Microsoft Archives - Applied Information Sciences

@bwodicka

Microsoft’s RPA (Robotic Process Automation) solution will transform organizations, helping teams realize cost savings and increased productivity. And the beauty of Microsoft’s RPA capabilities is that they build atop an organization’s existing Azure infrastructure, tapping into native Microsoft cloud services – like Azure Active Directory, On-Demand Compute, Native Network Security Tools, and RBAC Access Control – rather than building these capabilities from scratch on another solution.

While automation has been around for decades, the Microsoft one cloud platform provides seamless, integrated process automation services. Microsoft automation capabilities can extend across all departments of large enterprise organizations, optimizing processes and significantly trimming costs.

Many years of Azure experience and award-winning Power Platform capabilities provided the AIS team the opportunity to collaborate with Microsoft on a whitepaper for enterprise deployment of RPA. We’re grateful for the opportunity to help create opinionated guidance and resources for organizations looking to enable and govern the rollout of Power Automate for RPA and other hyperautomation scenarios. Many talented SMEs across Microsoft and AIS partnered to deliver valuable guidance for you to accelerate your path to automation. In this blog, our team shares six key learnings and takeaways from the project.

What We Learned Helping Write the RPA Whitepaper

It’s hard to beat the opportunity to work with a product team. We’ve been a dedicated Microsoft partner for nearly as long as we’ve been a company. Throughout our partnership, we’ve been lucky enough to work closely with product engineering across various teams. It’s always enlightening and inspiring and gives both of our teams an opportunity to apply product vision to customer priorities.

Opinionated first, genericized later. New technology is released at a rapid clip. We know there’s a lot of noise. You need to get things done efficiently and the last thing you need is a case of analysis paralysis. Opinionated guidance will help you do that, giving you a leg up and a head start on the best approach. We’ve enabled cloud capabilities at some of the largest and most complex enterprises for over 13 years. We’ve infused those learnings and hardened processes into opinionated guidance by identifying what’s most effective. From identity and network operations to migration and modernization approaches, we arm delivery teams with constantly improving best practices and resources. Many organizations approaching RPA won’t be starting from ground zero in the cloud; the Microsoft RPA solution, with some help from other cloud resources (like our CDF), will allow you to leverage and build on your cloud investments.

Successful enterprise programs require insights from real-world, practical experience. The result of this whitepaper is an example of the powerful impact of talented product teams and veteran systems integrators coming together. We were able to bring learnings from building out enterprise-level Azure environments. Together with Microsoft, we shaped the vision for RPA technology into practical, hands-on resources for building and supporting hyperautomation. Insight from previous experience, enterprise technologies outside the Microsoft suite, and an understanding of customers’ business outcomes allowed us to inform the product and develop the resources to enable it. The combination of product team vision and insight and hands-on, experienced practitioners is a winning formula for developing valuable customer guidance.

Checklists are always helpful. Checklists drove the format of the whitepaper to help us make the content as actionable as possible. The goal of this whitepaper was to set forth a set of optimal milestones and share the thinking to help teams make progress faster. This approach was driven by Apostolis Papaioannou, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft. His vision was to create content that was consumable for such a vast topic, building on the foundation of the Holistic Enterprise Automation Techniques (HEAT). What you will find with this whitepaper is a thorough overview and actionable steps to get a workable environment up and going quickly. There’s a wealth of additional material and documentation available today with more coming soon.

Cross-cutting teams are the means to succeed. We brought in AIS Power Platform, Azure, M365, and other architects with varying skillsets to support the whitepaper creation, in addition to the Microsoft contributors, and the range of experience and perspectives made a big impact on the outcomes and guidance. This experience was yet another example of the success and trend towards cross-functional and cross-cloud collaboration, a concept and model the AIS team has adopted with much success.

