What is Azure Site Recovery?

Azure Site Recovery is a robust disaster recovery service offered by Microsoft Azure. Its primary role is to ensure your business operations continue unabated, even amidst unforeseen disruptions like network failures, natural disasters, or power outages.

The service works by automating the replication of your virtual machines (VMs) to a secondary location, either on your premises or in the cloud. This creates a failover environment where your applications can continue running even if your primary site experiences an outage.

Key Features of Azure Site Recovery

1. Automated Replication: Azure Site Recovery automates the replication of your Azure VMs, ensuring a seamless transition in the event of a disaster.
2. Health Monitoring and Disaster Recovery Drills: With Azure Site Recovery, you get comprehensive monitoring and reporting of your replicated applications. You can also execute test failovers to ensure your disaster recovery plan is up-to-date and effective.
3. Flexible Recovery Plans: Azure Site Recovery enables you to create and manage custom recovery plans. These plans provide a systematic approach to failover and recovery, ensuring minimal disruption to your business operations.

Why Choose Azure Site Recovery?

Incorporating Azure Site Recovery into your disaster recovery strategy brings numerous advantages:

• Business Continuity: Azure Site Recovery minimizes the impact of outages on your operations, ensuring your business remains up and running at all times.
• Cost-Efficient: Traditional disaster recovery solutions require significant investments in duplicate systems and hardware. With Azure Site Recovery, you only pay for the resources you use during a failover, leading to substantial cost savings.
• Compliance: Azure Site Recovery meets a broad set of international and industry-specific compliance standards, including GDPR, ISO 27001, and HIPAA, among others.

Your Azure Managed Services Provider: Ensuring Seamless Disaster Recovery

As your Azure Managed Services provider, we help you unlock the full potential of Azure Site Recovery. Our team of Azure experts handle the setup, configuration, and management of Azure Site Recovery, ensuring your disaster recovery plan aligns perfectly with your business needs. We also provide round-the-clock support, ensuring rapid response and resolution to any issues that might arise.

In a digital-first world, safeguarding your operations from disruptions is critical. With Azure Site Recovery, you get a disaster recovery solution that’s flexible, cost-effective, and robust. As your Azure Managed Services provider, we’re here to make that solution a reality for your business, ensuring you’re prepared for anything the digital landscape might throw your way.

Cyber protection is a must and a requirement to navigate the digital world safely.

For more information on discovering what is the best solution for your business, visit our Acronis Cloud page

Microsoft Defender prevents, detects, and responds to threats across identities, endpoints, applications, email, IoT, infrastructure, and cloud platforms.

With Microsoft Defender, Microsoft is rebranding the existing threat protection portfolio and adding new capabilities, including additional multi-cloud (Google Cloud and AWS) and multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS) support.

Microsoft Defender is delivered in two tailored experiences:

• Microsoft 365 Defender for end-user environments
• Azure Defender for cloud and hybrid infrastructure

Microsoft 365 Defender

• Microsoft 365 Defender delivers XDR capabilities for identities, endpoints, cloud apps, email, and documents.
• It uses artificial intelligence to reduce the SOC’s work items.
• Built-in self-healing technology fully automates remediation more than 70% of the time, ensuring defenders can focus on other tasks that better leverage their knowledge and expertise.

The branding changes to unify the Microsoft 365 Defender technologies:

• Microsoft 365 Defender (previously Microsoft Threat Protection)
• Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (previously Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection)
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (previously Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection)
• Microsoft Defender for Identity (previously Azure Advanced Threat Protection)

New features available within Microsoft 365 Defender:

• Extending mobile threat defense capabilities in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to iOS, Android and macOS.
• Priority account protection in Microsoft Defender for Office 365 will help security teams focus on protection from phishing attacks for users who have access to the most critical and privileged information.

Customers can customize prioritized account workflows to offer these users an added layer of protection.

Microsoft 365 Defender

Azure Defender

Azure Defender delivers XDR capabilities to protect multi-cloud and hybrid workloads, including virtual machines, databases, containers, IoT, and more.

Azure Defender is an evolution of the Azure Security Center threat protection capabilities and is accessed from within Azure Security Center.

Microsoft has announced brand changes for these capabilities under Azure Defender as well:

• Azure Defender for Servers (previously Azure Security Center Standard Edition)
• Azure Defender for IoT (previously Azure Security Center for IoT)
• Azure Defender for SQL (previously Advanced Threat Protection for SQL)

New features now available within Azure Defender:

• To help defenders identify and mitigate unprotected resources, Microsoft is delivering a new unified experience for Azure Defender that makes it easy to see which resources are protected and which need further protection.
• Added protection for SQL servers on-premises and in multi-cloud environments as well as virtual machines in other clouds, and improved protections for containers, including Kubernetes-level policy management and continuous scanning of container images in container registries.
• Support for operational technology networks with the integration of Cyber X into Azure Defender for IoT.

