[MUSIC PLAYING] Let's start with Office 365. What are the specific challenges that offers to IT administrators?
Well, the great thing about Office 365 is that it creates a fantastic collaboration platform for users. And the cool thing about Cloud in general is that those new features and benefits that come with the product are immediately available to users. Now, that can cause some drawbacks for IT admin. So for example, if we use OneDrive as one example, that's something that's had a huge amount of uptake. And what it's done is it's allowed users to really easily be able to share data, share resources amongst their peers, and they could do so by deciding who they want to share this information with.
That's brilliant. But for IT admins, they now have a greater surface area to manage. They need to be able to see who has access to that data, especially sensitive data, as well as who has access to the groups those users are creating and making accessible. So as the productivity grows within the Cloud platform, so does the risk for organizations. They need to be able to control the data that's there, the access, and also auditing, being able to see what happens in that space.
I guess another problem for administrators, which has always been a problem, is internal changes, either of business focus or actually the company changes and merges. Is that easier with Cloud tools?
Well, that's interesting because, with Cloud, because of this ability to organically grow really quickly-- I mean, it's subscription-based. So as you have more users, you just buy more subscriptions. So it's really great in that, for smaller organizations that are growing or even large enterprises that are acquiring new companies, they can very easily adopt all those new users.
But the drawback is that, as you move more and more stuff into Office 365, you have tenants that are created, and it's not so easy to merge those tenants and the users the accounts, the data that's within those tenants. So currently, there are no native tools that will allow you to do this. So that's why we've developed Quest On Demand, our On Demand Migration, a module within our Quest platform that will allow the really easy tenant-to-tenant migration of mailboxes, accounts, and OneDrive data.
So it just allows you to merge two companies or two parts of the organization much more quickly.
Yeah, so if you're merging or acquiring two companies-- so let's say you're a university and you've rolled up lots of Office 365 tenants. Well, what happens is, as you start to grow, your IT admin staff doesn't. So you need to be able to cost effectively manage all of those tenants, and the best thing to do is consolidate them into fewer tenants. And that's what On Demand Migration will do. It will consolidate the email accounts and OneDrive data for those tenants and give you that central visibility that you need. But also, sometimes companies shrink, so sometimes you divest, and you need to separate that data. So if you need to move it from one point to another, that's another challenge within Office 365 that you can solve with On Demand Migration.
And what about Microsoft's Azure AD. What do you see the big business impact of that being?
Yeah, that's interesting because before, people only really looked at Azure AD because it provides the access to Office 365. So you can't use Office 365 without an Azure AD account. But now Azure AD's really grown, and it's got a lot of cool new features as well, like single sign-on. So single sign-on allows you to control the authentication and access for enterprise applications as well.
It's also heavily used for B2B and B2C accounts. So let's say you have a mobile app or web application and you want to give users but not your users-- maybe external users-- access into some system. Well, you do that through B2B and B2C accounts.
Now, the problem there is that, if you are like many organizations and you're relying on using your on-premises Active Directory as the backup and recovery solution, if something were to happen in the Cloud-only space, which is B2B, B2C accounts, security groups, hard deleted users and groups, things like that, and license attributes associated with Azure AD-- if those bits are deleted, either maliciously or accidentally, you can't retrieve them back with native tools. You need an external solution, and that's why we've created On Demand Recovery.
And does it work like a straightforward backup?
Yeah, so On Demand Recovery does backups as well as restore, granular restore. So what you can do is set a backup schedule-- and this is really important for disaster recovery. You can set a backup schedule, and then within On Demand Recovery, you can actually view the difference between backups, any backup that you've created, and live Azure AD.
So let's say something happened, and you're not quite sure what happened, but you think it might be slightly dodgy. You could go back into the difference report and see what's changed, what's been deleted or added or modified. And you can go down to that exact object and restore it on any unwanted changes very simply.
Ann Maya, thank you very much.
Thanks, John.
[MUSIC PLAYING]