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More Efficient and More Secure? Inside Microsoft’s Evolving Cyber Security Catalog

Change is in the air for Microsoft’s cyber security portfolio. Beginning at last fall’s all-virtual Ignite conference, the company embraced a mission to help organizations more efficiently navigate and deploy its security catalog. We reached out to our in-house Microsoft experts to learn more about these changes and what they could mean for organizations eager to better their cyber security posture in the new year.

Up first, back at Ignite, Microsoft announced a wholesale rebrand of its security catalog. Billed as more than a cosmetic change, Microsoft saw this as a chance to simplify its naming conventions to better enable organizations to find the solutions they needed to keep users and their on premises infrastructure safe. This meant ditching the “Advanced Threat Protection” moniker in favor of more widespread adoption of the Microsoft Defender brand (itself launched in 2019 as a refresh of Windows Defender). Here’s an outline of what this change looks like:     

  • Microsoft Threat Protection, the company’s high-end enterprise infrastructure security suite, became Microsoft 365 Defender 
  • Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, its endpoint and forensics solution, became Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
  • Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, the company’s email and phishing security offering, transformed into Microsoft Defender for Office 365
  • Azure Advanced Threat Protection, its identity authentication solution, became Microsoft Defender for Identity

On the topic of name changes, it’s also worth noting that Microsoft’s cloud and hybrid infrastructure offerings underwent a rebranding of their own:

  • Azure Security Center Standard Edition, which brings threat detection and advanced defenses to Windows and Linux machines, became Azure Defender for Servers
  • Azure Security Center for IoT, which provides holistic threat detection for IoT/OT environments, became Azure Defender for IoT
  • Advanced Threat Protection for SQL, which detects advanced threats targeting SQL machines, became Azure Defender for SQL 

Fast-tracking your way to greater cyber security 

Not content to leave its transformative efforts in 2020, Microsoft has continued to revise its security catalog into the new year. Back in January, the company announced that its newly re-named end user and on premises infrastructure security offerings would be entering the FastTrack.   

Microsoft’s FastTrack program connects eligible organizations with expert-level resources to ensure efficient and optimized rollouts of select solutions. This support can come either directly from Microsoft or from a strategic partner like Arraya. The latter option combines a high-degree of knowledge about the Microsoft solution in question and a pre-existing familiarity with an organization’s unique IT footprint. FastTrack already covered cornerstone technologies such as Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 applications, putting the Microsoft 365 Defender series in elite company.

Next Steps: Lean on a security partner who knows you and your environment

To be eligible for inclusion in FastTrack, an organization must have at least 150 Microsoft 365 licenses. If your organization fits the bill or would like to learn more about Microsoft’s transforming cyber security catalog, Arraya’s team can help. As a Microsoft FastTrack partner, we can help you deploy and optimize Microsoft solutions that more than deliver on their initial promise. Reach out to our team of experts today to strike up a conversation.

Visit https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/ to connect with our team now.

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Interoperability at the Forefront: 4 Key Microsoft Ignite Announcements

Microsoft generated plenty of headlines during its Ignite conference earlier this month, however, it wasn’t the only tech giant to do so. Dell Technologies and VMware also got in on the action, unveiling several headline-worthy items of their own during this year’s all-virtual event. Created in collaboration with Microsoft, these new solutions are set to impact some of IT’s buzziest topics, including SD-WAN, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud.

With some help from our in-house experts, let’s look at four major Microsoft and Dell/VMware collaborations that debuted during Ignite.

VMware SD-WAN with Microsoft Azure  

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed plenty, including the way in which users access organizational resources. Instead of potentially only following a handful of routes, network traffic can come from anywhere as workforces remain geographically dispersed. Even as traffic patterns diversify, organizations must still ensure the security and efficiency of those pathways. Enter: VMware SD-WAN with Microsoft Azure.   

