20. Office 365 is a Public Cloud (SaaS)
http://www.office365.com
21.
22. The Windows Azure Platform
Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers around the world,
proving a simple, reliable and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.
23. app usage patterns
+ Costs to make systems resilient
Total Cost on
Separate Hardware
WHAT IF…
• We could share the hardware and the
Cost Saving
software
• We could very quickly scale up to
closely match application needs
• We could scale down quickly so I only
pay for what I am using
• Resilience was baked in
Predictable Bursting Unpredictable Bursting Growing Fast On and Off
Services with micro seasonality trends Successful services needs to grow/scale On & off workloads (e.g. batch job)
Unexpected/unplanned peak in demand
Peaks due to periodic increased demand Keeping up w/ growth is big IT challenge Over provisioned capacity is wasted
Sudden spike impacts performance
IT complexity and wasted capacity Cannot provision hardware fast enough Time to market can be cumbersome
Can’t over provision for extreme cases
24. Ready-Made
Services
Existing DataCenter Azure Platform
AppFabric Service Bus
LOB app CDN
Windows Azure 2 Tbps
from 22 global DCs
SQL Azure
LOB Data Data Sync SQL Azure
AD ACS
ADFS
Partner
29. Data Center
Cloud Service
Self Service
Virtualization
physical Public
Cloud
Virtualization Virtualization Virtualization
Public Cloud
Traditional Virtualization Private Cloud Hybrid Public Cloud
Cloud
Public Cloud
Cloud Computing
Activities
100%
On
32. Private Cloud
Cloud Computing
1.
1) Virtualization with
Hyper-V (Free with
2.
Windows Server)
3.
2) Install System Center
4.
Virtual Machine Manager
5.
3) Install System Center
40. Cloud Service
Solution on all Microsoft Work with Microsoft and
Build Cloud Strategy Deliver to End User Winning Together: CRM Product Partner Manage Investment
Develop Plan with Base on Windows
Focus on User Need Microsoft & Partner Working with Office 365 Technology Provide Alternative Follow Cloud Technology
Hybrid BCP Service Catalog
Build Helpdesk and RAS SLA Readiness Attractive
Technical support Enjoy total cost down
Hinweis der Redaktion
Note to Speaker: Through these 4 builds, we want to land that Microsoft has played a pivotal role in leading this technology transformation and making it ubiquitously available for businesses. We’ve truly democratized these computing shifts and made them very approachable to everybody. Key Points:Over the past 40 years computing has seen a number of transformationsIn the 70s and 80s was the introduction of the mainframeIndividuals did not have computing power only large corporations required to store large amounts of data Talk Track:Computing has seen a number of transformations. First, let us take a look at the past 40 years and how IT has evolved. In the 1970s and 1980s, IT was a large compute device, the mainframe, in the datacenter with terminals to retrieve data from the mainframe. During this time, there was no concept of having computing power on an employee’s desk, applications, or even employees using technology at home. Agile was not a word used to describe IT during this time, in fact - for all practical purposes was a closed system with little to no involvement by the rest of the company, let alone outside the four walls of your business. The only consumers of these machines were large corporations, financial institutions, and healthcare organizations that were required to store large amounts of data.
Key Points:1990s = the PC revolution was in full swing. People began having PCs at home IT used PCs as a solution to give employees better access to data and be more productive Applications that had a client component are developedTalk Track:When we moved into the 1990s the PC revolution was in full swing. With the rise of x86 PCs and Servers, IT capabilities started to spread and the ability to create new solutions and easily run them on commodity systems dramatically changes the way customers leveraged technology. More and more people began to purchase PCs for their home in order to use technology to help with their personal lives. As these people began to have PCs in their homes, they wanted to have the same experience at work as they did at home. Businesses also began to feel the increasing costs of buying, supporting, and maintaining these large computers. IT used PCs as a solution to give employees more power to be more productive, have better access to data, and deliver better and more strategic results. The back office changed to support this shift by writing better applications that had a client component on each employee’s PC. This was very much one of the first instances of self service to data.Although the new method of computing was highly agile, it lead to significant server sprawl (including servers under desks!).