What is changing? 

DYNAMICS 365 PROJECT OPERATIONS

New application came on October 1, 2020. Going forward, all roadmap investments for the PSA software market will be done through this application.

DYNAMICS 365 PROJECT SERVICE AUTOMATION

There will not be any immediate disruption. Microsoft will work to transition you to at your pace. This service will continue running for customers on CSP until October 1, 2022 and EA until October 1, 2024, or until current contract ends, whichever comes first. Contract renewals will continue until October 1, 2021. Microsoft will offer a migration path to Project Operations. Current customers will be grandfathered into the new SKU and pricing.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND ACCOUNTING (PMA)

There will not be any immediate disruption. Microsoft will work to transition customers. SKU adjustments and entitlements for new customers will go into effect on October 1, 2020, moving from Finance to Project Operations. Microsoft will offer a migration path to Project Operations. Current customers will be grandfathered into the new SKU and pricing.

MICROSOFT PROJECT

Will be continued to be sold as PM and PPM solutions and common core capabilities Project for the web will incorporated natively into Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

Azure adds new constrained vCPUs, capable virtual machines to reduce software licensing costs without impacting performance

Azure offers various VM sizes for which you can constrain the VM vCPU count to reduce the cost of software licensing, while maintaining the same memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth.

This may be crucial for some database workloads like SQL Server or Oracle that require high memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth, but not a high core count since many database workloads are not CPU-intensive.

So, by deploying the latest Azure Virtual Machines, you can further increase the efficiency of your cloud infrastructure.

The vCPU count can be constrained to one half or one quarter of the original VM size. These new VM sizes have a suffix that specifies the number of active vCPUs to make them easier for you to identify.

The Esv4, Edsv4, and Easv4 memory optimized Azure VM series now offer new constrained vCPU VM sizes.

For example, the current VM size ‘’E8s_v4’’ comes with 8 vCPUs, 64 GB RAM, 16 disks and 12,800 IOPs. The new VM sizes ‘’E8-4s_v4’’ and ‘’E8-2s_v4’’ comes with 4 and 2 active vCPUs respectively, while maintaining the rest of the specs of the ‘’E8s_v4’’ for memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth.

The licensing fees charged for SQL Server or Oracle are constrained to the new vCPU count, and other products should be charged based on the new vCPU count. This results in a 50% to 75% increase in the ratio of the VM specs to active (billable) vCPUs. These new VM sizes allow customer workloads to use the same memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth while optimizing their software licensing cost. Currently, the compute cost, which includes OS licensing, remains the same one as the original size.

There are benefits too with data residency provided from Azure UAE Regions, as data can be kept in the two UAE datacenter regions, in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

From the day that Microsoft has announced global availability of Azure UAE Regions, Microsoft strived to make this more useful for customers and partners such as the recent availability of M and Mv2 Series Virtual Machines to provide SAP S4/HANA high performance, scalability and security along with the addition of new Azure Services to the UAE Regions recently.

Whatever your Application Modernization strategy, Azure is the platform that you need. You can now run App Services, Functions, Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Azure Files Premium tier and Azure DevTest Labs in UAE regions.

• Azure App Service: Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps to enable productivity and innovation. App Service helps for building, deploying, and scaling web apps quickly and easily by supporting APIs .NET, .NET Core, Node.js, Java, Python or PHP, in containers or running on Windows or Linux.
• Azure Functions: Azure Functions allows developers to act by connecting to data sources or messaging solutions thus making it easy to process and react to events. Developers can leverage Azure Functions to build HTTP-based API endpoints accessible by a wide range of applications, mobile and IoT devices.
• Azure Red Hat OpenShift: Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a flexible, self-service deployment of fully managed OpenShift clusters. You can maintain regulatory compliance and focus on your application development, while your master, infrastructure, and application nodes are patched, updated, and monitored by both Microsoft and Red Hat. You have the option to choose your own registry, networking, storage, or CI/CD solutions. Or you can get going immediately using built-in solutions with automated source code management, container and application builds, deployments, scaling, health management, and more.
• Azure Files Premium Tier:  Azure Files premium tier storage offers high-performance, easily accessible file services, built on solid-state drives (SSD). Premium tier is optimized to deliver consistent performance for IO-intensive workloads that require high-throughput and low latency.
• Azure DevTest Labs: Azure DevTest Labs make it possible to quickly provision development and test environments, which minimizes waste with quotas and policies. The service allows automated shutdowns to be set to minimize costs. Additionally, Windows and Linux environments can be built.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is an enterprise feedback management solution that empowers everyone in the organization to develop enterprise-grade surveys to collect timely feedback from the customers and employees. With point-and-click simplicity and AI-assisted features everyone has the tools to create, send, and analyze custom surveys that integrate directly into the workflows and the organization’s business system.