VMware SD-WAN with Microsoft Azure is a composite of VMware’s industry-leading SD-WAN technology and Microsoft’s Azure Virtual WAN Hub. In practice, this intersection of the two solutions will enable VMware SD-WAN users to leverage Azure Virtual WAN’s networking, security and routing services.

As such, organizations will be able to have thousands of separate streams, including branch locations, business travelers and work-from-homers, all connect to the Azure cloud. Traffic will also be routable between multiple Azure hubs. Using this interconnectivity, organizations can more easily, rapidly, and securely deploy mission-critical applications to all corners of their networks.

Disaster Recovery for PowerScale Multi-Cloud

Dell Technologies used a portion of their time during Ignite to discuss the continued evolution of the company’s PowerScale for Multi-Cloud solution. At its core, this solution combines Dell’s PowerScale storage platform with cloud services from cloud leaders including Azure, allowing a lone data warehouse to be stretched across multiple cloud bases.   

Cloud or no cloud, disaster recovery still needs to be part of the conversation and that notion come to PowerScale Multi-Cloud at Ignite. There, Dell announced a new integration with Superna Eyeglass DR Manager, bringing recovery capabilities to PowerScale for Multi-Cloud. Now, in the event of an outage, customers will be able to failover from their primary data center to a cloud-adjacent, Faction service-supported site. Additional upsides to this integration include one-touch failover, flexible replication scheduling, built-in recovery testing and reporting. 

New PowerProtect for Multi-Cloud Capabilities

Dell also had some news about its PowerProtect portfolio to share at Ignite. At the event, Dell announced the security offered by its PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution would be coming to the company’s PowerProtect for Multi-Cloud offering. The idea behind this move is to give modern organizations the confidence that, in the event of a ransomware attack or some other incident, they will be able to return to a state of normalcy with minimal operational disruption.  

Through this newfound integration, PowerProtect for Multi-Cloud customers will gain access to an air-gapped, cloud-adjacent vault for data which they can use to recover data during a cyber incident. It will also layer on additional security features, including immutability and intelligent analytics to ensure the integrity of the data stored within. Should an attack happen, organizations will be able to recover back to either their data center or a leading public cloud option (Azure, AWS, etc.).

VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Certifies with Azure Arc

Lastly, we’ll close with another VMware announcement. VMware also revealed at Ignite that the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid has been certified with Microsoft’s Azure Arc. With this certification, Azure Arc can now be hosted across Kubernetes-conforming solutions within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem.      

VMware’s Tanzu Kubernetes Grid leverages open-source technologies and automation to help organizations efficiently ramp up into multi-cluster Kubernetes environments while the Azure Arc hybrid cloud platform streamlines multi-cloud and hybrid cloud governance and management. VMware and Microsoft see the joining of these solutions as essential to further unifying the Kubernetes landscape, allowing for a more consistent experience as organizations deploy and manage modern applications in multi-cloud architectures.     

Next Steps: Put Ignite advances to work for your organization

Want to learn more about the above solutions or any of the news and headlines to come out of this year’s Ignite conference? Arraya can help. Our subject matter experts can help break down the announcements and determine if any of these advances make sense for your organization. Reach out to our team today to get the conversation started.

Visit https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/ to connect with our team now.

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3 Questions Every Organization Should Ask Their Cloud Provider (and Themselves)

An IT nightmare scenario came to life last week after a fire tore through a data center complex in Strasbourg, France operated by European cloud giant OVH. All told, the disaster took more than 3.5 million websites offline, including those of banks, government agencies, and beyond. Luckily, no one was injured in the blaze, which destroyed one of four data centers housed at the site, damaging one other. However, at least one organization reported complete regional data loss, tweeting seven words bound to send chills down the spine of any IT pro: “Data will be unable to be restored.”

Those words were typed by Facepunch Studios, developer of an online survival game. The company slowly got back online during the latter half of last week, but acknowledged game progress had to be reset for some users due to the destruction of its OVH servers. Other organizations, like Algeria’s Trust Bank, saw their website outages drag on as they waited for power and normalcy (or some version of it) to return to the campus’ remaining data centers. 

