May 2017 - Applied Information Sciences

With the recent release of Microsoft Teams, you may be wondering what the differences between Teams and Office 365 Groups are. At AIS, we’re always on the forefront of the latest Office 365 services, and given our long-time partnership with Microsoft, we’ve actually been using both Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups for while now. We’ve gotten a solid sense of what both services are good at and what they’re…not so good at. At least not yet. Read More…

Justin Baca

Microsoft has over a thousand Virtual Machine images available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. If your organization has their own on-premises “Gold Image” that’s been tailored, hardened, and adapted to meet specific organizational requirements (compliance, business, security, etc.), you can bring those images into your Azure subscription for reuse, automation, and/or manageability.

I recently had the opportunity to take a client’s virtualized Windows Server 2008 R2 “Gold Image” in .OVA format (VMware ), extract the contents using 7-Zip, run the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter to create a VHD, prepare and upload the VHD, and create a Managed Image that was then deployed using PowerShell and an Azure Resource Manager Template.

It’s actually quite simple! Here’s how… Read More…

Harun Davood

Please read Part One and Part Two.

Part 3: Azure Automation, Azure RunBooks, and Octopus Deploy

With just PowerShell and an Azure ARM template, we can kick off a deployment in just a few minutes. But there are still some manual steps involved – you still need to login to your Azure subscription, enter a command to create a new resource group, and enter another command to kick off a deployment. With the help of an Azure automation account and a platform called Octopus Deploy, we can automate this process even further to a point where it takes as little as three clicks to deploy your whole infrastructure! Read More…

Harun Davood

(Part One of this series can be found here.)

Deploying Azure ARM Templates with PowerShell

After you’ve created your template, you can use PowerShell to kick off the deployment process. PowerShell is a great tool with a ton of features to help automate Azure processes. In order to deploy Azure ARM Templates with PowerShell, you will need to install the Azure PowerShell cmdlets. You can do this by simply running the command Install-Module AzureRM inside a PowerShell session.

Check out this link for more information on installing Azure PowerShell cmdlets. PowerShell works best on a Windows platform, although there is a version now out for Mac that you can check out here. You can also use Azure CLI to do the same thing. PowerShell and Azure CLI are quick and easy ways to create resources without using the Portal. I still stick with PowerShell, even though I primarily use a Mac computer for development work. (I’ll talk more about this in the next section.) Read More…

AISblog

@aisteam

Yesterday AIS’ VP of Business Development Larry Katzman sat down with Federal Tech Talk’s John Gilroy on Federal News Radio to discuss how federal IT professionals can innovate in a constantly changing environment..and with a shrinking budget.

The discussion starts off with a common theme — today’s younger generation is accustomed to programming from an early age. When they show up for work at an agency, the expect to be able to “fire up” environments to test code.

Everyone wants to unlock this spirit of innovation – but there are certain restraints. For example, you may use a system that only needs a credit card to get started. This can result in “drunken sailor syndrome.” In other words, you may blow your annual budget in the first week if you are not careful.

From there, the conversation moves into the issue of “Rogue IT” or “Shadow IT,” where users sign up for cloud offerings on their own and completely bypass the CIO. AIS actually offers a solution to this one: CloudCap, a system where users are granted access to thousands of enterprise class applications that can be managed. Much like “managed services,” the CloudCap system allows both the user and supervisor to know how much is spent and when.

You can listen to the full interview over at Federal News Radio.

BlogMonthly Archives: May 2017