Write a lot. Trim a lot more. Repeat. This was the flow of operations. We would quickly get up to 100 pages, then trim back a lot. This helped us get all the ideas and perspectives out there, before evaluating to focus on the right message and resources. In some cases, guidance can boil the ocean. Our goal was to vet the options and provide an opinionated best path forward to support organizations in focusing on the right things.

Get Started: Administering a Low-Code Intelligent Automation Platform for Your Organization

Are you considering RPA solutions for your organization? Check out the whitepaper, Enterprise Deployment for RPA and more in Power Automate, as well as other resources below. Please share a link with your partners and colleagues and let us know what you think. If you have any questions, please reach out to the AIS team.

Access the whitepaper: https://aka.ms/autocoeadminwhitepaper

Helpful Microsoft RPA Resources and Guidance Links

• Automation CoE Blueprint https://aka.ms/autocoeblueprint
• Automation CoE Strategy https://aka.ms/autocoestrategy
• HEAT https://aka.ms/rpapnp
• HEAT video series https://aka.ms/rpapnpvideo
• Whitepaper overview blog: https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/administer-and-govern-a-low-code-intelligent-automation-platform-whitepaper-enterprise-deployment-for-rpa-and-more-in-power-automate/
• Automation Admin & Governance Whitepaper https://aka.ms/autocoeadminwhitepaper
• Manage Power Automate for Desktop on Windows https://aka.ms/padonwindowspnp
• Hyperautomation SAP Playbook (https://aka.ms/MicrosoftRPAPlaybookForSAPGUI) & video series (https://aka.ms/AutomateItSAPSeries)
• Automate It video series: https://aka.ms/AutomateIt
• RPA in a Day training: https://aka.ms/RPAinaDayPackage

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Apostolis Papaioannou, Kent Weare, Pranav Rastogi, Anitha Natarajan, Jonathan Eckman, Lav Gupta, Brent Wodicka, Vishwas Lele, Gautier Chastan, Kathy Osborne, Rakesh Krishnan, Amit Bhambri, Ashvini Sharma, and Jonathan Kendall for the partnership on this whitepaper.

Derek Morgan

The Current Situation

Today, organizations continue the transition to cloud computing as part of their digital transformation journey and become highly productive organizations in their respective industry. While transitioning to cloud computing demonstrates agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and performance, the challenge is strengthening their security foundation and reducing risk. While vendors, such as Microsoft, provide the best-in-class measures and features for tightening the organization’s security foundation, the ultimate responsibility belongs to the specific organization. Of course, organizations will take precautionary steps for protecting device assets and data from malicious exfiltration and theft. Still, organizations tend to loosely protect the number one crucial asset: the user’s identity. As reported by Microsoft, cybersecurity experts detected and reported 15 million attacks, scoped to password-based attacks alone. This is a signal that the user’s password is the primary target! So, the big question is…how does an organization protect the user identity, device assets, and corporate data, preventing compromises and breaches? The answer: Zero Trust.

What is Zero Trust?

Top cybersecurity experts and leaders changed the game with the introduction and indoctrination of Zero Trust, revealed as the top method to protecting identities, assets, data, and the overall organization. First, let’s start with the basics: what is Zero Trust?

Microsoft clearly defines Zero Trust by following three objectives:

Verify explicitly
Use least-privileged access
Assume breach

To summarize, treat every request as if it came from an unknown network and always verify.

Verify explicitly – the user identity is the key to accessing organizational data and assets. Therefore, the first step is to verify the identity belongs to the user accessing the data—Azure AD supplements this concept with Conditional Access and leveraging security features, such as multi-factor authentication.

Ask yourself these questions:

Is the user accessing the data from the correct device to take it a step forward?
Is it in the correct location?
Is the user now at high risk?
Is the device at high exposure due to an existing cybersecurity incident? Is the device compliant?