In the wake of this disaster, here are three questions every organizations should be asking their cloud providers (and themselves):

  • “What physical security safeguards do you have in place?” A detailed accounting of a site’s safety mechanisms likely won’t be forthcoming. Yet, it’s good to know at least at a high level what a provider is doing in terms of fire suppression, access restrictions, etc. For its part, OVH does apparently have security personnel always on site, something that could potentially have sped up emergency response times. Meanwhile, it never hurts to turn that investigative eye inside, reviewing your in-house physical security systems and procedures. This will take on added significance as organizations begin bringing more teams back on site.  
  • “Where specifically is my data going to live?” Diversity is always a good thing and regional diversity when it comes to the cloud is certainly no exception. What took place at OVH’s Strasbourg site is a good example of the risks faced by those who put too many eggs in one regional cloud basket. Instead, your organization would likely be better served duplicating data across multiple cloud regions. Cross region resiliency ensures that, in the event of an outage, you wouldn’t end up in a scenario where your site goes offline for hours on end or user data must be reset.    
  • “What’s your disaster recovery plan? Is it up to snuff? How do I know?” This one is cheating a little bit since it’s three questions rolled into one, but they are all connected. Wherever data resides, all organizations (and their cloud providers) need a disaster recovery plan. In the event of a worst case scenario, be it cyber or physical, you need to know that you will be able to get your operations back to the status quo quickly and with no data loss. Further, it’s not just enough to have a plan in place. It must be routinely tested to ensure it performs as expected and that team members know how to execute it. These are questions you’ll want to have answered regardless of where your data calls home.

Next Steps: Prepare your organization for a ‘worst case scenario’     

Accidents are going to happen. While it’s impossible to fully eradicate risk, organizations can take steps to lessen the impact of such events. Arraya can work with you to protect your resources onsite, in the cloud and everywhere in between. Our team can help you audit the security and availability of your current data center and/or cloud environment and recommend the tools and tactics you need to close any gaps.

Arraya’s team can help you design and walk through a fully customizable worst-case scenario. Our Incident Response Readiness Discovery Session will stress test the response mechanisms you have in place to ensure your plan is fully ready and optimized for real world threats.

Visit https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/ to connect with our team now.

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John Salmons, one of Arraya’s Inside Sales Engineers, demonstrates how to use two of the newest apps in Microsoft Teams: the Shared Channel Calendar and Who.

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Microsoft Edge Legacy End of Support: What Can You Expect from the ‘New’ Edge?

Microsoft’s Edge browser is nearing an edge of its own. In just a few short weeks, support will run out for the browser, leaving users without the patches and updates needed to ensure a safe online experience. However, Microsoft has already laid out a post-Edge path for organizations to follow, one that won’t require learning a new browser name.

Support for Microsoft Edge Legacy, as it has been dubbed, will end on March 9, 2021. Microsoft’s next generation browser, also called Microsoft Edge, will arrive on April 13, 2021 with the release of the company’s next monthly security update. This update, once applied, will automatically uninstall Edge Legacy and replace it with the newly reimagined version of Edge. It’s worth nothing there are a few ways to gain access to new Edge sooner, including by applying the optional Windows 10 March Preview.

So, what is it about “new” Edge that makes it worth the trip from legacy Edge? Aside from the fact that it will still be supported as we move through the spring (and beyond)? We sat down with our in-house Microsoft experts to find out.

