Cloud Integration Consulting

Progent has helped organizations of all types and sizes to design, deploy, and administer networks based on a range of hybrid architectures that combine Azure cloud resources with physical datacenters, private clouds, and additional public clouds like Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform. Progent is unmatched in the ability to provide rapid and affordable online access to Technology experts to assist you to evaluate the possible benefits of various Azure products and services for your specific business. Progent's virtualization consultants can help you to set up VMs on Azure Virtual Machines. Progent's certified data security consultants can help you centralize identity management using Azure Active Directory. Progent's data protection consultants can help you to deploy backup/recovery solutions with Azure Backup. In addition, Progent's VPN and firewall specialists can help you create safe and dependable connections to Microsoft Azure.

About Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure, formerly branded Windows Azure, is a leading cloud platform that lets you utilize IT infrastructure, servers, and key applications residing on Microsoft's vast cloud. The Azure ecosystem offers dozens of cloud-centric services including the ability to host Windows and Linux-powered virtual machines (VMs), scalable cloud storage, unified messaging, development, and backup/restore. Azure products are available on a subscription basis and provided dynamically, so you can instantly expand or reduce processing and storage resources. Because you pay only for the capacity you consume, efficiency is high, which is one of the major attractions of public clouds.

Key Microsoft Azure Cloud Services
Microsoft Azure offers more than 60 infrastructure and PaaS products and hundreds of cloud services. This expanding set of integrated cloud services addresses practically all facets of IT such as processing, data and storage, networking, administration, security, web hosting, mobile, business applications, and development. Additional Microsoft offerings such as Office 365 Exchange depend Microsoft Azure network infrastructure. (Visit Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online integration and technical support consulting services.)

Major Azure products and services for which Progent can deliver advanced consulting expertise and technical support services include:

Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines makes it easy for you to deploy, expand and administer virtual machines on Azure. Your Azure Storage subscription provides storage for the OS disk and associated data disks. Azure Virtual Machines supports Windows Server, major distributions of Linux, SAP, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server, and other popular platforms. Various categories of virtual machines (VMs) are available and priced according to CPU performance, memory capacity, and I/O latency. You can connect with Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines via Remote Desktop Connection. The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) features of Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines allows you to run Windows applications like SQL Server, Exchange, and Microsoft Dynamics plus mainstream Linux distributions such as Red Hat, CentOS, CoreOS, and RancherOS.

The current deployment model for Azure Virtual Machines, branded Azure Resource Manager and introduced in 2014, supersedes what is now known as Azure Classic and offers streamlined VM management by allowing VM groups with a shared lifecycle. Before, Microsoft Azure cloud services for deploying, sizing, and administering virtual machines had to be performed individually. Resource Manager provisioning options include Azure Portal, Azure Resource Manager template, Azure PowerShell, and Visual Studio support. Progent's Azure specialists can help you create and administer Microsoft Azure solutions efficiently and affordably by delivering expertise with all these tools for supporting Azure Virtual Machines.

Microsoft Azure Storage offers on-demand capacity and load balancing for primary storage on the Azure cloud. An Azure General Purpose Storage account gives Azure subscribers access to storage services for Blobs, Tables, Files, Queues, and VM disks. Each account includes a 500 TB storage maximum. For higher throughput, you can subscribe to a Premium storage class and operate virtual machine applications on solid state disks (SSDs).

Azure Blob storage for General Purpose Storage accounts is designed for massive amounts of unstructured data like documents, social media, backups, web pages, and system logs. Blobs are managed as containers, which makes it easy to assign security policies to groups of objects. To send blobs that are impractical to upload over an Internet connection, you can send media to Microsoft.

A special class of Blob Storage is designed for apps that use only block or append blob storage. You can designate frequently used or infrequently used access characteristics for block and append blobs (but not for page blobs). Being able to define access characteristics in Microsoft Azure Storage allows you to arrive at the right trade-off between price and throughput.

Table storage is affordably-priced cloud storage for developers using schemaless metadata such as contact books, device information, or web applications. Table Storage works with the OData protocol for querying and supports JSON and XMLd AtomPub formats. Queue storage facilitates the creation of messaging applications by supporting asynchronous exchanges between application components across cloud and physical environments. Azure File storage accommodates SMB file shares, which simplifies migrating older applications to Azure.