Use least-privileged access – not a new concept, but not a heavily practiced concept. Specifically, in Microsoft 365, organizations utilize privileged identities for administrative functions and operations. However, remember that organizations do not separate privileged access from their regular accounts and leave a permanent assignment for privileged access even if the identities are separate. Also, some organizations allow users to consent for apps accessing Microsoft 365 data. Azure AD offers features to reduce the risk revolving around privileged access and tracking identities. For example, Azure AD Privileged Identity Management, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Conditional Access, Azure AD Identity Governance, Azure AD Identity Protection, Microsoft Information Protection, and more.

Assume breach – As any cybersecurity expert, vendor, or leader will tell you, an organization will never reach 100% hardened as malicious actors and attackers continue to develop sophisticated attacks. Therefore, the organization must adopt the “assume breach” mindset and always defend themselves. Thus, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Identity, and Microsoft Cloud App Security protect the organization from modern attacks, allowing an organization to become proactive and leverage advanced hunting features to prevent future malicious attacks. Other methods of adopting the “assume breach” mindset are reviewing user sign-in risk, device health risk and exposure, threat and vulnerability management, device & user identity hygiene, and more.

Why Microsoft Security for Zero Trust Foundation?

In brief, Microsoft defines security under four (4) pillars: protect everything, simplify the complex, catch what others miss, and grow your future.

The four (4) pillars outline the overall position on Microsoft Security and the value it demonstrates for all customers: simplifying the Zero Trust foundation. In addition, Microsoft Security is proving its firm establishment in the cybersecurity field by being a prime leader in seven (7) Forrester Wave reports, and five (5) Gartner Magic Quadrant reports.

Microsoft Security continues to develop an end-to-end approach, integrating with a total of 53 essential categories around the cybersecurity landscape. It also demonstrates cost savings with Microsoft security solutions covered under Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5 licensing tiers, compared to competitors in cybersecurity, such as Symantec, Cisco, and CrowdStrike.

How Can AIS help?

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, AIS contains the expertise and skills to assess, guide, and deploy the Zero Trust foundation from leveraging the solutions from the Microsoft Security foundation, such as Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Cloud App Security, Microsoft Information Protection, Azure AD Privileged Identity Management, and more. Below is the Zero Trust Guidance Center from Microsoft. Consider AIS for assistance on this journey for your organization to be at an optimal state of the Zero Trust foundation!

Zero Trust Guidance Center: Zero Trust Guidance Center | Microsoft Docs

AISblog

@aisteam

In May, AIS held an internal hackathon for Microsoft Power Platform to expose our team to the platform, concepts, approaches through hands-on experience and to demonstrate the role Power Platform plays in modernizing legacy applications in the cloud.

The DevOps team automated the portal deployment process using Power DevOps Tools and deployed the solution across three environments (dev, test, prod). Since Microsoft Power Platform does not support source control and versioning, the team used Azure DevOps as the solution repository and version control.

Introduction

When building apps on Microsoft Power Platform, use Microsoft Power Platform Build Tools to automate common build and deployment tasks. These tasks include:

Synchronization of solution metadata (also known as solutions) that contains the various platform components like model-driven apps, connectors, and virtual agents.
Generating build artifacts
Deploying to downstream environments
Provisioning or de-provisioning environments
Checking solutions to identify problematic patterns

Our Purpose

We can easily create compelling apps, and automation flows using Microsoft Power Platform. But, regardless of platform technology – how do you package and deploy the solution between various environments? Usually, at least three are for development, one for testing, and one for production. Power Platform is no exception: you should have separate development (dev), test, and production (prod) environments for your solution. So, let’s look at how to automate the deployment of Power Platform solutions from one environment to another.

Architecture Flowchart Diagram

Technical Approach

Problem:

The following picture shows the manual and repetitive steps required to deploy the Power Platform solution from one environment to another. Manual tasks are prone to errors, and actions are missed or incorrectly executed. This can lead to defects and inconsistency across environments.