4 ways new Edge was built with security in mind

Here are the elements our team wanted to highlight. New Edge:

  • is built on a Chromium foundation. Microsoft’s new Edge browser shares a Chromium (an open source project sponsored by Google) base with another leading browser: Chrome. By leveraging Chromium at its core, Edge can take advantage of, and build upon, the engineering and security advances project team members have already pioneered.  
  • includes best-of-breed malware and phishing protection. Microsoft’s SmartScreen technology clocked in at a 98.5% success rate stopping malware attempts and a 95.5% success rate stopping phishing attempts. SmartScreen operates by using real-time reputation checks to verify the respectability of sites, downloads and more. It draws its threat insights from Microsoft’s global security network.      
  • supports native threat isolation. Untrusted sites can, as part of a Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise environment, be opened and run in a separate, isolated container using Application Guard. In the event a site does prove to be a threat, that threat won’t be able to spread to the rest of the corporate network.    
  • built-in defenses against internal threats. Security initiatives must look inward as well as outward. Edge includes native support for advanced Microsoft 365 tools designed to keep data safe from internal risk factors. These include:
    • Azure AD Conditional Access, which uses signals such as user and location, device type, application, etc. to inform better security decision-making and enforce organizational defensive policies.
    • Windows Information Protection, which can help stop data leaks by restricting access to corporate data to only approved applications on Windows 10 devices. It can also provide download encryption, upload prevention, and more protecting data as defined by organizational security teams.  
    • Microsoft Endpoint Data Loss Prevention discovers and labels sensitive data on employee devices, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. Endpoint DLP can then alert users to potentially non-compliant activity regarding this data as they work online.

Next Steps: Modernizing your users’ browsing experience

What comes next? You’ll want to have a plan in place to transition off of Edge Legacy and onto the new version. Also, as with any change, you’ll want to take time to inform users about what to expect and offer training as needed. Furthermore, if Kiosk mode is in use, it will need to be redeployed following the switch to new Edge. 

Need a hand preparing your users or your environment for life after Edge Legacy? Arraya Solutions can help. Our team can handle everything from end user training to deployment and configuration, to ensure your organization enjoys the most modern, secure Edge experience. Reach out to our team today to start a conversation!

Visit https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/ to connect with our team now.

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Microsoft kicked off 2021 with a master class session on a topic that has grown near and dear to many IT pros’ hearts over the last twelve months or so: Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD). Primarily a chance for admins to learn how to better deploy and manage virtual desktops and apps directly from Microsoft’s experts, the session also featured a look at the road ahead for WVD. Among the highlights? Greater security, reduced management overhead and an interesting opportunity for new users.

Microsoft Debuts New Features (and Ways to Save) on Windows Virtual Desktop

Organizations have leaned heavily on WVD to keep teams connected and productive, particularly during the pandemic. As workplaces continue to evolve this year and beyond, it seems so too will WVD’s capabilities and its role in the modern enterprise. We checked in with our team of cloud and workspace experts to get a better understanding of what’s here and what’s coming next for WVD.

Here & Now: WVD + Defender for Endpoint

Let’s start with what’s available now. In a separate post, we discussed Microsoft’s decision to unify its security portfolio under the Defender brand. Well, as of this January, Defender has come to WVD. Those leveraging Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session will be able to take advantage of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint support for up to 50 concurrent connections. Single sessions are also supported.

As a result of this integration, multiple new options will appear in Microsoft Defender Security Center, including the following:

  • Within the Device Inventory page, admins will now be able to see all of the machines connecting through WVD using the new “Windows 10 WVD” filter in the OS Platform column. 
  • The Device page has also been updated to reflect the new WVD compatibility. Both the “Device Details” and the “OS” sections can now be used to identify WVD-connected machines. Additionally, admins will be able to use this page to monitor the number and identities of users who logged into a device over the past 30 days.
  • Admins will now be able to monitor WVD activity using the Machine Timeline menu. This screen will collect activity from all users logged into a WVD device. Those familiar with Defender and Machine Timeline will find that it functions much the same way for WVD as it does for other solutions, including allowing admins to drill deeper into specific users or user sessions should something raise a red flag.  
  • Finally, Defender’s advanced hunting capabilities have also been expanded to cover WVD devices. Using advanced hunting, admins can do things like dig more deeply into sessions or network events for all WVD-connected users or they can explore activity emanating from specific profiles over a set period of time.  

