When designing a technology strategy for an organization, business and technology, architects need to choose where to invest their resources. Cloud deployment models answer the question, where will we place our resources?

Hardware resources—such as servers, storage appliances, and network devices—must physically exist somewhere. When choosing a deployment model, architects also need to think about other aspects, such as serviceability and supportability, physical and logical security, redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities, business continuity concerns, ease of use, and performance.

Customers need to decide where they are going to put their equipment, which, in turn, defines where they will be storing their business-critical or potentially sensitive information. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all design. Fortunately, there are several options, and organizations can choose the deployment model that makes the most sense for their business. Customers can generally choose from these three options:

• Public cloud: Using infrastructure and services provided by an external vendor
• Private cloud: Building and maintaining infrastructure on their own
• Hybrid cloud: Utilizing a combination of public and private cloud solutions

The following sections will explore each of these models more closely and identify the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Public Cloud

Organizations can choose to leverage a public cloud to help achieve their business goals. A public cloud means that a service provider is responsible for provisioning, supplying, and maintaining resources such as application servers, networking hardware, and storage. There are public cloud options for specialized purposes, such as manufacturing, resource planning, and general ledger accounting, as well as more general purposes, such as file storage or email.

With public cloud solutions, you do not typically own anything except the actual data. You will probably share resources with others in some form of a multi-tenant environment.

Multi-tenant configurations function much like an apartment or office building: everyone shares the same physical building, but each person or business has a small space allocated that they are responsible for managing. To translate this to cloud computing services, the service provider’s infrastructure is the building, and your business’s configuration and data are the office spaces. From a security perspective, you are responsible for granting keys to your office space. And when it comes to billing, you only pay for the actual office space that you are leasing. You are not responsible for managing the relationship the building owner has with the municipality, nor are you responsible for troubleshooting and fixing the plumbing or electrical service when something isn’t working. Those are all part of your service agreement. The same is true in the cloud services scenario—you are not responsible for providing power or cooling to data centers, nor are you responsible for adding new server capacity or applying software updates. All of those are handled as part of the service agreement.

One of the primary benefits of a public cloud solution is that you divide the cost of the resources between all the other organizations using the service. Because you share resources with others, you are not responsible for the large capital expenditure or capital expense (CapEx) required to procure equipment or software, nor are you responsible for deploying, troubleshooting, or updating the shared resources. Competition incentivizes service providers to provide redundancy and fault tolerance. These features and capabilities would cost organizations significant amounts were they to deploy and manage them themselves.

Public cloud solutions provide a lot of the benefits that you learned about in Chapter 1, Introduction to Cloud Computing, including scalability, agility, and reliability. In public cloud deployments, the service provider takes on the risks and responsibilities of the system, and the customers pay a subscription fee that’s typically proportional to their usage of the service. Service providers use their scale to obtain pricing benefits and discounts when purchasing and can invest in the expert, specialized talent required to support the platform. The subscribers are then able to focus more of their investment on their core business instead of investing in people to maintain infrastructure.

Looking back at the office building or apartment models, building maintenance is handled by the owner of the building as part of the lease. Each business with office space has access to specialized staff as opposed to having to hire and maintain their own building specialists. Public cloud solutions work in much the same way.

Microsoft’s Azure and Microsoft 365 platforms are examples of public cloud platforms.

Jumping into the Public Cloud

To read more about the public cloud, please visit https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-a-public-cloud/.

Some organizations, however, have certain requirements or internal policies that might not allow them to use public cloud services. In those cases, private clouds are an alternative.

Private Cloud

A private cloud essentially means that users connect to a restricted or secured private internal network. When an organization deploys a private cloud to meet its business objectives, it is responsible for virtually everything, from the disks that are used in the servers to network cables, switches and routers, firewalls, servers, storage appliances, and applications to the support staff, maintenance agreements for software and hardware, and building contracts.

Financial, healthcare, and public safety organizations frequently decide to use private cloud solutions. They typically cite regulation and compliance requirements. Some municipalities and public sector organizations have data residency requirements (geographic requirements about storing data) that they feel can more easily be met with private cloud solutions.

Diving Deeper into the Private Cloud

To read more about private cloud architectures, please visit https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-a-private-cloud/.

Most organizations, however, don’t exclusively use public or private cloud solutions. They rely on a combined approach, called a hybrid cloud.

