United Airlines Uses Azure Site Recovery to Build a Disaster Recovery Solution
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United Airlines Uses Azure Site Recovery to Build a Disaster Recovery Solution
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:
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Safeguard complex workloads against outages
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Support heterogenous environments (including Hyper-V)
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Leverage computer resources
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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
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Case Study: UniKey
“I’ve never been a fan of traditional keys,” says UniKey founder Dumas, an electrical engineer with a background in biometrics security. “Keys literally, in their current form, have more or less been around for 1,100 years, and I just felt a passion for unlocking things in new and unique ways.”
In April, UniKey raised $10 million in a Series A round of venture capital funding to propel additional products to market. That was nearly two years after UniKey and its first residential lock partner, Kwikset, launched Kevo. Kevo is a secure, one-step, Bluetooth-enabled smart lock, now available for resale in five countries.
“That one step is touching your door, which is about as simple as it gets,” says Dumas.
BizSpark helped UniKey save money in its early days, and now Azure is helping UniKey expand into new markets. The company uses Azure Cloud Services, Service Bus, Redis and Linux Virtual Machines, which hosts UniKey’s Ruby on Rails MyKevo.com site.
“Microsoft Azure affords UniKey the information and flexibility to immediately respond to ever-growing customer demand,” says Dumas.
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Reinventing the world from keys to light switches, startups grow their businesses on Microsoft technology
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Reinventing the world from keys to light switches, startups grow their businesses on Microsoft technology
In the span of five years, UniKey has grown from a tiny startup to a pioneer in the smart lock industry. Its founder and president, Phil Dumas, has gone from a budding Florida entrepreneur who appeared on “Shark Tank” to the head of a company that’s raised $14.3 million.
UniKey now powers a leading smart lock on the market with partner Kwikset, the largest residential lock manufacturer in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world.
“We basically set out to replace your entire keychain with your phone,” says Dumas. “As long as you have your phone on you or in your pocket or purse, all you have to do is walk up and touch the door and it magically unlocks.” In other words, no fumbling for your keys — or your phone to open an app.
UniKey is one of many successful startups around the world to grow and raise funding with the help of Microsoft programs and tools. Microsoft BizSpark gives thousands of dollars in free Azure cloud services to startups, and Microsoft Ventures operates accelerators in seven cities worldwide that give startups guidance and mentoring to pitch investors.
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Microsoft helps startups grow in all stages of funding, whether they’re bootstrapping, crowdfunding, talking to angels or going through their first Series A. With free access to Azure, startups have a secure, reliable, open-source-friendly platform to deploy apps, store data and create virtual machines as they develop their solutions.
And go-to-market support and networking with Microsoft customers help startups grow around the world and navigate a funding landscape that’s changed over the years. Gone are the days when startups went directly from friends and family to venture capitalists. These days, startups have access to many more funding types, with accelerators, crowdfunding platforms, angel investors and angel groups.
“There’s no better external validation than seeing our startups raise significant funding,” says Scott Coleman, general manager of Microsoft Ventures. “It tells us we are finding and mentoring great startups and that our support is having a positive impact. Their success is our success.”
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Case Study: FUNDEMEX Small Nonprofit Makes Big Strides Through Tech
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FUNDEMEX: Small nonprofit makes big strides through tech
FUNDEMEX (Mexican Foundations for Entrepreneurs) supports entrepreneurs in the rural corners of Mexico, enabling the disadvantaged to climb out of poverty. A dated IT system often slowed operations to a crawl, though, and made working on the road a technological headache. The Office 365 Nonprofit program changed all that.
The universality of the cloud-based suite, available to qualifying nonprofits for free or at a huge discount, allows FUNDEMEX to
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send multimedia updates from the field,
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eliminate costly delays,
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work anytime from anywhere, and
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bring advanced technology to underserved communities.
Thanks to the donation, FUNDEMEX is empowering more entrepreneurs than ever—and watching the benefits fan out to change even more lives.
"Reliable software in the cloud makes us more efficient so we can better achieve our goals and save money."