The road ahead for WVD

Let’s move on to what comes next. A number of new features previously announced at last year’s Microsoft Ignite conference have entered into public preview, such as:

  • Azure Monitor for Windows Virtual Desktop – Gain access to a centralized, single pane of glass view of the comings and goings within a virtual environment to speed up maintenance and incident remediation.  
  • MSIX App Attach – Tired of relying on PowerShell scripts to connect MSIX-formatted apps to an individual user session? This new feature enables this connection dynamically, without the need for PowerShell.
  • Screen Capture Protection – Take greater control of data no matter where it resides by disabling screen capture for remote apps and desktops housed on WVD. 
  • RDP Short Path – Gauges network types to allow session connections to take place via direct peer-to-peer UDP instead of over internal WVD gateways where appropriate to enhance security and performance. 

Next Steps: Cutting costs to open the door to new WVD use cases

Does this recent run of updates have you considering WVD for your organization? In addition to the new features, there’s another reason the time is right to make a change. Right now, Microsoft is offering new WVD customers 30% savings on compute costs for select virtual machines for up to 90 days. Time is of the essence as this promotion expires on March 31.

Want to learn more about WVD or take advantage of this limited time offer from Microsoft? Arraya can help. Our team can help you audit your goals and challenges to determine if WVD makes sense for you. If it does, we can also help you spin up and manage it. Reach out to us today to start a dialogue!   

Visit https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/ to connect with our team now. 

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We check in with Matt Rush, one of Arraya’s Inside Sales Engineers, to learn more about Meraki’s latest crop of access points.

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How Florida Town’s Cyber Security Near ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Can Inspire Positive Change

We usually measure cyberattacks in terms of records accessed or data lost, but the consequences could have been far more severe for one Florida town after hackers targeted its water treatment facility. Fortunately, the town avoided a “nightmare scenario.” Still, as one local official put it, the incident served as a reminder of the realities of today’s cyber security landscape and the need for everyone to be vigilant and “on notice.” 

The attack occurred in Oldsmar, FL, a small city of around 15,000 in the Tampa Bay area. It began first thing on a Friday morning when a water treatment plant employee who was working remotely noticed someone briefly access the plant’s computer system. Initially, the employee wrote this off as no big deal. After all, it was commonplace for a supervisor to access the system remotely as well. What took place that afternoon, however, was far more alarming.

At around 1:30, the same employee watched as someone once again accessed the system. Only that time, the person took control of the cursor and began moving it around the screen. After a little digging, the unknown party found the controls regulating the flow of sodium hydroxide into the city’s water. The city uses the solution, more commonly known as lye, in small doses to regulate the acidity of its water. The substance is also present in household cleaning chemicals and can cause skin irritation and burns and can be lethal if ingested. The employee watched as the person on the other side of their machine increased the amount of sodium hydroxide in the city’s water from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million. Recognizing something was wrong, the employee reset the concentration level once the attacker left the system. 

Local officials were adamant that Oldsmar residents were never in any real danger. Apparently, it would have taken more than a day for the contaminated water to enter the water supply. They stressed that built-in safeguards and redundancies would have caught the change and sounded the alarms before anyone landed in harm’s way. Despite that, concerns remain given the potential severity of the consequences should those safeguards have failed. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has vowed to contact the FBI and wants the incident to be treated “as a matter of national security.”

In response to the breach, the city has disabled the remote-access system leveraged by the attacker.

Cyber security-boosting takeaways for any organization

Post incident investigations have turned up evidence that the plant’s cyber security hygiene may not have been the greatest. Oldsmar’s computers apparently all shared the same password for remote access. They also lacked firewall protection. Additionally, computers with access to the plant’s control systems ran the no-longer-supported Windows 7 operating system.

So what can we take away from this near-miss? Aside from the basics of adding firewalls, implementing strong passwords and upgrading away from unsupported technology wherever possible? For starters, while the employee deserves credit for catching and correcting the attacker’s changes, you can’t help but feel like there was an opportunity to nip this whole thing in the bud even earlier. A quick message to the supervisor could have confirmed that wasn’t who accessed the system earlier in the day, putting everyone on high alert and hopefully locking out the malicious actor.

