Part I

An Introduction to Microsoft’s Cloud

  • Chapter 1: Welcome to the Cloud
  • Chapter 2: Getting Your Environment Ready for Office 365

Chapter 1

Welcome to the Cloud

What’s in this Chapter

  • Learning the various approaches for cloud computing
  • Learning about factors that impact moving to the cloud
  • Understanding the Microsoft Azure Platform
  • Understanding the Office 365 offering

This chapter helps you gain a better understanding of Microsoft’s two primary cloud technologies—Office 365 and Microsoft Azure. You also learn about various approaches towards cloud computing and how Microsoft aligns its strategy with these approaches. Toward the end, this chapter touches on the various challenges and risks that are associated with cloud computing in general.

An Overview of the Cloud

The word cloud, without any doubt, is one of the most ambiguous words out there in the information technology industry today. You ask ten people about how they define the cloud and you will get ten different replies—what constitutes the cloud is rather complex question. However, there is one common factor that most replies share: Cloud is anything that can be offered as a service for which you don’t need to bother about how it’s implemented and maintained. Also, it’s generally agreed that to utilize the cloud you must have Internet access, without which the concept of cloud does not exist. For the purpose of this book, cloud computing refers to a varied range of scalable services that are available to you ...

Get Programming Microsoft's Clouds: Windows Azure™ and Office 365 now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.