Morning,

Looking into Windows server hosting to move away from on-premises hardware. Any experience with companies that offer a good deal? Based in London but location not really an issue these days. There’s a lot out there, so any experience would be great to hear.

Thanks.

Azure, Rackspace both good ime for hosting. However, a lot will depend on what sort of service you want.

If you want a small supplier who can manage all your onsite equipment, comms etc as well as the off-site hosting then DM me – there’s a co we’ve used who are very good.

Any reason not to go cloud?

How much data, how business critical is it and how confidential is it? Hosted file service costs can soon mount up and you need to look into costs and SLAs for file recovery. If the files being stored there are big and you don’t have good Internet connectivity then also be prepared for user complaints (we had this with our finance department and large Excel files just moving a file server from one site to another with a 100Mb link between the users and new server location).

Nixie, when you say Cloud, what do you mean? Office365, google, Dropbox, etc? About 100gb data, mainly word docs, excel stuff but don’t like the idea of constantly syncing to desktops in the office. There are so many options it’s difficult to know what to do, but most people I know are still happy with an on-site box. It seems a bit archaic there days.

Can you use Azure without local hardware? Just have a server in the cloud?

Thanks.

Can you use Azure without local hardware

I may have misunderstood the original post – what are you looking for – literally servers for off site data storage or for hosting apps?

You’ll always need local hardware…

Servers for off-site data storage and no server in the office. Obviously will still have PC clients in the office. Thanks.

Can you use Azure without local hardware? Just have a server in the cloud?

Yes, sort of but not recommended for this sort of scenario. Ideally you’d want a private VPN connection into Azure and have your users access via that method (rather than them connect directly into Azure). You also need to consider file/share permissions – assuming you’re in a domain now and are using file permissions based on AD users then you either need to get rid of that and switch to local user permissions in Azure (with people authenticating again to access files) or have your domain linked into Azure (various ways to do this). It quickly starts getting complicated and the costs soon add up though.

Internal file storage still makes a lot of sense if you have existing backup infrastructure, a working DR plan and users can get to the files easily.

How much data and how much is actually shared? One Drive can do quite a lot now with peer sharing, removing a traditional centralised file server need, and you get a fair bit of space with a o365 sub. This would be the easiest way to get to zero onsite hardware (you could consider Google docs / drive etc. too). Be aware a lot of these services don’t necessarily include backups or versioning – read the small print.

The constant sync is not a concern on any half decent (fibre) connection, it’s block level changes that get replicated. It’d suck on ADSL due to upload speed but so will any cloud file server.

You can use Azure, with a hardware vpn connection, and have an Azure hosted AD controller, but that’s just running a server somewhere else .. i.e. make the far end of the VPN your server room. Setting it all up would be a bit of work. Using A N Other provider and a VPN to them would likewise be a fair bit of effort and cost. Not convinced its worth it for a single server, a cloud backup solution for that would make more sense to buy some continuity cover.

We’re using SharePoint for that and will be moving over the Azure AD when we get the time.

Needs to be embraced though, if you try to use it as a cut-price Cloud Server it’ll drive you nuts. We use the online version of Word / Excel, again, once you get used to the whole ‘right click’ thing, it’s great.

@root-n-5th I mean store and access in the cloud, do away with the servers and their management all together (including the mail server!). If its just docs/spreadsheets then there is no reason to sync it locally. The online apps directly access the documents in the cloud storage. Local storage becomes verboten. There is a certain big internet company that works this way with the devices only being a way to access the browser based applications.

Thanks for the ideas, people.

I’ve been digging into this and I’m almost there with a solution. There is, however, a real missing link between using Office 365 and Sharepoint, which I think is the way to go, and uses authenticating locally before they logon to O365.

With a server, the PCs are easy to set up – stick them on the domain, chuck a load of Group Policies at them and they purr like kittens. I feel I will be going backwards many years (the 1990s spring to mind) where I will be managing local user logons on each PC. If Fred wants to log onto 3 PCs, and so does Bob and Sue, that is already 9 user accounts I need to manage locally.

I could go complete cloud as mentioned above, have a stripped down single logon per PC with no ability to save files, but I feel this might be a step too far.

I’ve seen some Cloud based AD services, but they cost, and Azure is also costly. Is there a middle ground?

Cheers.

You’ll get (some) Azure AD functionality with O365 and there’s absolutely nothing to stop you just syncing your on prem AD servers to AAD. The O365 AAD gives you 6 SSO federation enterprise apps as well which is nice, gives you the option to use the MS authentication app to provide simple MFA

We don’t have any tin on site any more just firewalls doing DNS caching and VPNs out to our core backbone in Azure.

If you want to do this on the cheap then the Azure file storage is dirt cheap and you could just run a couple of ubuntu boxes with SAMBA joined to your domain :p

I could go complete cloud as mentioned above, have a stripped down single logon per PC with no ability to save files, but I feel this might be a step too far.

I may have misunderstood – but my laptop keeps a local copy of my onedrive that is available when not connected and syncs up when I go back on line; icloud and dropbox both do this as well. So I save files to a file on my machine and it replicates to onedrive as and when – best of both worlds.

Is there a middle ground?

Cheap local server to run AD.

I merely the Muppet employed to sell the stuff, I leave the actual making it work thing to others, but we’ve been having the same argument in work for ages –

Me ” lets use Azure AD”

Techies “I don’t want to”

“Okay, lets get a small on-prem box for AD”

“I don’t want to”

“Okay, lets just use MS Live and allow self-service password management”

“oh no, how could I ever control it all”

“you don’t need to”

“yes I do”

“why?”

“reasons”

“But the data will be secure within 365, that what we need to control”

“la la la la la la la la – I can’t hear you”.

 there’s absolutely nothing to stop you just syncing your on prem AD servers to AAD

It’s what we do.  Going back to local logins is madness.

We’ve just moved offices.  In the old office we had two racks’ worth of servers.  In the new one we have a single VMware host running a DC and a couple of app servers.  (Redundancy is provided by other branches.)

Interesting stuff. After much thought, I have discovered exactly what I need, but I don’t think it exists yet.

Firstly, I really don’t want to have any server hardware on site.

I want a client that can be downloaded to each PC in the “Virtual Domain” and locks the local hdd so no access can be gained to anything. Only the administrators can configure it and I guess it might encrypt the hdd for good measure.

It will automatically log on the PC and present the user with an office 365 login, and when they have authenticated it will unlock, or create if it is the first logon, a folder on the hdd that will become their local profile type of thing. Of course it will also give them access to O365 online and locally installed apps.

The admin can choose whether to sync folders locally or not amongst a host of other controls, like desktop background and the important stuff like that.

The best thing about it is that once the client is controlling the PC, it can be configured from within Office 365 online, anywhere in the world.

Right, I’m off to start hacking away at some powershell code and by the morning (sometime in the future) I’ll have the a modern day, digital Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Unless the Chinese get there first, which I hope they do, as it will save a lot of bother.

Or, does it already exist?

Yeah, it’s called Citrix. (-:

Yes, sounds good. Is it cost effective for a small company?