Additionally, this incident further reinforces the fallacy of trying to stay under hackers’ radar. Far from a bustling metropolis, Oldsmar still managed to draw the eye of attackers. Why? Larger cities and, for that matter, organizations have larger security budgets. Whether motivated by financial gain or, as seems to be the case here, malice, hackers only want to do so much work. Softer targets allow them to accomplish their nefarious goals without coming up against as much resistance.

Finally, this incident also highlights the ongoing need to further harden the network edge. In a recent blog post, we discussed the increasing threat facing organizations as workforces have grown more and more dispersed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. We also highlighted the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework as a way in which to remediate the risk posed by these necessary distributed work arrangements. At a high level SASE combines: secure web gateways, cloud access security brokers, firewall as a service and aero trust network access to deliver the following outcomes:

  • reduced security cost and complexity
  • modernized collaboration
  • enhanced security and performance
  • streamlined network and security management  

Next Steps: Improving your security at the edge and back

If you’d like to further the conversation around SASE, network edge security or, more broadly, the realities of securing access, data and users in today’s environment, Arraya Solutions can help. Our team has the security and network experience needed to help connect you to the right solutions based on your unique use case. Reach out to us today to start a dialogue!   

Visit https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/ to connect with our team now. 

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6 Things Stopping Organizations from Maximizing Their Public Cloud ROI

Last year changed a lot of things, including the way many organizations view the public cloud. Once seen as an interesting alternative to onsite technologies, 2020, specifically the coronavirus, made the cloud mission critical. However, the public cloud’s value isn’t tied strictly to the pandemic, whose days are mercifully numbered. There’s long-term, fundamental value to be drawn from a growing and continued embrace of the cloud. That said, there are obstacles standing between organizations and the realization of that value.  

The cloud’s ascension to mission critical status was documented in “Cloud Trends 2021,” a study released earlier this year by IDC and Cloudreach. According to researchers, more than a quarter (27.5%) of IT decision makers labeled the cloud as “essential” for the survival of their organizations. In that study, the same number of leaders also believed large public cloud migrations are strategic business decisions as opposed to simply an IT concern. These findings are encouraging, although, admittedly there is still work to be done.

The study reinforced that fact elsewhere as 23.5% of surveyed leaders claimed public cloud moves were “purely technology decisions.” And it’s not just perception standing between organizations and fully realized cloud ROI. More troubling: In a separate report, the “2020 Cloud Computing Study” conducted by IDC parent company IDG, 94% of survey participants said they found it “challenging” to fully optimize their public cloud usage. The list of reasons why included five more, let’s call them usual suspects:

  • Cost/sprawl control (40%)
  • Data privacy and security (38%)
  • Protecting cloud resources (31%)
  • Governance/compliance (30%)
  • Lack of security skills/expertise (30%)

The concern is organizations that have embraced the public cloud out of COVID-19-inspired necessity will seek to repatriate workloads once the coast clears due to one (or more) of the above challenges. While bringing workloads back onsite isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it can be expensive and complex for organizations that choose to pursue it. Workloads that were re-architected for the cloud may need to be reworked again before they can come back on prem. Additional infrastructure may need to be added to in-house data centers to accommodate data and compute growth over the last year plus.

Furthermore, as we pointed out in a past blog post on the subject, repatriation may not even solve the problem. In the case of concerns around security, the cloud isn’t inherently any less secure than on prem. Public cloud providers like Microsoft and AWS have deep pockets (and deep benches) as far cyber security goes. It’s doubtful that many organizations would be able to go toe-to-toe with them in that regard.

Next Steps: Position your organization for lasting success in the cloud  

So what needs to be done to help organizations?
1) Advocate for the cloud as an organization-wide topic
2) Get the most out of their cloud investments despite their ever-changing needs

Both take time, expertise and an ability to work with all departments and organization levels. This where a partner like Arraya Solutions can help.