Approach

Azure DevOps and Power Platform Build Tools help automate manual tasks and minimize issues to make the team more efficient. Once there is automation, releases become more consistent and predictable, and requirements move more quickly between environments. This gives the team more confidence plus the ability to release more frequently.

Automate Build and Deploy Solutions
Microsoft Power Platform Build Tools tasks are used along with any other available Azure DevOps tasks to compose, build and release pipelines. Pipelines that teams commonly put in place include Initiate, Export from Dev, Build, and Release.

In our application, we used three environments (dev, test, prod). We exported the solution from dev and source controlled to git.
Packed the solution from source control and deployed it to test.
Exported the managed solution from test and imported it into prod.

Automate Portal Deployment
Portal development involves several configurations and customizations to achieve the desired experience for portal end-users. After the development and configuration of a portal instance are complete, it is deployed in other environments like test and prod. Creating a manual backup of your portal configuration and importing it to different environments is a very time-consuming process. The portal deployment process can be easily automated by installing Power DevOps Tools, an additional toolset available in the Azure Marketplace.

In our application, we used three environments (dev, test, prod). The default configuration (schema file) was downloaded from Migrate portal configuration – Power Apps | Microsoft Docs
Exported the data using the configuration and deployed to test and prod using DevOps.

Lessons Learned & Next Steps

With the help of Power Platform build tools, we can easily deploy the solution into various environments.
We can source control the Power Platform environment.
Increase the release frequency.

Thank you to the DevOps team for sharing their experience

Vikram Reddy (team lead)

Looking Ahead

We are just as excited about what is on the horizon. Microsoft closed out the end of the fiscal year 2021 with several announcements, such as:

Increasing cross-platform synergy for apps and data (like Power BI and Azure Synapse)
Significant investments in business applications
Emphasis on security
Continued focus on industry and customer success

It’s an exciting time to be a Microsoft partner! The potential results of the collective Microsoft cloud ecosystem and technology and services partners that extend these capabilities are overwhelming.

“We strive to be the most trusted Microsoft partner for technically challenging, enterprise-level cloud adoption, app modernization, and data work.” said Vishwas Lele, EVP and CTO at AIS, Microsoft MVP, and Regional Director. “Our team continues to lead first of their kind design and build solutions on Azure, Power Platform, and M365 in regulated industries. We earned the 2020 Worldwide Partner of the Year Award. We’re seeing amazing convergence across the various solution areas and look forward to driving these new capabilities into the mission space for each of our clients.”

Our Methodology

Outcomes are at the center of our approach. Whether it’s delivering 100% uptime and better performance for a mission-critical defense application or using automation to reduce manual processes and advance a business outcome for a Fortune 500 client, we always work from the outcome first.

Delivering results-based solutions means having an arsenal of skillsets that allow technology to meet the needs of users. It takes all kinds of talent, and AIS provides a range of disciplines (e.g., .NET, SharePoint, Power Platform, Data, UX, Knowledge Management, Change Management, Web Dev, and more).

We believe in multiple “deployment” models for modern, scalable, and intelligent app and data projects. This includes composite applications leveraging Microsoft 365, Dynamics, and Power Platform, with Azure at the tip of the spear.

Fostering a community that cuts across diverse backgrounds, cultures, experiences, and skills is a significant core value at AIS. The challenges of remote work won’t stop us from getting together, sharing best practices, and staying connected as a community! The growing demand for low code with both new and longtime SharePoint, Dynamics, and Azure customers is exciting to see. The early indicators of swift transformation these capabilities have on organizations are gaining attention from business leaders and promoting valuable thought and solution design diversity.

The AIS core values are rooted in education and knowledge share. We invest in our employee’s education with aisUniversity, boot camps, morning learning series, lunch and learns, self-directed educational materials, certification bonuses, and more. These learning opportunities allow individuals across projects and communities of interest access to new skills and approaches.