Microsoft Azure Active Directory is a cloud directory and identity control service that provides password synchronization and single sign-on spanning local and cloud infrastructure. Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) is incorporated in Office 365, Salesforce.com, Concur, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and thousands of other cloud apps. Features include multi-factor identification, endpoint registration, password synchronization across cloud and local environments, privileged account management, role-based access management, auditing, security monitoring and reporting, and alerts. Azure AD integrates transparently with your Windows Server Active Directory to make it easy to combine local and cloud identities. Azure offers high availability by locating your directories on at least three separate facilities.

The Azure AD Connect utility has superseded Windows Azure DirSync, Azure AD Sync and Forefront Identity Manager as the recommended means to integrate on-premises directories and synchronize identity information with Active Directory, Office 365 and SaaS cloud-hosted applications.

Azure Backup is an automated cloud-based backup service for offsite backup of local, cloud-resident, and hybrid cloud/local data. Three backups are kept in the same Azure datacenter, and three extra copies at additional cost be protected in a different Azure location. Microsoft offers Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for 99.9% availability, and archiving in Azure is available for as long as 99 years. Backups can be scheduled for daily, monthly, weekly, and yearly cycles, and recovery time is quicker and less expensive than old-school tape solutions. Azure encrypts backups before to being sent over a secure connection to Azure, and backups are stored in their encrypted state. The encryption key is kept locally for better security compliance. Additional features include throttling to take advantage of off-peak hours, compression for enhanced performance and reduced storage costs, and incremental backups to conserve bandwidth. Azure Import/Export allows you to perform your seed backup on-premises and deliver a physical storage device to the nearest Azure datacenter.

Azure Backup can be integrated seamlessly with System Center Data Protection Manager to provide specialized support for Microsoft's key workloads like Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and Hyper-V. Data Protection Manager works seamlessly with Windows Hyper-V VSS to backup virtual machines without disrupting their operation. SCDPM also offers platform-specific granular recovery capability such as mailbox recovery for Exchange, database-level recovery for Microsoft SQL Server, and ILR for SharePoint Server. Azure Backup environments integrated with Data Protection Manager can be monitored with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to watch over system health, throughput, and utilization.

How Progent's Experts Can Help You with Microsoft Azure Integration
If you want to migrate your network to the Azure cloud or create a hybrid ecosystem that integrates on-premises and cloud-based resources, Progent's consultants can help you assess the advantages of the Microsoft Azure line of products and services compared to other public cloud platforms or alternative networking strategies like using colo centers. Progent can help you with any phase of Microsoft Azure integration such as benefits assessment, solution design, proof of concept, configuration, centralized administration, performance tuning, software license management, disaster recovery planning, cybersecurity planning, and compliance validation.

Progent can assist you to determine which of your line-of-business applications are a good fit for Azure and help you make your legacy applications are cloud ready. Progent offers cost-effective as-needed expertise to help you immediately deal with stubborn technical roadblocks or Progent can provide comprehensive project management consulting expertise to ensure your Azure integration initiative is completed on schedule and within your budget.

To help you implement centralized administration of a hybrid network that incorporates Azure services, Progent can provide Microsoft System Center consulting services including SCDPM consulting, System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) support, System Center Configuration Manager consulting, System Center Virtual Machine Manager hybrid cloud management expertise, and Microsoft Intune mobility management consulting.

Cloud-integrated networks have to furnish a secure, manageable, user-friendly, and resilient way for user to connect to both on-premises cloud-based applications and services. Progent has a wealth of experience configuring VPN connections and implementing or debugging firewalls to connect to Azure services. Progent can provide rapid remote access to Cisco-certified CCIE network integration consultants and to firewall experts certified by top suppliers such as Symantec, Barracuda, and WatchGuard to help you to set up or troubleshoot firewalls for integrating your local network with Azure. Progent also supports mobile users by providing the help of iPhone and iPad technology experts as well as Android connectivity experts to help you to configure and manage smartphones and tablets connected to your Microsoft Azure environment. When you come up against glitches with your Microsoft Azure solution, Progent has experience working with Microsoft's Azure support personnel to fix issues with Azure.