Customer Voice License:

Dynamics 365 Project Operations connects sales, resourcing, project management and finance teams with a single application to win more deals, accelerate project delivery and maximize profitability.

The Project Operation New License offer:

• The Base License Cost:
  • 120 USD Per User Per Month
• The Attach License Cost:
  • 30 USD Per User Per Month
• Purchase Requirement:
  • 20 User Minimum
• Entitlements per Tenant:
  • Database Capacity
  • Log Capacity
  • File Capacity

Customer Segment

The Dynamics SMB promotion will only be available to the following types of customers:

Net new customer tenant

An existing customer tenant which does not have an active Dynamics 365 subscription

SMB customers in trading, services, and other industries that have a customer service department and sales department

Eligible Products & Offer ID’s

Dynamics 365 Sales Professional

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Professional

Terms and Conditions of the Promo

• Orders can be placed on a monthly basis
• Promo is valid for orders placed before 25^th of June 2021
• For monthly orders; prices will be maintained for 12 consecutive months
• Regions eligible: Gulf and MCC and Egypt
• Qualifying customers will receive a 100% discount in the first 4 months with a minimum 1-year commitment for Dynamics 365 Sales Professional or Dynamics 365 Customer Service Professional:
  • Customers must be purchasing a net new Dynamics 365 Sales Professional or Dynamics 365 Customer Service Professional customer tenant.
  • An existing customer with an inactive or recently canceled (within the last 30 days) subscription may also qualify.

FAQ

• Will the new customer eligibility be enforced?
  Yes, the Dynamics SMB promotion will be technically enforced
• Is there a minimum purchase requirement?
  There is no minimum user purchase requirement
• How many licenses can be purchased at the promotion discount?
  There is no maximum of licenses that may be purchased. Customers may purchase as many licenses as they need.
• What if I don’t start the promotion when it first becomes available?
  New customers may take advantage of the Dynamics SMB promotion at any time between September 3, 2020 and June 25, 2021. Customers subscriptions must begin before June 25, 2021
• What happens to the monthly subscription price of Dynamics 365 Sales Professional and/or Dynamics 365 Customer Service Professional licenses when the promotion ends?
  Microsoft will honor the September 2020 catalog prices of the licenses for the duration of the annual subscription commitment. This means if a customer starts the promotion on September 1, 2020, their price for months 5 to 12 will be the September 2020 license monthly price
• When does the 4-month Dynamics SMB promotion pricing end?
  The promotion pricing expires 4 months from the subscription start date not 4 months from the CSP billing date. For example, a new customer who takes advantage of this promotion and purchases their license September 15, 2020 begins their subscription September 15. The promotion price will be honored September 15, 2020 through January 15, 2021.
• How should partners use these promotions?
  Partners can include these promotions in current customer acquisition motions to enable new customers in need of digital selling or remote selling scenarios to sign up with a partner. Throughout the promotion partners have opportunity to showcase the value of Dynamics 365 Sales Professional and/or Dynamics Customer Service Professional to new customers.
• How do partners transact these promotion offers?
  CSP partners can transact the Dynamics SMB promotion offers through BPS Market Place on behalf of the customer effective September 1, 2020.
• Can partners still sell the regularly priced offers without promotions to qualifying customers?
  Partners who do not wish to offer promotional pricing to otherwise qualifying customers may choose to cancel the promotion applied to the subscription and rebuy the subscription on the same day to void the promotion. Partners can always sell the regularly priced offers to non-qualifying customers.
• Does the promotion apply if my customer wants to cancel existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Professional or Dynamics 365 Customer Service Professional subscriptions?
  Based on the new customer definition, the promotion will not be applied because the customer has an active Dynamics 365 Sales Professional and/or Dynamics 365 Customer Service Professional or cancelled one within 30 days.
• What if my customer does not align to one of the eligible customer types?
  Your customer may be eligible for the current products without the Dynamics SMB promotion or another offer. Please refer to additional details and the full list of Teams trials and offers.

For the 2020 release wave 2, we’re focused on the following areas to help you expand your offerings and extend your solutions:

• Transform the employee experience: Manage leave and absence directly from Microsoft Teams, along with full enhancements to employee and manager self-service.
• Build an HCM ecosystem: Enable streamlined integrations to recruiting and payroll partners.
• Optimize HR programs: Continue from wave 1 with additional enhancements in leave and absence and benefits management.
• Unlock your HR data: Modify existing reports and build custom reports using Azure Data Lake and Power BI Pro.
• Enrich your existing Microsoft solutions with HR data: Integrate directly with Azure Active Directory, Outlook, and other Dynamics 365 applications.