Key Points:Late 90s / early 2000s the Internet was becoming more prevalent in business and at home. Dial-up access to the Internet through AOL, Netcom, local Telcos etc. Home access to work assets such as: email, files, internal LOB tools 2003-2005 business began using the internet more and more to increase their revenuesDevelopment of early web apps Talk Track:As we approached and passed the year 2000, the Internet was becoming more prevalent in business and at home. More people began to use dial-up access to the Internet through companies like AOL, Netcom, or their local Telco. We even began to see the seeds of high speed internet access moving from business to the homefront.This transformation continued the evolution that client / server started, but dramatically simplified the consumption of applications. Business better adopted the idea of getting increased productivity from users by giving them access to corporate assets while outside of the office. For example: Email, files and internal LOB tools. The ease of new app deployment and application upgrades also played a role in this transformation, since the logic runs on the server and only the UI is sent out over HTML / web browsers. We saw this make the most significant impact as we moved into 2003-2005 when business began using the internet more and more to increase their revenues. Developers began moving away from writing client/server applications to writing applications for the web. Banks began providing online access to account information. Bill pay eservices begun to flourish while online shopping was gaining more and more adoption.The world was moving more towards transacting their lives on the web while business were increasing their productivity and bottom line using the Web.This momentum has continued as we have seen the way apps are being consumed change as well. As the line between work life and personal life continues to blur, IT has new pressures to provide access to applications outside of the normal bounds of the organization and conversely support a broader range of devices in which business users want to use to stay productive.
Key Points:Virtualization is not a transformation in that it changes the way applications are delivered or consumedVirtualization has been a driver of efficiency in IT for nearly a decade a shift in technology that is a strong foundation for what is next… Talk Track: Next came virtualization, not that virtualization is a true transformation – it’s real value to IT was the economics of virtualization, running many client / server/web applications on a single physical box. That said, with virtualization we are still delivering and consuming the same applications as we were through the client / server and the web, but it for the first time allowed IT to massively increase efficiency. In fact virtualization has been a driver of efficiency in IT for nearly a decade a strong technology shift that provided a strong foundation for what is next...
Key Points: So what will that next transformation be? Talk Track:So what will that next transformation be?
Key Points:Next transformation = IT as a Service Talk Track: Microsoft believes that the next transformation will be IT as a Service. IT as a Service supports your business end to end with cloud computing solutions that meet the needs and requirements of your business. Can you imagine a world where: Global deployment of applications takes 2 hours rather than 2 months; hardware utilization is 75% rather than 15%; developers use a self-service platform to provision and scale applications rather than costly manual processes or where there is 1 person for every 10,000 servers rather than 1 person for every 100 servers?