Hybrid Cloud

The hybrid cloud combines the ideas of both public cloud and private infrastructure. With hybrid cloud solutions, organizations link their private cloud infrastructure with that of the public cloud service providers. In this scenario, organizations can have data residing in either cloud and, in some cases, can shift data and services between the two (public and private) environments.

Properly designed and implemented hybrid cloud environments can create a seamless experience for users.

A common use of the hybrid cloud is to store non-sensitive data in a public cloud service while storing business-critical or sensitive customer data in a private cloud infrastructure. Being able to use both of those services together can provide an advantage for organizations—and can allow them to use the benefits of both cloud models. It’s a model that can be used to save costs on general services (such as email or file storage) while introducing an organization to cloud services. The sensitive or critical line-of-business apps with more strict requirements can be kept on-premises or in a private cloud infrastructure until a cloud model can meet business requirements.

Resources for Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures

Check out the following link for more information on hybrid clouds: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-hybrid-cloud-computing/.
Microsoft Azure has hybrid cloud options as well, which you can read about at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/hybrid-cloud/.

Here are some real-life examples of hybrid cloud solutions:

• Due to a global pandemic, an organization wants to start using Microsoft Teams for online meetings and chat. However, they continue to use their SharePoint Server 2010 and Windows-based file servers for the majority of their data. This organization decides to turn on Microsoft Teams and OneDrive for Business to enable meetings, instant messaging, and file sharing. In this scenario, users may need to be aware of which data is stored in which location or service and how to navigate to each service, as there’s no direct integration between Microsoft Teams and the on-premises file server infrastructures.
• An organization is slowly transitioning on-premises mailboxes to a service such as Microsoft Exchange Online and using Microsoft Teams for meetings and chat. The organization configures Exchange hybrid to allow for calendar interoperability between Exchange Online and their on-premises Exchange Server 2016 environment. In this scenario, however, the hybrid configuration will allow users, regardless of their desktop client, to locate the infrastructure hosting their calendars, messaging, and chat. Whether they are using Microsoft Exchange Server on-premises, Exchange Online, or Microsoft Teams, their desktop clients can locate the appropriate services behind the scenes.

Now that you’ve explored the three different cloud deployment models (public, private, and hybrid), you’ll move on to the different types of cloud service scenarios.

As new technologies and opportunities present themselves, businesses and other organizations must constantly evaluate how to invest their time and resources. In this section, you’ll review the advantages of pursuing different deployment models.

Cloud Deployments

You already know how cloud computing can help reduce costs in maintaining your files and data, while also making them easier to access. Now, imagine that at the enterprise level, where an information technology (IT) department has to support thousands of users and their data, they have a lot more to worry about than just cost and accessibility. Companies use a lot of applications and data as integral parts of their operations.

Important organizational data assets can include content that could be categorized as personally identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI), or intellectual property (IP). Not only must organizational data protection requirements be met, but also regulatory requirements governing many types of financial or personal data must be adhered to. Cloud service providers build infrastructure to address these important needs and considerations.

Adopting cloud computing architectures can provide a lot of benefits to an organization. Some of the benefits of a cloud-centric deployment are that it is the following:

• Cost-effective
• Scalable
• Quick
• Reliable
• Secure
• Current

The next sections will look at each of the benefits in more detail.

Cost-Effective

In many cases, cloud services can help save a lot of operating IT costs. Usually, businesses allocate a budget on a yearly basis. This may or may not work out, depending on market changes or large unplanned increases or decreases in business volume (which then may dictate staffing numbers and investment in supporting equipment). Since Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based service, it is easy to predict how your business expenditure may increase or decrease based on the number of users you need to purchase licenses for.

Business expenditures typically fall into two categories:

1. Capital expenditure or capital expense (CapEx): This is an upfront cost, such as purchasing a server, a desktop computer, or a network switch. CapEx is frequently connected to physical items. Additionally, CapEx is typically amortized over an ownership period.
2. Operational expenditure or operational expense (OpEx): By contrast, this is an ongoing or recurring cost, such as maintenance or subscription fees, or other operating costs, such as electricity. Microsoft’s cloud offerings fall into the OpEx category.

The MS-900 exam will contain questions about both types of expenditure, so make sure you are familiar with this vocabulary.