Regina de Angoitia Guerrero, Director of Partnerships and Development
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A ripple effect in the cloud
Crossing the digital divide
FUNDEMEX works with other nonprofits and entrepreneurial groups operating in underdeveloped parts of Mexico, thereby reaching more clients than they could alone. “With Microsoft Office 365, FUNDEMEX is able to reduce the digital divide as rural communities lack access to information technologies,” Marisa Monroy, director of programming, says. These organizations are often hundreds of miles away and have the most rudimentary tech, but cloud-based tools enable employees on both sides to collaborate with ease.
“Without this partnership with Microsoft we couldn’t have reached the organizations that we have,” she adds. “The technology generates a triple result: economic, social and environmental development.”
Expanding capacity in the field
FUNDEMEX employees travel to partner sites throughout Mexico, from a small-scale organic coffee farm to a women’s weaving cooperative. Staff upload reports and photos to OneDrive, updating the home team about progress via their mobile phones. Instant communication prevents the need for expensive follow-up visits since they can address issues while employees are on-site. And because they share documents in the cloud, they avoid the confusion of image-heavy emails bouncing.
What’s more, using Skype for Business allows them to join meetings taking place at their office in Mexico City. With a staff of just seven, every member is invaluable, and the organization couldn’t function if employees went offline every time they hit the road.
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 managed services to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
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Empowering attorneys and staff with Office 365 helps Kelley Drye transform into a digital workplace
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Empowering attorneys and staff with Office 365 helps Kelley Drye transform into a digital workplace
By Judith Flournoy as written on blogs.office.com
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The legal profession stretches all the way back to the orators of ancient Rome. The field has come a long way since then, with attorneys often working together across geographical and organizational boundaries on behalf of their clients. That idea of teamwork—collaborating with colleagues, outside consultants and even clients—needs to be at the core of what we do so that we can take advantage of areas of expertise and facilitate efficiencies.
As law firms have expanded to handle matters across the globe, they’ve needed to change the nature of collaboration, which has evolved tremendously over the last 50 years or so. For most of the history of our profession, attorneys relied on face-to-face meetings and documents shared via human messengers. The telephone and fax machine began to alter that communication landscape, but the first major game changer was email, which is still heavily used today to exchange documents, images and other information related to client matters.
At Kelley Drye, we’re continuing that evolution by embracing new avenues of collaboration through Microsoft Office 365. Rather than sending long email threads, we rely on Microsoft SharePoint Online. We use its project and team sites to manage issues, contacts, project tasks, links to internal and external content, timelines and document access—all in one place and accessible from anywhere. Adopting modern capabilities like SharePoint Online helps us maintain a comprehensive view of a project and all its moving parts.
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Having the capabilities is one thing. Embracing them is another. Some industries more readily adopt new technologies than others. Although the legal field can be conservative when it comes to using technology, we’ve found that giving our attorneys the ability to work together more seamlessly has had a big impact on client service at Kelley Drye. The attorneys control how much visibility into the drafting process they share with clients and other stakeholders, depending on their comfort level and the sensitivity of a given matter. They definitely appreciate the ease with which they can now facilitate the sharing of information among colleagues, clients and outside consultants.
Of course, one of the huge side benefits of using SharePoint Online for collaboration is that our data stays more protected. We know exactly where it is, who has access to it and who has actually viewed it. Client confidentiality is always a prime concern in the legal field, and it was tough to know what happened to documents if we emailed them to a client or outside partner. But now, that valuable data stays more secure, with relevant parties given access to documents but not necessarily the power to change them.
We’re getting feedback from clients that they’re pleased with the steps we’ve taken to improve our service to them. That tells us we’re evolving the right way and making strides in the right direction.
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Case Study: How The Global Fund streamlined its move to the cloud
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How The Global Fund streamlined its move to the cloud
The Global Fund is a public–private partnership mandated by the World Health Organization to finance programs that prevent and treat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria—epidemics that disproportionately affect those in poverty in the developing world. In 2015, the fund raised and invested more than US $4 billion to fight these diseases. It supports programs that treat 8.1 million people for HIV/AIDS and that have helped cut death rates for tuberculosis and malaria by almost half.