Key Points: IT as a Service =Public Cloud Productivity SolutionsPublic Cloud Platform Solutions Private Cloud Solutions Talk Track:IT as a Service delivers on these promises. And today, Microsoft is the only provider of IT as a Service which covers the entire spectrum of cloud computing, spanning public and private clouds and including Public Cloud Productivity Solutions such as Office 365, Pubic Cloud Platform Solutions such as Windows Azure and what we are going to talk specifically about today: Private Cloud Solutions. We believe it is a hybrid approach or a combination of all three cloud computing models will become the norm for IT. Supporting information in case there are questions on the difference between how we define Public Cloud Productivity Solutions, Public Cloud Platform Solutions and Private Cloud Solutions and the “aaS’s” – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a model for provisioning hardware (compute, storage, networking, etc...) to the end user where management of the underlying fabric is controlled by the provider, but the end user maintains control of the operating system and applications installed within. This system usually includes a metered-by use cost model and allows the end user to expand/contract their use of the infrastructure as needed, usually via self-service portals. Examples include: FastHosts, Go Daddy, Rackspace, Amazon EC2, vCloud Express Services (e.g., BlueLock, Hosting.Com, Melboure IT, Terremark), private clouds deployed/managed by IT as a service to business units (internal IT’s end-customers), Azure Service with the VM RolePlatform as a Service(PaaS) is a model for delivering complete development platforms as a cloud service. PaaS offerings facilitate development, testing, deployment and on-going maintenance of applications without the cost of buying the underlying infrastructure and software environments. Examples include: Microsoft Azure Platform, Google App Engine, VMforce.comSoftware as a Service (SaaS) is a model where an application is delivered over the Internet and customers pay on a per-use basis. It is the most common form of cloud computing delivered today. Examples include: Office 365, Salesforce.com, Hosted Exchange, Salesforce.com
Slide Objectives:Explain the differences and relationship between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in more detail.Speaking Points:Here’s another way to look at the cloud services taxonomy and how this taxonomy maps to the components in an IT infrastructure. Packaged SoftwareWith packaged software a customer would be responsible for managing the entire stack – ranging from the network connectivity to the applications. IaaSWith Infrastructure as a Service, the lower levels of the stack are managed by a vendor. Some of these components can be provided by traditional hosters – in fact most of them have moved to having a virtualized offering. Very few actually provide an OSThe customer is still responsible for managing the OS through the Applications. For the developer, an obvious benefit with IaaS is that it frees the developer from many concerns when provisioning physical or virtual machines. This was one of the earliest and primary use cases for Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). Developers were able to readily provision virtual machines (AMIs) on EC2, develop and test solutions and, often, run the results ‘in production’. The only requirement was a credit card to pay for the services.PaaSWith Platform as a Service, everything from the network connectivity through the runtime is provided and managed by the platform vendor. The Windows Azure best fits in this category today. In fact because we don’t provide access to the underlying virtualization or operating system today, we’re often referred to as not providing IaaS.PaaS offerings further reduce the developer burden by additionally supporting the platform runtime and related application services. With PaaS, the developer can, almost immediately, begin creating the business logic for an application. Potentially, the increases in productivity are considerable and, because the hardware and operational aspects of the cloud platform are also managed by the cloud platform provider, applications can quickly be taken from an idea to reality very quickly.SaaSFinally, with SaaS, a vendor provides the application and abstracts you from all of the underlying components.
Key Points:No one has the breadth of cloud servicesOnly Microsoft has a the wide set of cloud services that complements on-premises softwareScript:In addition to our consumer-facing cloud services, Microsoft offers the most complete set of cloud-based solutions to meet your business needs including advertising, communications (email, telephony, meetings), collaboration (document storage, sharing, workflow), business applications (CRM, business productivity), storage, management and infrastructure services. And unique to Microsoft these sets of cloud services complement a full and rich set of on-premise software enabling often times to add cloud functionality to your existing software or move between cloud and on-premises systems.Click:And with Office365 we are seeing quite a bit of momentum of customers moving to the cloud.
Key point: The Windows Azure Platform is a set of cloud computing services that can be used separately or together.Windows Azure is hosted in Microsoft data centers around the world. Windows Azure provides compute power, storage, and automated service management, as well as easy connectivity to other applications and access control to provide secure authorization and authentication of access to cloud resources. Also hosted in the Windows Azure platform is Microsoft SQL Azure, providing relational database services and automated management of relational service. SQL Azure can help reduce costs by integrating with existing toolsets and providing symmetry with on-premises and cloud databases. Windows Azure AppFabric helps developers connect applications and services in the cloud or on-premises. This includes applications running on Windows Azure, Windows Server and a number of other platforms including Java, Ruby, PHP and others. Windows Azure AppFabric provides a Service Bus for connectivity across network and organizational boundaries, and Access Control for federated authorization as a service.