In terms of cloud services’ cost-effectiveness, consider this: on-premises infrastructure requires purchasing and maintaining CapEx such as hardware, building space, security systems, and a host of other items. To that, add OpEx, such as salaries or expenses for engineers, consultants, project managers, as well as electricity, and cooling, that are necessary to support the infrastructure. Organizations frequently have trouble determining how much equipment to purchase, especially if their business model has large activity swings. An organization might have to purchase an incredibly expensive and powerful system to ensure it can meet a peak demand or load situation that might only occur once a month or once a quarter, resulting in a system that will likely sit underutilized much of the time.

If you want to fulfill a demanding need with a cloud services model, you can rent capacity from a provider as you need it. With a subscription such as Microsoft 365, if your organization brings on seasonal workers, depending on your license agreement with Microsoft, you may be able to increase or decrease the number of licenses as your headcount changes. You’re only paying for what you need.

Scalable

Cloud service providers typically allow you to immediately increase or decrease resources or services, depending on the demand.

Consider the following examples:

• You host a website and, based on your usage metrics, you know that the busiest time is 9 A.M. – 5 P.M. during weekdays. During the weekend, however, it is much less active. In this instance, you want to make sure you have enough servers or service instances to support your website visitors during specific busy times. You also want to decrease the server capacity outside of the busy hours to match your business demand. With the scalability of cloud services, you can meet the demand quickly and flexibly while maintaining minimal expenditure during off-peak times.
• You own a retail sporting goods store. You have estimated that you will need 10 seasonal workers on the floor to help assist shoppers. All your staff need basic email, so you choose to provide everyone with Microsoft 365 Frontline Worker F1 licenses. Due to an upcoming winter festival and extended holiday season, your store is busier, and you need to hire more workers. You can simply add additional F1 licenses to provide the new hires with emails without having to invest in additional infrastructure or other resources.

In both of these examples, you can use the flexibility of cloud services to scale and meet your organization’s demand.

Quick

Scalability is a key differentiator of cloud services, but it’s not very useful if it can’t fit your business’s schedule. It’s critical to be able to quickly scale up or down:

• Cloud services enable you to quickly scale up your demand for website hosting resources to meet your peak load times, as well as to scale down when you don’t need the capacity. This frees your organization from having to spend capital on server, storage, or networking equipment.
• As your organization needs email for additional staff, you can quickly add licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin portal and have mailboxes available for them almost immediately.

The speed of scalability is an important factor in evaluating cloud services for your organization.

Reliable

As a consumer, you expect services you access on the internet to be accessible when you want them. As a business customer, you demand reliability for your cloud services to ensure that your organization can continue to operate fully, whether that’s internal operations, hosting e-commerce sites, or another public-facing service.

Resiliency, recoverability, and disaster recovery are high priorities in a cloud service provider’s infrastructure design, which is why providers typically rely on a blend of highly available infrastructure designs. These architectures can include network load balancing, data replication, redundant hardware, multiple network paths, and data backups. In addition, service providers publish Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) that outline their commitments and responsibilities in this regard (for more on Microsoft 365’s SLAs, see Chapter 13, Identify Support Options for Microsoft 365 Services).

Data Resiliency in the Cloud

To read more about Office 365’s data resiliency policies and procedures, please visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/securitycompliance/office-365-data-resiliency-overview.

When looking for cloud service providers, ensure that they are committed to providing a level of availability that meets your business requirements.

Secure

Security in this context addresses multiple concerns, both physical and logical.

From a physical security perspective, cloud service providers equip their data center facilities with hardware such as cameras, gates, locks, and equipment cages. They will also implement personnel and procedures, such as guards and identification verification, to ensure only people who legitimately require access are allowed into the facilities. Some facilities even use X-ray machines, mantraps (interdependent locking and unlocking door systems), and biometric measures (handprints, retina scans, or fingerprints) at multiple stages to detect unauthorized individuals and prevent them from accessing a facility.

Securing the Physical Side of the Cloud

You can learn more about the security measures Microsoft implements at its data center facilities at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/physical-security.

Just as importantly, computing service providers secure electronic data. To ensure the utmost security, providers implement multiple layers of logical security, including secure protocols and encryption to protect data that is both at rest (sitting on physical media) and in transit (as it is being transmitted between endpoints). These security measures help prevent unauthorized access to data. In the event of breaches of physical security, cryptographic technologies can be used to prevent attackers and thieves from accessing the contents of stolen equipment.