But in many of the places we work, we had trouble collaborating and communicating efficiently with our employees, partners and local stakeholders. To modernize our infrastructure and improve remote access to our network resources, we wanted to migrate our email and collaboration environments to Microsoft Office 365.
Reevaluating our approach
We initially produced a project plan that we considered conservative. We thought that if we migrated our mailboxes to Exchange Online one department at a time, we could solve any problems we encountered while they were small. But we ran into challenges when we tried to manage the migration on our own, so we engaged the Microsoft FastTrack Center to help us onboard Office 365. Our assigned FastTrack* team helped us assess our existing infrastructure, identify our problems, refocus our vision for Office 365 and develop a successful rollout. The FastTrack engineers understood our priorities, and they advised us to reconsider our approach.
The FastTrack team showed us that if we just dedicated some extra support resources for the week after the migration, we could move the whole organization in a single day. Plus, they highlighted some potential pitfalls in our original plan: a phased rollout would separate user calendar accounts from each other during the transition, some on-premises and some in the cloud, and people who manage multiple calendars might not have access to all of them. It could have resulted in weeks of missed meetings, double-booked conference calls and probably more than a few frustrated managers and executives.
So we planned ahead, and when the time came, we migrated the whole organization—1,200 mailboxes—to Exchange Online in one day. The temporary help desk we set up spent about a week addressing minor problems here and there, and then we were done.
With the FastTrack Center there to support us when we needed them, we saved weeks on our Office 365 migration. More importantly, we likely avoided a lot of unnecessary user issues—and the costs that would have gone with them.
Staying focused on our mission
Thanks to the quick and successful Exchange Online migration, The Global Fund can manage its entire collaboration environment in the Microsoft cloud, instead of spending time and money on an expensive, complex on-premises infrastructure. When we spend less effort on infrastructure maintenance, it frees up resources to focus on modernizing our business, collaborating more effectively with our employees and partners on the ground, and building new ways to accelerate the end of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria as epidemics.
To learn more about how The Global Fund is using Office 365 to modernize its business, read the full case study.
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Case Study: Autry Museum improves support, reduces costs with cloud solutions
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Autry Museum improves support, reduces costs with cloud solutions
If you’re fascinated by the American West, you can’t do better than a visit to Autry Museum. Through exhibitions, lectures, events, film, research and educational outreach programs, the Autry tells the stories of the diverse people, art, history and cultures of the region.
The Autry welcomes more than 200,000 visitors each year to its three sites in and around Los Angeles, a main campus in Griffith Park, the historic Southwest Museum in Mt. Washington, and a research and education facility in Burbank. When Autry staff work to manage exhibitions, special events or outreach programs, they need mobile tools to coordinate efforts across museum facilities.
“With public events throughout our campuses, we rely heavily on laptops, tablets and smartphones,” says Maren Dougherty, director of Communications and Marketing at the Autry Museum.
Prior to deploying Office 365 in 2014, the organization had been using Microsoft Office, and employees liked the Microsoft Outlook on the web app for email. But they couldn’t download attachments, share calendars or reserve campus event space easily on their mobile devices, which made it harder to coordinate events efficiently or collaborate on the fly. At the same time, the museum’s on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server was costing more to maintain while limiting inbox capacity—and staff productivity.
The right tools for the job
To provide museumgoers with the best possible experience, enhance employee collaboration and reduce IT maintenance, the Autry initially compared cloud-based Office 365 and Google Apps, ultimately deciding on Office 365. “We chose Office 365 for consistency, but also because employees use it to search and sort information in a variety of ways that are very useful for organizing their work,” says Rebecca Menendez, director of Information Services and Technology at Autry Museum.
In November 2014, the Autry IT team migrated 130 staff email accounts to Office 365. They started on Friday and completed the move by the time employees returned to work on Monday morning. “The transition was so smooth that I think a lot of people barely noticed the difference,” says Dougherty.
A mobile-productivity roundup
Since the Autry adopted Office 365, more staff have been responding to email, retrieving attachments, scheduling meetings and managing their calendars remotely. “Once we got to Office 365, everyone was thrilled to see that the calendars work seamlessly on mobile devices,” says Menendez.