In many cases, optimization makes more sense than repatriation. We can partner with organizations to regularly review and manage their cloud commitments, preventing cost or scope creep and ensuring they stay in alignment with established targets. Additionally, Arraya has the in-house security and cloud expertise needed to keep cloud resources secure, private and in compliance with any and all applicable industry regulations.  

Additionally, we can serve as an advocate for the cloud, working with the executive level on down and across departmental barriers to raise awareness about how the cloud impacts them in their various roles and how they can utilize it to succeed.

If you’d like to learn more about cloud optimization, reach out to our team today to get the conversation started. 

Visit https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/ to connect with our team now.

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How Microsoft and VMware Plan to Make Your Virtual Meetings Better

Video meetings became the nervous system of the business world in 2020, connecting employees with each other and organizations with their customers. While video meetings allowed business to carry on, to some degree, as normal, the shift from in-person to remote meetings wasn’t without its challenges. From the user perspective, we’ve likely all spent our fair share of time over the last year dealing with lagging video feeds or choppy audio. Meanwhile, on the back end, organizational networks have struggled to keep up with traffic levels they weren’t built to handle.

One technology that has become increasingly important to fostering connections over the last year is Microsoft Teams. Microsoft’s all-purpose collaboration platform has seen its daily active user numbers spike as organizations moved operations off-site. Back in November 2019, which admittedly feels like a lifetime ago, Teams boasted roughly 20 million active users each day. By April 2020, during the still early days of pandemic-necessitated shutdowns, that figure had risen to 75 million. In November 2020, with the year mercifully nearing a close, Teams’ daily usage figure hit 115 million.

With video meetings and, specifically, Teams meetings, fixed to remain a key part of work lives as 2021 unfolds, organizations must address the challenges incurred by this arrangement in order to keep productivity levels high.

Microsoft and VMware set their sights on better meetings

It was with that goal in mind that VMware and Microsoft came together to develop Horizon Media Optimization for Microsoft Teams. This feature, available with Horizon 7 (version 7.13) and 8 as well as Horizon Cloud on Azure, rethinks the way in which virtual machines process Teams audio and video. The result should make end users and network admins alike happy.

Before we get into the changes made by Horizon Media Optimization for Microsoft Teams, let’s first look at how this process worked previously. When a remote user placed a video call, voice and video data would travel from the end point to the user’s virtual desktop. Even with Horizon’s built-in compression capabilities, these data sets were still large enough to tax the virtual desktops tasked with processing them. Video streams were then routed back to the endpoint so that the user making the call could see him or herself, adding on additional stress. 

So how does that process work with Horizon Media Optimization for Microsoft Teams? Essentially, when a user places a video call, that data will now travel outside of the virtual desktop, from the end point to the internet. This is accomplished using a separate channel that is opened specifically for that call. The user, however, is none the wiser, as there is no indication that the call has ever left the virtual desktop. Using this method, all of the compute cycles that used to unfold in the organization’s network are now taking place on the end point itself. This results in less network strain and, potentially, a better user experience due to the streamlined path taken by call data.       

Next Steps: Make better quality remote meetings a 2021 priority

Last year, for obvious reasons, was the year of remote work. Something that was once a perk became, for many of us, part of our daily lives. Ideally, 2021 will bring with it a return to normalcy. Although, some jobs that moved offsite in March 2020 may stay that way permanently. Even those folks who do ultimately return to the workplace may expect expanded access to work from home where once there might have been pushback from leadership. Because of this, organizations should continue to look for ways to provide the best (and most efficient) offsite work experience possible.

If you’d like to learn more about Horizon Media Optimization for Microsoft Teams, Arraya’s team is here to help. Our experts can help break down the network and performance benefits your organization could achieve through this solution. We can also help deploy and configure it and the necessary supporting solutions as needed for those organizations that make an ideal use case. Start a conversation with our team today!

Visit https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/ to connect with our team now.

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