Businesses that are driven to the Cloud, either to save costs, to increase productivity, or just to stay competitive, often start by moving workloads onto Office 365. But some of these companies struggle to really see the benefits while still enabling users and keeping control and security. Quest is developing solutions to help in this changing world. That means, whether your business relies on On-Premises, Hybrid, or Cloud, you'll have the tools you need. Today, we're talking to Ann Maya, Software as a Service specialist at Quest, to hear more. Ann, let's start with Office 365. What are the specific challenges that offers to IT administrators?
Well, the great thing about Office 365 is that it creates a fantastic collaboration platform for users. And the cool thing about Cloud in general is that those new features and benefits that come with the product are immediately available to users. Now, that can cause some drawbacks for IT admin.
So for example, if we use OneDrive-- that's one example. That's something that has had a huge amount of uptake. And what it's done is it's allowed users to really easily be able to share data, share resources amongst their peers, and they could do so by deciding who they want to share this information with.
That's brilliant. But for IT admins, they now have a greater surface area to manage. They need to be able to see who has access to that data, especially sensitive data, as well as who has access to the groups those users are creating and making accessible. So as the productivity grows within the Cloud platform, so does the risk for organizations. They need to be able to control the data that's there, the access, and also auditing, being able to see what happens in that space.
I guess another problem for administrators, which has always been a problem, is internal changes, either of business focus or, actually, the company changes and merges. Is that easier with Cloud tools?
Well, that's interesting because, with Cloud, because of this ability to organically grow really quickly-- I mean, it's subscription-based. So as you have more users, you just buy more subscriptions. So it's really great in that, for smaller organizations that are growing or even large enterprises that are acquiring new companies, they can very easily adopt all those new users.
But the drawback is that, as you move more and more stuff into Office 365, you have tenants that are created, and it's not so easy to merge those tenants and the users, the accounts, the data that's within those tenants. So currently, there are no native tools that will allow you to do this. So that's why we've developed Quest On Demand or on Demand Migration, a module within our Quest platform that will allow the really easy tenant-to-tenant migration of mailboxes, accounts, and OneDrive data.
But also, sometimes companies shrink, so sometimes you divest and you need to separate that data. So if you need to move it from one point to another, that's another challenge within Office 365 that you can solve with On Demand Migration.
So there's still a tension between empowering users and the IT department keeping some control.
Absolutely. We've seen that, with Office 365, the beauty of it is the freedom that it allows users. And one of the things that users have been taken advantage of is being able to create their own groups. And this is really handy for them, things like creating projects. If there's new projects, they can create groups and decide which users should have access to data or resources, and that's brilliant.
The problem is there are just some drawbacks for IT because IT now lose track of, how many groups are out there? Who has access to them? What are those groups providing access to? So what's the data behind them? And this can be a problem because there could be sensitive data that they're sharing. And as those groups grow, you lose that central management.
Compounding this is that there's still a huge amount of reliance on On-Premises Active Directory, On-Prem AD. And what that means is that that comes with thousands of groups that were already created within that platform that have proliferated over the years. We've seen this ourselves within Quest as we move to Office 365.
And what about Microsoft's Azure AD? What do you see as a big business impact of that being?
Yeah, that's interesting because before, people only really looked at Azure AD because it provides the access to Office 365. So you can't use Office 365 without an Azure AD account. But now Azure AD's really grown, and it's got a lot of cool new features as well, like single sign-on. So single sign-on allows you to control the authentication and access for enterprise applications as well.
It's also heavily used for B2B and B2C accounts. So let's say you have a mobile app or web application and you want to give users, but not your users-- maybe external users, access into some system. Well, you'd do that through B2B or B2C accounts.
Now, the problem there is that, if you are like many organizations and you're relying on using your On-Premises Active Directory as the backup and recovery solution, if something were to happen in the Cloud-only space, which is B2B, B2C accounts, security groups, hard deleted users and groups, things like that, and license attributes associated with Azure AD-- if those bits are deleted, either maliciously or accidentally, you can't retrieve them back with native tools. You need an external solution, and that's why we've created On Demand Recovery.
And does it work like a straightforward backup?
Yeah, so On Demand recovery does backups, as well as restore, granular restore. So what you can do is set a backup schedule-- and this is really important for disaster recovery. You can set a backup schedule, and then, within On Demand Recovery, you can actually view