Key Points: Microsoft has a long history of providing some of the largest cloud services in the world.Microsoft’s consumer services are built upon Microsoft’s server technologies that also power Microsoft’s commercial servicesScript: We’ve actually been in cloud computing for a while:We’ve been delivering some of the largest cloud services on the planet for almost 15 years.Our online properties (WL, MSN) see some 600 million unique users every monthXbox pushed out some 5 petabytes of content over Xbox Live during the week of Christmas (2009)We process up to 9.9 billion messages a day via WL MessengerWe have over 500 million active Windows Live IDsThe BPOS guys have a million paying users in 36 countries and regionsMicrosoft Update/Windows Update … operates at incredible scale - pushes out over a petabyte of updates every month to millions of servers and hundreds of millions of PCs When you look at our experience, our commitment and our continued leadership in cloud computing there are a number of fairly substantial differences between us and other providers. From a developer perspective, the consumer services provide developers with a foundation (Bing, Live) for not only consumer services but also commercial services viz. Bing Maps integration with multiple partner offerings, Bing Translator integration with tools such as Microsoft Word and to enhance web sites, and the more than 75 partners whose services are being integrated with Windows Live. More importantly perhaps is that Microsoft’s consumer cloud services are built upon the very same technologies (e.g. Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008) that Microsoft sells to its enterprise customers as servers and uses to form the foundation of its cloud services platforms (Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online). This consistency is powerful not only for the developer who gets to use Visual Studio, .NET and the appropriate frameworks across the board. It ensures that each audience benefits from refinements triggered by the others. It also proves Microsoft’s commitment to its technologies (dog fooding)
DEPENDING ON CUSTOMER, USE THIS SLIDE TO LEVEL SET OR EDUCATETiming: 2 minutes (or 5 minutes, if educating) Key Points:Microsoft defines the cloud in three ways: Private cloud—You or a partner controls your own separate infrastructure using cloud-enabled products (on-premises or hosted by a third party).Public cloud—We manage the platform for you in our data centers.Hybrid cloud—You have a mix of the two.Microsoft’s private cloud is not the same as another vendor’s approach.Microsoft is betting on businesses’ need for hybrid cloud solutions to allow them to compete now and in the future. Script:To make sure we’re all talking about the same thing, let me define what Microsoft means by “cloud.” For Microsoft, our overarching vision is to provide a continuous cloud service for every person and every business. It harkens back to Bill Gates’ vision of “A PC on every desktop and in every home.” That grounds you in how broadly we’re thinking about the importance of the cloud. To do this, we’re taking all of the years of experience we have at running applications at Internet scale, which started with MSN in 1995 all the way to Bing and Hotmail today, and we’re combining that with our expertise in on-premises software. We're pouring all of this into three cloud concepts:Private cloud—You or a partner controls your own separate infrastructure using cloud-enabled products (on-premises or hosted by a third party). AS NEEDED:A question we sometimes hear is, “What distinguishes cloud computing from a ‘highly virtualized’ environment?” Here are the key differentiators—the powerful attributes that make cloud computing unique:Pooled resources—In a private cloud, your core resources—compute, storage, and network—are transformed into a pool. This enables dynamic provisioning of applications and services. Self-service—Once resources are pooled, you can deliver applications and resources as services. Your customers can request, configure, and manage IT services as required through an interactive portal that allows for automated provisioning.Elastic—Because resources are pooled, they can quickly be expanded or contracted through automation or workflow. This means your environment and resources can scale up or down almost instantly to meet business requirements.Usage based—With resources as services, usage can be metered so that you and your customers pay for only for the resources that actually get consumed. Private cloud adds additional control and customization. Public cloud—We manage the platform for you in our data centers.Hybrid cloud—You have a mix of the two. We’re investing heavily in the concept of hybrid cloud. By hybrid, it's not just having a deep and broad set of services and platform capabilities across public and private. It's the ability to bridge the two. The commonalities between our private and public clouds provide the real magic in Microsoft’s business cloud strategy. These commonalities of identity, virtualization, management, and application development are what makes the Microsoft platform very unique.This entire hybrid cloud picture is where we believe businesses will achieve the biggest advantage with the cloud and what we’ll be discussing today.
