’re able to deliver all of this for you in just six weeks, imagine what you’ll be able to do in six months with Xamarin and Microsoft!