Now employees can maintain their productivity whether they’re on the main museum campus, staffing special events or working from off-campus locations. They use Office 365 calendar features to help manage events and venue rentals, designate event rooms and assign permissions so users can view the calendar and make reservations. “It is much easier now to set up remotely with an outside table and a couple of laptops,” says Dougherty. “Employees just send an email to add people to the guest list.”
Using OneDrive for Business for file storage and Skype for Business Online for calls and teleconferencing, Autry employees can communicate more easily, from sharing files with colleagues to responding to press requests for high-resolution images. “Sending files was difficult for my team because it took a lot of time,” says Dougherty. “Now we don’t have those kinds of restrictions.”
Fewer headaches, better collaboration, easier growth
With Office 365, the Autry IT team no longer suffers the headaches of server maintenance and email support, and the museum is saving 85 percent in monthly IT maintenance costs. “Anytime I can take money away from back-end administrative costs to put toward the way we communicate, it’s a real positive for the organization as a whole,” says Menendez.
Transitioning to Office 365 has helped the Autry increase mobile productivity, improve collaboration and reduce IT costs. The museum is now better equipped to meet the needs of visitors—and continue to grow.
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343 Industries Gets New User Insights from Big Data in the Cloud
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343 Industries Gets New User Insights from Big Data in the Cloud
The Halo franchise is an award-winning collection of properties that has grown into a global entertainment phenomenon. To date, more than 50 million copies of Halo video games have been sold worldwide. As developers prepared to launch Halo 4, they were tasked with analyzing data to gain insights into player preferences and support an online tournament. To handle those requests, the team used a powerful Microsoft technology called Windows Azure HDInsight Service, based on the Apache Hadoop big data framework. Using HDInsight Service to process and analyze raw data from the Windows Azure cloud operating system, the team was able to feed game statistics to the tournament’s operator, which used the data to rank players based on game play. The team also used HDInsight Service to update Halo 4 every week and support a daily email campaign designed to increase player retention. Organizations can also take advantage of data to quickly make business decisions.
Situation
Halo 4 marks the beginning of a new saga in the blockbuster franchise that has shaped entertainment history and defined a generation of gamers. Developed by Microsoft Studios’ 343 Industries game studio exclusively for the Microsoft Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system, Halo 4 brings back the Master Chief character in a new, epic sci-fi adventure. Released in November 2012, the game achieved more than $220 million in global sales in its first 24 hours and attracted more than 4 million players in its first five days after launch.
For the Halo Services Team, a development team at 343 Industries that manages the game, one of the biggest challenges is scaling to meet player demands. That’s one reason the team uses Windows Azure to power the game’s back-end supporting services. These services run the game’s key multiplayer features, including leaderboards and avatar rendering. Hosting the multiplayer parts of the game in Windows Azure ensures that the team has a way to quickly and inexpensively add and remove server capacity as needed.
As the game was prepared for release, however, 343 Industries was faced with an entirely new kind of challenge: to gain insight into player behavior and user preferences. To achieve this goal, Microsoft leadership asked 343 Industries to find a way to effectively mine user data.
At the same time, the team was faced with another need: analyzing data during the five-week Halo 4 “Infinity Challenge” tournament and providing results each day to their tournament partner, Virgin Gaming. The Halo 4 Infinity Challenge, the largest free-to-enter online Halo tournament in the world, tracked a player’s personal score in the game’s multiplayer modes across a global leaderboard, giving players a chance to win more than 2,800 prizes. Virgin Gaming needed to use business intelligence (BI) data gathered during the event to update leaderboards on the tournament website.
To meet these business requirements, 343 Industries knew it needed to find a BI technology solution that would integrate with Windows Azure. “One of the great things about 343 Industries is how they use cutting-edge technology like Azure,” says Alex Gregorio, Program Manager for Microsoft Studios, which published Halo 4. “So we wanted to find the best BI environment out there, and we needed to make sure it integrated with Azure.”