Microsoft’s cloud offerings span the public and private cloud with a comprehensive set of products and solutions. The Microsoft public cloud delivers Platform Solutions through products like Windows Azure, and also Productivity Solutions through solutions such as Office 365 and Windows Intune. And we also deliver the Microsoft private cloud with products such as Windows Server with Hyper-V and System Center. Although you have choices when it comes to the public and private cloud, from our research we know that customer are – and will continue to – do both and create a hybrid environment.With Microsoft, the advantage to you is that we have great strength in having four areas of commonality between the public and the private cloud which are: Common identity, common virtualization, common management and common development which provides you choice to pick the option that is most appropriate by workload and the freedom to move those workloads should your business requirements change.
Timing: 5 minutes Presenter Guidance:Use the detail on the three slides that follow this one to enrich the script here.Amplify certain aspects of the messages based on customer need. Key Points:With a hybrid cloud, we believe you should be able to:Embrace the right IT for your business by moving to the cloud at your own pace, with a comprehensive range of enterprise cloud offerings that span on-premises and online.Make more of your existing investments in infrastructure, tools, and skills.Delight your users with the best experiences that reflect how they prefer to do their work and interact with others. Script:We talked about the different aspects of cloud: private and public. As I’ve mentioned, Microsoft believes that cloud implementations in the future will be hybrid. Let’s talk about how we think about the hybrid cloud.A lot of the security and compliance concerns about the cloud really reflect the public cloud. But the most significant scalability and cost benefits also come from the public cloud. With the private cloud, you retain more control and you have maximum customizability, but you also must purchase and manage the infrastructure. Here at Microsoft, we believe you should be able to choose how you use the cloud. Depending on what fits your business best, you could look at a public solution, or a private solution, or—in what we believe will be the most common choice—a bit of both. A hybrid cloud gives you the best way to balance risk and opportunity. In fact, the CTO for Capgemini in North America puts it like this: “If an enterprise really looks at [migrating] to the cloud, it’s almost 100% going to end up with some sort of hybrid.”Microsoft’s hybrid cloud offers distinct advantages:Embrace the right IT for your business. Choice and flexibility are key to cloud adoption now and in the future.Our goal is to help you make the cloud work for your business. It should be up to you to decide what you want to deploy in the cloud and when, so you have the ultimate ability to balance control and flexibility with cost and agility. At Microsoft, we offer a comprehensive range of enterprise cloud offerings that span on-premises and online, helping you move to the cloud at your pace. Do you want better performance, better security, to free up IT staff? We’ll help you strike the right balance for your business by using private cloud, public cloud, and traditional infrastructure environments that all work together. Make more of your existing investments. You’ve already made a massive investment in IT, and taking advantage of the cloud shouldn’t require you to start again. With Microsoft, a hybrid cloud is truly that—it enables you to use your existing infrastructure, tools, and skills for maximum value, efficiency, and productivity as you extend to the cloud. Since our platform spans from on-premises to the public cloud, you can use the data center resources that you already have in place to build your own private cloud and then extend into our public cloud. We make the hybrid environment easier on your IT staff by providing a single, unified toolset for managing both traditional and cloud environments. We help you mitigate risk because you can extend Active Directory in your existing environment to the cloud, so you use just one identity infrastructure. And because we provide a common platform that spans from the client to the cloud, we can help you maximize IT and developer productivity. Delight users with the best experiences. As we discussed earlier, users have never had higher expectations of the technology they use to do their jobs. We can help you support today’s workforce with tools that reflect how they prefer to do their work and interact with others. With our cloud-based productivity apps, you can deliver the familiar, business-class experience that your users already love across the PC, mobile devices, and browser. Our cloud-based services also make it easier to ensure that your users always have the latest capabilities and tools without adding to the maintenance burden for your IT staff.No matter where your users are located, you can use the cloud to connect them in easy, natural ways online using enterprise-ready social computing tools that make it easier for them to share information and interests.Let’s look at each of these areas in a little more detail. GO TO THE NEXT SLIDEORLet’s talk about the solutions we have that can do all of this. SLIDE 11 (THE MICROSOFT HYBRID CLOUD) Additional Information: “Your Strategic Guide to IT 2012” (by the editors of CIO, CSO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, ITworld and Network World). IDG. January 2012. http://www.computerworld-digital.com/computerworld/it2012#pg2