Microsoft uses multiple logical security layers to protect data on disks and other media, as well as data being transmitted between servers, data centers, and end users.

Under Lock and Key

You can learn more about the security tools Microsoft uses in its environment at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/securitycompliance/office-365-encryption-in-the-microsoft-cloud-overview.

Up to Date

Cloud services are evergreen, meaning they are constantly under development and improvement. Both security updates and feature updates are constantly developed and deployed. In more traditional on-premises approaches, you might wait for security updates to be deployed at monthly, quarterly, or even yearly frequencies. You would have to wait for the release of a security or feature update, spend the resources deploying the update, and then test it. On the other hand, cloud service customers can focus on other operations, knowing that their environment is being maintained as part of their provider’s commitment.

Features or new tools are made available to customers automatically, rather than requiring them to go through the process of reviewing, deploying, and potentially integrating features.

When using cloud computing services, organizations can spend more of their valuable resources driving or transforming the business, as opposed to just keeping the lights on.

You’ve gone through the six main benefits of cloud computing: cost-effectiveness, the ability to scale, speed, reliability, security, and always being current with the latest releases. In the next section, you will explore some use cases for cloud computing.

Hybrid Deployments

Many organizations choose to initially start off with hybrid deployments due to the existing infrastructure investments or contracts that they already have. Hybrid cloud deployments allow organizations to adopt cloud services at their own pace, giving staff ample time to ramp up on new skills required.

If configured appropriately, organizations can slowly transition on-premises or private cloud workloads to a public cloud service with little to no service interruption. Organizations can also start new projects on a cloud service or platform and leave their legacy private cloud or on-premises infrastructure in place rather than migrating it, letting it retire, or decommissioning it when it is no longer valuable or useful.

While being able to bridge the public and private cloud models has some advantages, it does introduce complexity. Having applications, services, or data split between two locations can introduce confusion and can be a disadvantage for hybrid cloud customers. This complexity can affect both the user and administration experiences, so it’s important to architect hybrid cloud solutions in a way that directs users and administrators to the correct resources.

On-Premises Deployments

Private cloud (or on-premises deployments) is the most traditional deployment model.

When building and deploying an on-premises or private cloud solution, you can easily restrict access to the network to only employees or business partners. This level of control is a draw for many organizations.

One of the benefits beyond access control and overall ownership is the ability to support unique business needs, such as legacy applications or particular regulatory and compliance requirements. With an on-premises or private cloud solution, you control the storage of all the sensitive data in a data center you manage. You can also maintain physical access to the data center and audit who goes in and out—something that isn’t typically allowed with public cloud services. Private cloud deployments allow you to have much more control over your environment. You can implement an unlimited number of security procedures and protocols, and you can customize as much as you need, so long as your budget allows for it.

However, some of these advantages can also become drawbacks. For example, owning your hardware and software means you have the utmost physical control over it. It also means that you must secure the upfront financing to purchase the equipment and support contracts, which can influence your ability to deliver the finished product to your organization. Depending on your organization’s timelines and objectives, you may need to budget time for internal procurement, external financing, delivery, installation, and configuration.

Outside of the physical procurement and deployment concerns, you also need to consider security requirements when building private cloud solutions. If your organization doesn’t already have security access controls, governance protocols, and technology, you may need additional investment in remote access and networking technologies. If your private cloud will communicate externally with partners, vendors, or customers, you may also need to expand your network communications capacity with additional circuits or network capacity, as well as staff or consulting resources to design and implement both the policies and technology.

Availability and redundancy are two additional key concerns for private cloud solutions that organizations must consider. If the private cloud is going to house business-critical data to support operations, you’ll likely need to evaluate, purchase, and configure options for fault tolerance inside your data center, as well as geographically separated sites and external network redundancy to ensure business operations continue in the event of localized outages or disasters.

Choosing the Right Model

When organizations are evaluating what models to use, they frequently try to determine the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI).

When computing the TCO, organizations will likely consider both CapEx and OpEx costs over a fixed period of time to help guide the decision-making process. For example, if the business is estimating costs for the next five years, it would typically include the asset costs (servers, switches, computers), labor costs (developers, administrators, architects, project managers, support staff), and recurring costs (electricity and other utilities, facility lease, insurance, software subscriptions, and support agreements) for each plan and then make a value determination.