We put humans at the focal point of technology. Engagement from all corners of the business world is a sure indicator of what lies ahead with advancements in low code solutions. We’re helping business users, most of whom have no previous technical background, quickly embrace new technology and enable them to scale solutions so we can focus on solving their most challenging technology problems.

Our Investment in People and IP

An investment in people, process, and tooling is an investment in the success of our employees and the organizations they support. Last year, we built the AIS Cloud Delivery Framework (CDF). The CDF provides opinionated guidance and resources which help our clients modernize in the cloud. The CDF combines our experience executing enterprise cloud projects with the techniques presented in Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF).

The CDF includes backlogs, deliverable samples, starter files, project experience write-ups, and much more. On top of this foundation, our teams continue to develop resources for business applications, cloud security/compliance, governance, data & AI, and many more.

These innovations would not be possible without the support of the AIS Cloud Acceleration Hub (HUB). The HUB is a dedicated team of AIS consultants organized to help our project teams deliver successful cloud solutions. The HUB team consolidates knowledge and experience to provide rapid research and guidance services for AIS delivery teams at no additional cost to our customers.

Critical to the AIS growth plan is our culture. We’ve added an essential role to our leadership team, VP of Culture and Employee Experience. We are proactively hiring and developing skills around emerging areas of our business (e.g., data intelligence, business applications, RPA, user experience, and knowledge management). We’re heading into the next fiscal year with a vibrant (and growing) team, and we couldn’t be more excited about what comes next.

WE'RE GROWING! WON'T YOU JOIN US?
Check out our career openings at ais.com/careers and apply today.

View Careers

Partnering with AIS

AIS prides itself on being one of the few Microsoft partners that consistently delivers challenging, enterprise-level work across all Microsoft cloud platforms (Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics, and Power Platform). We support the entire Microsoft cloud ecosystem. We deliver foundational landing zones, security & governance, complex app development and modernization, and large-scale data and AI projects.

With AIS, you get consultants who offer the best possible solution. These consultants will advance your highest priority goals and objectives.

We bring 13+ years of enterprise experience on Azure, global leadership in Power Platform, and unmatched cloud adoption, security, and governance experience in highly regulated industries.

Along with this experience, our customers also get the full backing of Microsoft. Through our 26+ year partnership, AIS and Microsoft have established close relationships across product engineering, account teams, and executive leadership. This partnership offers our joint customers access to all the resources they need for digital transformation.

DRIVE YOUR MISSION FORWARD! PARTNER WITH AIS.
Work with a team of Microsoft technology leaders to enable your teams and partner with AIS today.

AISblog

@aisteam

In this episode of the Azure Government video series, Steve Michelotti sits down with AIS’ very own Vishwas Lele to discuss migrating and modernizing with Kubernetes on Azure Government. You’ll learn about the traditional approaches for migrating workloads to the cloud, including:

1. Rehost
2. Refactor
3. Reimagine

You will also learn how Kubernetes provides an opportunity to fundamentally rethink these traditional approaches to cloud migration by leveraging Kubernetes in order to get the “best of all worlds” in the migration journey. If you’re looking to migrate your existing legacy workloads to the cloud, while minimizing code changes and taking advantage of innovative cloud-native technologies, this is the video you should watch!

WORK WITH THE BRIGHTEST LEADERS IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

VIEW CAREER OPENINGS

AISblog

@aisteam

Our time at Microsoft Inspire is wrapping up, but before we go, take a look at a few final tweets and photos, plus a video of AIS President Tom O’Connell participating in Wednesday’s Success Stories panel:

BlogPosts tagged with “Microsoft”

What We Learned Helping Write the RPA Whitepaper

Get Started: Administering a Low-Code Intelligent Automation Platform for Your Organization

Helpful Microsoft RPA Resources and Guidance Links

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Our Purpose

Architecture Flowchart Diagram

Technical Approach

Problem:

Approach

Lessons Learned & Next Steps

Recommended Content

Looking Ahead

Our Methodology

Our Investment in People and IP

Partnering with AIS