In December of 2023, it was announced that the ability to move a VM to a zonal configuration (deployed into a specific availability zone). Prior to this, if a VM was deployed without being set in a availability zone, an administrator would have had not choice but to rebuild the VM (provided that VM was slated for that region). A traditional deployment would post information as noted in Image 1 below in the general properties of the VM. Please note the edit feature now highlighted to the side of the “availability zone ..read more

Azure's capacity demand –  ..read more

For companies using Azure virtual machines, there are many avenues to reduce costs. Historically many companies have focused on the compute aspects of virtual machines. This is the appeal of reservations; by committing to a machine series in a region a company can reduce the computer costs significantly.   While effective, many Microsoft customers overlook the costs of the operating systems which they are leasing per month. To explore this, let’s use Azure Price Calculator and examine the monthly cost of basic VM ( D2ds v4 ) noted in image 1 below ..read more

Microsoft Azure is nearing one billion worldwide users, and it’s for good reason. As businesses grow and expand their operations, they often require more advanced and scalable technology solutions. Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service that offers a range of services and tools to help businesses operate more efficiently and securely. Is Microsoft Azure right for your business? And if you already use it, are you making the most of its features and reaping all of the Microsoft Azure benefits? To help you out, we’re going to do a deep dive into what Azure is, how it can benefit businesses ..read more

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Smaller organizations are more prone to appoint IT admins with global admin rights as a “catch all” privilege, especially where the company might have started their cloud journey with Office 365. This might be compounded where in small companies, an admin will be expected to support a wider breath of technology. However, this goes against least privilege guidelines for companies looking to a “zero trust” model ..read more

Microsoft Active Directory has been commercially available for more than 20 years. As noted in Image 1 below, the core appeal of the product is being an effective platform for authentication and providing policies at enterprise scale. However, the core premise of Microsoft Active Directory in providing effective services, is for end users to be onsite. During the time of Covid-19 with more companies shifting to a hybrid work model, Microsoft Active Directory is becoming problematic to end users. The cornerstone of this issue is the companies relying on VPN access. Most company VPNs operate on ..read more

When we redefined email security in 2015 with an API-based approach, it was just us. Today, while there are probably a dozen API-based email security vendors in the market, Avanan still continues to dominate with over 5000+ customers worldwide and top rankings from Gartner Peer Insights (#1 ranked), G2 (#1 ranked), and Aite Group (best in class) among others. Many of the other API vendors have a similar sounding story at the surface, sometimes making it hard to distinguish one from another… Easy to deploy, AI-enabled, APIs, etc. Some of them use hype as a means to impress. But at the end of ..read more

Many of our customers come to Avanan from Secure Email Gateways. For example, in the last quarter, 30.9% of our new customers switched from Mimecast. When they get to Avanan, our customers find the solution to be leaps and bounds better than SEGs, including Mimecast. One of the most critical things is the difference in architecture. Introducing a Secure Email Gateway will blind Microsoft and Google's default security to incoming threats. To install an SEG, you must first disable Microsoft and Google's spam filters — which play a key role in anti-phishing. This is why upon deployment, you w ..read more

Historically Microsoft has had common cost advantages for customers looking to onboard to the cloud such as reservations and Hybrid benefits (a reduction in cost leveraging on-premises Software Assurance-enabled Windows Server and SQL Server licenses on Azure). But as time has progressed Microsoft has started introducing features which can be only found on Azure exclusively leading to Azure cost savings ..read more