When determining the ROI, organizations will calculate the estimated dollar benefits for scenarios and evaluate those benefits against the costs.

Both types of calculations are important factors in organizations choosing one deployment model over another.

Hybrid and flexible are two newer business terms that have changed the way organizations look at accomplishing work—especially in a post-COVID-19 era.

Hybrid work is a newer concept that expresses a shift in balance between working on-site in an office location and working remotely (typically from home). While not all types of jobs and roles support the concepts of hybrid work (for example, manufacturing plants or restaurants), those that do are seeing an increased frequency of workers wanting to spend less time in the office.

Hybrid work scenarios can lead to more productivity—workers are able to spend less time commuting and more time working. However, this increase in productivity can also lead to difficulties in drawing distinctions between work time and personal time,—a situation that can further lead to poor work-life balance (WLB) or even burnout.

While the idea of flexible work (or flexi-time) has been around for a while, it’s being re-applied in scenarios where people can work asynchronously with teams spread across different time zones. Just as not all roles support hybrid work scenarios, not all roles can support flexible work scenarios, either. Some organizations, goals, or projects may require everyone to work in tandem for a period of time. Flexible work concepts allow you to prioritize work tasks to be accomplished during different hours of the day. Hybrid and flexible work together can offer employees benefits that allow them to spend more time with their families and friends while maintaining a high level of consistent output.

Both flexible and hybrid work, however, require trust on the organization’s part and accountability on the worker’s part, to ensure success. Microsoft 365 tools such as Viva can help both employees and managers see how time is being spent and track productivity and employee well-being.

Further Reading

To see insights into Microsoft’s learning on hybrid and flexible work, see https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/flexibility/hybrid-work-solutions.

The chapter explained the three types of cloud deployments (public, private, and hybrid) and what they mean from the perspectives of features and benefits.

Knowing the difference between the private and public cloud, as well as the advantages of each in a hybrid deployment, is critical to helping organizations identify the best possible solutions.

Mapping business requirements to cloud models (in addition to evaluating SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS services) can help organizations determine how to get the most value.

In the next chapter, you’ll explore the Microsoft 365’s productivity solutions.

Benchmark Score: 75%

Apart from a solid understanding of key concepts, being able to think quickly under time pressure is a skill that will help you ace your certification exam. That’s why, working on these skills early on in your learning journey is key.

Chapter review questions are designed to improve your test-taking skills progressively with each chapter you learn and review your understanding of key concepts in the chapter at the same time. You’ll find these at the end of each chapter.

Before You Proceed

You need to unlock these resources before you start using them. Unlocking takes less than 10 minutes, can be done from any device, and needs to be done only once. Head over to the start of Chapter 9, Describe the Threat Protection Solutions of Microsoft 365 in this book for instructions on how to unlock them.

To open the Chapter Review Questions for this chapter, click the following link: https://packt.link/MS900E3_CH02. Or, you can scan the following QR code:

Figure 2.1: QR code that opens Chapter Review Questions for logged-in users

Once you login, you’ll see a page similar to what is shown in Figure 2.2:

Figure 2.2: Chapter Review Questions for Chapter 2

Once ready, start the following practice drills, re-attempting the quiz multiple times:

Exam Readiness Drill

For the first 3 attempts, don’t worry about the time limit.

ATTEMPT 1

The first time, aim for at least 40%. Look at the answers you got wrong and read the relevant sections in the chapter again to fix your learning gaps.

ATTEMPT 2

The second time, aim for at least 60%. Look at the answers you got wrong and read the relevant sections in the chapter again to fix any remaining learning gaps.

ATTEMPT 3

The third time, aim for at least 75%. Once you score 75% or more, you start working on your timing.

Tip

You may take more than 3 attempts to reach 75%. That’s okay. Just review the relevant sections in the chapter till you get there.

Working On Timing

Target: Your aim is to keep the score the same while trying to answer these questions as quickly as possible. Here’s an example of how your next attempts should look like:

Table 2.1: Sample timing practice drills on the online platform

With each new attempt, your score should stay above 75% while your time taken to complete should decrease. Repeat as many attempts as you want till you feel confident dealing with the time pressure.