Timing: 3 minutes OPTIONAL SLIDE—to be used if customer engagement requires further detail Key Points:With the Microsoft cloud, you can use the right IT for your business. Since the Microsoft platform includes private cloud, public cloud, and traditional environments that all work together, you can use the right balance of the three for your business. Script:With the Microsoft platform, you can strike the right balance for your business with private and public cloud platform and infrastructure services designed to work together with the traditional on-premises infrastructure that you already know and trust. With a hybrid environment built on Windows Azure, Windows Server, and System Center, you can:Get maximum control of more critical and sensitive data and applications by building a private cloud.Get maximum agility and scalability for less critical and sensitive data and applications with the public cloud.Get the best of both worlds by enabling on-premises applications that are required to stay on-premises—for security, legal, technical, or procedural reasons—to interact with applications in the public cloud. Support variable workloads by extending your private cloud to the public cloudfor times of peak load or “bursting” to take advantage of added computing and storage capacity as required.Our productivity platform features a complete set of applications available both in the cloud and as a traditional on-premises deployment. This gives you the freedom to use the cloud where it makes the most sense for your business, such as for a subset of users or for specific applications, without being locked in.
Timing: 4 minutes OPTIONAL SLIDE—to be used if customer engagement requires further detail Key Points:A Microsoft hybrid cloud enables you to make more from your existing investments:Build a private cloud and extend to our public cloud using your existing data center resources.Simplify management of your hybrid environment with a single, unified toolset that spans your traditional infrastructure, private cloud, and public cloud environments.Mitigate risk by extending Active Directory in your existing environment to private, hosted, and public cloud environments, for a common identity infrastructure.Maximize IT and developer productivity with a common platform that spans from the client to the cloud. Script:I’m sure you are thinking about how the cloud should work with what you already have in your infrastructure. With a Microsoft hybrid cloud, what you’ve already invested will move forward with you as you evolve to the cloud. Our hybrid cloud enables you to make more from your existing investments:Take existing data center resources and skills to build a private cloud and extend to our public cloud.Windows Server 2008 R2 includes Microsoft virtualization technology—Microsoft Hyper-V—so most enterprises already have the building blocks in place for their private cloud. You should be able to repurpose your existing licenses if you choose to host your private cloud with a partner. You can connect and integrate your existing on-premises systems with the public cloud without having to move your data or write custom code, with features such as the Windows Azure Service Bus (which provides secure messaging and relay capabilities) and Windows Azure Connect (which provides network-level connectivity between Windows Azure services and on-premises resources such as database servers and domain controllers). Use a single toolset to manage your traditional and cloud environments.With System Center 2012, we offer full visibility and control through a single toolset across traditional infrastructure and private and public cloud environments, helping simplify management significantly. You can use Microsoft management tools to manage your complete server virtualization environment—not just Hyper-V, but also VMware and Citrix XenServer hypervisors. You can also support guest operating systems in your Microsoft private cloud, including earlier versions of Windows Server, Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux, and CentOS.Use a common identity infrastructure to mitigate risk.Through federation, you can extend Active Directory from your existing environment to private, hosted, and public cloud environments. This lets you uniformly control access to your applications, information, and services while simplifying management and helping enhance security and compliance. With a common identity infrastructure, you can enable single sign-on access to applications, information, and services across on-premises and public cloud environments, minimizing the risk of compromised passwords.Use a common platform to maximize IT and developer productivity.Our