Because all Halo 4 game data is housed in Windows Azure, the team wanted to find a solution that could effectively produce usable BI information from that data. The team also needed to process this data in the same data center, minimizing storage costs and avoiding charges for data transfers across two data centers. Additionally, the team wanted full control over job priorities, so that the performance and delivery of analytical queries would not be affected by other processing jobs run at the same time. “We had to have a flexible solution that was not on-premises,” states Gregorio.
The team began its search for a new BI solution in the months leading up to the scheduled November launch of Halo 4.
Solution
Although it initially considered building its own custom BI solution, 343 Industries ultimately decided to use HDInsight Service, which is based on Apache Hadoop, an open-source software framework created by Yahoo! Hadoop, which is ideal for running complex analytics, can analyze massive amounts of unstructured data in a distributed manner. HDInsight Service is a big data solution for Windows Azure that empowers users to gain new insights from unstructured data, while connecting that data to familiar Microsoft BI tools. “Even though we knew we would be one of the earliest customers of HDInsight Service, it met all our requirements,” says Tamir Melamed, Development Manager on the Halo Services Team. “It can run any possible queries, and it is the best format for integration with Azure.”
The team was particularly attracted to the flexibility of HDInsight Service, which allowed for separating the amount of the raw data from the processing size needed to consume that data. “With previous systems, we never had the separation between production and raw data, so there was always the question of how running analytics would affect production,” says Mark Vayman, Lead Program Manager for the Halo Services Team. “Hadoop solved that problem.”
HDInsight Service was also instrumental in changing the team’s focus from data storage to useful data analysis. That’s because Hadoop applies structure to data when it’s consumed, as opposed to traditional data warehouse applications that structure data before it is placed into a BI system.
The team wrote Windows Azure–based services that convert raw game data collected in Windows Azure into the Avro format, which is supported by Hadoop. This data is then pushed from the Windows Azure services in the Avro format into Windows Azure binary large object (BLOB) storage, which HDInsight Service is able to utilize with the ASV protocol. The data can then be accessed by anyone with the right permissions from Windows Azure.
Every day, Hadoop handles millions of data-rich objects related to Halo 4, including preferred game modes, game length, and many other items. With Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Microsoft SharePoint as a front-end presentation layer, Windows Azure BLOBs are created based on queries from the Halo 4 team.
Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel loads data from HDInsight Service using the Hadoop Hive ODBC driver. A PowerPivot workbook is then uploaded to PowerPivot for SharePoint and refreshed nightly within a SharePoint site, using the connection string stored in the workbook via the Hive ODBC driver to HDInsight Service. The team uses the workbooks to generate reports and facilitate their viewing of interactive data dashboards.
Benefits
Using HDInsight Service, 343 Industries is more agile and can respond faster to customer requests. With the solution’s flexibility, the Halo Services Team is able to make weekly updates to the game and was able to help Virgin Gaming detect cheaters in the online Infinity Challenge tournament. HDInsight Service also supports customized email campaigns that the Halo marketing team is using to improve the user experience and retain players. In addition, the solution relies on familiar tools that can be used to simplify decision making.
Increases Agility and Speeds Response Time
With HDInsight Service, 343 Industries is more agile and can respond more quickly to business requests for BI. Part of the reason for this agility is the solution’s performance. With Hadoop, the team was able to build a configuration system that can be used to turn various Windows Azure data feeds on or off as needed. “That really helps us get optimal performance, and it’s a big advantage because we can use the same Azure data source to run compute for HDInsight Service on multiple clusters,” says Vayman. “It made it easy for us to drive business requests for analysis through an ad-hoc Hadoop cluster without affecting the jobs being run.”
And launching Hadoop clusters is a simple, fast process. “We can easily launch a new Hadoop cluster in minutes, run a query, and get back to the business in a few hours or less,” says Melamed. “Azure is very agile by nature, and Hadoop on Azure is more powerful as a result.”
