Introduction
To be able to give optimal support to our customers, Centric makes use of Microsoft technology for its services. By using Microsoft products, Centric provides her customers with the solutions and capabilities they need to be prepared for social and business developments, now and in the future. In this blog series we will zoom in on how Microsoft technology in combination with our Compliance, Governance and Backup services can support more secure data and its availability.
Why this blog series? Because in practice we often see volatile implementations with Microsoft 365 services. Volatile implementations are more often the standard than the exception. Microsoft 365 services like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive have been put into use without thinking carefully about the possible consequences of this. No organization wants sensitive data to end up outside the organization or for a data leak to occur. Everything starts with a good and solid foundation, also known as Governance.
How do we support this? With our Governance, Compliance and Backup services, we can ensure that Microsoft 365 customer environments are optimally configured, according to our baseline, and that sensitive data is optimally protected and can be retrieved in the event of a disaster. At the end of this blog series, we will provide you with ideas, services, and a way of working to hugely improve the success of implementation of M365. Before we zoom in on the content, it is good to give you a global picture of how Microsoft has set up their own data centers to guarantee data security and availability.
For those who use a telephone, laptop, or other device and where information is an abstract thing, the question of where the information is located seems less important. After all, “it just has to work”. Nevertheless, it is useful to consider the question of how we move ourselves and which roads this involves. To put it in the context of this blog: How do we ensure that our information is moved unharmed and what requirements do we place on the way in which it is done?
Data, information: It’s all about connections where highway numbers change as often as technology abbreviations. And always, we trust that everything will go as we would expect and even be protected against accidents that naturally also occur in digital form.
Our most important data is in the Cloud. A somewhat vague concept that everyone seems to give their own interpretation to, but that data is also stored somewhere. And without asking, we assume it stays there. To be able to rely on it, the availability of the services that are delivered via the Cloud is of the utmost importance. Data must be stored securely but at the same time accessible to everyone who has the right to access it. Laws and regulations make this task increasingly complex, which is why Microsoft is constantly working to improve the quality and integration of services so that data is properly protected. How does Microsoft ensure that data is moved securely and is always available?
The data centers, currently 16 data centers worldwide, where all the information that we experience as in-the-Cloud is stored, are specifically designed to ensure that data stays where it belongs. Multiple levels of security and advanced techniques should ensure this.
Microsoft has facilities all over the world to meet the above demand. A global architecture provides redundancy, and its purpose is to bring the data as close as possible to the end user. And all of this in a safe, compliant, and reliable manner. Data is spread across geographic regions, with an availability of at least 99.999%. This depends on the agreements that have been made about this in the form of SLAs. Microsoft is investing heavily in their infrastructure and the entirety of procedures, management, networks, and sustainability that together must ensure that services are available 24x7x365.
Azure Regions
Who says Microsoft cloud, says Azure. An Azure data center is a physical location containing many highly secured systems that are supplied with power and cooling almost completely independently. And of course, a (large) internet connection that connects the data center with other data centers. Data centers that are located together form an Azure Region. Data centers are clustered within an Azure Region, for reasons of redundancy and performance.
Users work together within a Microsoft 365 environment in a specific geographic area with their own pricing and licensing structure. However, an Azure region is a logical structure that offers the possibility to apply specific SLAs and rates per region. For example, depending on the specific requirements set for a service, it pays to see if a particular service is offered cheaper in a specific region.
Azure regions that are geographically close (about 500 Km) are connected to each other in a Region Pair as protection against natural and other violence. If an entire Region is damaged, you can automatically fall back on another Region. This does not apply to all Azure services, so organizations will have to make provisions for this themselves.
Availability zones
Within a region, several data centers can be merged into an Availability zone. Customers who require a particularly high degree of redundancy and performance can use specially configured and encrypted connections.
Azure Edge Zones
Edge Zones are small extensions of Azure placed in areas far from Azure regions. Azure public MEC (multi-access edge compute) integrates Azure compute and services with 5G connectivity from mobile operators for low-latency applications at the operator edge. Azure public MEC supports virtual machines (VMs), containers, and a select set of Azure services that enable organizations to run latency-sensitive and throughput-intensive applications close to end users.
We hope that you as a reader have gained an idea of how Microsoft ensures the security and availability of your data, among other things. Centric’s services are based on Microsoft technology. So, we also think it is important that data is available and can be used in a safe way. Of course, agreements must also be made about this. In a next blog we will zoom in on the importance of Governance.
Keep an eye on the CRAFT site!
This was the first in a series of four blogs to help you improve the success of your M365 implementation. The blog series consists of these blogs:
- Introduction
In this first blog, the first in a series of 4 blogs, we zoom in on how Microsoft ensures how their services, and our data can be offered securely and always available.
- Why is Governance important within a Microsoft 365 environment?
In this blog we take a closer look at Governance and why it is so important. As far as I’m concerned, Governance is a starting point for any project.
- Why should you provide yourself with a Microsoft 365 backup?
Why is it so important to use a good backup solution? We take you into what Microsoft provides and where it does not.
- What options do our Centric services offer?
When we look at data security, we as Centric offer various solutions. In this blog we explain these services in more detail and the logical structure within them.