private cloud technology draws on IT’s existing expertise with the Windows platform, helping maximize IT productivity and reduce the need for extensive retraining and recertification of personnel.Because developers can use their familiar toolsets and development frameworks—including the Microsoft Visual Studio development system and Eclipse—it’s easier for them to transition to building applications for the cloud. They use the same skillsets as they use to build for the client, phone, browser, and server. The Microsoft cloud is based on an open and interoperable platform, so developers can use the languages that they already know, such as .NET, Java, PHP, and Ruby. Additional Information: Service Bus: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/service-bus/Windows Azure Connect: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/virtual-network/
Timing: 3 minutes OPTIONAL SLIDE—to be used if customer engagement requires further detail Key Points:With the Microsoft cloud, you can delight your users with technology experiences that let them work the way they want to:The Microsoft platform provides a business-class experience regardless of whether users are working with traditional apps or cloud-based services and whether they are working from a PC, on their mobile device, or through a browser.With Microsoft cloud-based productivity services, you can deliver the latest capabilities to your users without delays for building the infrastructure or planning and deploying updates.The anywhere connectivity of the cloud makes it easier to connect your distributed workforce with enterprise-ready online social tools. Script:With the Microsoft cloud, you can delight your users with technology experiences that let them work the way they want to:Deliver business-class experiences across the PC, mobile devices, and browser.With Microsoft productivity tools, you can give users a feature-rich, consistent experience no matter what device they’re using and where they’re working from. If you choose to transition from a traditional deployment of Microsoft productivity software—such as for email, team workspaces, or customer relationship management (CRM) software—to a cloud environment, the familiarity of the Microsoft platform will help save users time, as they won’t have to learn a new interface. For example, Office 365 works seamlessly with Outlook and other Microsoft Office tools they already know—they can create, store, and edit Word, OneNote, Excel, and PowerPoint files using a web browser, and they can work both offline and online. This helps limit downtime and reduce the need for retraining. It also makes it easy for them to share information with people using the traditional versions (whether inside or outside the organization) as they will be using commonly accepted formats. Provide the latest productivity tools without the maintenance burden.With the cloud, you can deliver the latest enterprise-ready productivity capabilities to users without the need to plan and deploy upgrades and manage availability. The public cloud enables you to offload patching, maintenance, and upgrades to Microsoft. You also get enterprise-grade availability you can rely on: Microsoft cloud-based productivity solutions have continuous data backups, robust disaster recovery capabilities, globally redundant data centers, and extensive privacy features, plus an industry-leading, financially backed 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. For users, this means they get the latest capabilities as they become available. And for IT staff—in combination with the easy-to-use, cloud-based management tools, 24×7 IT-level support, and reduced maintenance burden—this means they have more time to spend on more strategic activities.Microsoft cloud-based productivity solutions can help you get new groups of users up and running without delay. For example, following a merger or acquisition, with cloud-based services you can quickly get everyone on the same platform, without having to worry about building the physical infrastructure. Microsoft cloud-based productivity applications let you provide different levels of service for different types of users using a single, unified platform to minimize complexity. You can provide rich capabilities to information workers while giving more basic capabilities to workers that don’t have their own dedicated workstation.Connect users no matter where they are in easy, natural ways online.Office 365 lets users take advantage of the anywhere connectivity enabled by cloud computing by using enterprise-ready social computing tools that make it easier for them to share information and interests. Users can post real-time updates on where they are located and what’s on their mind, share ideas through blogs and wikis, and share documents, resources, and links of interest through their own personal sites. This helps bring people together and build communities through an experience similar to the consumer equivalents—including social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, applications like Skype and Windows Live Messenger, and personal blog services such as WordPress and Blogger—without the security risks.