Helps Halo 4 Team Make Weekly Game Updates
In addition to responding quickly to business requests, the Halo 4 team can take BI data pulled from the game each day and identify user trends, such as the average length of a game and the specific game features that players use the most. By getting these insights, the Halo 4 team can make frequent updates to the game. “Based on the user preference data we’re getting from Hadoop, we’re able to update game maps and game modes on a week-to-week basis,” says Vayman. “And the suggestions we get in the forums often find their way into the next week’s update. We can actually use this feedback to make changes and see if we attract new players. Hadoop and the forums are great tuning mechanisms for us.”
The team is also taking user feedback and giving it to the game’s designers, who can consider the suggestions in developing future editions of Halo.
Provides In-Game Analysis and Helps Identify Cheaters
Because Hadoop applies structure to data when it’s consumed, the team can focus more on analytics and less on storage. Instead of worrying about how to store and structure game data, the team can concentrate on what game modes users play in or how many users are playing at any given time. With this ability to focus more tightly on analysis, 343 Industries could meet the needs of Virgin Gaming. “Using Microsoft HDInsight Service, we were able to analyze the data during the five weeks of the Halo 4 Infinity Challenge,” says Vayman. “With the fast performance we got from the solution, we could feed that data to Virgin Gaming so it could update the leaderboards on the tournament website every day.”
In addition, because of the way the team set up Hadoop to work within Windows Azure, the team was able to detect cheaters during the Halo 4 Infinity Challenge. “HDInsight Service gives us the ability to easily read the data,” says Vayman. “In this case, there are many ways in which players try to gain extra points in games, and we could look back at previous data stored in Azure and identify user patterns that fit certain cheating characteristics, which was unexpected.” After receiving this data from the team, Virgin Gaming sent out a notification that any player found or suspected of cheating would be removed from the leaderboards and the tournament.
Contributes to Player Retention
The flexibility of the HDInsight Service BI solution also gives 343 Industries a way to reach out to players through customized campaigns, such as the series of email blasts the team sent to players immediately after the launch. For that campaign, the team set up Hadoop queries to identify users who started playing on a certain date. The team then wrote a file and placed it into a storage account on Windows Azure, where it was sent through Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Integration Services into a database owned by the Microsoft Xbox marketing team.
The marketing team then used this data to send these new players emails customized by screening several variables including when they started playing Halo 4 and their game play behaviors. The choice of which email each player received was determined by the HDInsight Service system. “That gave marketing a new way to retain users and keep them interested by talking about new aspects of the game,” Gregorio says. The Halo marketing team plans to run similar email campaigns for the game until a new edition is released. “Basing an email campaign on HDInsight Service and Hadoop was a big win for the marketing team, and also for us,” adds Vayman. “It showed us that we were able to use data from HDInsight Service to customize emails, and to actually use BI to improve the player experience and affect game sales.”
Uses Familiar Tools to Simplify Decision Making
Microsoft has started to expand HDInsight Service to other internal groups, and one of the reasons adoption is growing is that users do not have to be engineers or Hadoop experts to take advantage of the technology. Data is collected in Windows Azure and made easily accessible through familiar productivity tools. “By hooking Hadoop into a set of tools that are already familiar, such as Microsoft Excel or Microsoft SharePoint, people can take advantage of the power of Hadoop without needing to know the technical ins and outs,” says Vayman. “A good example of that is the data about Halo 4 Infinity Challenge cheaters that we gave to Virgin Gaming. The people receiving that data are not Hadoop experts, but they can still easily use the data to make business decisions.”
Another reason Hadoop is becoming more widely used is that the technology continues to evolve into an increasingly powerful tool. “The traditional role of BI within Hadoop is expanding because of the raw capabilities of the platform,” says Brad Sarsfield, Microsoft SQL Server Developer. “In addition to just BI reporting, we’ve been able to add predictive analytics, semantic indexing, and pattern classification, which can all be leveraged by the teams using Hadoop.”
With these and other capabilities, there is little question that HDInsight Service will continue to positively affect business. “With Hadoop on Windows Azure, we can mine data and understand our audience in a way we never could before,” says Vayman. “It’s really the BI solution for the future.”
Windows Azure
With Windows Azure, you can quickly build, deploy, and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. You can build applications using any operating system, language, or tool.
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