Some samples of online expertise Progent has provided to businesses to help them create and manage their Azure-connected ecosystems include:

• Configure and troubleshoot IPsec VPN tunnels forsecure connectivity to Azure
• Plan or analyze the architecture of hybrid Azure/on-premises network models
• Build VM images for Windows or Linux technology to be located on Microsoft Azure
• Configure Azure Active Directory, Azure AD Connect, and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)
• Design and validate data protection systems that utilize Azure Backup
• Set up and debug virtual hard disks (VHDs) for Microsoft Azure
• Specify and deploy security policies
• Identify and resolve problems with IP addresses
• Resolve synchronization problems with Office 365
• Set up, patch, and troubleshoot firewalls from Cisco, Barracuda, Symantec and other leading vendors
• Set up Cisco AnyConnect for remote access to Azure products and services
• Simplify license administration
• Fix issues with certificate management
• Select and set up unified management, monitoring and reporting utilities that span hybrid cloud/on-premises networks
• Set up Configuration Manager to deploy apps
• Configure SCVMM locally and on Microsoft Azure
• Design and configure hybrid Exchange solutions
• Tune query performance on SQL Server hosted by Microsoft Azure
• Move Citrix XenDesktop to the Azure cloud
• troubleshoot PowerShell problems for loading modules to Azure

Other Cloud Platforms Supported by Progent's Cloud Integration Experts
Services available on public clouds like Azure are expanding quickly in number and complexity. Choosing the best solution is increasingly difficult. Most large businesses maintain hybrid networks that utilize multiple public cloud and at the same time maintain corporate datacenters. Office 365 family of apps, including Exchange Online, rely on the Azure cloud and offer alternatives to Azure's Infrastructure-as-a-Service options. Progent's cloud experts can help you to assess the business benefits of the service portfolios of the major public clouds and can show you how to plan, configure, and maintain IT ecosystems that include a mix of public and private clouds along with physical local datacenters.

Other public cloud platforms supported by Progent include:

Microsoft allows you to create seamless hybrid networks that integrate Microsoft 365 and local Exchange deployments. This allows you to have certain mailboxes hosted on your corporate datacenter or private cloud and other mailboxes resident on Microsoft 365. Progent's Microsoft-certified Exchange consultants can help you with any facet of planning, implementing and troubleshooting your hybrid Microsoft 365/Exchange network. Progent's Exchange specialists can deliver occasional expertise to help you through stubborn technical problems and also offer comprehensive project management outsourcing or co-sourcing to ensure your hybrid Microsoft 365/Exchange solution is carried out on schedule and within budget. To find out more about Progent's consulting services for hybrid Microsoft 365 Exchange and on-prem Exchange systems, go to Microsoft 365 Exchange Online integration with on-premises Exchange.

Progent's Office and Microsoft 365 consultants can help businesses of any size to incorporate Microsoft Office desktop and Microsoft 365 apps including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Microsoft Outlook, Access, Visio and Publisher into a seamless productivity solution that offers fast return on investment and promotes improved business outcomes. Progent can assist your company to integrate Office or Microsoft 365 apps with each other and with other core Microsoft technologies including SharePoint, Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server deployed locally or hosted in the cloud. Progent's consultants can also help you to resolve compatibility issues with various releases of Office desktop and offers live online Office and Microsoft 365 instruction to individuals or teams.

Progent's Amazon AWS integration consultants offer cost-effective online consulting to assist businesses of any size to integrate Amazon AWS cloud services including Amazon EC2 for virtual server hosting, Amazon S3 for expandable low-latency storage, and Glacier for low-cost long-term archiving. Progent can assist you with every aspect of Amazon AWS integration including requirements analysis, readiness assessment, system design and review, testing, deployment, administration, performance tuning, licensing management, backup/restore solutions, and security. Progent offers advanced expertise with firewalls and VPN connections and can help you deploy all-cloud or hybrid networking models that efficiently incorporate Amazon AWS services. Progent offers as-needed support or Progent can deliver project management outsourcing to help you migrate efficiently to the Amazon AWS cloud platform.

Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) is a library of APIs that enables Amazon sellers to improve the efficiency of their business processes by automating crucial sales functions including listings, orders, payments, inbound and outbound fulfillment, and reports. By leveraging Amazon's vast online ecosystem and automating their sales processes, merchants can broaden their market, lower their operating costs, accelerate response time to customers, and increase their profits. Progent's Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) developers can work with your development team and provide programming, workflow integration, project management support, and training so you can shorten development time and speed up your return on investment.

Progent's Google Cloud Platform (GCP) planning and integration consultants can provide cost-effective online and onsite support to assist businesses of any size to move any part of their core network infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform services. This can save management hassle and hardware costs and enable access to Google's cutting edge machine learning tools. Progent can assist you with every phase of Google Cloud Platform migration and troubleshooting including needs analysis, preparedness evaluation, architectural design, testing, configuration, centralized administration, performance tuning, software license management, disaster recovery mechanisms, and security and compliance.